31 ms·

Hollywood as We Know It Is Over

• sandworm101 10y ago
  Unions and filesharing are not killing hollywood. (Did the mpaa write this?) The fact that 70% of revenue comes from overseas is to be expected. 70+% of people live there. Unionized, wage earning, labour costs are not high. Look any large production. Compare the headliner (stars, directors etc) takehome to the union workers. The rise in production costs has far more to do with on-camera talent than cameramen. "Hollywood" is dieing, but only if you are one of the old guard, the handful of old production studios that make up the mpaa. Netflix, youtube and amazon show us that there is plenty of money out there should you produce something people actually want to watch, delivered in a way people actually want. Ditch the commercials. Stand up to your a-list talent during negotiations. Actually pay the writers (see the Goodfella fiasco). Cut the focus groups. And make something worth my time to watch.
  • legodt 10y ago
    Anti-labor rhetoric and actions is almost always the first response of dying old gaurd in industry. This should come as no surprise
    • thrill 10y ago
      The US textile industry would be pleased, if it still existed.
    • Eridrus 10y ago
      That's pretty much the point of the article though; that movies are not competing in the category of movies where their costs are acceptable, but the general category of entertainment and that when industries truly are dying, unions will roll over because the other main option is for the company/industry to die.
  • jessaustin 10y ago
    The rise in production costs has far more to do with on-camera talent than cameramen. Production costs wouldn't have to be rising, for smart producers to wonder whether they couldn't cut some corners and save some money, especially in a context of lowered ticket sales. I'd argue that inflated pay for star actors is just a symptom of the disease. Ticket sales are falling, studio heads don't know why, and they get into bidding wars for the fewer and fewer leads whose recent movies have done well. The real reason is that movie fans would rather watch their 75" screen at home than schlep to the theater. Incidentally, what was the "Goodfella fiasco" about?
    • sandworm101 10y ago
      From the studio's perspective Goodfellas never turned profit on video rentals or licensing. So the writer isnt getting residuals. It's a protracted legal battle involving shell companies and hollywood's accounting practices. Update: they recently settled. http://variety.com/2016/biz/news/goodfellas-irwin-winkler-warner-bros-1201752862/ http://variety.com/2016/biz/news/goodfellas-irwin-winkler-wa...
    • npsimons 10y ago
      It occurred to me that we only seem to see the same couple dozen of actors in the most highly advertised movies any more. Why is that? Surely there are plenty of actors who could cover many of these parts. I mean, good for these actors if they're enjoying the work and want to be overbooked all the time, and I'm sure they're perfectly competent for the jobs, but it does feel to me like Hollywood keeps shoveling out the same thing over and over again, and it's not just the scripts and CGI.
      • gmarx 10y ago
        You seriously underestimate how rare star power is (or how spoiled we have become).
      • Arizhel 10y ago
        Yep, I'm really sick of seeing Tom Cruise in so many movies. I'll actively shy away from watching a movie with him in it. I just can't disassociate him from all that Scientology cult silliness he keeps pushing; it ruins the suspension of disbelief.
  • kazagistar 10y ago
    I've seen what entertainment industry looks like without unions; animators in anime get paid below living wages, even though that industry is bigger then ever.
    • sandworm101 10y ago
      And young kpop/japanese pop stars who are owned and treated like garbage as thier brands are marketed worldwide.
    • Grue3 10y ago
      Yeah, and the state of western animation (especially hand-drawn) looks pathetic in comparison. So it's either unions, or cheap entertainment, you can only pick one.
  • EGreg 10y ago
    Just want to say I think movie RENTING may be affected, but not movie ticket sales or netflix subscriptions.
• _pdp_ 10y ago
  It occurred to me that the cinema as we knew it would be soon over as soon as I saw the first episode of Lost. Technology is definitely driving the price of content production but also content consumption to the bottom and there is no way escaping it, except maybe what Netflix is currently doing - original content - which they are getting better and bette at. It is kind of a medium between hollywood productions and youtube - fun, engaging and most importantly agile. According to Netflix reports they spent a lot of money last year but the amount of original content produced in a single year is astonishing. That being said, younger generation prefer watching youtube which is 95% free - and I can see the appeal. I doubt that we will stop watching movies anytime soon but I am more than certain that the format will change to make it bite-size, more engaging and instantly available for a small fee that makes it actually rather annoying to use torrents to consume pirated content. Netflix is right there but what I find even more interesting is what Amazon is doing because of the way they package everything up into a single service. Let's be honest, the most annoying thing with subscription services, regardless how less you are charged, is the renewal. I know this first hand because I run my own SaaS. Amazon packages everything into their prime subscription which is annual and for a small fee not only you get to receive expedited delivery on many of the items but also original content and music and that is quite a killer feature that is hard to compete with. Combine this with the fact that almost every modern TV you can buy since 2016 is preloaded with Netflix and Amazon Video - you start to get the bigger pictures. I am sure others such as Google and Apple will follow but they might be too late in the game.
• TACIXAT 10y ago
  I love movies. Whenever I visit my dad (other side of the country), we go to see movies. However, most of the year I live with my girlfriend who falls asleep in theaters and can't justify the cost. This leads to me not seeing movies in theaters anymore. Now, I am subscribed to two streaming services. I don't pirate. I refuse to watch anything with ads, happy to pay, and somewhat ironically, the only ads I watch to completion are trailers that I haven't seen. I would love to catch movies as they are released but I have to wait until they're available on the streaming service. When they are available it is usually 5$ for a "rental". Is that a joke? I used to pay that at Blockbuster, and they had a physical location and employees! They've priced their digital content in such a way that I will only pay to see the movies that I really want to see. If it was cheaper, I'd be a constant consumer. It seems that is how most things in society get priced. Not for ultimate consumption, but to maximize the profit curve. I get that is how capitalism works, but that logic doesn't make sense to me for digital goods. They are practically zero cost to distribute once they are manufactured and your competition is people pirating them. If you're worried about audience size, lower the cost. You'll enable a lot more people to see a lot more movies.
  • chadgeidel 10y ago
    I'm not sure what your economic situation is, but I feel that $5 is pretty reasonable - at least in the US. Remember going to Blockbuster and then discovering the movie you wanted wasn't in stock? Along with the 2nd and 3rd options in your mind? I don't know about you, but I went home empty handed several times. (Yes, I had already gone through the greatly limited back catalog of interesting movies at all my local movie stores).
    • coredog64 10y ago
      RedBox will rent you a physical DVD for $1.50, and IIRC, $2 for a BluRay.
      • CodeCube 10y ago
        Yeah, but then you have to go get in your car, drive to the corner store, get out, wait in line, browse to find your movie, pay, get back in my car, drive back home. Ugh! I know I know, #firstworldproblems ... but some markets like where I live in Orlando, FL, driving is a pain in the arse (not a walkable city), so I just pony up the $5 for the digital rental to save me the hassle.
• jvagner 10y ago
  The three act structure of most "film" is also killing it. Television, cable, streaming and Youtube have introduced much richer versions of content formats... a 100 minute action movie, or historical drama, will follow so many familiar beats nowadays that there's almost no way to make it compelling.
  • malnourish 10y ago
    While I agree that we could use some structural novelty, I would be hard pressed to believe that mainstream audiences care.
    • thenomad 10y ago
      They care far more than you'd expect. Almost everyone watching a movie has seen hundreds if not thousands of movies. They're experts on movies. They might not be able to explain their expertise, or turn it into creation, but they recognise and have feelings about the structures and the tropes. They may like them or they may hate them, but assuming your audience is ignorant of the cinematic form is one of the big newbie filmmaker mistakes.
      • gowld 10y ago
        The mistake is assuming audiences don't want the age-old well established hugely popular and profitable cinematic forms.
        • deleted 10y ago
          [deleted]
    • npsimons 10y ago
      One of the things they don't tell you about getting old (or you don't believe it, or you ignore it) is that once you've seen/heard enough stories/music, it all starts to sound/look the same. I can tell from a trailer or sometimes even a movie poster exactly how a movie will play out to the point I don't want to see it because I'll be bored to tears. This is also why Hollywood markets to the young: they haven't been alive long enough yet to recognize the repetition.
• rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  Great, it'll be like the novel-rewriting apparatus from 1984, except instead of Winston Smith switching around names and scenes, it'll be a neural network. I'll bet $100 that in the next ten years we will be able to create content on the fly. Instead of one single Game of Thrones that everybody watches, the TV microphones will pick up on people's sentiments and adjust the plot line accordingly. Don't want your favorite character to die? They survive. Hate another's guts? They'll be gone. Prefer a lighter tone? The entire set has been replaced with Disney World and the cast now consists of the characters from Arrested Development.
• robert_foss 10y ago
  I guess $COMIC-$REBOOT-7 isn't all that appealing.
  • saalweachter 10y ago
    We don't really get it with the content still being controlled by its original creator / the chain of people the original creator sold the rights to, but to be honest I kind of like the idea of remaking Batman, Superman, Spiderman every few years. It becomes like Shakespeare or the opera: you don't go to see a new story, you already know it by heart. You go to see the performance and the innovation within the framework. You get to start asking questions like, "Who was the better Spiderman?".
    • VLM 10y ago
      The big danger of becoming Shakespeare or the opera is you run a narrowcasting risk of turning something that 100% of the population was once familiar with into something less than 1% of the population will ever see. Financially that might not be long term sustainable. Spiderman remakes as the new Hamlet is interesting conceptually as a hard sci fi or alt hist topic. I don't think it would be realistically possible with one showing per year to 0.1% or less of the population dressed in black tie and gown. A similar yet totally different "innovation within the framework" might be traditional soap opera writing. However that begins to get close to regular TV series. Would it be possible to put on thirty years of daily Spiderman daytime drama?
      • saalweachter 10y ago
        I don't mean "on the stage" so much as the way Shakespeare -- and other public domain works, like Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein, or Dracula -- forms the nucleus of new works of art. Every few years a new director or actor will put their spin on Sherlock Holmes -- two movies starring Robert Downey Jr, one staring Ian McKellan, and two on-going TV series. Romeo and Juliet is the basis for like a hundred movies, sometimes with tragic endings and sometimes with happy ones. Retelling well-known stories with slight variations or twists is something humans have been doing for millennia.
• iampliny 10y ago
  There are two kinds of "disruption": * The first merely inconveniences people who already work in a given industry, by forcing them to learn new tools or workflows. * The second unseats incumbents and fundamentally shifts power dynamics. "Hollywood", "Film" et al have by and large not been disrupted yet, in the second sense. Digital change came late to film & tv. We are just now on the tail end of digital transformations that will enable the second wave of disruption. I've written about this extensively, it's kind of my bag: http://endcrawl.com/blog/two-digital-revolutions-disruption/ http://endcrawl.com/blog/two-digital-revolutions-disruption/
  • anjc 10y ago
    The first is people incorrectly using the dictionary definition of the word without understanding Organisational Strategy. The second is the "canonical" definition of the term as defined extensively by Christensen. The state of the film industry and streaming services fits into Christensen's parameters of "disruptive innovation" but it's a long way off given that something like 90% of houses pay for network TV services.
• webwanderings 10y ago
  Things have evolved based on time and change in people's habits due to technological advancement. You noticed that the TV industry is thriving, particularly the studios which are positioned to deliver slow-paced but epic shows like Games of Thrones (which stands as a barometer for the others to compete). People are just better suited to keep up with their entertainment needs, in different settings and environment. The movie industry would need to adjust itself.
• roymurdock 10y ago
  And it’s only a matter of time—perhaps a couple of years—before movies will be streamed on social-media sites. For Facebook, it’s the natural evolution. The company, which has a staggering 1.8 billion monthly active users, literally a quarter of the planet, is eventually going to run out of new people it can add to the service. Perhaps the best way to continue to entice Wall Street investors to buoy the stock—Facebook is currently the world’s seventh-largest company by market valuation—will be to keep eyeballs glued to the platform for longer periods of time. What better way to do that than a two-hour film? This might begin with Facebook’s V.R. experience. You slip on a pair of Oculus Rift glasses and sit in a virtual movie theater with your friends, who are gathered from all around the world. Facebook could even plop an advertisement next to the film, rather than make users pay for it. When I asked an executive at the company why it has not happened yet, I was told, “Eventually it will.” Really interesting point - would expect to see Facebook/Netflix converge on this idea, perhaps even enter some type of M&A action. If it were legal, perhaps Alphabet would be wise to move first and bolster YouTube with Netflix content to create a quasi monopoly on video content - both user created and studio produced. The other giant player to consider would be Amazon with Twitch and their original series as well. Seems like a bit of a fight to the bottom, but I'm not sure what the margins/financials look like for these businesses.
• two2two 10y ago
  In summary, Hollywood is a dinosaur on its deathbed losing their strength to control the market as SV seeps into every crevice of consumers lives providing solutions Hollywood was too stubborn to embrace.
• ravenstine 10y ago
  What a coincidence that this gets written right as I decide to ditch television and begin going out to see films again. I already watch the least television out of anyone in my peer group(when I do watch anything, it's usually educational & self-development content on Youtube), yet I feel that I've come to an understanding about what this "television renaissance" really is. * from here on out, I'm using the word "television" to mean both TV & streaming. While there we have seen some excellent writing for television in recent years, and while there are more than 400 scripted shows being produced for both television and streaming, I'd argue that most of it is trash. Now hear me out, because I know that word gets used in a relative sense, but I'm trying to be objective here. I call it trash because as well-produced as these shows are(in terms of acting, sets, effects), few people that I know, including myself, actually watch these shows all the way through to their last season. From the conversations I've had with people, it sounds like a common thing to binge through a couple of seasons of a given show, get bored of it, and then move on to another one of the hundreds of available shows. Is this really such a good thing? Is this better than the state of the film industry at its height? I've started asking myself these questions a lot lately, as my experience tells me the average person isn't getting a whole lot of lasting satisfaction out of a given show yet they are spending an inordinate amount of time "bingeing". The film industry screwed itself in the behind for more reasons than are in the linked story. Big studios are well-known for destroying the creative process and watering down what might otherwise become a classic. Evidence of this can be found in interviews by writers & producers who, years after they've cut their ties with studios, feel safe to talk about what "could have been" if the executives didn't return scripts with a bunch of notes and lines crossed out. So not only did we end up seeing a lot of inferior products at the cinema, but we were paying out the ass for it; somehow we were paying over $20 to watch mediocre films while sitting in dirty theaters, and people gradually caught on to the fact that it sucks. On top of that, we they began subjecting us to loud video advertisements before the trailers would run. But then why would I go back to film, you might ask? Well, I'm fortunate to live in LA, and we do have a lot of "arthouse" cinemas that have a far superior experience, if you are willing to look for them. There are still lots of independent and foreign films being made that are at least decent and break the mold of the average Hollywood blockbuster. More importantly, I think it's healthier to see a film every once in a while, and actually be around other human beings, than be at home eating diet ice cream while Netflix autoplays. Films also tend to have a story that has to be complete in at least 1.5 hours; contrast that with the J.J. Abrams style of television show that's common these days, where we're lead by a carrot on a stick for several episodes(possibly entire seasons!) by some idea that seems neat but actually has very little payoff, only to be then redirected to a more enigmatic carrot on a stick(e.g. Lost's "hatch" or the "maze" in Westworld). With film, the worst that can happen is you lost a couple hours out of your life, and that doesn't happen that often for me. Meanwhile, I've known people who watch entire seasons of mediocre shows just because those shows are new, and that's a lot of hours that could definitely be spent doing something better. What a coincidence that those same people have energy levels far below what they should have for their age! EDIT: I forgot to include the real point I want to make: people will realize that they are overvaluing the time they are spending in front of the tube, and there will come a point where the film industry makes a comeback.
• vostok 10y ago
  Hollywood is being disrupted as we speak. Look at the incredible success of Annapurna, A24, and the original content by Netflix and Amazon.
  • barneygumble742 10y ago
    How is Annapurna and A24 disrupting Hollywood?
  • superuser2 10y ago
    Original content by Netflix and Amazon is produced by the same companies, people, and tools as the rest of Hollywood's output, just for a different distribution system.
• jarjoura 10y ago
  The article reads more like an anti-union piece than anything else. Yet, Hollywood has been making TV shows in Vancouver for the last 20 years to avoid this union overhead, so it's not really news to anyone paying attention. Lord of the Rings was famously filmed in New Zealand and brought accents to our movies. Now you'd be hard pressed to watch a recent film without a couple accents. Post-production is pretty much all that's left in Los Angeles. Edit: Sorry, in my quick commenting, I meant to imply that accents are more a symbol that Hollywood films its big blockbusters outside the US now. In re-thinking it, it was a bad form.
  • throwaway91111 10y ago
    What do you mean by the accent remark? America didn't have a shortage of accents in movies before LOTR, that's for sure.
  • Shivetya 10y ago
    with regards to being anti-union it merely highlights that the industry is artificially labor intensive in a day when it should not be. similar to how newspapers were chock full of people who were very limited in scope but wholly protected. the negative about unions is that protecting an overly narrow just eventually leads to loss of not only that job but supporting jobs as well. the only "industry" protected from this loss potential is within the realm of government employment especially in maintenance categories. hollywood was able to hide such largess when the money was flowing but this is low hanging fruit to pick on, the salaries of actors and actresses is where many need to go but are afraid to call out. People compare CEO to line employee pay all the time but compare the lead actor(s) to the set people, never.
  • yellowbeard 10y ago
    New Zealand even changed labour laws to ensure The Hobbit would be filmed there. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/oct/31/warner-bros-new-zealand-hobbit-film https://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/oct/31/warner-bros...
  • mmanfrin 10y ago
    Lord of the Rings was famously filmed in New Zealand and brought accents to our movies wat
• rayiner 10y ago
  Who cares about Hollywood? In the last few years I've seen a handful of movies in the theaters: Frozen (I have a 4-year old), that documentary about Anthony Wiener (not Hollywood), and Fantastic Beasts. Almost all my consumption has been Netflix, Amazon, and HBO original content. These companies are hitting it out of the park when it comes to good storytelling. (Which, incidentally, is a good illustration of the good side of copyright. Not being able to just be a cheap distribution outlet for existing Hollywood content forced Netflix and Amazon to start making their own content. And the movie/TV industry is far better for that.)
  • JumpCrisscross 10y ago
    Ha--exact the same three. Plus one more, I think, though I can't remember which one right now. On the other hand, I've been hooked to The Man in the High Castle, Black Mirror, strings of documentaries and cartoons bought through iTunes, et cetera.
  • eutropia 10y ago
    I guess I care. My wife and I go to the movies almost every week during Oscar season: we love movies, and this year had an absolute ton of good ones. (And plenty of the low-effort formula films, too)
• espeed 10y ago
  YC RFS9: Kill Hollywood https://twitter.com/paulg/status/160491053080776706 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/160491053080776706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3491542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3491542 Mission complete?
  • l33tbro 10y ago
    I'd have to say mission incomplete. Part of the whole 'Kill Hollywood' meme was that a ground-breaking startup would appear with a business model to succeed the current production and distribution systems. Anyone nailing that?
• mtalantikite 10y ago
  Which really isn't a bad thing. If we can kill off the big budget movie that is all terrible writing and only effects (Ben-Hur, $100 million budget, $26 million gross) and replace it with smaller budget movies with great scripts and acting (Hidden Figures, $25 million budget, $104 million gross), I'm completely fine with that. Add in movie theaters like Metrograph in Manhattan, where I can buy an assigned seat for, say, a Kurosawa double feature, then I think we're moving in a good direction.
  • jobigoud 10y ago
    > smaller budget movies [...] $25 million budget Movie budgets have always astonished me. Even your low number is so extravagant. I mean, twenty five million dollars. Thinking what this represents for a company or a city.
    • mixmastamyk 10y ago
      Watch the credits until the end, and that doesn't even include the catering.
      • l33tbro 10y ago
        Or locations fees, travel, and accomodation budgets.
  • aaron695 10y ago
    All you've done is name some big budget movies that sucked and a low budget movie that worked. I argue the big budget movies that worked out number the # of low budget movies that worked (Obviously the # of low budget movies that sucked is in the hundreds way outnumbering big budget movies that sucked) http://www.imdb.com/search/title?year=2016,2016&title_type=feature&explore=user_rating&sort=num_votes,desc http://www.imdb.com/search/title?year=2016,2016&title_type=f...
• youdontknowtho 10y ago
  Hollywood is dieing because of tech and stuff so we should kill unions?
• Kiro 10y ago
  Regarding the raindrop thing. Why would the production company ever hire someone for that? The article makes it sound like they are forced to.
  • gmarx 10y ago
    I doubt that is the persons only job. She might be the costume person or in charge of continuity. It's like how the union guys who are in charge of moving everything (teamsters I think) won't let you move anything
    • germinalphrase 10y ago
      It depends what you're moving - and for good reason. Unions remain strong in industries that continue to have dangerous work environments. Film sets are controlled chaos with very high powered electric lights/equipment, cables and cords everywhere, and sometimes uniquely unusual (read: dangerous) work demands - high ropes, scaffolding, helicopters, pyrotechnics, intentionally crashed cars and other practical effects. When I was starting out in the industry - before I was Local 600 (camera dept.) - I think I scoffed a little bit about the "my job"/"not my job" stuff; however, in most cases there are some legitimate safety/efficiency/equipment protection requirements backing those decisions.
      • gmarx 10y ago
        Not only that, with a large group of people you can't trust everyone to have the judgement to tell exceptions to the rule. So it works better to just have everyone learn a simple rule like "don't move anything"
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
• FussyZeus 10y ago
  It's worth noting that a big part of what hit Big Print and Big Music was democratization, not just SV. Where it used to be only a few people could publish blogs and make music to the quality of a Real Recording Artist, regular Joe's and Jane's all over (and a number of big name DJ's) all got started making shit with Garageband and the like. Audio editors used to be exclusive software and required beefy (for the time) computers to use, now? A low end Macbook can easily stand in for the majority of what you'd find in a recording studio, as long as you output in mp3 at a reasonable bitrate, the mainstream consumer could never tell the difference. Same thing is now happening to movies, GIF makers on Imgur belt out effects that look like pro movie work for the cost of Adobe After Effects (or not, their morals depending) and I've seen fan films for various franchises that could easily stand toe to toe with budget movies. I think this trend toward the costs of entertainment creation going down are what's really going to eat the creative industry's lunch, including Netflix and the like eventually. Once we get to the point where a few friends can create something on the level of, just pulling something out here, Orange is the New Black over a few weekends at an investment of 20 grand? Why even pay Netflix at that point? We're already seeing a near infinite amount of free content created by people who just wanted to make things, without even intending to get rich in the process. Sure, the quality is hit and miss but how is that terribly different from Hollywood these days? Sorry for the ramble, hope I got my point across.
  • gmarx 10y ago
    The price of the tech goes down, but with so much choice the quality of the writing, acting and so forth, if anything, needs to be higher
    • FussyZeus 10y ago
      Right, but Hollywood doesn't seem to be attempting to scale that mountain.
  • magic_beans 10y ago
    Any links for this great free content? (Asking for a friend)
• chiph 10y ago
  The XBox mention was interesting. I wonder if there's a market for a machinima-style series, with distribution done via the Microsoft Store (if they have subscription pricing). Lots of Hollywood actors do voice-over work on the side. And since it's all virtual, you wouldn't have the overhead of union-rate costumers, craft-services, lighting techs, and so on.
  • touristtam 10y ago
    That mention actually made me question the genuine understanding of the author. As much as mircotsoft is pushing to be a big player in this, I do not see them taking a significant part of the market for home media center. There are just too many android box doing the same job for media streaming and big players pushing their own (Holu and Amazon come to mind).
• sitkack 10y ago
  > An algorithm generally provided better suggestions than an actual in-store clerk. Could use another pass or two of editing. And the whole thing smells like an anti-union hit piece. Funny thing, I was just in a shared ride with a production person from Hollywood. They might agree on the face of it, "Hollywood as we know it is over", because you and me baby, we KNOW Hollywood. But that Netflix and Amazon have fueled an explosion of new content that is outside of normal channels and normal timelines. Production houses all over the country have more work than they know what to do with. If the title was, "Hollywood as we know it is transforming" it wouldn't sound so dramatic.
  • TheGRS 10y ago
    Yea this is one thing I was thinking. Part of the downfall of music and newspapers, which are the prime examples cited in the article, are that those industries were ripe for disruption by everyone with a little talent (and even some without). Anyone with a guitar and some practice can create music and anyone with a little money for a personal sound studio can even create pretty good music that can go up on Spotify. The newspaper industry had even less barrier to entry. Anyone with a computer can setup a blog and write an op-ed piece. Film isn't unique because anyone with a good camera and some basic lightning and sound equipment (which aren't very expensive these days) can put together a movie. But really good films also take more than one person to make, unlike the other industries cited. You need crew and actors to bring everything together on a set and none of those come cheaply. I do think film is ripe for disruption, but not in the same way as these other industries where only a single person was needed.
    • ysavir 10y ago
      You say that... But have you compared the quality of youtube videos today to those from 10 years ago? The quality of writing, effects, and production have escalated sharply, even when done by a single person. Youtube is unlikely to disrupt Hollywood, due to it's format (video shorts), but it makes it clear that there's potential for someone else to step in and fill the gaps.
      • 10y ago
• plandis 10y ago
  I LOVE going to see movies in movie theatres. When I watch movies at home it's hard to focus. Pretty much constantly someone will feel the urge to check their phone. They will talk during movies, get up, etc... At a theatre that ever happens. Everyone is focused and there are, in general, few distractions.
  • wfh 10y ago
    I actually find the opposite - when I am out at a movie there seems to always be someone rustling chocolate or whispering loudly to their neighbour, or someone has brought overly boisterous children, who normally don't really want to be there, to the screening. At home, I can dim the lights and really get into a movie without any distractions.
  • the_watcher 10y ago
    I also love going to movies. The giant screen, surround sound (or at least sound that is properly equalized so I don't need to constantly turn the volume up and down), and the mental shift to "I'm in a movie, my phone is off" all wildly improve my enjoyment of the movie. It's also a huge reason why I saw so many more movies in theaters when I lived in Austin and could go to the Alamo Drafthouse, since it simply built the experience around the things that make theaters great. Since moving to the Bay Area, I find myself seeing far fewer movies in theaters though.
  • joeax 10y ago
    Although I like going to movies on occasion, the ability to turn on subtitles (to better understand dialogue and overcome my kids being loud) and pause/rewind as needed makes watching at home more enjoyable.
• dbg31415 10y ago
  Seems relevant: * Kim Dotcom on Twitter: "How to stop piracy: 1 Create great stuff 2 Make it easy to buy 3 Same day worldwide release 4 Fair price 5 Works on any device" || https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/288199968932630528 https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/288199968932630528
• gmarx 10y ago
  The writer has little sense of history and doesn't understand what "Hollywood" as a business, is. Hollywood is content creation. When Netflix creates their own content, they are becoming part of that business. The theater business is a different thing and the author neglects to mention that long ago the studios also owned theaters, so integration of that kind is not new. The author thinks that the fact that the price paid for studios recently means something. The history going back thirty years or more is of companies paying too much for studios because of the glamour of the business and later selling when they realize they have no idea how this crazy business works.
  • Gargoyle 10y ago
    It's the same people making the content, it's just different people paying for it. Netflix and Amazon are just wave number #928288919 of funding sources for Hollywood.
• frik 10y ago
  Hollywood, as we know it is dead for 10+ years. The mass of super hero movies is appalling. Where are the action movies and funny comedies, that were so great in the late 1980s, 1990s and earlier 2000s. Last year's San Andreas was pretty good, but so many other movies are just boring, unfunny, too dark, too shaky camera, too much CGI, etc. That TV series got too much attention by Hollywood studies hurts movies a lot. The only TV series I saw last year was Silicon Valley, I don't know were people have the time to watch that many series - I would trade TV series for great movies all day.
  • nolok 10y ago
    My parents have traded "regular TV" for netflix series. It's surprisingly easy to consume it quickly once you remove ads and other interruptions, as well as setting the schedule to fit your own. No more wasting 15 minutes for it to start, no more waiting between episodes, no more waiting during the episode ...
  • kogepathic 10y ago
    > I don't know were people have the time to watch that many series Netflix exists solely because people want to binge watch their favourite series. They're betting that once people have finished binge watching all of Friends in a weekend and are wondering what to watch next, they'll pick a Netflix Original™ from the list of suggested shows. I don't have Netflix and rarely watch series (except those like Silicon Valley) but I know a lot of friends who do have Netflix and will happily spend an entire weekend watching a series from start to finish.
  • Arizhel 10y ago
    Forget the action movies and funny comedies, where are the sci-fi movies??? And I don't mean some stupid movie about a guy living in what appears to be the modern world sans display screens and talking to his earphone, I mean movies with spaceships (and especially spaceships with elaborate corridors). The 70s and 80s were chock full of these movies. And no shaky-cam back then either. So far, all we've had is Star Wars--blah (yet again, Hollywood milking an old franshise), and Prometheus in 2012 (again, milking an old franchise). Supposedly we're going to get a few spaceship sci-fi movies this year, including "Passengers" which looks promising. But we've gone quite a long time now without much in the way of sci-fi.
• banku_brougham 10y ago
  The 'raindrop story' is meant to emphasize the union aspect, but the author apparently knows nothing about continuity in filming and editing. If the actor is supposed to have drops of rain on their shoulder, thats a part of wardrobe, and seeing a wiped off shoulder before it rained (because editing) is the reason they are so fastidious. For example, a filmed discussion over drinks where the actors glasses gradually fill up rather than empty. continuity fails: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WibfRyQK0kY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WibfRyQK0kY
• the_watcher 10y ago
  > “We’re different,” one producer recently told me. “No one can do what we do.” Any industry whose leaders make a claim similar to this is probably one you can safely bet on a severe disruption to come, if one is not already in progress.
• Shihan 10y ago
  The upside of this is that there will be fewer celebritites who think that because we are interested in their acting we are also interested in their political views.
• SmokyBourbon 10y ago
  We should reverse the law that prevents studios from owning their own theaters. It made sense in the 1930s but technology no longer allows them to create a monopoly. I could see Marvel Studios, for example, opening chains of theaters and producing enough content year round to keep them full. I'd be willing to pay a subscription to go once a week.
• dagenleg 10y ago
  And good riddance!
• Animats 10y ago
  Production cost is a problem, and technology has made it worse. Look at that long, long list of animators and technicians at the end of any effects-heavy film today. A cast of thousands. In the late 1990s, when I was working on physics engines for animation, I was talking to a major Hollywood director. He'd done some of the first films that had both live and photorealistic CGI characters. He wanted to get the cost down, so he could make $20 million movies. At $20 million, he could direct; at $100 million, he was running a huge operation that had to have everything pre-planned in great detail. His model was the early CGI cartoon, "Reboot". Reboot was a weekly half hour cartoon made by a staff of about 30. He wanted to get to that level of productivity at theater quality - make a 2 hour film in a month with 30 people. That didn't happen. Not even close. It's been tried. "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" started as a low-budget picture rendered on Macs. In that film, if nobody touches it, it's CG. Ended up costing $70 million. Worldwide box office $50 million. Fail. "Iron Sky" was made for €7.5 million. Worldwide box office $11.5 million. Fail. There were successful low budget directors in the past, Roger Corman being the prime example. (His autobiography is titled "How I made a hundred movies in Hollywood and never lost a dime".) It's harder to do that today. Viewers today expect incredible production value. Most TV shows have more production value today than 70s movies did. Hollywood has so many people on set because they bring a team together on short notice to do a job, then disband the team. They need many competent people with different skills to make that work. If you cut corners, it looks like Youtube crap. On big movies, we've mostly replaced set painters and carpenters with people who sit at workstations and do the same job with CG models. "Big" is now cheap, but "detailed" remains expensive. Procedural visual content generation can generate good landscapes and vegetation now (check out SpeedTree), but as yet, nobody has been able to procedurally generate one convincing block of a city street seen at ground level. Making GTA V cost $265 million. Not seeing an incoming reduction in production cost. Netflix has no huge advantage. HBO is in the same position - they make content to sell to their own customers, and know exactly what sold. Data collection is retrospective. Trying to figure out what movies will be box office failures in advance remains hard. That's why Hollywood generates so many sequels - predictability.
  • MichaelMoser123 10y ago
    > That's why Hollywood generates so many sequels - predictability. Does it have anything to do with the size of the studios/companies? Look at Disney/Pixar, can it be that they are just too big in order to come up with anything original?
• 6stringmerc 10y ago
  The big studios with big budgets for big blockbuster movies are a very proven model. At least until the model goes bust with too many losses compared to wins. Happens with Music Labels plenty as well. I like to think "Hollywood" is changing, and A24 is at the forefront of doing things right.
• touchofevil 10y ago
  There's definitely a move from the theater to on-demand streaming platforms for all movies except giant movies like Star Wars, so I think the author is right that the theatrical experience will see audience attendance continue to drop. Also making movies that can play for audiences around the world does mean that the dialogue has to be very simple and/or reduced. I think Jason Bourne had 50 lines of dialogue total in the latest Bourne movie for this reason. Without dialogue it does get harder for great actors to shine (Chaplin & Keaton excepted). As movies have gotten less culturally specific, they've also gotten less culturally relevant and this minimizes the importance of directors, writers, actors, and movies as art. The author's inexperience in the industry shows though in this article. Crews are extremely efficient. Movies are made one shot at a time and when you have big crews made up of different departments (art, camera, sound, lighting, vfx) they have to work essentially in very quick shifts. For example, the camera move is set, then the actors step out and the lighting crew lights the scene, then lighting steps out, art dept. steps in and works, then the actors come back in, etc. To an outsider it looks like 90% of the crew is just standing around doing nothing, but it's much more efficient to work that way and safer too. So I think the author is putting too much blame on union crews for inefficiency. Also, the author completely omits the marketing costs of films which increased hugely once TV advertising was used to market movies. Marketing costs are one of the main reasons that movies have to basically be blockbusters to make money. A TV ad spot for Star Wars costs the same as a TV ad spot for an indie film. The idea that CG actors are going to replace real actors en masse is not realistic. I work in visual effects and, trust me, it's a lot more work than this author realizes and is not cost effective unless an actor has died in the middle of your shoot. I also don't see editors getting replaced by A.I. for films or TV/streaming. Maybe for wedding and vacation videos or perhaps as a tool for reality TV editors to help select shots from the massive amount of footage. But film/TV editing is now an extremely efficient process thanks to digital editing tools like Avid or Premiere. A single editor can cut a film almost as fast as they can think at this point (okay a bit slower). Having to screen 50 versions of an edit produced by AI (and then do rounds of editing notes that way) would take longer than having a good editor just cut the movie. Don't get me wrong, the theatrical movie experience is going to keep going down hard. I think the biggest threat to movies is that for the most part they don't matter much to the culture any more. But this author's lack of experience in the industry makes some of his predictions suspect.
• cft 10y ago
  Facebook, Youtube, Instagram and Snap are the new Hollywood.
• vonklaus 10y ago
  Hollywood isn't over. The "we" in the article title is hollywood, i.e how it understands itself. We as HN, and pretty much everyone else knew this in 2010.
• albertTJames 10y ago
  http://www.the-numbers.com/market/ http://www.the-numbers.com/market/ The whole article is based on false assumptions.
• elihu 10y ago
  The "disruption" of the music industry by the Internet, Napster, etc.. ultimately led to users being given greater control over the music they listen to. You can now legally purchase DRM-free single tracks from the various online stores. Maybe a similar thing needs to happen with movies? I think the fansub community, the Tolkien edit of The Hobbit, and MST3K and Riftrax are examples of what "greater control" could look like. Suppose there were a standard video format that accepted a separate stream of commands to skip or re-order scenes, insert audio or subtitles or splice in video from external sources and remove or alter vocal/sound effects/music from the original content. Now, users could create alternative versions of their favorite movies and share them with each other. Suppose a movie with an alternative sound track requires songs that you already own? No problem, it just uses them. Suppose it requires songs that you don't already own? Maybe it pops up a window "would you like to buy these tracks from Amazon/iTunes/whatever for 99 cents each?" and then when you buy them it adds them to your music library. If you don't want to buy all the tracks, maybe there's just no music in that part of the movie. I could see this as a really great way for movies to increase music sales, and for people to get excited about and re-watch old movies and have a way to participate in the creative process. It also can be done in a way that's respectful of copyright law, by giving users a convenient way to purchase all of the copyrighted content they need to watch the movie in its edited form. I suspect a lot of traditional Hollywood types will hate the idea of people watching movies in any way other than how the director originally intended, but I think they should just get over it.
  • forgottenpass 10y ago
    Maybe a similar thing needs to happen with movies? It won't. Consumers got the level of control over their music library that they did as an accident of timing. The quality of the popular home format (CD) was very good, home computers came with the hardware to read them, the power of home computing and network speeds were just good enough for audio piracy. So music piracy became ubiquitous before the pieces were in place for DRM to stop it. Video piracy only hit big at the tail end of that window, so the market doesn't expect as much flexibility when buying video as with music. Every year we're stuck with more and more DRM technology coming standard in the products we buy and software we use.
• 1_2__3 10y ago
  My personal belief is what will kill (and is killing) Hollywood is what (effectively) killed TV: Scale, and blandness. Hollywood had a hard enough time being interesting when it had to appeal to a broad swath of Americans. Now they want to make world-friendly films, which has already sparked a race to the bottom in terms of common denominator. This will continue as more and more markets are able to access maintstream films, and the end result will be nothing but the least-offensive, most-broadly-kinda-appealing pablum.
• bonif 10y ago
  about time
• tomdell 10y ago
  The assertion at the end of the article is absurd - "The good news, however, is that we’ll never be bored again." No matter what changes, people will find a way get bored of it.
• ktRolster 10y ago
  This is (to me) the most revealing quote of the article: Some 70 percent of box office comes from abroad, which means that studios must traffic in the sort of blow-’em-up action films and comic-book thrillers that translate easily enough to Mandarin
• bad_user 10y ago
  Article mentioned the CGI characters in Rogue One, but those ruined the movie for me, among other reasons. For one I think I've seen better graphics in video games and while I concede it must have been the contrast between real and fake, what really pissed me off is the realization that either they lacked the imagination to come up with a credible alternative story or that this was some sort of sinister "fan service". The other thing that pissed me off is that in Rogue One, like in other recent movies, nobody is kissing anymore, but people dying of violent deaths is totally OK. The primary reason for why Hollywood is having problems is because they make really shitty movies, full of CGI but with no story. I can even understand the violent deaths, after all, given the lack of story, you can't relate to those characters, so they might as well die spectacularly, before the audience dies of boredom. Oh yes, I'm not from the US, so not sure what audience they are targeting, but it ain't me. I like some kissing to go with my action.
• Ericson2314 10y ago
  Globalization, technology, union decline, foreign-bankrolled censorship (of course original Red Dawn is wildly propgandistic), feedback loop of banality, monopolization---for one, Netflix and co practicing the same vertical integration that was broken up at the end of the golden age. It's all here. The article adopts the classic disruptor snide and glee, but seeing the political blowback of the past few months, and the inherent dubious benefit of some of the things I listed, I'd have adopted a more ambiguous tone. It's one thing for David to kill Goliath, it's another for Goliath to kill his parents.
  • Ericson2314 10y ago
    "The good news, however, is that we’ll never be bored again." Ok, please have that final, ominous line mean the tone of the piece was at least somewhat satirical.
• multinglets 10y ago
  Sounds good to me. Hollywood is a trash heap and every single person on Earth would be better off if it didn't exist.
• inthewoods 10y ago
  I'm a bit surprised Amazon, as an example, has not been more disruptive to Hollywood. Take "Manchester by the Sea" - gross about $40m in box office. Amazon has chosen a traditional window approach to the film. Now imagine, instead, the released it for 2 weeks (or whatever the requirement is for Oscar consideration) then pull it from theaters and make it available on Prime. I wonder if they would have made more than $30m on new Prime subscriptions. That to me would be more disruptive.
• minusf 10y ago
  Carpenter's debut: Darkstar (1974) is estimated to have a budget of 60k... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Star_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Star_(film).
• macspoofing 10y ago
  People want to watch movies. Maybe at theaters, maybe not. Hollywood will be fine.
• yuhong 10y ago
  I have been thinking about how lawyers took over Hollywood and the recording industry in the first place. Remember the Betamax case, not to mention the history of DAT tape too.
• j1o1h1n 10y ago
  > If you could give a computer all the best scripts ever written, it would eventually be able to write one that might come close to replicating an Aaron Sorkin screenplay. This is nonsense. Children's programming, however, Thomas the Tank Engine episodes, are ripe for disruption.
• Keyframe 10y ago
  Here's Lynda Obst talking about what, how and why it happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_oHW31jQfg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_oHW31jQfg tl;dw; DVD dead, Netflix ruins it further, New markets
  • touristtam 10y ago
    There is the digital locker the film industry has been trying to move forward for quite a while without being able to make it the standard: http://www.techradar.com/news/home-cinema/ultraviolet-what-you-need-to-know-1077658 http://www.techradar.com/news/home-cinema/ultraviolet-what-y...
• davidgerard 10y ago
  Called this five years ago: https://rocknerd.co.uk/2012/10/08/no-film-is-not-in-unique-need-of-blockbusterism/ https://rocknerd.co.uk/2012/10/08/no-film-is-not-in-unique-n... Not that it wasn't obvious. Filmmakers plead their uniqueness and that only they can deliver blockbusterism. Record companies did the same! and then the studio turned out to be a computer with a DAW program on it, and you can literally record something of full professional quality at home. You can use a full studio if you want, but now it's optional.
• pippy 10y ago
  Technology has also created a market where the number of high quality films available for movie goers increases at a constant rate. If someone has a collection of high quality movies to watch, a new film coming to market is competing with the previous titles. It wasn't too long ago when an improvement in CGI meant the movie got an automatic increase in quality.
• ouid 10y ago
  "This might begin with Facebook’s V.R. experience. You slip on a pair of Oculus Rift glasses and sit in a virtual movie theater with your friends, who are gathered from all around the world. Facebook could even plop an advertisement next to the film, rather than make users pay for it. When I asked an executive at the company why it has not happened yet, I was told, “Eventually it will.”" This is so profoundly implausible, I have to assume it is a paid advertisement from Facebook.
• beloch 10y ago
  Claim: Hollywood movies are going to become less profitable and less viable to make! Sane response: What was the last Hollywood movie that actually turned a profit on paper for tax purposes?
• somberi 10y ago
  In another part of the world which consumes movies voraciously. An Indian movie called "Bahubali" which had lot of special effects (of varying quality), was made for 40 million USD. It is a two-part release so each one cost about 20 million and made ~100 million. The second part is yet to be released. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baahubali:_The_Beginning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baahubali:_The_Beginning One can imagine the special effects from efforts like these become mainstream, reducing the cost. A related read: https://qz.com/674547/hollywoods-special-effects-industry-is-cratering-and-an-art-form-is-disappearing-along-with-it/ https://qz.com/674547/hollywoods-special-effects-industry-is... Another movie that was heavy on special effects and story (but light on the wallet) was Pan's Labyrinth (Cost 20 Million USD, made ~80 Million USD).
• matheusmoreira 10y ago
  It's wonderful to witness the fall of these rotting "industries". It's taken way too long. Being required to organize my time around some TV channel's programming just isn't good service. Internet-based services like Netflix have no such requirements. Yet these aging TV companies are still relevant to me just because they have exclusive rights to the series I like and won't let Netflix have them. Why do I have to go to the cinema just to watch a new movie? To me it's not that good an experience. I'm basically paying more than a single month's worth of Netflix to watch a single movie on worn out and uncomfortable seats in a crowded theater with half an hour of irrelevant ads before the film actually starts. My only other choice is waiting months until it finally arrives on TV, only appearing on Netflix much later if at all. Even when they do arrive, it's significantly delayed just because I'm not American. It's beyond irritating to discover I can't view something on Netflix or even YouTube just because I'm not in the US. Maybe it's due to some copyright issue I'm supposed to care about. This "industry" treats me like a third rate customer and acts as if I was lucky to get whatever scraps of stale content they decided to make available. In reality, most of the movies and series they release aren't that good. Given enough convenience I'd watch them but as it is now it costs way too much in terms of money, time and dignity. The only relatively new movie I'd actually pay to see again in theaters is Mad Max: Fury Road. Is it any wonder people pirate stuff? Pirates consistently provide much better service with much lower operational costs. If anything, they're the state of the art.
• sreenadh 10y ago
  I think hollywood's main issue is that there are too many over-paid & useless actors who drain the resources that can be used to make a better movie.
• thr0w__4w4y 10y ago
  I live in Los Angeles, specifically the west side; hardly a day goes by that I don't see a Ferrari pull out of the Sony Studios facility, a 50-person crew filming 2 actors talking next to a cafe, or an action scene that closes down part of a freeway, with 100s of police, security, helicopters, etc. around. Many scenes of Grey's Anatomy are filmed in what is almost my back yard, and they often involve a dozen camera-crew trucks, staff of 60+ people, etc. I just cringe when I think of the cost. What most people want is a great story, and great dialog. I'm not talking about the audience for a Transformers movie, I don't watch them but some do; that is a different story, and the animation can be done, and is being done, more cheaply outside of Hollywood already. But what I'm saying is that if you can write a great script and have a great story with great dialog, there are plenty of hungry, often young (age isn't relevant BTW) people with RED 4K cameras who can film and edit and put together a great product for $3M, not $30M or $100M. The days of Brad Pitt getting $30M for a movie, of Julia Roberts getting $25M, are coming to and end. It might take 5 years, or 10 years, or even a generation, but it will happen. Same thing to studio execs; the days of drinking champagne for breakfast and lighting Cuban cigars with $100 bills will end. IT JUST IS NOT SUSTAINABLE, NECESSARY, OR COMPETITIVE ANYMORE. (Sorry for shouting, but that is the crux of my point). 30 years ago, there was no internet to speak of, there were no RED (or Canon, etc.) cameras, there were no "prosumer" drones with HD cameras, non-western countries were isolated and not part of the global workforce, etc. That has all changed. It is just very easy to put together a great product for less, and all must adjust. It happened to IT, computing and programming, and it's happening to entertainment.