Great article, I really thought it was a recropping like friends (and many others). So weird that they just forgot about CGI.
Execs have less and less shame as the years go on. Pride in artistic endeavour? That’s not going to make the shareholders happy.
People in the business world seems to only know business, and that's the limit of what they care about. Place these people into the arts, and you quickly see how important it is to have at least a single ounce of care when you work on projects where you want some level of quality.
But I think HBO, Netflix and most TV/streaming services are run by business-people still, as they think it's a numbers game, not a arts game. Eventually someone will understand and take the world by storm, but seemingly not yet.
Because they are businesses? Just because something is art doesn't mean expenses can be more than revenue.
There was an enormous increase in the supply of entertainment over the last 20 years, in the form of Youtube, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, WhatsApp, HN, video games, etc. Demand stayed the same, maxed out at 24 hours per day. One should expect changes in quality and quantity and price in a market with drastically shifting supply and demand curves.
You’d think these people would go off and be executives at a ball bearing manufacturing company or something and leave the arts alone, but it never happens that way.
I know that you are joking, but well-made BBs are incredibly important to just about any modern machine that moves, and indirectly, all the non-moving ones too.
Hell, Albert Speer, Nazi in charge of BBs and other manufacturing, said that the US bombing offensive would have had a huge impact on the war if they had just kept at it with bombing the BB factories instead of giving up.
The public did not spend a lot of money on buying these remasters - they lost a lot of money.
The DS9 documentary "What we left behind" had some HD reproduction. It was great, and I was lucky enough to see DS9 on a big screen at an semi-arty cinema in Hackney (not a chain, but did have popcorn), but doing this type of production is expensive.
Automating it is far cheaper, and although it comes out crap - people would prefer to watch stuff in 16:9 and either
1) Have stuff (like the hold in the Friends wall) which wasn't suppose to be there
2) Crop stuff out (see the first 20 years of Simpsons)
With the Simpsons there was enough outrage that they gave an option to fix it, but for those who remember 20 years ago it was very common for the average viewer to have their TV simply stretch 4:3 to fill the entire screen width. Nowadays a whopping 4 in 5 people in America are using their phone at the same time as watching TV, they simply aren't paying attention.
The number of people
1) Who notice
2) Who care
3) Who are watching older stuff
4) Who will pay for it
Is tiny.
I thought it was a lot, but had no idea it was that high. Man, phones really are like crack to us. One of the main reasons I like having a projector setup at home and no "TV" is when I put a movie on it means a) it's worth dedicating hours to and b) we really actually watch it because the room is dark and it fills our field of view.
All this time I've been wondering how people watch the mindless crap that's on TV. I can feel my brain rotting away as I look at that stuff. But now I realise the answer: they're not watching it.
How depressing. Well I guess I'll have to make do with ~50 years of quality and if it ever changes I'll consider it a bonus.