10 ms·
This could end up being a really interesting precedent in film (not in a way I like, personally). akersten writes farther down: > We're going to wind up in som
by bo1024 7y ago
This could end up being a really interesting precedent in film (not in a way I like, personally). akersten writes farther down:
> We're going to wind up in some terrible place where if you pre-order your movie ticket you can see the Target special edition of Avengers Endgame 8 that is only available in theaters for two weeks before it switches to some other version. Maybe we'll get to the point where movie theaters will just perpetually have the same film on roll and update it every couple of months with the latest patches like an MMO. Remember, your Avengers and Superman subscriptions are different.
Not sure about the last one, but you could imagine lots of possibilities:
- Regional versions of films with anything from chunks of dialog ("I'm from X") up through entire cityscape backgrounds changed depending on the theater location. With CG, even things like character appearance (e.g. race) could be regional.
- Brand placement: Top sponsor's products appear in the first two weeks of showings, then second bidder for the next two weeks, etc.
- A/B testing different versions of films with live audiences and tweaking.
- The opposite of what akersten said: introduce new little easter eggs or features regularly over the course of the film's theater run to encourage repeat ticket buying from the hardcore fans.
What else?
- netsharc 7y agoI doubt people could.be convinced to do repeat (say monthly) viewings of a movie. It could spectacularly backfire when the audience say "let's wait until they release version 3 in a few months, after they've patched up the shitty parts the beta viewers didn't like.". Yesterday I saw the headline that in Singapore, a lesbian kiss was deleted from the Skywalker movie, so a version of your idea exists.
- tialaramex 7y agoIt's completely normal for feature films to have cuts for different regions to handle censorship preferences. Consider Leon (released as "The Professional" in the US). Mainland Europe isn't as up tight about the idea that teenage girls crush on older men and so the edit released there includes scenes the US wasn't comfortable with and as a result fleshes out the middle of the film. Unlike that lesbian kiss we're taking about several whole scenes with dialogue which were shot but aren't in the US movie at all. And that's normal. What's special about Cats is that they changed the movie after it "shipped". This is a watershed like when video games started getting day one patches. Super Mario Brothers had no day one patch, it was a physical hunk of metal and plastic, when we played Outer Worlds we set apart an hour the day before for the patches to apply, knowing there would be patches because all games do that now.
- hinkley 7y agoLeon the Professional was available in North America with the BluRay re-release if not before. If I hadn’t sold The Professional I could have shown it to the kids several years earlier. As it is the cringe factor they experienced means I may have still miscalculated. That film cemented Gary Oldman as my favorite actor for that decade. It’s also just a really good action film. And I was bummed when Danny Aiello passed and hardly anyone mentioned Old Tony.
- hinkley 7y agoThe writers of Clue did three endings. If you’ve played the game that’s the perfect place to try that sort of trick, but I think they chickened out and didn’t do it. It’s now standard to include them as a sequence at the end.
- rincebrain 7y agoAFAIK they did indeed show three different endings depending on the theatre you saw it at for the theatrical release.
- mewse 7y agoThey did do it for the original theatrical release. Movie listings published in the newspapers specified whether each showing was ending ‘A’, ‘B’, or ‘C’, so if you wished you could attend multiple times and ensure you saw a different ending each time.
- iso947 7y agoFirst time I watched kingsmen was on a Qatar airlines flight. There were a lot of cuts - the church scene was about 20 seconds long for example.
- rosybox 7y ago> - Regional versions of films with anything from chunks of dialog ("I'm from X") up through entire cityscape backgrounds changed depending on the theater location. With CG, even things like character appearance (e.g. race) could be regional. This already happens. Pixar movies for example do this, Inside Out for example used different region-specific foods that kids didn't like for that memory in the movie. Movies released in China and the US often are cut differently where in China the Chinese actor or actress is given more prominence in the plot.
- xbmcuser 7y agoMovies have different cuts for different regions to pass different censorship ratings the currently running star wars movies has a few scenes cut to get PG13 rating in Singapore.
- mgiannopoulos 7y agoJust FYI: That’s a single 1-second scene of a lesbian kiss (during celebrations at the end of the movie) with two nameless characters that don’t matter in the movie.
- xbmcuser 7y agoYeah but it is a different edit wolf of wall street had bigger edits
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- JoeSmithson 7y agoThis is rarely done well. In Inside Out UK edition, the dad daydreams by thinking about a football (soccer) match, presumably because this is a stereotypical Dad Thing "translated" to British. However, it is a major plot point that the dad (and whole family) are obsessed with ice hockey so this makes no sense. He never mentions or thinks about soccer again. Similarly Captain America's personal list of pop culture stuff is replaced with a local version, which makes no sense for the embodiment of USA. There is an interesting bit in Le Ton Beau de Marot about the French translation of Gödel Escher Bach where Hofstadter says he instructed the French translation team to feel free to "culturally translate" analogies and examples etc, but is horrified when they translate a personal anecdote about attending an American football game in Ann Arbor into a rugby match.
- mroche 7y ago> This could end up being a really interesting precedent in film The problem is that this doesn’t play out well at all and isn’t sustainable for the production houses actually working on the film. VFX work on a film can finish months, and few weeks, of days before a release date. As soon as that deadline is hit, workers either: go on break, get reallocated to another show, or leave as their contract is up (non-contract artists are very few in this industry). Having to pull people that worked on a show back to fixes after being put on a new one, or they may be completely gone, will only damage the show they are currently working on. It’s not a practice that is sustainable, and with the pretty thin margins of VFX right now isn’t something that is as simple to solve as keep people around or hire more. And most studios can’t follow MPC/Technicolor’s philosophy of throwing as many junior bodies at the task.
- icelancer 7y agoThey won't reshoot or re-do the work. They will simply make 3-5 versions of it, the modern day DLC, before it ever hits the theaters. Then release versions of it over time.
- Corrado 7y agoI think you're discounting the possibility that this can be (at least partially) automated. Specifically things like changing sponsor logos or animation models. I can envision tools that allow a sign in a store front to change from "Coke" to "Pepsi" automatically, or even replace that Audi car the hero is driving to a Mercedes. Of course, not everything could be automated but I think a good portion of it could be. The original VFX team would just have to insert "markers" into the workflow which could then be replaced and re-rendered. Almost like changing build flags and recompiling a program.
- bouvin 7y agoWalt Disney's ambition for the original Fantasia movie was that it would remain in cinemas with new segments replacing old ones over time.
- _ZeD_ 7y ago>>> - The opposite of what akersten said: introduce new little easter eggs or features regularly over the course of the film's theater run to encourage repeat ticket buying from the hardcore fans. soo... what happened with evangelion?
- hinkley 7y agoMy college roommate memorized a Siegfried and Roy monologue joke that was taken out of Ace Ventura Pet Detective pretty quickly. As far as I’m aware I only ever saw that version one time, so I knew he wasn’t crazy. Interesting thing is that you can still google that joke, but it’s not in the movie. The shared cultural experience of the movie is lost if everyone has different scenes, if the jokes are different, if the details vary too much. It would be quite easy to fall into uncanny valley territory.
- carapace 7y agoThat scene in NCIS where two people are typing on the same keyboard at the same time was removed in the DVD.
- dec0dedab0de 7y agoAce Ventura was the first time I noticed differences in a movie. When they showed it on regular TV they did a whole bit about star trek when he was in the pool looking for clues. Everyone thought I was nuts, but years later I learned that when they edit a film for commercials sometimes they use deleted scenes to make up the time differences. Harry Potter is like that too, but I can't remember the specific scenes.
- Nursie 7y agoI was convinced for years that there was a scene in Dune where they show the making of the water of life, by drowning a young worm in water. I had seen it in the cinema when I was quite young but it never showed up on rewatching. 20 years later I found out that there was such a scene, and it was just as I remembered, but it was only in an extended, poorly made tv-edition cut that was never shown in theatres. I still don't know what happened there, really.
- coredog64 7y agoI think that’s the Alan Smithee cut. I have it as part of a steel box Dune set. It’s interesting to watch some of the stuff that was cut.
- coupdejarnac 7y agoFilm the audience as they enter the theater and insert them in the movie as extras. Use AI to alter their facial expressions and movements, perhaps even give them dialog. Each showing of the movie would be unique.
- 7952 7y agoI think this would make more sense as an added extra or gift set.
- MrsPeaches 7y ago> Regional versions of films This already happens in India. I can’t remember the title but there was a film where two stars from neighbouring states (I think it was Kerala and Tamil Nadu) fought each other and each one won the final battle in their respective states.
- Filligree 7y agoI'm somehow not at all surprised. Bollywood movies are hilarious. :)
- geuis 7y agoI believe something like this was done for Zootopia. The news reporter characters were specific to the language regions where the movie played.
- mroche 7y agoIt’s called localization. Most feature animation projects do localizations of varying degrees so that their movies make cultural sense to the regions they’re played in, allowing the audience to better relate to the film.
- harimau777 7y agoI've never seen it, but I remember hearing that the same thing happened in the old Godzilla Versus King Kong movie. Godzilla wins in the Japanese version while King Kong does in the American one.
- trhway 7y agoin Russian version Elton John wasnt gay. Granted, that was done by the distributor just cutting out the scenes, yet given the technological developments like deep fakes i think it would in near future be possible to straighten things out in more natural and artistically non-intrusive way.
- foobar1962 7y ago> This could end up being a really interesting precedent in film (not in a way I like, personally)... Cinema as a Service (CaaS)?
- kevcampb 7y agoThis isn’t new. The US ending of the big blue was switched to a happy one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Blue#Original_and_alternate_(US)_endings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Blue#Original_and_alte...
- tomcooks 7y agoIt's literally how mythos and folklore has always worked. A couple of tropes and interchangeable characters.
- tom_mellior 7y ago> A/B testing different versions of films with live audiences and tweaking. Test screenings are a thing and they can very much influence the final product: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_screening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_screening I guess they didn't test Cats.
- toyg 7y agoMate, this is nothing new... just have a look at what happened with Blade Runner, or infamously the first Star Wars trilogy: every new release tweaked this or that, and it’s now extremely hard to find the original theatrical versions. Having it explicitly done in a transparent way would actually be an improvement. It would trigger the necessary alerts for archivists to get to work, and we’d never risk losing the historical record of a film.
- pdpi 7y agoChanging from cinema to home video is one thing. Changing while still in cinemas is something else, though
- dpau 7y agoi had this experience when blade runner was released in china. really wanted to see it in the theater but then learned parts had been censored. the problem wasn't really the extent of the actual censoring (i think they only removed some boobs), but the knowledge it had been censored without knowing which parts. just as with censorship i don't feel like there's any way companies would want to make changes like ad placement explicit. they would want seamless edits...
- philwelch 7y agoAfter the initial release of The Shining, Stanley Kubrick decided to make one final edit to remove a scene at the end of the movie and the studio sent instructions to every theater to perform the edit on their physical copies of the film and return the cut segment of film to the studio.
- DanHulton 7y agoRegional variation is already here. The news anchors in "Zootopia" were different in different countries: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/76784/zootopia-has-different-news-anchors-different-countries https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/76784/zootopia-has-diffe...
- naravara 7y agoSame with “Inside Out.” They replaced the broccoli on the plate with other vegetables in Japan because broccoli isn’t coded as something kids are disgusted by over there.
- lonelappde 7y agoGreen bell pepper in Japan. I saw a Hello Kitty cartoon that also used pepper.
- city41 7y agoInside Out did this as well: https://slate.com/culture/2015/07/inside-out-director-pete-docter-explains-why-pixar-re-animated-certain-scenes-like-the-broccoli-scene-for-international-audiences.html https://slate.com/culture/2015/07/inside-out-director-pete-d...
- techer 7y agoDemolition Man had Taco Bell but Pizza Hut internationally.
- amphibian87 7y agothe movie where he doesn't know how to use the 3 seashells?
- op00to 7y agoLol what kind of dummy doesn’t know how to use the three seashells.
- 7y ago
- RegnisGnaw 7y agoIron man did this as well with extra scenes.
- JohnFen 7y agoThose sort of things would kill any interest I might otherwise have in seeing those movies.