Comment by satvikpendem | Hacker News Reader

Comment by satvikpendem | Hacker News Reader

> The quality of their product has ceased to matter.

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.

This is wrong in so many ways.

> 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?

My mistake, I shouldn't have said art house, you're right that I'm talking about low budget studio films that are more serious in tone or have something unique about them and aren't just another action film. I don't mean indie art house films literally.

OK. Studio finances are too murky to understand, but I suspect the blockbusters that succeed mainly finance the ones that don't.

But you could be right; maybe in hard times they clamp down on ALL the spending.

> Most people don't go to the theater (or even stream) to watch "quality," they go for entertainment.

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.

> 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 for profit at the expense of everything else.

Not really, where exactly am I going to get dragons in real life?

How are you contradicting my point? It's historically very abnormal for adults to be so fascinated with dragons and other escapist features. We are living in strange times and it's not coincidence. We have lost capacity for art that engages with sincere human experience, a concerning situation for a society to find itself in. It means we are losing capacity to engage with ourselves; it is no laughing matter.

You’re basically calling them all the adults who read the young adult books

> It's historically very abnormal for adults to be so fascinated with dragons and other escapist features.

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.

Or just maybe I don’t care that people think I’m too old to enjoy the things I like, and don’t force myself to suffer through some art house cringe fest because some guy on the internet thinks it’s a sign of living in a capitalistic hell scape while posting on a site specifically targeting capitalists.

Truly, these are strange times. We need to go back to the times where adults scoffed at the robots of Asimov. I mean the time machines and vampires of Wells and Stoker. I mean the electrically reanimated corpses of Shelley. I mean the ghosts and fairies and witchcraft of Shakespeare. I mean the demigod superheroes of Homer. I mean…

Jules Verne's books basically 'young adult' fiction in his day. I think the 19th century nature of his works, which may challenge modern readers, likely obscures this fact from people today.

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.

Narrative works can make use of otherworldly features without being remotely escapist. Shakespeare and mythology are fine examples of this.

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.

Shakespeare was escapist. So was Asimov. So was mythology.

Not technically wrong, but it is one thing to decorate the complexities and contradictions of the human experience, and quite another to distract from the complexities and contradictions of the human experience. I think we both know which one is happening today.

> decorate the complexities and contradictions of the human experience

That is not something American cinema ever done tho.

is this a bit or have you not read any chinese or indian myths? where do you think the yellow dragon being associated with the chinese emperor comes from? or Indira and the Vitra? what about St George and the Dragon?

humans have been obsessed with fantasy for centuries and even more.

Mythology and fantasy are drastically different things. Meaning, purpose, context, are very important for understanding art, of course.

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.

> Mythology and fantasy are drastically different things. Meaning, purpose, context, are very important for understanding art, of course.

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.

> It's historically very abnormal for adults to be so fascinated with dragons and other escapist features

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.

> It's historically very abnormal for adults to be so fascinated with dragons and other escapist features.

Literally the oldest surviving epic is Gilgamesh, which features Tiamat, the mother of dragons.

Panem et circenses has been around a long time, it's not a new concept that you're implying. People like entertainment, which is sometimes but not always a proxy for quality. We can deny that at our peril or accept that that's what the majority of people like and cater to them. That's what studios do now, whether we artsy media watchers like it or not.

>Panem et circenses has been around a long time, it's not a new concept that you're implying.

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.

Based on this comment it seems they are implying that we are in some new sort of society: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767978

Which I find ridiculous to be honest, every generation laments the downfall of society, it's nothing new at all.

What feels “new” (at least to me) is that we no longer have any sort of large gradient between art house films and “turn your brain off and consume” mass market films. In 2023, you’re probably either going out to see a subtitled Korean drama or a paint by numbers Disney film.

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.

Indeed, I assume it's simply that budgets are inflating and it's difficult to fund more and more films (especially as marketing costs grow) such that, unless you have a string of hits like A24, it's nearly impossible to get off the ground.

> they definitely want to bet on that as the future and I'm not sure what leverage actors and writers have, honestly

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.

How is it "by definition?" Just because it trains on known data doesn't mean it does not mix and match ideas in novel ways. Even AlphaGo a few years ago played a completely novel move in the game that was never seen or even considered by master Go players, so I'm not too worried about AI's "creativity."

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.

You don’t see the difference between playing Go, a game with strictly defined rules and limited moves available at all times, and the process of creative writing?

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!

I agree, it might take some time, perhaps years or decades (although I doubt the latter based on current progress it seems), but it is not an insurmountable challenge, as long as you are a physicalist, I philosophical terms.

Have you ever seen "Unlimited Hams"? It's an AI recreation of the famous steamed hams scene from The Simpsons.

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.

And yet it still works because it's based on something that human writers did.

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