The businessmen broke Hollywood
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Basically all my techie and non-techie friends use it -- hoping that he finds a way to make it sustainable so that it sticks around! It's a much nicer experience than waybackmachine imo, at least for my use cases
How many minutes of TV were produced last year? How many minutes were produced in 1990?
Those legacy salaries are not possible, because if each American TV minute is worth $0.01, they're now splitting that $0.01 across 1,000 different shows, not a couple dozen.
If I'm a young person who wants to perform on screen for a living, I know where I'm going: TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. There, I can control my own creative output, make my own brand deals, and own my own face.
Expanding or contracting the industry is one thing. That’s not what’s happening here. This is a shift in how the money is distributed due to a tech “disruption”. Workers deserve to be paid well for the content they make happen.
An extremely sad state of affairs by any historical measure of a successful society.
Hollywood marks the absolute apex of American art. As this era of unquestionable greatness and human accomplishment draws to a close, we are nothing if not pathetic if we cannot at least acknowledge what it was. We should be nothing less than ashamed for letting it slip through our fingers, but here we are just making little quips about its outdatedness.
You also lose control of your distribution and are completely commoditised. Hence why the median full-time content creator makes $20,000/year, and I don’t think that includes production costs [1].
[1] https://www.epidemicsound.com/blog/the-future-of-the-creator...
But at the top end, I don't think there's a direct comparison - stuff gets made for YouTube that wouldn't get made as a movie and doesn't make sense as a movie, but it's no less valuable IMO. There is a lot less of it, and that industry has existed for less time.
Just look 3Blue1Brown's educational math videos, or Veritasium's science videos, or any of the other countless videos on various topics. Better at what they're trying to achieve than almost anything comparable that has existed before, IMO.
Even for things with more direct comparisons - take cooking YouTube vs cooking shows on TV. I believe cooking YouTube is much better in most ways.
It’s to entertain. Same as Hollywood. You have to get into the grunge of any medium to find content whose primary purpose is artistic expression.
Sure. But the purpose of mass-market movies is to entertain, and has been since the broadcast era.
Think of what good movies & television do as storytelling and I think you'll agree it better fits the narrative at hand.
Is it engaging and fun? Yep. Is the greatest artistic achievement? Not really, because they rarely even try.
On top of head, I think that something like Shigurui or Berserk would be great examples of art that engages with ideas and complexity. So would be Umberto Eco and the Name of the Rose, more or less. Even original Witcher books have huge amount engagement with ideas despite being meant for entertainment. The movie "Come and See" managed to make war sound not fun which is something too.
American cinema is just not about that. It is not about complexity, it is about simplifying and streamlining. Which is fine, it is just odd that someone claims opposite.
I love how Americans are so high on their own exceptionalism that they come out with these kinds of statements without even realising how clueless it makes them look. Not even "some of the greatest artistic accomplishments of mankind.", but all of them, apparently.
…what?!
The, I don’t know, Renaissance would like a word with you….
QED.
However, a lot of what we think as great art exists and survives because of gatekeepers: from rich men with enormous egos to critics mistaking their taste for objectivity to policy makers elevating some forms of art over others etc.
Most Rennaissance art is indistinguishable from TikTok. Go to a few museums and you will recognise the fads, the patterns, the techniques etc. A cross-dressing femboy doing a hundredth uwu on TikTok is no different from a Rennaisance painter doing a hundredth cherub flying over naked women in a forest.
As to eyeballs... This also reminded me of how "one of the greatest artworks ever" was relatively unknown until publicity and yes eyeballs. I'm talking about Mona Lisa of course: https://www.npr.org/2011/07/30/138800110/the-theft-that-made...
Most of what we call amazing pieces of art are such only because of the many eyeballs on them.
Which is not to say that I have some equally objective measure to offer you. I don’t. But then, I’m not the one who made claims about artistic accomplishment “by most measures” (whatever that even means). I simply provided an example of something that self-evidently certainly rivals “American cinema” as universally acknowledged to be profoundly artistically accomplished. Whatever the comment about dreck in every era actually proves, if you think the Renaissance was not the site of profound artistic accomplishment (hello, rediscovery of linear perspective; hello frescos; etc.) I don’t even know what to say.
[Edited to add: if artistic accomplishment is just eyeball quantity, then it will increase linearly with the increase in global population and interconnectedness as technology improves. Reducing something like artistic accomplishment to such a simple function of population size serves as the best possible reductio of that position.]
ahem, citation needed.
And... Hollywood is any better??
When you look at non-union actors that drops to about $25000, and often has many costs to maintain due to the lack of protections that would come with union membership.
Seems like youtubers and the like have a darn good deal considering it includes a far higher volume of low activity/effort/quality "actors" coupled with the independence and higher rate of higher scale earnings.
Hollywood is way more top heavy , regardless of if secondary business ventures are excluded from both sides, as that likely makes yt even more fair in that more yt creators have secondary streams like merch and services than Hollywood actors do, where only the biggest names can earn much of anything by thier "brand" alone.
I have to ask, did you even try to do a comparison or did you just google internet creator average income and the presume it was a pittance compared to that of the average of all working (and non working?) actors?
(Ed: ugh just reread that and dont like _how_ it's written, but since the correct sentiments and points are there and rewriting would be an undertaking, I'm just gonna leave it. Sorry for any headaches the prose causes.)
Let us not forget that in our current trajectory, Robots and Real Estate are going to be owned by one class of people who extract value from society while everyone else struggles to feed themselves.
Don’t rely on any of the big platforms long term.
If they can’t make money without paying a living wage, then they shouldn’t make money. Period. Business models like Uber, postdoc/adjunct professorships, and Hollywood are exploitative by their nature, replacing business models that used to pay better wages for the same service.
Of course, the execs are greedy, and of course they win. The execs always win.
You can look to Spotify for what happens on residuals, when an individual can choose to listen to any of 100,000,000 different songs. The only winners are those who control their own image and distribution. Like Taylor Swift, who makes 10 million each show and has full control over her recorded music.
Everything is fine whilst we are awash with loose speculative money, but when the tide goes out there isn’t enough real demand to keep the lights on.
You assume wrong. The members of AMPTP mentioned on wikipedia[1] are all publicly traded companies, hardly "PE" (ie. not public) or VC.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_of_Motion_Picture_and...
It went public in 2002. Any venture capital is irrelevant.
>Disney and Sony, no financial engineering.
elaborate.
In other industries you only pay a person once and then that work is owned by whoever paid.
In other industries you may be paid once, but you don’t get asked to sign away a permanent right to lose your likeness to get paid. But they might offer you stock options, which are a kind of payment based on overall performance of the product.
On a sidenote: With the horrible quality of the major films and tv show these days, these guys should be on strike demanding higher quality productions.
Soom seems to be "Ok give me an explosion here" "Move 3 steps" "Give me an explosion there" "You get on the motorcycle. " "I need 3 explosions there and then you four open up with machine guns"
Some movies seem to have bypassed the script writing entirely
It's basically a blip in AV production times. Hollywood movies will typically take one or two years to be made; so you won't see the economic effects of a strike for some time. TV starts hurting faster but it also hurts less, because you have sports, news, and reruns, to pick up most of the slack.
If this was, say, a NBA strike, we'd currently be towards the end of pre-season.
That is one of the goals around getting some baseline requirements around writer's rooms; they want to stop a hollowing-out race to the bottom with writing in Hollywood that has been going on for a while.
In contrast, a member of the Allman Brothers was holed up in a motel or cabin trying to write a song. In frustration with writer’s block he went out to the local store. Inside a woman was chasing her young daughter down the aisle calling her name. He liked the name and went back and wrote the song “Melissa.”
https://medium.com/@shelrochaleal/motown-the-star-making-pro...
You're always going to get a factory process when a lot of people are involved because there are deadlines and checkpoints written into contracts. That doesn't make the output bad.
The good thing is that most serious movie goes can easily ignore these movies, if they want to. The negative thing is that, well, those movies really do dominate they cinemas, and will get first priority on pretty much everything.
I'm from a small rural place, and back home they would screen nothing but the latest superhero movies for 3-4 weeks straight, when they got released. Other movies would either get passed on, or get screening time much later in the season. More often than not it was the former.
Maybe the big chains might exit your market regardless. AMC almost went bankrupt(they were saved by meme investors). Regal did go bankrupt. Hell even Alamo went bankrupt (but emerged successfully to live another day). How much time do you think is left? As AMC continues to decline they will chop the rural areas first. You'll be maybe left with mom n pop outlets that may not be worth dealing with from the point of view of the distributors(we'll see).
Ive said it before but i'll say it again(and get downvoted again). Living in a rural region confers many benefits one of which being likely low taxes...but another way to look at it is you are still paying a tax, just in other ways.
It does show that HN is a website for techies and not for cinema enthusiasts; there's good stuff out there, but you won't get to it if you only scratch the surface.
Hollywood’s CEOs are suffering. Not primarily from labor disputes or industry disruption or public-relations issues, but from vincible ignorance, which seems to be endemic in C-suites of all industries. Under pressure to deliver to Wall Street, too many CEOs have lost the plot of their own movie. They are not running companies to profitably deliver a good product, such as a book or a cup of coffee or, in this case, a movie or TV show. They are running companies to deliver good profit. The quality of their product has ceased to matter.
"Forget building a better mouse trap! Take on venture debt, buy out all the mouse trap makers in your area, make their products worse (or keep them the same and sell them under a different brand name - whatever doesn't matter anyway) and jack up the prices. What are they gonna do? Go to someone else?"
"Content business? What content business? Those old Hollywood studio executives were hacks! They still cared just a tiny bit (a vanishingly small bit) about making a 'great movie.' What phooey! Buy up licenses, sell them for as cheap as possible for a while and then flood the zone with generic content. They won't know the difference! It's all the same!"
The reality? People do care. They might like slop, but they like well produced slop. Not just any generic, store-brand slop.
No matter what the artistic merit of Friends and The Office is; hundreds of thousands to millions of people subscribed to Netflix to watch them over and over again. When those properties were gone, they slowly began to ebb away from the platform. Starting in 2019, when Netflix first lost the IP,
"Netflix suffers first major loss of US subscribers, blames price hikes," https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/17/20694711/netflix-friends-...
and continuing (with some ups) into 2023,
"Netflix loses almost a million subscribers," https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62226912
Their response to their decline wasn't to create better series or a better experience, but to crack down on sharing passwords. It made their subscriber numbers net positive for one or two quarters (so far), but you don't have to Fermi to predict how this will end. https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/9/23755156/netflix-subscribe...
It's a weird prisoner's dilemma, since value creators will always be bled dry by value capturers, but if value creators stop existing, value capturers have no value to capture anymore. Then they start flinging crap at the wall hoping something sticks, because in their intense drive to capture value they ignored to learn how to distinguish truly valuable content.
But, we also have short memory for the french metric kilometres of sheer dreck put out. I mean, "b movie" exists as a term because of it. hence D list celebrities exist because b list movies exist (kinda-sorta)
"Barton Fink" tells the story well: get amazing talent, smash the joy out of their life by applying the old school hollywood machine.
Disney has got scared too. It doesn't know if it will ruin the longterm income from Star Wars, by making more star wars. Its milked its goldmine of cartoons for 5 or more decades, and has a long term view (hence the remarkably bizarre disney thing about "putting it back in the vault" for a 5-10 year window so that a whole new cohort of consumers can be made to buy it)
The Australian experience I emerged into was 3 commercial, 2 state/semi-state (ch 7,9 10 commercial, ABC/SBS state/semi-state)
I posit, purely from interest, that in the H-H interest sense of 'monopoly' 5 independent agencies broadcasting and either taking Ad revenue or state revenue or a combination is actually pretty bloody good: they have economies of scale, and they can commit to both make shows, and screen shows.
Now, we didn't lose any of those. So 5 in OZ is joined by Foxtel, Stan, Binge, NetFlix, Disney+, HBO+, Amazon, Paramount. You might say "well from an HH index point of view, this must be better" but the experience is no: it isn't. They can't make enough ad revenue to make content, and they compete with the IPR holders for content, and the content is now more diffuse. Its actually not as "good" as old school TV. W I actually miss pre-streaming TV. I miss the sense of unity which came from watching the 6 or 7 o-clock news with millions of other people. Timeshifting existed in VHS days but most people didn't time-shift and couldn't binge-watch unless one of 5 broadcasters decided to binge-programme.
What we lack, and the UK has, is time-shifted. So, keep 5 (ok now 25) basic broadcasters but allow them to run their content on 3 distinct time feeds so you can "watch" things without missing them. I think THAT was smart.
TL;DR I watch some streams, but I miss 'channels' and I don't want to have to pay for bundles, or streams, as much as other people seem to want to.
I really miss when Netflix DVD had a truly vast back catalog of obscure films, but I suspect a lot of them didn't circulate all that much.
With streaming, the movies that people want always seem to be available somewhere. You might have to subscribe to a half-dozen services to get all of them, or rent them a la carte. Each of those services has some back catalog as a kind of nudge to keep watching this service rather than cancel and jump to some other service while waiting for the next big movie to come out. But they don't seem to expect any individual item to get much play.
Netflix in particular seems to mostly want to cut out the middle man and produce its own content. A lot of Netflix's most popular items are their own. I'm not sure I understand the economics of that -- they're spending major-studio-money on films ($100M+) and then using it as a "loss leader" to for their all-you-can-eat service.
People had no problem paying more than this to cable TV and satellite TV distributors.
To be fair to CNN, the creation of that service was a weird saga where an outgoing CEO wanted to push it front and center as a pet project and spent an enormous amount of money on it.
But then when he was forced to leave due to a scandal just as the service launched, the incoming CEO had no love for his predecessor's pet project. So he pulled the plug immediately after all the money had already been spent.
Its a textbook example of the C-suite not actually caring about the business as a whole. Maybe the product could have been successful (although it is hard to see how people would pay for a product they don't want to consume when its free), but due to circumstances unrelated to the product, it never got a fair shot.
Actors should never be whispering or mumbling for real. Even an actor pretending to be drunk should be able to clearly enunciate their words while still making themselves sound drunk. I'm sure modern actors can still do this, but they're being given bad direction.
I can't comment on the sequels.
Absurd.
But watching any US movie and I have to either turn on subtitles or blast it so loud that some action scene will probably crack speakers or the wall, since I hate getting lost in plot.
If they mixed it right, center speaker should be mainly dialogue.
And no, this is not a technical limitation: case in point, the new Star Trek shows. We've had three of them produced in parallel, sharing some sets and props, and they go full-spectrum - from "every scene is night scene" Picard, through "everything is underlit" Discovery, to "everything is bright well-lit all the time" Strange New Worlds.
The only reasoning I can think of for making what's clearly an artistic choice is that maaaybe it looks better on actual TV. I wouldn't know, who owns a TV these days anyway? But I got one clue - rewatching parts of last season of Picard on a hotel TV, I was suddenly able to make out colors and shapes that I couldn't on a computer screen.
I am going to guess a majority of people in the US live in a residence that contains a TV, probably even a large TV.
I must be odd because I have 6 of them: family room, office, master bedroom, both kids’ bedrooms, and back patio.
Actors all look the same? You bet they do, we market tested the top five male face shapes and we make sure every actor’s face is modelled on the most popular.
Writing derivative? You bet! Our customer surveys said they love that curly haired kid from Stranger Things! That’s why he’ll be the lead character in three separate Stranger Things spin-offs.
The Chris Pratt school of not acting is strong.
Joel Kinnaman on the other hand. Why is he repeatedly cast in leading roles?
Joel does stoic tough guys with a dead-pan sense of humor extremely well and doesn't stand out as miscast in the things I see him in.
In terms of acting, where you adopt someone else's persona, he makes Sylvester Stallone look diverse.
It can still be fun and enjoyable, but it's not Acting.
I would argue this is a symptom of the money men exerting too much control over entertainment. Everything has to be safe and neutered, every investment has to be as sure as possible. This isn't down to writers, there's interesting writing going on, you just won't see it come out of the big studios unless it's a smaller subsidiary.
I couldn't help but notice how the wild artistic risks taken in the movie would likely never happen today unless the artists paid out of pocket for both the production and distribution
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Na1h7ozW9VQ
Putting money behind stuff like this is dead.
> the wild artistic risks taken in the movie would likely never happen today
Tim Burton or Christopher Nolan would disagree. And there are plenty of brave films out there, just not necessarily from big Hollywood studios.
Here it is in full if you'd like to compare https://archive.org/details/the-fabulous-baron-munchausen
George Harrison of Beatles fame ended up funding the movie, I believe almost entirely out of his own pocket. This was back in the 70s.
It wasn't “someone has suggested/demanded it be removed, and we have refused” but “if someone did suggest/demand it we wouldn't”.
The top marginal rate of income tax was ~90% and this heavily encouraged investments like this. It meant that there was more space for creative risk taking as well as more commercial/industrial capital investment.
Back then, the short late-night voiceover, "Portions of the following program may be unsuitable for younger or more sensitive viewers," was the hallmark of Quality TV.
> Then game of thrones proved it was possible to make an adaptation that was both faithful and good cinema
.. up to the critical point where they couldn't be faithful because GRRM hadn't written the ending, so they wrote one which everyone got mad about.
A bunch of people who didn't inherit a franchise also complain about "toxic fandom". What's the problem with saying that? Do creatives have to butter up their fans?
I know the cases you're referencing, and I don't disagree with you that "toxic fandom" was a fake complaint in those specific cases. But it's not the writers who use this to deflect from criticism, it's the investors behind the scenes. The writers (the ones that are part of the normal work force) want to write good stuff and create good entertainment.
But, say, the actress of Rose from Star Wars? She has every right to complain about a toxic fandom. Christ, they sent her death threats because she performed as asked for by the studio!
The idea that Hollywood actors and writers are arrogant elitists who look down on "regular" working folks is, to a large extent, propaganda, specifically intended to destroy solidarity in moments like these.
Hmm. I've seen a few "passion projects" that reach new heights of uninterestingness. Detach the creative from needing to bring in an audience and we get projects that "explore the liminal space of boredom" and such. Once directors get the "make whatever you want" power it's not always a happy outcome. Same thing with authors - they get famous with a tightly edited 300 pages and use that to release a 1200 page barely edited brick.
Sometimes the balance of the two really works - the money man is the only representation of the audience and can cut out that nonsensical 45 minute dream sequence. I guess what I want is not a money man as such, just an editor with a bit of power as an objective source of improvement.
If there is a project that literally and perfectly matches your description, it is "Paint Drying", a 2016 protest film against censorship and classification mandates in the UK [1].
This is what happens when the money men also think of themselves or their buddies as creatives. Extremely high production values on extremely stupid movies.
Creative led projects are at least personal and that gives them a unique quality even if the project is an overall failure.
>I guess what I want is not a money man as such, just an editor with a bit of power as an objective source of improvement.
Editors would generally be considered creatives and not businesspeople. There is also no such thing as "an objective source of improvement" when it comes to art.
"Market logic" is very easy to misunderstand. For instance, do people in food deserts really want cheez-its and ice cream for dinner? Or do they just not have sufficient access to healthy options that they prefer?
Sometimes people actively want something that allows them to, even requires them to, shut off parts of their brain.
It is that contemporary screen writing is unable to engage with characters and complexity outside of, like, 5 stereotypical tropes. That they internalized set of rules about how to simplify things and just can't comprehend any slightly realistic psychology of adults or set of events.
The money men did a lot of damage and are the ones who set the rules. But the bad writing we see now is because writers insist on cproducing bad writing even having choice. Maybe all the good writers left, maybe it is something else, but they screw it up even when having freedom.
(I hear tell that as adaptions go The Expanse was relatively well done, though I haven't watched it myself as yet)
I believe media should be arranged by at least the following categories. Year Studio Director Genre Country of Origin
After that they can do whatever they want. I hope I"m wrong but I can't do this with iTunes, Netflix, HBO whatever, Criterion, TCM.
Criterion has newer films once they are released to the home market.
Also Criterion just edited "The French Connection" to make it more appropriate for viewers.
You see absolutely crazy stuff like The Eric Andre show get 6 seasons. A talk show that is basically just out to torment all their guests. 'Off the air' while only a few episode every few years, is much more of an art experimenter than anything you would consider a show, it is wonderful.
Every few months there is something new and twisted that comes along, it feels like Adult swim is that TV studio that the main company complete forgot exists and that head corporate hasn't checked on since the late 90's.
But the budgets also show, there are no million dollar budgets here.
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. It only existed because of a special relationship with the late show. Without worry about ratings, he did some great stuff that wouldnt get past the moneymen today.
The older seasons of Top Gear. It was wildly popular but got its energy from an old form of "blolky" male-dominated humor that just doesnt fly these days. The Grand Tour continues but is a pale comparision of the previous energy.
Note that all of these are dominated by male protagonists, a rare thing in recent years.
Man did he flirt with the beautiful actresses he had on the show.
I've seen Japanese subtitles before (I mean Japanese language subtitles) and almost all subtext is lost regardless. Far worse than the english subtitles on anime.
You might as well make the movie you want, the end result abroad will be bland regardless. The translation issues are just an excuse.
However, the dubs are the complete opposite. They pack in a ton of the original subtext and nuance, character quirks, etc, even making new jokes when necessary to convey something similar when the original is impossible. And of course the voice actors are great.
Japanese subtitles being terrible isn’t necessarily a natural state. It seems to just be where things landed in that industry.
Over the half of people (including many non movie enthusiasts) prefer dub, but sub is very popular in the internet because such people is verbose. I like sub for English (that I can understand a bit and good for learning), dub for the rest.
Ditto for India.
Nobody is giving 200 million dollars to a director just to break even.
As the budget increases, more and more people get involved; and decision by committee is a terrible system.
Is this concretely true, or just disinformation to put blame on writers vs. producers?
I’m not saying it’s not plausible either way, but this is a common cop out.
> "I've been on shows — namely 'Witcher' — where some of the writers were not or actively disliked the books and games (even actively mocking the source material). It's a recipe for disaster and bad morale," wrote DeMayo.
https://www.looper.com/1128621/the-witcher-writer-casually-c...
Maybe he's being paid by the producers to lie about that, but that seems like a strange theory to me.
Also, this characterinzaction of the Witcher series writing is 100% correct - especially in last season. Going by the comments writer made publicly, she did not even understood events or relationships between characters in books. It is as if she understood adolescents, but had real issue comprehend adults or write about them.
This seems like a very common problem in modern American entertainment. I think it's because they're hiring writers who are too young with too little life experience. Characters who should be mature adults seem like immature teenagers. Maybe the writers know how to write mature characters but think this is what audiences want... but I tend to think the writers are nepo hire hacks.
Second, being fully grown adult does not have to imply perfection. Fully grown adults make bad insensible decisions all the time. They however do that differently then teenagers, for different more complex reasons.
And this is something that is super visible in Witcher. Original characters don't make sensible decisions all the time ... but they have adult psychology. Even when they are bad to each other, they still don't act like middle schoolers. They act like adults with issues. And show writing just completely stripped them off the adulthood.
That’s what you get when you hire writers willing to work in mini-rooms (and not go to production): inexperienced folks still sponging off their parents.
The other part of the comment that isn’t fair is the “sponging” part. Generally this implies loafing or laziness, someone taking their parents resources and being lazy with them. But we’re talking about working people who are new to their career and putting in the sweat and willing to work in mini-rooms. I don’t think using parental resources is sponging when someone is early career and trying to work hard to get ahead.
If the pay is so bad that the job's only available to kids with rich parents, whence comes the breadth of experience needed to portray the world as it really is?
And by offering such bad pay, hasn't the industry brought this on themselves?
Imagine a world where all junior developers are contractors hired for a month or two. They work with more experienced senior devs to write a program together. But junior devs contracts end before the code is ever compiled or run, so they never learn anything about bugfixing or adjusting to client changes or performance with real world data. This is what working hard to get ahead looks like in Hollywood today.
And good writing sees the difference. Take Breaking Bad - neither Walt nor Jessie make good decisions. But Walt is clearly mature man and Jesse is young and immature(and matures during the show). That is good writing involving mature adult, Walt, despite him making one bad and emotional decision after another. Same thing Game of Thrones in initial series - involves well written mature adults doing horrible things.
Then take writing in the Netflix Witcher (and everything that was said about it) or last Game of Thrones series. Long term friendship between mature imperfect adults is something the writer did not even understood. Complicated respectable mature women (who still have difficult personality) is changed into clingy teenager with crush. And judging from interviews, the writer just does not understand these aspects of humanity or of writing.
> They might be better at hiding it, but they still do it.
Then the character should hide it like adults do.
A classic case of hating or not caring about source material, whilst also being a complete writing hack.
Whatever they're trying to do, it's not that: https://i.imgur.com/yIzvm1d.jpg
No one was forcing them to took up that job/stay at that company...
and in the case of the witcher the talent and the writers had pedigrees, not like henry cavil wasn't in movies before, or since.
I have bills to pay too. But when job-hunting there are some industries I simply won't consider.
The bottomline is that as a screenwriter you should do the absolute best work you're capable of, within the constraints of the project. If you can't do that because you aren't passionate about the franchise or whatever other bogus reason, don't take the job. You'll only hurt your own reputation.
They've likely done several other shows where they were told that ignoring their distaste and working hard would serve them well in the future, then the only options provided were more shows where they'd have to ignore their distaste and work hard. Eventually you'll try to cram your ideas into a project you aren't terribly fond of.
To illustrate my point, while it's probably not a comprehensive list, I took a look at this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fantasy_television_pro... and from what I can tell there is one fantasy show not based on an existing franchise airing after 2020. The Outpost on CW.
No one said anything about original TV shows. 99% of screenwriters - a number I pulled out of my ass - never have one greenlit.
I did. That's what I meant by targeting existing markets over taking risks, or why I mentioned non-franchise fantasy writing opportunities, and what I assumed the person I was replying to was talking about when criticizing using The Witcher as a backdrop for their disconnected stories.
And even if we brought that number down to 95% of screenwriters, that would still provide a place for everyone to stick their own ideas in.
But it's a zugzwang: impossible to avoid woke ideology in movies, because minorities had become such a powerful entity that they have ability to destroy the company or a life of any person if they don't like what you do or say.
The entire history of art relies on rethinking of classical plots in new ideology.
People like to slag on Rian Johnson, but it was JJ Abrams that trashed the trilogy and left the mess to Johnson. And none of this has anything to do with video games anyway, Disney executives dropped the ball with bad hiring and that turned the Star Wars fanbase sour to future movies.
Why? Is it not possible the proportion of the population that wants to watch movies (especially non novel ones) in movie theaters is trending lower and lower?
Based on the fact that the examples you listed are all sequels, the quality of the content is also suffering, but it is very possible that even if it was not suffering, the demand would be lower.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DIS/disney/gross-p...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/193140/revenue-of-the-wa...
The only apparent "colossal losses" to Disney seem to be due to Disney World attendances cratering during the pandemic.
Seems a bit unfair to blame Disney for upholding the work started by George Lucas.
Are they even capable of trashing Lucasfilms IP to any degree greater than that already demonstrated?
However we are both commenting on a sub branch headed by a comment:
Colossal losses of Disney ...
Regardless of its trashiness in the eyes of fans it still box officed $1.334 billion after a budget < $320 million (according to wikipedia).
Let's agree that it was slop ... but it was slop that made bank for Disney.
I'm only commenting here to counter the upstream claim that "going woke is sending Disney broke".
I'm seeing the counter position that "pushing trash is pumping cash" (for now at least).
The MCU suffers from largely the same problem.
Transposing 2023 American social problems 1:1 into a fictional universe, as many productions do today, has the effect of breaking suspension of disbelief completely. It's not interesting or insightful. To someone like myself who actually agrees with this stuff it comes off as cheap pandering. I can imagine how fucking annoying it is to see if you have a different worldview.
It also doesn't help that the veil of mystery around a writer's or director's intention is often intentionally removed by endless interviews, teasers, and press junkets. Again, the "woke" media of the 90s did not suffer from this nearly as much. What the author intended was often a mystery and up to the viewer's interpretation. Combined with the aforementioned allegory or metaphor, it made it possible to enjoy media made by someone whose views you would 100% disagree with.
Yes. It's just not very well thought out. And unfortunately the "critical" ecosystem on youtube and social media makes this even worse, when films are torn apart by people who can't read subtext and misinterpret the views of a character for the views of a writer.
Doing "wokeness" by box-ticking also has counterproductive effects when writers try to get too many things into one film, resulting in lots of one-dimensional characters. It works a lot better when the diversity originates from somewhere slightly outside the system but intrinsic to the film, such as Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Or worse, confuse the character as-written with the actor performing that role. I'm sure this happened before the internet, but people couldn't reach out and send vitriol towards the actor quite as easily. I still remember when Anna Gunn got a bunch of hate mail for "being mean to Walt". It's a miracle that good movies/TV shows still manage to get made in this environment.
I'm glad I'm not the only one to notice this one. There seems to be five or six "allowed looks" for each gender, and many mainstream Hollywood actors and actresses have become almost clones of those archetypes.
I thought maybe I'm just old and more familiar with actors from older generations. Show me a random famous Hollywood actor who's under 35 years old and I probably can't tell you who it is. But maybe it's because they all actually do look the same!
The last leading man that I can remember with non-conventional looks, is Vin Diesel - and he got there by muscling (eh) his way in, not by acting.
Hollywood was never about matching reality, rather just creation/working on dreams, so one shouldn't expect these things. If you complain, you basically complain about what majority wanted to see at given time, which is never fringe-pleasing experience.
It is not just US cinema though. I see the same in other countries' movie markets such as India's. Possibly just that population increase of potential actors made it more competitive, so minimum standards increased.
It has been years since I followed Scientology, but IIRC its beliefs see physical attractiveness and physical fitness as a sign of moral correctness, therefore anyone without it is suspect.
Heh, this can be interpreted in two ways and I think both are true. His movies have too many attractive people (over-cast). Also none of those attractive people are very memorable because they're in Tom Cruise's shadow (overcast).
Finance is nothing more than rent seeking. The correction required is society wide movement to dethrone finance.
You can see this very clearly in US remakes of some UK stuff where they'll add a black guy or whatever and increase diversity by that metric, but typically diversity goes down by almost every other metric.
And I'm not against adding black folks, I'm just saying that the US idea of "diversity" is exceptionally narrow, one-dimensional, and overall quite un-diverse.
Sad part happens due to rise of situations where certain art (and I still call much of Hollywood product an art, just like white triangle on white canvas can be called one) can't be produced anymore. Think about ie Tropical Thunder, even Downey jr admitted it would be impossible to do such project only a decade later due to exactly this. I guess the conservatives again won, even if within diversity movement.
I recall vividly, when doing Aconcagua trip few years ago, one team member was a 2nd or 3rd generation taiwanese immigrant lady from New York. She was so pissed off how diversity movements in US are actually racist towards any other than black race, specifically her own. Try to say anything, ask anything, and you are immediately labeled as another racist, no discussion, no understanding.
I guess we all get why its wrong and then somehow on our own come up with ways to adhere to it, and sometimes some folks overdo it just to not be seen as not caring enough. Western Europe is same scheize, especially it seems English folks tend to go that extra mile in this without any actual need for it. Eastern Europe just stares cluelessly, we really don't get this since we have no shameful racist history to work through (plenty of other shameful history to work with though, but we prefer being ignorant and tell ourselves sweet little or big lies to feel good, critical thinking ain't popular here).
Yeah, I think there's a certain amount of unexamined prejudice in the Balkans.
It’s because the market dynamics have changed and we stopped buying DVDs and VHS.
Matt Damon talked about this just a few years ago on Hot Ones.
“So what happened was the DVD was a huge part of our business, of our revenue stream,” Damon said.
“Technology has just made that obsolete, and so the movies that we used to make you could afford to not make all of your money when it played in the theatre because you knew you had the DVD coming behind the release.”
Links:
https://www.ajc.com/life/why-dont-they-make-movies-like-they...
Licenses are written before the technology is invented. Originally we had radios and record players. Each new medium requires a new license due to the structure of the ownership of the content.
Publishers that own images for print can't post them on the web. The problem is the exceptional nature of the contracts. This is why things are so splintered. All the acquisitions of corporations may create even more exceptions to the licenses.
Getting $20-30 per DVD from this audience was much more lucrative than the cents you get per stream when competing against the algorithm of "what should I watch next". It's a VERY different market now. Smaller stuff just doesn't compete.
Once you remove the need to personally curate and review (think also towards the death of the film critic), you introduce a homogenization to the industry.
Streaming is fantastic for convenience. It is terrible for variety, despite the illusion that we're overloaded with choice. The modern streaming system hides everything in plain site. It is almost impossible for me to "browse" streaming sites the way I used to in a Blockbuster or Best Buy. Discovery is much harder.
If you have an original DVD collection of The Boondocks [1] then you have the episode
Boondocks, The S03E04 The Story of Jimmy Rebel
banned after first showing on Adult Swim for excessive depictions of racism and perceived racial insensitivities over the episode's portrayal of a racist country singer named Jimmy Rebel (a parody of real-life white supremacist country singer Johnny Rebel). [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boondocks_(2005_TV_series)
It can't be there sole reason, and I sincerely doubt it's even true. Sure, the price of a single DVD would've covered the price of 1-2 months of streaming on Netflix, but people didn't buy a DVD each month. And if they did, they lent it to friends after.
Makes me think - how do copyright owners know how many times ie Netflix streams given movie? Or do they just get some bulk fees from Netflix based ie on region and duration, and nobody cares about actual view counts?
The actors and writers, who may be paid residuals on a per-stream basis, do not have access to this information, and I believe this is one of the demands of the current strike.
I recently tried to watch Spirited Away on Netflix. While Netflix has umpteen audio versions on mobile and desktop, it only shows 5 (Japanese, English, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish) on Apple TV. Why?
Somehow they still let you cast from mobile to TV with all the audio versions, but I expect them to remove that ability soon.
I consider this to be mostly a positive. I'm interested in following stories rather than watching the N+1th Actor X movie.
If people will still pay, you would of course cut quality to increase margins. Walmart figured out that quality was a secondary concern to the customer, who is quite happy to buy a lawnmower that starts twice for $90 over one that lasts years for $180.
Walmart is the master of the commodity. It’s dumb not to buy many things there. Whole Foods will sell you a gallon of vinegar for $7, Walmart will same the same product probably made at the same place for $2.50.
(Disclaimer: I have no idea about lawnmowers or their costs. I’m engaging based purely on economic decision making.)
Unfortunately the environmental cost of producing disposable junk continues to be externalized and not factored into the economic decision-making spreadsheet.
Aside from environmental cost this is clearly also intended to reduce reliance on low-labour cost countries. Since these usually tend to have regimes which might not "philosophically fully align with ours".
Western countries went to China and started selling opium. China went to the west and started selling low quality cheap stuff. I think the later might even be more addictive then the former...
I use a Murray lawn mower that my dad bought for $40 in 1995 at Walmart.
The evil of Walmart isn’t the products, it’s their predatory destruction of competition in rural areas. Once you hit the suburbs, they lose that power.
America is built on the assumption that people have agency to make choices. We have been robbed of that time and agency by the deluge of things competing for our attention, but also by the amount of things that we need to think about. There should be economies of scale - it shouldn't matter which toothpaste you buy, because journalism should keep them honest, but it doesn't because there's too many options for that and they're all corrupt.
I don’t think toothpaste is “corrupt” per se, I think everyone needs toothpaste, and very subtle differences may equate to millions of units of sales.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.It's a nice idiom to have when you use labour to trade for income and your income doesn't increase by your efforts but the reason why people are rich is more based on their production than their consumption.
The analogy makes sense for middle class folk though, but a rich person will stay rich regardless of what they buy as long as their production output is stil desirable.
“Today the New York Yankees will play the Montreal Expos. Our game begins with the Yankees having a score of 79,613 runs and the Expos having a score of 12,177 runs.”
If this is how baseball worked how much energy do you think the Yankees would spend recruiting a hot new pitcher versus starting one of the owners kids?
This phenomenon happens even in simpler models, where it's easy to see that the eventual "winner" is only there through pure long-term luck, with zero distinguishing merit or intelligence etc.:
> If you simulate this economy, a variant of the yard sale model, you will get a remarkable result: after a large number of transactions, one agent ends up as an “oligarch” holding practically all the wealth of the economy, and the other 999 end up with virtually nothing.
> It does not matter how much wealth people started with. It does not matter that all the coin flips were absolutely fair. It does not matter that the poorer agent's expected outcome was positive in each transaction, whereas that of the richer agent was negative. Any single agent in this economy could have become the oligarch—in fact, all had equal odds if they began with equal wealth. In that sense, there was equality of opportunity. But only one of them did become the oligarch, and all the others saw their average wealth decrease toward zero as they conducted more and more transactions. To add insult to injury, the lower someone's wealth ranking, the faster the decrease.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine...
Depending on how you count things, the Yankees were founded in either 1901 or 1903, while the Expos were created in the 1968 baseball expansion and started playing in 1969.
Without reseting the score for every game, there is simply no way for the Expos (now called the Washington Nationals) to ever have equality with the Yankees. (well, ok, it is possible but is just plain never going to happen).
At the end of the last (American) football season, the Green Bay Packers beat the Chicago Bears, and in doing so passed the Bears for the most all-time wins in professional (American) football, which is the first time ever that the Bears did not have the most all-time wins. The Bears are one of the founding teams, and the Packers joined the league in the second season. If the Bears and Packers both won 0 games for 4 straight years, the New York Giants would catch up with both of them. But only if they won all 16 games every year. Then again, the Giants joined the league in its 5th year. Is there any reasonable situation in which a non-first-decade team manages to catch up? No: it would take a generation of spectacularly bad performance by all the old clubs while at the same time a newer club needs to be spectacularly good the entire time!
That original analogy was so good :)
I'm ideologically predisposed against centralization (including that of government), but I've still got to acknowledge the extreme slashing of tax rates that took place over the last several decades. Not only the income tax, but also the estate tax. Take a look back at the historical rates for both, and they're shocking compared to what we consider "high taxes" today.
These taxes were gutted under a pretend banner of limiting government, while government spending continued full steam ahead - including spending on mega subsidies to the financial industry by the federal reserve. Those taxes were all money that used to be recaptured by the government, now continually accumulating in private hands. The only reason we haven't had massive price inflation over the past several decades is that technological progress and outsourcing has made manufactured goods continually less expensive to produce. Instead the inflation has shown up in the "everything bubble", with asset prices mostly exempt from CPI, as ever-growing anti-productive wealth pools bid up ownership of our entire society.
I’m not saying the wealthy never make anything of value, but rather that wealth is not necessarily correlated to “output” of any kind.
I don't dispute that many people are born into wealth, but over the past 20 years there has been more wealth produced in the world than ever before. There are more millionnaires and billionnaires than ever before, most of them were not born rich.
You don't become rich by reducing your expenses, you become rich by making something people want and monetizing it.
Oh, dear. I can tell from reading your comments that it’s not gonna matter to try to argue with you, so I’ll just say that this is incredibly deeply profoundly naïve.
I don’t find that odd. Even if accurate, “naive” tends to have more negative connotations and typically codes as an insult.
I tend to find other ways to communicate that same information to someone when needed, even if it is less direct or less accurate: it ends up being better received. The communication winds up more successful overall.
We can say it allocates capital to other people who then produce things; and so they “produce” at a distance. I think a better description of that is “control” (or “influence” if you are feeling more charitable). They control what value is produced by others, through the trust.
Does the trust really create anything useful on their own, though? Is there value inherent in their control/influence? Is that an optimal way of allocating resources?
Personally, I don’t think so - I think it’s inefficient, and mostly serves as a way for the wealthy to extract rent (so to speak) from society.
I will admit that this is the only world I have ever known, so it’s hard for me to envision an alternate future. But, I don’t think that means what we have today is really a good idea - and I think recognizing who actually produces “value” in society is an important realization to have.
The family trust having that wealth has to have come from somewhere in the first place though - someone (probably you or your ancestor) has to have made something that people wanted and were willing to pay for (obviously this is in general terms, there are exceptions in unethical stuff like stealing etc)
I broadly agree with your critique of the current system we have - which is why sensible social safety nets should be established and a government should exist as a safeguard and as a check on it.
However, production is entirely different to distribution and we're talking about two different things. I'm talking about how an individual becomes and stays rich, you're talking about the system - I agree with the critiques of the system as a whole.
People get rich by creating something people want. It is not by buying higher quality products or w/e the quote implies. You can buy all the crappy products you want and still be rich as long as whatever you're producing is in demand.
Who knows. The problem is that optimal resource allocation is not an objective concept. You make the argument that the family trust is dead weight, but I would disagree because someone has to do the allocation, and that is real work. Most of that work is done by analysts hired by the family office, and they would just be doing that work for another employer otherwise.
You could also make an argument that the person who has inherited and doesn't have to do any work is economic dead weight. And on that point I would agree with you. But the truth is that the number of people who inherit enough money to never work is vanishingly small. Top 1% in the US is net worth $10 million, and even that is only barely enough after estate tax if they have 1 child. Top 0.1% is 50 million, and that would do it for sure. So we may be losing 0.1 - 1 % of our potential economic productivity to this dead weight, but that's insignificant. And in reality, the people I know from school from families like that are all working anyway. Most rich parents don't want to support dead weight kids even if they can easily afford it.
Or let’s take predatory check cashing places. No one should be lose 3% to 7% of their wages to literally cash a check, yet if you can’t carry the minimum savings amount, you can’t get a bank that won’t charge you a monthly “maintenance fee” (lol, like what “maintenance”are they doing? Polishing coins, and ironing bills?), so you lose 3% of your wages as a poor tax, whereas someone with a more lucrative job, keeps all of their take home pay.
Maybe our Warehouse Stores are run very differently? Not sure. Been awhile since I've gone to Sam's, maybe they compete in that price range.
And I just checked Chase, they charge $12 / month* for basic checking. (*Waived with just $500/month direct deposit, but let's ignore that.) If you're cashing more than $400/month, you should just sign up for it. ($400/month is deep, deep poverty level, like panhandling.) I'm sure there's people who don't get a real checking account and could benefit from it, but the reasons are probably more along thines of "ineligible to get a bank account" or math illiterate, not "too poor for the minimum balance requirements".
The whole idea is just ridiculous. The main consumer good people get screwed over like this is housing, but that's 60% screwing over the other 40%, not the top 1% vs the 99%, so most people don't see themselves in those terms.
Seriously though I have no problem with them setting a minimum quality bar, but the idea that poor people would be rich but for their ability to shop at Costco is just wrong.
i.e. best value
>yet if you can’t carry the minimum savings amount, you can’t get a bank that won’t charge you a monthly “maintenance fee” (lol, like what “maintenance”are they doing? Polishing coins, and ironing bills?),
Yes, operating a physical building, employing people, taking on liability all costs money. The US government could do its job and offer people free money transfer services if it wanted to ensure everyone had access to electronic money accounts. I do not see why one would expect a non charity to take up this responsibility.
Fraud is the fastest growing sector in America, and until there are daily executions for fraud, we will not be getting better.
Disclaiming the specific failure mode sounds dodgy as hell.
Laminated glass is a common one, with multiple layers of glass bonded together. If the glass is broken, the bonding material will (should) hold the glass together. This is presumably what the OP's glass was meant to be. This is common for skylights and automotive windshields.
Another type is toughened glass where the glass is treated (toughened) so that when it breaks it crumbles into small granular chunks that aren't sharp or dangerous in the way glass shards are. This is presumably what you were thinking about, and might have been what OP had installed based on their description of the failure. This is common in the passenger windows of cars.
It's common after an accident to see a broken but intact windshield (laminated glass) and other windows to be completely missing as they fragmented into small chunks (toughened).
There is also wire mesh glass, that you've probably seen in more industrial and commercial settings that is a lot more fire resistant than plain glass.
There, I said it. If Spirit Airlines didn't take advantage of people putting up with being miserable, they would not be viable as a business.
(The drip pricing is a problem and probably needs some tegation or something, and more gates, noreairports, and more route competition. But that is a aseparate issue than deep budget airlines, which you see even in highly competitive markets.)
In those book, Vimes is practical simple man with little time for big picture side of things. He deals with what is immediately around him and never really cares about root causes or anything like that.
The reality is simply that the sector rides waves, and at some point the wave ends. VHS was a wave. DVD was a wave. Mega-CGI (from The Matrix to Lord of the Rings to Marvel) was a wave. Streaming was a wave (Netflix threw money at productions almost senselessly, for a few years). Now that those waves are over, bosses' largesse is in scarce supply. Unions will do what unions are supposed to do.
The only novel bit, in this dispute, is the role of AI and computer-generated characters; but tbh we could see this development coming for a long time. A simple example: the brother of Spider-Man 2099, in the comic, is a film director who makes movies completely on his own, via digital means. This was published 25 years ago.
You need our money more than we need to give it to you.
...been that way for several decades, not just 'now'.
Yes, yes, but they've forgotten a key truth that used to be understood. People like to be moralized to. Persuasive speech is interesting to people because done well it evokes a response on an intellectual and emotional level. Moralizing is not the problem.
The problem is that if you're going to preach at people you need to make it entertaining preaching or people aren't going to stand for it, never mind pay for the privilege.
This.
Linked video [0] is entirely CGI generated in real time, and it looks better than the CGI in most modern Hollywood blockbuster movies, which can spend 10 minutes rendering each frame if they need to.
I'm not a gamer but people familiar with modern video games probably already know this.
There's no excuse for the lack of quality in modern movie CGI other than "we refuse to pay what good CGI artists are worth."
The cost of an average blockbuster production, compared to the cost of independent productions on platforms like YouTube, is insane. There's a reason why the cost of seeing a movie in a theater is so much higher today. But the value proposition is profoundly difficult. Spend $20/person/night at a movie theater, or $12/month for ad-free YouTube, where the production values of the top content producers have increased as per-episode views have reached into the millions? YouTube democratized content production, and gave anybody with sufficient talent access to the video entertainment market without needing to deal with the Hollywood gatekeepers. Think that the talent behind YouTube productions are going to unionize? That genie is out of the lamp.
Once the consumers leave Hollywood, good luck to Hollywood trying to get them back. And because the union's agreement doesn't extend to foreign productions, good luck trying to prevent actors and screenwriters from going abroad, whether to be part of a foreign production or an American production for YouTube, the longer the strike goes on.
Very skeptical about this. You'll see a bit of it while the strike is on, but the quality difference is real and the average US audience hates both sub and dub content.
You might get a bit of e.g. Scandinavian murder mystery or Korean drama, especially following the breakthrough of Squid Game.
The Anglosphere is larger than the US. Britain, Canada, South Africa, Australia each have domestic production companies that pump out English-language content that would not require dubbing or subbing.
The production difference is not large enough to justify the difference in cost. Ultimately, the streaming platforms control distribution. If you're Netflix, and the cost to acquire a foreign production is a fraction of the cost of an American production, even if the foreign production has a more limited audience, which are you going to decide to purchase and promote?
Maybe streaming distributors could introduce premium subscription tiers to unlock access to more expensive American productions, but I doubt it. Netflix's business model is predicated on purchasing large amounts of niche content that, due to a global audience, are sufficiently large to justify the purchase of the niche content. Ultimately, the American subscriber market is just another niche, when you're building out a global subscriber base. American audiences can be uninterested in most foreign productions, as long as individual subscribers are interested in some foreign productions.
> but the quality difference is real
It’s surely a matter of taste, but IMO there are lots and lots of European and Asian films that are extremely high quality and stand head and shoulders above most Hollywood productions.
Probably still true at present, but it's a mutable attribute. All you need to change this is to consistently present Americans with foreign content they personally find compelling. This has already been demonstrated with anime; Americans who like anime become acclimatized to subtitles, and of course dubs. And it's happening again with Americans who like romantic dramas; they're increasingly turning to Korean content. It could easily happen with blockbuster action movies too, particularly since those are light on dialogue anyway.
If Hollywood is counting on native English content being their moat, I think they're in trouble. That's a moat Americans are willing to cross if enticed with enough good content.
As for Youtube, TikTok, etc, I believe these address a completely different need of the consumers. It takes Hollywood to create a Mission Impossible (or even Everything Everywhere All At Once). No one is going to create something like that and release it on social media (the economics don't work). Also, I (and I presume most other people) don't want to watch a 2 hour epic on my phone or laptop. The movie product includes the experience of going out, having a communal experience, etc. It is not just a solitary experience of seeing people act stuff on a screen.
I actually agree with you, but as the price of movie tickets keeps going up, so does the cost of that communal experience. The price is starting to creep up against live concerts and live sports (for bleacher seats, OK, but still).
> It takes Hollywood to create a Mission Impossible (or even Everything Everywhere All At Once). No one is going to create something like that and release it on social media (the economics don't work).
The economics aren't working for movie theaters. The number of big-budget flicks that Hollywood can finance is decreasing over time as theater attendance declines and the films keep getting more expensive (at least due to inflation). The risks (costs) are increasing while the rewards (ticket sales) are decreasing. Something has to give.
Has there ever been a time when the suits weren't ignoramuses? And if they're optimizing everything to deliver a profit, why aren't they profitable?
The suits are to blame in terms of accountability, because the buck stops with them. But the product as far as I can tell has never been more expensive. The new Indiana Jones movie had a production budget of approximately $300M, plus marketing costs (between $50M & $150M). If we assume Disney will pocket 50% of the gross box office, they'd need to make $700M-900M just to break even. So far, more than two weeks after release, the film has made just over $300M worldwide.[0] That movie alone is very likely to lose hundreds of millions. Movies losing money is the norm, but not to the tune of hundreds of millions.
What's gone wrong? 1) The writing has deteriorated. Stories have become boring & tendentious, filled with unlikeable characters, hackneyed plots and preachy dialogue. 2) The studios have become completely risk-averse. I can kind of understand why they'd want to be risk averse with budgets of $300M, but audiences tire of remakes, reboots and distant sequels. (I think the creative types have gotten wise, which is why "explorable" IP with large worlds like Star Wars or Middle-Earth have been cannibalized to tell stories that are tonally and thematically quite different than the source material, because the suits have zero clue. Sometimes it even works, like with Andor. Though even Andor has struggled to find its audience amongst all of the noise.) 3) The costs have gotten too high. I'm not sure if the streaming wars or golden age of TV or even just low interest rates are responsible, but the costs of production are staggering. This is in a day and age where technology should have made it cheaper to produce films & TV. When I look at Oppenheimer's budget of $100M, I can almost understand why it is so expensive. I can't explain the Indy 5 budget.
When I was younger, I could almost always find a movie I wanted to watch on a Friday night. Those days are long gone. At some point, Hollywood stopped producing anything worth seeing, and now they're paying the price.
[0]https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl2776598017/?ref_=bo_...
The Sony leaks from years ago showed that the executive level lived up to every stereotype of an out of touch and ignorant executive that you could imagine.
It's possible that things have somehow changed since then, but I doubt it.
This is a silly meme, none of us have a crystal ball; there's really no telling how much further there is to fall. If this is the end stage, what are you going to call it in 50 years when people are getting themselves euthanized so they can sell off the last of their organs to put their child through elementary school?
Like are you talking about Marx who talked about capitalism in the context of western countries said capitalism was a necessary stage of development that brings about remarkable scientific and technological changes—changes that greatly increased aggregate wealth by extending humankind’s power over nature? Is he or his ideas the embodiment of this science of socialism or is it broader and how broad? Does it include critiques of the kind of economic determinism you have in mind? What did 'the science' say about the sino soviet rift, vietnam, etc?
Is the science of capitalism embodied in Adam Smith or some similar amalgamation of concepts? Did the science make predictions about Free State Congo, the republic of china and modern day US?
I wouldn't take any "science of capitalism" seriously either. Anybody telling you their political or economic ideology is a science that can predict the future is somebody you should laugh at. No ideology can predict with anything approaching scientific precision or accuracy the complex chaotic interplay of competing nations and the impact of technology yet to be invented.
There's nothing unreasonable about that. In fact, it is an extremely rational viewpoint, and pretty bluntly obvious. That's why Marxism-Leninism (aka "scientific socialism") is "materialistic"
It's not really science, but they needed a way to try and quantify and measure what they were doing.
If actors/writers can't earn a living from the profession quite frankly 'too bad'. Am I the only one who was raised and was told that you can't earn a living doing acting or entertaining unless you are 'a star'? The problem was going down that road and becoming dependent on it and not thinking things might change.
By the way what is going to happen to all of the people that have jobs in and around the industry that makes gasoline powered cars. Nobody seems to concerned about that. I don't mean just people who build gas powered cars but the entire industry supplying parts that will not be needed by EV (or parts for gas pumps etc you get the point).
Most people don't go to the theater (or even stream) to watch "quality," they go for entertainment. Artsy films might have a lot of artistic quality (like The Green Knight, for example) but most people don't care, they'll watch the latest blockbuster, which is where studios make the most money. For the people who do watch artsy films, understand that the blockbusters make the bulk of the revenue to even greenlight artsy films; without the mass market films, there wouldn't even be any artsy films (of a sizable budget like 10 to 50 million dollars, not true indie or art house films).
Interestingly, it would be ironic if, were these strikes to go on for a longer time, studios would simply think to invest more into AI which doesn't have the sorts of problems mere humans might, hastening the demise of writers and actors. This must be why it was reported that negotiations broke down as soon as AI was thrown in there, they definitely want to bet on that as the future and I'm not sure what leverage actors and writers have, honestly. It seems like whichever way the strike goes, studios won't budge on that issue.
Edit: removed art house label as it was inaccurate.
A tell-tale sign of a decadent society where people are depressed and unfulfilled, more interested in escape from life than engagement with life because everything they might live for is compromised in the name of profit at the expense of everything else.
I don't know what point you think you're making, but it's not helpful and there is nothing about this that anybody should be proud of.
Not really, where exactly am I going to get dragons in real life?
For some reason dubious psychologists had a thing for King Arthur stuff for quite a while and I'm not really sure there's any dragons in there, there's weird fisher kings and stuff. I think someone is rich enough and has enough free time (probably over a billion now, but similar people existed in the past in lower numbers), they would find some weird thing to work on or think about.
I've been reading some of his books recently and enjoy them, he's a legend for a reason. But once you get accustomed to the style and archaic words, you start to realize the stories and characters are pretty basic. Where he really shines are the creative premises.
Science fiction is historically not escapist at all, but that has somewhat changed.
These days we have adults everywhere who will openly exclaim their plain adoration of dragons and robots and hobbits devoid of any particular meaning or social value. They just merely love dragons and robots and hobbits. This is escapism and it's historically unprecedented.
That is not something American cinema ever done tho.
humans have been obsessed with fantasy for centuries and even more.
We live in a time when adults everywhere will openly exclaim their adoration for fantastical nonsense. They will unabashedly assure you that they simply adore dragons and robots and hobbits, devoid of any purposeful meaning or relation to the world we live in. Almost nobody who loves zombie films, for example, has the first clue what zombies meant when first devised.
They are literally the same. Fantasy is just modern mythology and most fantasy is rooted in ancient historical tales or historical events. The Kree-Skrull war for example was based on WWII USA vs Japan.
Old mythological stories and religions are based on historical events and switched to entertain. It's almost a certainty that Ramanaya never happened but Indian invasions of Sri Lanaka did happen etc.
> Almost nobody who loves zombie films, for example, has the first clue what zombies meant when first devised.
Ok and who cares? People don't speak ancient Sanskrit or old English either. Are you going to be complaining people who love English don't have the first clue what English looked like when it was invented.
Ever heard of Odyssey and Homer? That is adults being fascinated by escapist features long long time ago. We have records of adults entertainment and adults being fascinated by entertainment from pretty much any historical periods we have records from.
Literally the oldest surviving epic is Gilgamesh, which features Tiamat, the mother of dragons.
He doesn't seem to be implying that this is new. Rather, that this is something that happens to any decadent society society where people are depressed and unfulfilled.
Which I find ridiculous to be honest, every generation laments the downfall of society, it's nothing new at all.
Distribution groups like A24 are still carrying the torch, but the mass consolidation of Hollywood really seems to have greatly diminished the variety of bread and circuses available.
The fact that AI is by definition just going to create recycled, derivative content. If the industry replaces writers and actors with AI it’ll be their demise because audiences will get very, very bored very quickly.
I'm also not necessarily talking about AI creating the entire movie from scratch, it's a useful tool to help guide decisions. Personally I'm more looking forward to seeing indie filmmakers making something on par with a Marvel film in terms of CGI, without having to hire actors, rent studio space and time, etc, because the product at the end of the day is all pixels, data that can be generated line by line by a computer if only it knows what color to make each pixel. It sounds far-fetched today but in due time, everyone will have that power.
I’m impressed by what AI is capable of but it feels like we’re making the same mistake everyone made with self driving cars. It can drive down an empty road in a desert? Well it’ll surely only be a couple of years before they’re everywhere! ChatGPT can generate a paragraph of prose? Well it’ll surely only be a couple of years before it’s coming up with inventive show concepts, developing characters and planning season arcs!
It's the most entertaining nonsense I have ever had the delight of witnessing, despite being extremely repetitive. And at times I learn about pretty exotic foods as a bonus.
The original version was banned due to a cooking mishap, but there's a successor of sorts and it's more or less the same thing.
> the blockbusters make the bulk of the revenue to even greenlight art house films; without the mass market films, there wouldn't even be any art house films (of a sizable budget like 10 to 50 million dollars, not indie films).
Your assumption seems to be that big studios somehow use the profits of blockbusters to subsidize arthouse films. That would be wonderful if true.
It's false, though. Art films are financed from different suppliers of funds, and they even play in different theaters.
> there wouldn't even be any art house films (of a sizable budget like 10 to 50 million dollars, not indie films).
I don't know what this means. Before you were talking about arthouse films but now it's low-budget studio films??? What are you saying?
But you could be right; maybe in hard times they clamp down on ALL the spending.