That really shows the hunger for original stories and IC among cinephiles.
Major studios were too afraid to produce something fresh instead of numberless sequels and reboots in the last decade or so.
Major studios were too afraid to produce something fresh instead of numberless sequels and reboots in the last decade or so.
I think calculus somewhere has changed that is allowing these small/mid sized movies to be made again.
Hell, they ditched DRM on music in that time period too and will sell you lossless ALAC as well as MP4 audio. (They obviously weren't able to talk Hollywood into that.) Steam is DRM that ensures the capability to pull rugs.
Maybe. It's not been a very prominent line of business for them, and even then I can recall a couple of significant dramas over that time - didn't they merge two different kinds of libraries and cause confusion? The unremovable U2 album is also a cause for concern, not because an extra album is bad but because it implies they see the contents of your library as up to them rather than you. Most of all, they went out of their way to break music being sold by Real for iPods, which hardly suggests a company committed to interoperability and open platforms.
> Hell, they ditched DRM on music in that time period too and will sell you lossless ALAC as well as MP4 audio. (They obviously weren't able to talk Hollywood into that.) Steam is DRM that ensures the capability to pull rugs.
Not "obvious" at all, and precisely the point at issue. I'm happy to buy music from Apple, but movies require another level of trust that they haven't reached yet. I will grudgingly, cautiously buy games from Steam when they're not available on itch/GoG, and maybe that's unfair, but Apple have never sent me the message that they want or care about me (a non-Apple hardware user) as a customer of their movies.
Open the settings and uncheck "automatically download purchased music that isn't on the device".
Fixed.
> movies require another level of trust
When Apple paid the studios extra to alliw them to upgrade previously purchased 480p movies to HD, I'd say they earned it.
And how many people run linux that this is even relevant?
> May 28, 2026
https://mastersingaming.com/2026/05/28/despite-astronomical-...
Not to mention reading this on Linux with Steam in the background.
The DRM in Steam is not one of ownership. It’s one of needing a Steam account to buy and access those installer and game files.
“You can just stream your movies from proprietary device through apple tv app” isnt Steam for Movies in the spirit of the idea. What you have described is no different than having a streaming only subscription where you dont own the files and can’t access a copy of it offline. However you are correct that if you don’t care then you probably never wanted to own a copy of the files in the first place.
> The iTunes movie store is not friendly outside of the Apple ecosystem. Making the entire idea not really affordable since you need a expensive electronic device to utilize it sanely. Might as well find another way to get to it at that point.
I pointed out that buying a movie from Apple does not require an expensive device and does not require buying any hardware from the Apple ecosystem.
You ignored the facts and kept going on about having to buy expensive Apple hardware, which it isn't and you don't.
You moved the goalposts by requiring not only that purchases not require hardware that's expensive or from Apple, you added that it must not be revocable or streamed and must work on Linux.
I am not advocating for the iTunes store or any other source for buying media, I lost interest in owning TV or movies long ago, I was just providing factual information about what doing so requires.
And I am providing factual information on what a Steam for movies is.
Also when I write things in “quotes”, does not mean someone is quoting you or inventing things you said. Quotes have many uses and contexts. Perhaps if you cannot stay on topic or focus on the criteria of what is being discussed and dont understand how quotes work, this forum is not for you.
Steam for Movies and how iTunes store does not fit that description is exactly what my original message was about. Please stop pretending otherwise.
Probably because the Linux market is too small to support an iTunes for Linux.
By my understanding, the Linux market prefers free, open source, community effort. So essentially the real question is: why aren't you making movies yourself and sharing them free with your Linux peers?
This is always the dumbest style of argument.
P1: Healthcare sucks!
P2: Oh yeah? Why aren't you a doctor?
Be serious. It's perfectly fine to criticize things and the answer is extremely rarely change your life and become a domain expert in something else to meet some kind of "oh yeah, be the solution" nonsense by somebody that often themselves refuses to get off the couch for anything meaningful.
If the Linux market is large enough for steam to support it, then it should be big enough for a movie store to support.
But it's really beside the point, since supporting games on an OS is a hell of a lot harder than supporting video. You're right that movie stores have no excuse - except the control argument, working the other way than it did for Valve.
We've also seen Apple upgrade 480p movies purchased in the past to HD which is an improvement compared to buying physical media.
Cost ranges from $5-30. Fewer dirt cheap sales than Steam, but the standard price point at launch is lower, in exchange.
(Having to explain “buying movies” makes me feel old!)
I can't watch my Amazon purchases in HD because I run Linux. I get downgraded garbage 480p instead.
I can't watch any of this while on an airplane because I'm not allowed to download it.
And I don't own any Apple hardware so iTunes is a bit of a nonstarter.
In contrast, Steam lets me play offline and bends over backwards to get games to run (e.g. Proton and many other compatibility tools). And my Steam Deck doesn't earn me any extra special privileges over anything else.
Yes, I think it's just people today have more options for entertainment. There are lots of people in this thread trying to rationalize their declining interest in movies as the failing of someone else with "there's no Steam for movies", "they don't make good original movies anymore", or "they don't hire talented people anymore" but that stuff is all happening and has been for a while. People just found other stuff to do with their time so they aren't seeking movies out as much anymore, but it's all out there if you put in a little effort to find it.
DVDs and even video tape are relatively recent.
Hollywood was a lot less risk averse before DVDs and video tape. Heck, Hollywood was less risk averse before TV became mainstream.
Yeah and it was a different business model before then with a lot more people going to theatres
> Sean Evans:
> I think a scenario lots of viewers can relate to is sitting on the couch on a Friday night, going through the streaming services, cycling through the movies and thinking to themselves "they're not making movies for me anymore". As somebody who's been intimately involved in movie making for 30 years, what are the macro Hollywood conditions behind that sentiment?
> Matt Damon:
> Well, so what happened was the DVD was a huge part of our business - of our revenue stream - and technology has just made that obsolete. And so, the movies that that we used to make: you could afford to not make all of your money when it played in the theater because you knew you had the DVD coming behind the release and 6 months later you'd get a whole other chunk - it would be like reopening the movie almost.
> And when that went away, that changed the type of movies that we could make. I did this movie "Behind the Candelabra" and I talked to a studio executive who explained: it was a $25 million movie. I would have to put that much into print and advertising to market it - what we call P&A - so now I'm in $50 million. I have to split everything I get with the exhibitor, the people who own the movie theaters, so I would have to make $100 million before I got into profit. The idea of making $100 million on a story about this love affair between these two people... Yeah, love everyone in the movie, but that's suddenly a massive gamble in a way that it wasn't in the 1990s when they were making all those kind of movies - the kind of movies that I loved and the kind of movies that were my bread and butter.
Edit: yes, it was direct to HBO. So maybe Damon was just using it as an example because he knew the production cost off the top of his head.
"the kind of movies that I loved and the kind of movies that were my bread and butter (are no longer affordable if I was to do a cinema release)"
So maybe Behind the Candelabra was direct to HBO precisely because of the economics he was pointing out?
Hollywood has also completely failed to cultivate a new generation of celebrities. God, we had a few years of nothing but Pedro Pascal to the point we have memes inside memes.
And the cost of production has gone way down, you don't need a specialized studio to put in CGI these days when some guys Blender can do better.
So Hollywood is busy being in a downward spiral eating itself while so much room has opened for "indie" to eat their lunch and dinner.
Pre-Covid there was simply not enough major weekends to release a big movie. They end up competing with each other.
Sure, Baby Driver made $300m on a $40m budget. But for pure profit maximization you are better off making a billion dollars on a $500m budget.
If you have only 4-5 good chances to make money in a year, you're going to maximize revenue over profitability.
Lol no you're not. $1B off a 500M production budget would be a disaster bordering on a flop. You've not taking marketing into account. You've not taking having to split earnings with theaters into account. Baby Driver is the more desired outcome 10/10.
AAA video game makers are having the same problem.
Last year it was basically F1 and Minecraft (and while not sequels, both are arguably well known "franchises" outside of movies - but I guess MJ and Wuthering Heights are too ;-)).
Not to say that it isn't an improvement, but we're still pretty far from seeing American cinema catching up to the world stage in originality, let alone to the golden Hollywood era.
Sadly, I heard that the studio is apparently trying to figure out how to make a Hail Mary sequel (sigh).
they put a lot of subtle hooks in the ending montage. i just hope they dont try to force it and make a direct sequel with ryan as the lead.
I enjoyed both the book and the movie btw
Backrooms was a quite successful web series on YT which in turn originated in 4chan boards.
Only the medium being sourced from is changing from successful Broadway shows, popular novels or comic books in the years past. The calculus remains the same - properties with name recognition even from other formats tend to be green-light.
But the original element that set backrooms/liminal spaces apart wasn't what was in them, but what wasn't. Sure it's creepy to be all alone, you may be afraid to get jumped, but you aren't. Some of the backrooms-inspired video games stay true to this concept.
So point is, the "Backrooms" film author may be an outsider, but he sticks to a very well-tried formula - one mainstream authors probably avoid for being too cliche more than anything.
What A24 is doing with this movie is what the large studios have been doing, they're just doing it for a different audience. It's franchise driven content but simply 'gamer-coded' and sourced from Youtube or game-related media rather than from more traditional sources, mobilizing the gen-z fans of that content.
Still a lot of people buy those, so studios continue to make them.
Also indie games are too cheap. I noticed the need to correct my own thinking: Why should the boring game of a big publisher cost more than the great game made by a single guy? And allowed myself to use more money when I want to support smaller studios.
Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die
Honey Bunch
Cold Storage
Send Help
Marty Supreme
Dust Bunny
Fackham Hall
Eternity
Rental Family
Bugonia
Roofman
Is it worth being involved in indie production when success just guarantees a hate campaign against you? It will probably happen over Backrooms soon enough.
Like most projects, some indie productions (like TADC) end in creator burnout, others (like iron lung) end in moderate success, most probably end somewhere in between. We saw this with undertale, lights out, hazbin hotel, primer, el mariachi…
Major studios produce movies that most people want to see. The cinephiles don't like those films, but conveniently, they do like films that don't cost a quarter of a billion dollars to make.
The headline here is about a movie that took in $81 million. The Mandalorian took in about the same amount in its first weekend, and it's considered a financial disaster.
If people would start going to see more of those low-budget movies, they'd see a lot more interesting films. The cinephiles would be thrilled, because it would get those films into major theaters (over 2,000 for this film), rather than having to seek them out in tiny arthouse theaters for very few showings.