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> The root cause of this is basically Hollywood this is what i've started calling the "it takes one to tango" fallacy, where an issue has two responsible parti

> The root cause of this is basically Hollywood this is what i've started calling the "it takes one to tango" fallacy, where an issue has two responsible parties but only one gets blame. hollywood's not forcing people to spend their money on mass-produced uninspired movies - worse! thats what people pay to go see!

sethhochberg 5y ago
Sure, the consumer does have some degree of influence here, but they're still picking from the menu of options the studio makes available. If someone likes movies as recreation, even if they would prefer something different than the action blockbusters, their choices are "don't enjoy yourself to send a message to the studios" or "watch a movie you might enjoy less than something from another genre"... most people who enjoy watching movies are probably gonna chose the route that still lets them enjoy watching a movie. The incentives don't line up. Its like buying McDonalds at an isolated highway rest stop - I don't particularly love McDonalds, but if my choices are a hot meal or whatever I can get from a vending machine or pack with me, I'll take the hot meal every time. Its not an enthusiastic endorsement of globalized fast food chains despite my paying for it.
- kryogen1c 5y ago
  > The incentives don't line up. this is again "it takes one to tango" - the people create the incentives the studios follow. movies largely make money with sales volume. this is important; tickets arent more expensive for different movies, its strictly a numbers game (ignoring uncommon deals like toys and video games, etc). according to the first link i clicked, marvel's last movie infinity war grossed two BILLION dollars. you are simply wrong if you think some novel, avant-garde sundance indie is going to interest that many people. the world is the way people want it to be. this is the tyranny of the majority. if we want non-incentivized things to exist, we're gonna have to invent new socioeconomic theories in this movie thread : )
  - arrosenberg 5y ago
    You are assuming a fair and competitive market where the consumer is actually in charge. False assumption. The world is the way the people with money want it to be, because it’s the lowest effort, most extractive model they can legally get away with. That’s not to say people didn’t like Endgame, but we all could have done without the last 3 or 4 Transformer movies. There are plenty of examples of trash movies that only get made because the story is watered down enough to pass globally.
    - Brain_Thief 5y ago
      The entire premise here is a bit odd to me; are people forced to spend their time and money watching a sub-par movie? Couldn't they watch one of the innumerable television shows that are available, watch YouTube, older movies, etc., etc.? The comparison made above to having to eat McDonald's in a desert doesn't make any sense in this context since that is talking about needing life-supporting nutrients in a literal desert.
      - arrosenberg 5y ago
        Invert it. I want to watch a movie in theaters because that's a treasured pasttime. What's available to see is what's most profitable to the producer (which is measured globally), rather than what's pleasing to the customer (which is measured locally). It doesn't matter that there are alternative avenues - we're talking about a specific, consolidated economic sector that is behaving irrationally at the local level. I didn't write the McDonald's thing, so I'm not gonna try to contextualize it.
        Brain_Thief 5y ago
        I understand your frustration but I still cannot get past the point that, generally speaking, an individual must make a specific, conscious, and unforced series of decisions in order to repeatedly end up in front of movies that they dislike. Their decisions must also by necessity happen in a context where there are many other media options available. I also enjoy the cinema but I only go when there are films that I find interesting and worthwhile. In my specific case this means that over the past few years I've seen Parasite, a showing of the original Alien, a few midnight B-tier horror movies, etc. I don't get to go to the movies as often as I would prefer but the alternative of wasting my time on films that I don't find attractive while simultaneously financially supporting an industry I disagree with seems obviously non-viable to me.
- jk7tarYZAQNpTQa 5y ago
  >but they're still picking from the menu of options the studio makes available. They're often not, just choosing whatever gets more promoted.
- imtringued 5y ago
  "Nothing" is the common denominator of everything. Mass market movies are attempting to reach this perfect "nothing".
fullshark 5y ago
Yeah i guess the root root cause is TV + streaming competition has squeezed them so much that's the only way to get people to come out to the multiplex. Edit: Well since I introduced the idea of a "root cause" I concede the truth is the root cause of all business decisions is, has been, and always will be market forces.
rhino369 5y ago
I know more than a handful of people who complain about Hollywood originality, but only go to the theater for Marvel or Star Wars movies. Or who only go to see a movie that has 80% on Rotten Tomatoes (unless its a franchise movie). The real problem is that TV killed the middle-rung movie. All that is left is blockbuster spectacle (which costs too much to take risks with) or art house stuff.
- OJFord 5y ago
  > The real problem is that TV killed the middle-rung movie I nodded away to your last paragraph, but then I thought about my old Saturday job at an independent cinema. We charged £2.50 for a ticket (now £3.50, just checked; about US$3.50 & $5 in today's), the money was in the snacks, and of course it is in major chains too. I think the real problem is consumer perception/treatment of cinemas as expensive rare treats comparable (in price) to going to a theatre. Which they are, at major chains fully laden with snacks, but don't have to be. Television is no doubt a contributor to that image of cinema, but not I think in itself the cause of this.
  - jk7tarYZAQNpTQa 5y ago
    > I think the real problem is consumer perception/treatment of cinemas as expensive rare treats comparable (in price) to going to a theatre. My happiest relationship with film was when I was able to go to the movies every week (some weeks even twice!). I was going alone, during the week, to independent movie theaters that charge 4-5€. It's a great experience, even if you don't love the movie. It never feels like a ripoff. The main problem IMO is that people don't want to get out of their comfort zone (and lack time/interest to find new stuff they might like). But of course when tickets are 15€ instead of 4€ people are much less willing to take the risk.
- TMWNN 5y ago
  >The real problem is that TV killed the middle-rung movie. You're 70 years too late. Life magazine in 1957 talked about how one of the consequences of the Hollywood studio system (from both TV, and the 1948 Paramount antitrust case) was the death of the "million-dollar mediocrity" (<https://books.google.com/books?id=Nz8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA146 https://books.google.com/books?id=Nz8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA146>): "It wasn't good entertainment and it wasn't art, and most of the movies produced had a uniform mediocrity, but they were also uniformly profitable ... The million-dollar mediocrity was the very backbone of Hollywood". The "million-dollar mediocrity" died because the Paramount case forbade block booking, in which studios required that theaters purchase said mediocrities to also buy big films. Original TV movies appeared in the 1960s but their budgets and production values were too low to really fill the hole in Hollywood, but today's streaming companies' insatiable appetite for content has opened a new outlet for middle-tier films (and, more importantly, series).
lodi 5y ago
> "it takes one to tango" Love it.
addicted 5y ago
Every US movie watcher could stop watching certain movies and the studios would still make a lot more money globally than a US centric comedy, for example. The consumer does not have that much power. The individual consumer almost certainly doesn’t.
- cout 5y ago
  Don't forget product placement and merchandise sales; those can pretty significantly offset the cost of making a movie. Ticket sales are becoming a smaller and smaller piece of the pie over time.
LeifCarrotson 5y ago
To assign blame to diffuse 'consumers' as well as the Hollywood/politicians/FAANG/manufacturers/international megacorporations that are the other side of whatever 'it takes two to tango' issue, the consumers need to have the capability to effectively communicate their demands back to their partner in the trap. Not only do they need the capability, they also need the expectation that the communication will be heard, else there is no reason to do it. But that line of communication is lost at large scales. Maybe a few purists will make a principled stand for nuanced, poignant, artistic, deep films, against the degeneration of the film industry towards bland, repetitive, shallow superhero rehashes, and will refuse to buy a ticket. But capturing those ticket sales would likely mean that more casual viewers didn't bother with the more difficult films. The only number that matters to Hollywood in the end is the box office gross sales; artistic purity is either counterproductive or immeasurable in that context and therefore irrelevant. I want to make responsible choices, and want to reject bland movies, or disposable packaging, or privacy-invading ad trackers, or greenhouse gassy lifestyle choices, or any number of similar issues. And I do make personal sacrifices that reflect these preferences. But I fully expect that Hollywood will continue to churn out uninspired movies, that the 'local' Walmart and, shortly thereafter, the landfill will contain almost as much plastic as product, that websites will increasingly pack their pages with ever-more-invasive trackers, that people will still live in single-family housing with multiple internal-combustion vehicles and long commutes. To be clear, I believe the blame actually lies with neither of the dancers, but with the system in which they operate. You can't expect the biggest studios like Universal/Paramount/Warner Bros/Disney/Columbia to make any decisions other than those which they're incentivized to make. They have no reason to do so, and if they did, they'd soon be replaced by a competitor who didn't. A corporation is not a moral entity, it's essentially an AI that attempts to maximize quarterly financial numbers, you can only expect it to act in the narrow context of incentives and consequences on which it operates. That cultural/social/political/economic context is the enemy, not any individual consumer and not any individual corporation.
- wpietri 5y ago
  You're simultaneously claiming that movie viewers have no way to communicate and that Hollywood listens very hard to ticket sales. I think you'll have to pick one. I agree these are systemic problems, but I think it's a giant mistake to absolve a corporation's execs and employees for moral responsibility for their actions. The social context is also part of the system, and it's one of the easiest parts to change.
bruiseralmighty 5y ago
I think this is ignoring the problem of the global market. Studios found that it was more profitable to cater to multiple countries and cultures simultaneously. For example, even if 100% of America went to see a film, that only represents approximately 1/3 of China's population. As a studio, ignoring that market would be seen as throwing away money. So you will see immense pressure to make your movie marketable in China as well as America. Even if many American consumers choose to watch a film catering to them that studio would still be pressured to view that film as a commercial failure. It doesn't seem to matter so much what the local consumers want since their demand is dwarfed by global demand.
mc32 5y ago
Hmmm. So who gets the blame for sugary drinks, snacks and other unhealthy junk food? The peddler or the consumer?
matheusmoreira 5y ago
I do blame consumers as well. Lowest common denominator consumers are absolutely to blame for their exceptionally poor taste. Unfortunately, they happen to be the majority of consumers. This opinion simply doesn't get expressed very often. People think it's elitism or something and react negatively to it.
ewmiller 5y ago
One party in the equation is a very powerful, profitable industry, the other is a huge but atomized group of people. To assume that the only power dynamic at play is consumers making individual choices as fully rational, considerate actors is a vast oversimplification. Your equation isn’t more even, you’ve just flipped the one side, assuming that consumers have all the power and Hollywood is just haplessly following demand. Yes, lowest common denominator viewers are the biggest purchasing group, and that’s the money that Hollywood is chasing. But that was true before. What changed isn’t the same consumers demanding more Avengers and less art films, but Hollywood setting their sights on the global audience, thus increasing the market for generic movies a hundred fold. Now the incentives are so skewed towards that group that the individual American consumer has next to zero power in influencing Hollywood’s direction with their dollars. You also ignore the power of advertising and limited choice. Marketing can and does create an audience of consumers that didn’t exist before. It’s not about “here are my products, now you choose the best” it’s “here are my products and I will subtly convince you that you need them.” Consumers are not rational actors in a classical sense of going to a market for a specific need and picking the best product from a wide selection. Marketing is sufficiently advanced that the owner of a supply can also create demand for it. Finally, Hollywood also controls the selection of choices. So as others have pointed out, people who would prefer smarter films have to forego movies altogether if they really want to “vote with their dollars.” So they might still choose a sub par movie if they like the theater and their friends want to go. PS: I’m not advocating for a solution, so much as I am pointing out that there’s more to market forces than a simplistic libertarian view of the market can offer. I think in this case it’s inevitable and Hollywood movies are just gonna be like that now. But there’s more at play than “oh well, consumers chose it!”

sethhochberg 5y ago

Sure, the consumer does have some degree of influence here, but they're still picking from the menu of options the studio makes available. If someone likes movies as recreation, even if they would prefer something different than the action blockbusters, their choices are "don't enjoy yourself to send a message to the studios" or "watch a movie you might enjoy less than something from another genre"... most people who enjoy watching movies are probably gonna chose the route that still lets them enjoy watching a movie. The incentives don't line up. Its like buying McDonalds at an isolated highway rest stop - I don't particularly love McDonalds, but if my choices are a hot meal or whatever I can get from a vending machine or pack with me, I'll take the hot meal every time. Its not an enthusiastic endorsement of globalized fast food chains despite my paying for it.

kryogen1c 5y ago
> The incentives don't line up. this is again "it takes one to tango" - the people create the incentives the studios follow. movies largely make money with sales volume. this is important; tickets arent more expensive for different movies, its strictly a numbers game (ignoring uncommon deals like toys and video games, etc). according to the first link i clicked, marvel's last movie infinity war grossed two BILLION dollars. you are simply wrong if you think some novel, avant-garde sundance indie is going to interest that many people. the world is the way people want it to be. this is the tyranny of the majority. if we want non-incentivized things to exist, we're gonna have to invent new socioeconomic theories in this movie thread : )
- arrosenberg 5y ago
  You are assuming a fair and competitive market where the consumer is actually in charge. False assumption. The world is the way the people with money want it to be, because it’s the lowest effort, most extractive model they can legally get away with. That’s not to say people didn’t like Endgame, but we all could have done without the last 3 or 4 Transformer movies. There are plenty of examples of trash movies that only get made because the story is watered down enough to pass globally.
  - Brain_Thief 5y ago
    The entire premise here is a bit odd to me; are people forced to spend their time and money watching a sub-par movie? Couldn't they watch one of the innumerable television shows that are available, watch YouTube, older movies, etc., etc.? The comparison made above to having to eat McDonald's in a desert doesn't make any sense in this context since that is talking about needing life-supporting nutrients in a literal desert.
    - arrosenberg 5y ago
      Invert it. I want to watch a movie in theaters because that's a treasured pasttime. What's available to see is what's most profitable to the producer (which is measured globally), rather than what's pleasing to the customer (which is measured locally). It doesn't matter that there are alternative avenues - we're talking about a specific, consolidated economic sector that is behaving irrationally at the local level. I didn't write the McDonald's thing, so I'm not gonna try to contextualize it.
      - Brain_Thief 5y ago
        I understand your frustration but I still cannot get past the point that, generally speaking, an individual must make a specific, conscious, and unforced series of decisions in order to repeatedly end up in front of movies that they dislike. Their decisions must also by necessity happen in a context where there are many other media options available. I also enjoy the cinema but I only go when there are films that I find interesting and worthwhile. In my specific case this means that over the past few years I've seen Parasite, a showing of the original Alien, a few midnight B-tier horror movies, etc. I don't get to go to the movies as often as I would prefer but the alternative of wasting my time on films that I don't find attractive while simultaneously financially supporting an industry I disagree with seems obviously non-viable to me.
jk7tarYZAQNpTQa 5y ago
>but they're still picking from the menu of options the studio makes available. They're often not, just choosing whatever gets more promoted.
imtringued 5y ago
"Nothing" is the common denominator of everything. Mass market movies are attempting to reach this perfect "nothing".

fullshark 5y ago

Yeah i guess the root root cause is TV + streaming competition has squeezed them so much that's the only way to get people to come out to the multiplex. Edit: Well since I introduced the idea of a "root cause" I concede the truth is the root cause of all business decisions is, has been, and always will be market forces.

rhino369 5y ago

I know more than a handful of people who complain about Hollywood originality, but only go to the theater for Marvel or Star Wars movies. Or who only go to see a movie that has 80% on Rotten Tomatoes (unless its a franchise movie). The real problem is that TV killed the middle-rung movie. All that is left is blockbuster spectacle (which costs too much to take risks with) or art house stuff.

OJFord 5y ago
> The real problem is that TV killed the middle-rung movie I nodded away to your last paragraph, but then I thought about my old Saturday job at an independent cinema. We charged £2.50 for a ticket (now £3.50, just checked; about US$3.50 & $5 in today's), the money was in the snacks, and of course it is in major chains too. I think the real problem is consumer perception/treatment of cinemas as expensive rare treats comparable (in price) to going to a theatre. Which they are, at major chains fully laden with snacks, but don't have to be. Television is no doubt a contributor to that image of cinema, but not I think in itself the cause of this.
- jk7tarYZAQNpTQa 5y ago
  > I think the real problem is consumer perception/treatment of cinemas as expensive rare treats comparable (in price) to going to a theatre. My happiest relationship with film was when I was able to go to the movies every week (some weeks even twice!). I was going alone, during the week, to independent movie theaters that charge 4-5€. It's a great experience, even if you don't love the movie. It never feels like a ripoff. The main problem IMO is that people don't want to get out of their comfort zone (and lack time/interest to find new stuff they might like). But of course when tickets are 15€ instead of 4€ people are much less willing to take the risk.
TMWNN 5y ago
>The real problem is that TV killed the middle-rung movie. You're 70 years too late. Life magazine in 1957 talked about how one of the consequences of the Hollywood studio system (from both TV, and the 1948 Paramount antitrust case) was the death of the "million-dollar mediocrity" (<https://books.google.com/books?id=Nz8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA146 https://books.google.com/books?id=Nz8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA146>): "It wasn't good entertainment and it wasn't art, and most of the movies produced had a uniform mediocrity, but they were also uniformly profitable ... The million-dollar mediocrity was the very backbone of Hollywood". The "million-dollar mediocrity" died because the Paramount case forbade block booking, in which studios required that theaters purchase said mediocrities to also buy big films. Original TV movies appeared in the 1960s but their budgets and production values were too low to really fill the hole in Hollywood, but today's streaming companies' insatiable appetite for content has opened a new outlet for middle-tier films (and, more importantly, series).

lodi 5y ago

> "it takes one to tango" Love it.

addicted 5y ago

Every US movie watcher could stop watching certain movies and the studios would still make a lot more money globally than a US centric comedy, for example. The consumer does not have that much power. The individual consumer almost certainly doesn’t.

cout 5y ago
Don't forget product placement and merchandise sales; those can pretty significantly offset the cost of making a movie. Ticket sales are becoming a smaller and smaller piece of the pie over time.

LeifCarrotson 5y ago

To assign blame to diffuse 'consumers' as well as the Hollywood/politicians/FAANG/manufacturers/international megacorporations that are the other side of whatever 'it takes two to tango' issue, the consumers need to have the capability to effectively communicate their demands back to their partner in the trap. Not only do they need the capability, they also need the expectation that the communication will be heard, else there is no reason to do it. But that line of communication is lost at large scales. Maybe a few purists will make a principled stand for nuanced, poignant, artistic, deep films, against the degeneration of the film industry towards bland, repetitive, shallow superhero rehashes, and will refuse to buy a ticket. But capturing those ticket sales would likely mean that more casual viewers didn't bother with the more difficult films. The only number that matters to Hollywood in the end is the box office gross sales; artistic purity is either counterproductive or immeasurable in that context and therefore irrelevant. I want to make responsible choices, and want to reject bland movies, or disposable packaging, or privacy-invading ad trackers, or greenhouse gassy lifestyle choices, or any number of similar issues. And I do make personal sacrifices that reflect these preferences. But I fully expect that Hollywood will continue to churn out uninspired movies, that the 'local' Walmart and, shortly thereafter, the landfill will contain almost as much plastic as product, that websites will increasingly pack their pages with ever-more-invasive trackers, that people will still live in single-family housing with multiple internal-combustion vehicles and long commutes. To be clear, I believe the blame actually lies with neither of the dancers, but with the system in which they operate. You can't expect the biggest studios like Universal/Paramount/Warner Bros/Disney/Columbia to make any decisions other than those which they're incentivized to make. They have no reason to do so, and if they did, they'd soon be replaced by a competitor who didn't. A corporation is not a moral entity, it's essentially an AI that attempts to maximize quarterly financial numbers, you can only expect it to act in the narrow context of incentives and consequences on which it operates. That cultural/social/political/economic context is the enemy, not any individual consumer and not any individual corporation.

wpietri 5y ago
You're simultaneously claiming that movie viewers have no way to communicate and that Hollywood listens very hard to ticket sales. I think you'll have to pick one. I agree these are systemic problems, but I think it's a giant mistake to absolve a corporation's execs and employees for moral responsibility for their actions. The social context is also part of the system, and it's one of the easiest parts to change.

bruiseralmighty 5y ago

I think this is ignoring the problem of the global market. Studios found that it was more profitable to cater to multiple countries and cultures simultaneously. For example, even if 100% of America went to see a film, that only represents approximately 1/3 of China's population. As a studio, ignoring that market would be seen as throwing away money. So you will see immense pressure to make your movie marketable in China as well as America. Even if many American consumers choose to watch a film catering to them that studio would still be pressured to view that film as a commercial failure. It doesn't seem to matter so much what the local consumers want since their demand is dwarfed by global demand.

mc32 5y ago

Hmmm. So who gets the blame for sugary drinks, snacks and other unhealthy junk food? The peddler or the consumer?

matheusmoreira 5y ago

I do blame consumers as well. Lowest common denominator consumers are absolutely to blame for their exceptionally poor taste. Unfortunately, they happen to be the majority of consumers. This opinion simply doesn't get expressed very often. People think it's elitism or something and react negatively to it.

ewmiller 5y ago

One party in the equation is a very powerful, profitable industry, the other is a huge but atomized group of people. To assume that the only power dynamic at play is consumers making individual choices as fully rational, considerate actors is a vast oversimplification. Your equation isn’t more even, you’ve just flipped the one side, assuming that consumers have all the power and Hollywood is just haplessly following demand. Yes, lowest common denominator viewers are the biggest purchasing group, and that’s the money that Hollywood is chasing. But that was true before. What changed isn’t the same consumers demanding more Avengers and less art films, but Hollywood setting their sights on the global audience, thus increasing the market for generic movies a hundred fold. Now the incentives are so skewed towards that group that the individual American consumer has next to zero power in influencing Hollywood’s direction with their dollars. You also ignore the power of advertising and limited choice. Marketing can and does create an audience of consumers that didn’t exist before. It’s not about “here are my products, now you choose the best” it’s “here are my products and I will subtly convince you that you need them.” Consumers are not rational actors in a classical sense of going to a market for a specific need and picking the best product from a wide selection. Marketing is sufficiently advanced that the owner of a supply can also create demand for it. Finally, Hollywood also controls the selection of choices. So as others have pointed out, people who would prefer smarter films have to forego movies altogether if they really want to “vote with their dollars.” So they might still choose a sub par movie if they like the theater and their friends want to go. PS: I’m not advocating for a solution, so much as I am pointing out that there’s more to market forces than a simplistic libertarian view of the market can offer. I think in this case it’s inevitable and Hollywood movies are just gonna be like that now. But there’s more at play than “oh well, consumers chose it!”