28 ms·

Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back

• Flatcircle 5y ago
  I love how he ends the article by saying, “I’m gonna produce plays on Broadway”
  • arkitaip 5y ago
    My understanding is that musicals have the exact problem of being way too commerical and basically adaptations of already, mediocre, work. The difference is that the indie scene is even smaller due to the relative costs of creating musicals.
    • ghaff 5y ago
      There's certainly a fairly steady diet of musicals/plays on Broadway/West End that are adapted from popular films. And, while many are well done, they also just feel utterly unnecessary in most cases. (There are exceptions--Network for example.)
• werber 5y ago
  The "movie business" is far from dead, there's an insane amount of production now and the breadth of those productions is far wider. The only death is the exclusivity of the industry, stories like the movie Tangerine (shot on iphones) or the recent release Zola (based on a twitter feed) are reaching audiences along with a ton of others that never would have seen them. Contrary to that, the highest grossing films of all time are mostly within this century and past decade now. There is more representation and choice in video content now than ever before, even if the movie theater industry might not ever go back to it's heyday. I personally am fine with more tailored content, tv or film, beamed into my home on demand over going to a theater
  • indigodaddy 5y ago
    Also, the Indian movie scene appears to be exploding. Prime knows I’m into Indian movies, and so I’ve noticed a huge uptick in year 2021 Indian movies in my Prime feed. Must be like 5 or 10 new ones added per week. And they look like good quality movies. Indian cinema has really come a long way, and Netflix and Prime are really the catalysts for that and are spurring that industry along.
  • lapetitejort 5y ago
    I've moved from watching movies and TV shows without end to watching limited series/anthology shows. The format hits the sweet spot between watching a self contained story and the anticipation of a TV show. I don't think the format gets the love it deserves, but networks like Disney+ (most of Marvel's recent outings), Netflix (Godless, Russian Doll, Alias Grace, The Queen's Gambit, The Haunting of Hill House), and HBO (The Night Of, Watchmen, The Outsider) certainly understand the benefits and have been amassing a quiet army of content.
    • indigodaddy 5y ago
      Have you caught Mare of Easttown with Kate Winslet on HBO? Tremendous.
      • lapetitejort 5y ago
        It's at the top of my list. Incidentally I went look for the best limited series shows, but aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes do a poor job separating them from other TV shows. Right now I see "Watchmen: Season 1" and "Unbelievable: Season 1" which as far as I know were only meant to be one season. Yet Chernobyl and Mare of Easttown are labeled as Miniseries and Limited Series, respectively. What's the difference between the two labels? Why hasn't someone went back and updated the database? Why can't I filter by ongoing versus limited?
        • indigodaddy 5y ago
          And because Mare was so well received and loved by audiences, there is now a ton of pressure on the producers/creator for a S2. So I guess if that happens it would get relabeled?
• ilamont 5y ago
  ”I used to be in the movie business where you made something really because you cared about it," he said, noting that popular reception mattered more than anything else. What arrogance.
  • rajin444 5y ago
    Really? At least in the US, most movies are either remakes or oscar grabs (which while novel somehow manage to be predictable and dull).
  • howaboutnope 5y ago
    How is that arrogant?
    • georgeecollins 5y ago
      I think the OP means that this is a person-- late in a storied career-- saying in effect: "We used to care about art, now they only care about money." Memory is kind. Barry Diller's Paramount made Orca, Bad News Bears Go to Japan, etc. Art and commerce were always mixed. The arrogance is in being able to convince yourself it was different in the old days without risk of being contradicted. Still, you have to admire Barry Diller.
      • howaboutnope 5y ago
        At no time in history has there been so much "art" as a result of about measuring the audience and seeking please it, or at least extract money from it. We're now already at the point where fans think in term of "franchises" and applaud "smart moves" made by "brands", i.e. even large swaths of consumers are now marketing drones, too. Of course that doesn't mean it was ever "pure" at any point in time, just that it got worse. I've seen so much regression and dumbing down in just the last 20 years, that I don't care if that guy is a hypocrite, I think he happens to be correct anyway. I see what I see, and I can only imagine how it would seem if I had overview of 50 years of that shit. > When books or pictures in reproduction are thrown on the market cheaply and attain huge sales, this does not affect the nature of the objects in question. But their nature is affected when these objects themselves are changed rewritten, condensed, digested, reduced to kitsch in reproduction, or in preparation for the movies. This does not mean that culture spreads to the masses, but that culture is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment. > The result of this is not disintegration but decay, and those who actively promote it are not the Tin Pan Alley composers but a special kind of intellectuals, often well read and well informed, whose sole function is to organize, disseminate, and change cultural objects in order to persuade the masses that Hamlet can be as entertaining as My Fair Lady, and perhaps educational as well. There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say. -- Hannah Arendt ^ Good luck making movies (with a budget, and an audience) that are not entertaining, because they have something serious to say that doesn't happen to be funny. They do exist, and in absolute numbers I bet there's more of them made each year than ever before, just because of accessibility of the technology. But it would be dishonest to focus on those and ignore the fact that, say, three The Hobbit movies exist, or how people break out in tears over Star Wars movies -- and all that insane, infantile, extremely commercialized utter crap. Again, Barry Diller may have been just as guilty of that stuff. I don't know and I don't care, because he doesn't matter. The world matters, the human species matters. How cool a specific individual is or isn't doesn't matter, they and anyone who remembered anyone who remembered them will be gone in a few centuries. > The arrogance is in being able to convince yourself it was different in the old days without risk of being contradicted. That would be nostalgia. And I'm not even convinced the assessment is wrong. And calling someone "arrogant" isn't contradicting them anyway, it's avoiding the argument if anything.
• tootie 5y ago
  He's basically saying he doesn't like it anymore and it's not fun. Not that it's not active or making money.
• sharken 5y ago
  The business of running movie theatres is what he is talking about and it's certainly changing. In Denmark the movies Godzilla vs. Kong, Nomadland and Black Widow will not be shown in major cinemas. The reason is that Warner Bros. and Disney (Marvel) have either shortened the exclusivity period (Warner Bros) or set the streaming premiere at the same day the movie airs in cinemas (Disney). The core of the issue is that the cinemas have to pay the same amount although the terms are clearly worse. I can't help but think that the loss in sales of merchandise will take a hit, but i could be wrong and things will continue as they are now.
  • _trampeltier 5y ago
    I'm a cinema guy, go to cinema about once a week. But to be honest, nobody misses movies like Godzilla vs. Kong. I think one of the worst movies ever.
    • iab 5y ago
      Now now, let’s not be too hasty to make that determination until we’ve seen what fast & furious 9 has to offer
      • adventured 5y ago
        No need to wait. It's really bad. The last King Kong (vs Godzilla) was at least silly amusing to watch (once). F9 is just bad across the board, there was nothing enjoyable about it, the formula has now jumped the shark twice (the last Fast movie was the first jumping of the shark). The Fast franchise is in the guard rail, the race is over.
        • SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
          > the formula has now jumped the shark twice Maybe we can rename the trope to some sort of car-based hijinxs? I want to say "launched a car into space", but that's probably going to annoy Tesla fans.
      • 5y ago
• tibbydudeza 5y ago
  Fast and Furious Marvel So what other movies are there ???.
  • OzzyB 5y ago
    Fast and Furious Marvel - Jack Snyder Cut
    • k12sosse 5y ago
      It broke new ground subverting all those expectations!
• afavour 5y ago
  The actual quote (with my emphasis added): > "The movie business *as before* is finished and will never come back." And I think that's correct. Superhero blockbusters taking over all box office receipts was one thing, but now those blockbusters are becoming deeply tied to streaming services like Disney+ that's bringing content into people's homes and away from movie theatres. I won't mourn movie theatres (though I hope places emulate the likes of Alamo Drafthouse and do dinner, drinks and let us make an evening out of watching a movie), but I do worry about things like movie financing. It feels the industry has split in two, either making super-expensive superhero blockbusters or super cheap indie films. It makes me feel like a grouch to complain about the uber-popular, widely loved thing but this intertwined superhero universe exhausts me. I don't want to have to watch three previous movies and two TV shows to fully enjoy the movie that's in front of me. So I watch a lot more limited series TV instead... and maybe that's just fine?
  • klodolph 5y ago
    TV shows have also gotten more prestigious, and so the people who would have been telling their stories as movies may be making TV shows instead. The article compares traditional movies to movies from streaming services, and I just think that’s avoiding the elephant in the room. The change started happening slowly in the late 1990s, but at this point I’d say that the change has happened and we’re in a golden age of television. In the 1990s, TV was seen as a step down from movies in terms of cultural prestige, but nowadays we have A-list actors starring in TV shows with budgets over $10M per episode. The formats for TV shows have changed, too, and you’re much more likely to see TV shows written as six-episode or eight-episode seasons. They can be much more like a big, long movie, rather than a short TV show. (Of course, the UK has produced six-episode TV series since forever.) Still, I recently rewatched a few episodes of Siskel and Ebert, and it made me a bit sad to think about just how many movies were coming out every year during the 1990s, and remember being excited to go to the theater. Rewatching some 1990s movies, there are shots that just don’t have the right impact in typical home theaters.
    • mbg721 5y ago
      Roots in the 1970s (and The Thorn Birds afterwards) was notable for being a widely-viewed blockbuster miniseries, so the concept was there; without streaming, it was just hard to get an audience to watch every episode at the right time.
• mullingitover 5y ago
  We're arguably repeating history, where 100 years ago film was the upstart (but rapidly growing) business and vaudeville was the established incumbent. Film offered far more creative possibilities and were dramatically more immersive than the entertainment it replaced. Today the film industry is the incumbent - profits have peaked, and the upstart video game business has already eclipsed it. Once again, video games have far more creative possibilities and are dramatically more immersive than the films they're replacing.
  • outlawBand 5y ago
    ...but there is a huge percentage of the population that doesn't like / play video games.
    • mullingitover 5y ago
      It's true, and yet even with a lot of people not being gamers[1]: > Global videogame revenue is expected to surge 20% to $179.7 billion in 2020, according to IDC data, making the videogame industry a bigger moneymaker than the global movie and North American sports industries combined. So the fact that there are still lots of people who aren't gamers just means that the video game industry has plenty of room for growth. [1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/videogames-are-a-bigger-industry-than-sports-and-movies-combined-thanks-to-the-pandemic-11608654990 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/videogames-are-a-bigger-in...
    • merlincorey 5y ago
      Plenty of them are willing to watch people play video games, even if they don't want to play them.
      • watwut 5y ago
        Those consider themswlves games and report themselves as gamers. They claim to like games.
    • metalliqaz 5y ago
      the "gaming" industry includes mobile games and things like slot machines, in addition to the big consoles that most people think of. I think there are more "gamers" than you might think.
• sisk 5y ago
  Sure, the _amount_ of content has grown given the lowered technological barrier for entry and the ease of distribution but content quality isn't some finite resource that is spread out within some limit. If anything, more content means more opportunities for truly great stories to come from corners of the world that might not have previously had that opportunity due to any number of reasons. Plus, these channels have opened up more categories of film to wider audiences. Big budget, full length films and multi-season tv series aren't the only viable options anymore—some of the most talked about media in my circles over the last couple of years have been limited series. Try dragging a brilliant 8 hour limited series across an entire 23 episode season or trimmed down to a two hour film and it's a completely different story. Brilliant film makers are still brilliant film makers and the number of studios willing to take a chance and fund them has never been greater. The traditional movie-watching experience is still here, it's just no longer the only option. I don't think declaring the movie business as dead is accurate, it has simply evolved and adapted. But from where I sit, this evolution has just given us more stories and more ways to hear them. Just because you can distribute a story without a year-long PR blitz doesn't mean you can't tell a good story.
• jeffreyrogers 5y ago
  It's unfortunate, but I think he's probably right. Some movies are just better in theater. The experience of watching Mad Max: Fury Road in theater vs at home is a night and day difference.
  • iamacyborg 5y ago
    Depends on your home setup, a big screen and some big speakers go a long way
    • yepthatsreality 5y ago
      I agree. No sticky floor, no person behind me that decided to take off their giant winter coat when the movie started (instead of previews), no people ruining my immersion because they have to pull out their pocket PC to address their attention deficit, no large groups of people clapping at every character reveal during a film or audibly cheering on the protagonists, no untrusted heavily farted-in seating, no reduced premium of the experience because big corp decided to save a few bucks by cleaning less, no overpriced concessions, no lines. What I do miss is "going out" to see a movie. Alamo Drafthouse has a good model that entices "going out" but most chains couldn't shift to adapt to a similar model. Auto-managed streaming quality is something I don't really like either, let me buffer my own selection.
      • adventured 5y ago
        Not having to listen to people eat like pigs during the movie while I'm trying to enjoy being immersed in the audio of the movie (while some guy nearby very loudly assaults a giant bucket of popcorn over the next two hours). Because if they didn't consume two thousand calories during the movie, they might starve, seeing as the US has no other available food options. The only way a movie theater experience can be consistently great is if you banish all food. Too many people lack even basic manners & consideration for others, they can't be trusted to not be inconsiderate idiots.
        • yepthatsreality 5y ago
• mihaic 5y ago
  What I find exhausting is having any systemic criticism of the movie/music industry met with arguments along the lines of: "It was just different, you're merely nostalgic/you have golden age syndrome", and have a hard time answering back with anything except: "It really was better, sometime things do get substantially worse". While technologically everything has improved, creativity feel like going from the golden age of the greco-roman world to 8th century Europe, where indie bands/movies are like the churches that preserved some measure of past glories. What argument can one make when the burden of proof is to show cultural regression?
  • scandox 5y ago
    I find the cure to this frustration is to accept that everything I love is obsolete and that it's OK. As you say there are historical periods we now look back upon and say objectively they took a step backwards in terms of skill and artistry in many areas. But we don't know if this is that period, because maybe the creativity is shifting into something we can't yet observe clearly.
  • cblconfederate 5y ago
    It's more like, the spotlight has shifted away from the medium and creative people have left. Old movies, like old books, are by definition more important. Looking at the highest grossing movies of the past 2 decades almost all are based on older stories/franchises, from star wars to marvel , to LOTR, to harry potter (newest one).
  • spywaregorilla 5y ago
    They're wrong, and the reason they believe it is because they're stuck on older mediums. In music, the radio and the record store defined the market. You had a small window so you invested big and mainstream stuff tended to be pretty good. Now music access is decentralized and you can chase a long tail of niche personal tastes. Music is incredibly healthy right now. There's so much great content going in myriad different directions, but you'd think otherwise if you're only listening to the radio which has tripled down on non-differentiating hyper mainstream blandness. Movies are largely the same with streaming. The movie theater model is rough. Even before streaming the vast majority of movie tickets go unsold, and to many people there's a sort of social group requirement to justify going there. So you get mass appeal as a requirement. But the actual space of film has more richness than ever before. People who say the only films are marvel films just don't know about the other films being released.
• k__ 5y ago
  "I used to be in the movie business where you made something really because you cared about it," I had the impression,the movie business was a shit show for at least half a century now.
  • JKCalhoun 5y ago
    Yeah, the big studios for sure. It's like he's describing indie films.
• flybrand 5y ago
  We’ve got a family love of the Fast and Furious movies - we got a big group to go see it yesterday. The movie is awful, it could be my last experience ever in a theatre.
• jollybean 5y ago
  He's right and it's sad. One positive note though is that 2 hours is very short - often not long enough to explore a story. Series formats mean they can take the time they need. That said, often they end up being filler.
• socialist_coder 5y ago
  I think "Movies", as we remember them from the decades of yore, will have a resurgence in the near future due to 2 things: 1) The demand for movies outside of what the streaming services are making. 2) Most aspects of movie production go completely digital to bring costs down astronomically. The easiest way to embrace digital is to just make an animated movie that looks animated with some interesting cool art style / rendering techniques. Maybe the boomer generation doesn't respond well to animation, but Gen X and Millennials are fine with it. Otherwise, just look at The Mandalorian for an example of what they've been able to do digitally. A huge huge huge Unreal Engine powered screen, instead of your typical green screen. It is linked to the camera so you get proper depth and angles as the camera moves. The lighting is realistic since the screen is actually shooting light onto the actors and props. And the director can see the composition of the shot in real time. As more aspects of production will go digital like this, costs will go way down. And hopefully we can have our "movies" again =)
  • Damogran6 5y ago
    Which will impact the QUANTITY of movies produced, but not necessarily the QUALITY. Granted, there's always been B-movies (and D-list actors), but surfacing interesting storytelling is going to be harder, the more we create.
    • socialist_coder 5y ago
      What I'm saying is that A list people will use these same techniques to make QUALITY movies at a budget that makes it economically viable to release to a smaller streaming audience.
    • toofy 5y ago
      > Which will impact the QUANTITY of movies produced, but not necessarily the QUALITY. Absolutely. We have a signal/noise issue. We need to figure out how to find the signal. I think one of the issues we really need to come to terms with is our absolute overReliance on algorithmic recommendations when it comes to completely subjective areas like film, music, fashion, food, art, etc… We’re just unable to reduce these things to algorithmic recommendations without the content being… algorithmic. When discussing this I have to often repeat to people, I’m absolutely not a luddite–I work, live, and breathe-in technology. I firmly believe science and technology are part of the key fundamentals to carry us forward. However, one area where I consistently get much better results is when these things are recommended by other humans. It really is no contest in how much better human curation is when it comes to recommendations. Obviously untested and obviously just pulling numbers out, but for me, I think algorithmic recommendations are just plain wrong about 95% of the time. Friend’s recommendations are close/spot-on about 75+% of the time. And human curation (from online reviews, real life DJs, critics, etc…) are decent maybe 60+% of the time. Far better results from humans. I think you’re correct that we’ll have a lot more quantity and we’re going to need human curation in there if we have any hope for the quality to gain footholds, to find the signal in the ever growing noise.
• okareaman 5y ago
  I can understand most of Dillers complains but not this one: "These streaming services have been making something that they call 'movies,' " he said. "They ain't movies. They are some weird algorithmic process that has created things that last 100 minutes or so." I'd like to know why he disparages writers and directors who work on streaming movies this way and if it has any validity
  • grawprog 5y ago
    Possibly this? https://blog.richardvanhooijdonk.com/en/the-entertainment-industry-turns-to-algorithms-in-search-of-blockbuster-movies/ https://blog.richardvanhooijdonk.com/en/the-entertainment-in... https://tecreview.tec.mx/2021/04/26/en/how-to-make-a-blockbuster-movie/ https://tecreview.tec.mx/2021/04/26/en/how-to-make-a-blockbu... >A team of scientists from the Spanish universities of Granada (UGR) and Cádiz (UCA) has designed the first computer system to help screenwriters write movie scripts that will do better at the box office, a model that makes use of artificial intelligence techniques to analyze the most successful clichés or tropes.
    • okareaman 5y ago
      Interesting. I thought something like this was going on. I remember remarking to a friend that I got the feeling from some shows that the screenwriters had help from AI. The plots of some were at the same time more complex but had weird twists the people normally wouldn't think of. I am also not surprised the AI is mining TV Tropes. Now I think Diller is right that there is some "They are some weird algorithmic process" going on, but I rather like it. It's less formulaic.
  • HellDunkel 5y ago
    These services have made some truely great movies possible and surely they offer a lot more opportunities for the arts. People like to complain that every netflix production is like the other when in reality they just refuse to make an effort to find the good stuff and take some minor risk of failure along the way.
• hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  I think this interview that gets at a broader point that I find depressing/scary: that the availability of so much data and analysis has ended up "quantizing" creative endeavors to the point where formulaic output is just much, much easier, and that any truly innovative or "misunderstood" productions become much harder to sustain. I really see this issue everyone nowadays, from movies, TV and music to things like the Olympics. Two good examples: to fix problems with subjectivity and unfairness (which were definitely problems) both gymnastics and ice skating moved from 'fuzzier' 10.0 or 6.0 scales to a 'code of points' model where every element has a fixed value. The result has been that the types of competitors that can win in this model are only the ones that can do the most impressive spins/turns/jumps etc. I mean, I'd be willing to be that you will never again see a 2x "women's" olympic figure skating champion, because you have these young teenagers doing quads now (who almost always lose this ability as they age and develop), but who retire from the sport before they hit 20. These feats are surely impressive, but they also crowd out other types of competitors.
  • Apocryphon 5y ago
    Optimization is eating the world.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • imbnwa 5y ago
      Premature optimization?
  • dillondoyle 5y ago
    What would the other type of competitor be? Those sports you mention like figuring skating and gymnastics already have execution scores 'style' if you will built in. Personally, I have the opposite opinion. I prefer sports that are more quantified on difficulty alone (and the obvious 1st to finish). Looking at execution is one thing, like taking a step is clearly not as skilled as sticking it no debate there. But judging how pretty something is just doesn't seem fair to me nor personally as interesting as throwing hard skills. Gymnastics in particular grinds me in that they have a lot of silly rules AND they actively decrement leading edge hard skills point value!
• mentos 5y ago
  I have no clue how they're making money on these movies that are going straight to streaming platforms? With a movie releasing in theatres there was a sense of urgency to see it on the big screen with big sound and big lights. Being able to stream it whenever you want from home now means you never will. Not sure if any platforms do it already but they should try to create a sense of scarcity by offering only a limited number of opening weekend tickets that you can reserve.
  • nmz 5y ago
    That's how you get piracy.
  • fullshark 5y ago
    It’s all just investments to reach a subscriber base of X with a retention rate of at least Y by certain dates. If you are ahead or behind adjust your capital spend accordingly.
• xnx 5y ago
  And yet a lot of people think that AMC stock is worth 4x what it was last year.
  • metalliqaz 5y ago
    Don't take the naive position that stock prices are (or should be) directly reflective of the value of a company's business. They aren't. Stock prices are defined by what people are willing to pay for them. In the case of AMC, the price is higher because some retail investors are willing to invest in the hope that they will be able to squeeze the shorts. Fundamentals are great, but as the old saying goes: the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
• IAmGraydon 5y ago
  Through my work, I have access to Placer.ai, which allows me to track foot traffic to any retail location or chain via visitors' cellphone GPS. Here's AMC's nationwide foot traffic from January 2017 through July 4, 2021. https://i.imgur.com/s3H7EYj.png https://i.imgur.com/s3H7EYj.png
  • syntaxing 5y ago
    Wait, how does Placer.ai work? Like you need to have some sort of AMC app?
    • IAmGraydon 5y ago
      Placer is able to track cell phones that have an app installed that uses their SDK. They currently have their SDK in over 500 mobile apps. The data is anonymized, but it would probably shock people how much information I can get from this system. I just pick a location and I can see how many people walked into that location over any time span in the past 4 years, where they live, how much money they make, where else they like to shop, etc. I work in commercial real estate, BTW. We use this software to analyze retail properties.
      • bananabiscuit 5y ago
        Is there a list somewhere of apps that use placer so that I can delete those apps off my phone forever?
        • gregsadetsky 5y ago
          There was a flagged submission about a year ago about them https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22704138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22704138 I’ll go on a limb and say that apps don’t even have to integrate Placer’s sdk directly. If an app uses any monetization/tracking/ad tracking system, that tracking vendor may collect the geo data and then re-sell it to Placer (i.e. talk to Placer via a server to server API to let them know about the end user)
• historyloop 5y ago
  Black Widow is destroying opening expectations in cinemas as we speak. Barry Diller is clearly disillusioned with the process, this happens a lot with veterans. But there's a constant supply of wide-eyed youngsters to fill-in those positions with new energy. I'd say it's a bit premature to declare permanent changes. Streaming will play a stronger role over time, but none of this is new or unexpected. And cinemas will continue to thrive.
• throwaway5752 5y ago
  It seems like the current movie business is mostly just a parasite on the back of 50 year old content (Marvel Silver age, Star Wars universe, Disney catalogs, Netflix 3rd party licensed content, et al.) The long tail of good content is very long. I wouldn't be surprised if Casablanca still generates annual royalties in excess of it's entire original cost, 80 years later. A great movie is a piece of artwork and like the Mona Lisa centuries later, has a timeless aspect to it. I don't disagree with Diller per se. In fact, "They ain't movies. They are some weird algorithmic process that has created things that last 100 minutes or so." is one of the best descriptions of modern film I've ever seen. May it is just because of the limits of the article length, but I think it's far more about short form content and limits of human attention. I'd rather watch several 10-20 minute videos from niche Youtube creators in a week than one two hour movie most of the time, and I can't do both. In that sense, Katzenberg /Quibli were probably onto something. You have to remember Diller created the anonymous content conglomerate of IAC and is commenting on Quibli from that perspective. He admits himself, at the end, that he's working on backing Broadway productions so he's not satisfied with the content landscape, either. Maybe someone will figure out what it means to make something that squares good content with the time/format demands of a modern viewer. TL;DR: I'm sick of Fast & Furious and Marvel franchise spin offs. Feels like someone made the film analogue of discovering that kids like candy and will preferentially take it over healthier food when offered.
  • Apocryphon 5y ago
    I believe that you ain't seen nothing yet. Superhero comic films are king but like, say, zombie media in the 2000s, it is a mammoth fad that will eventually be overthrown by another one. Once Hollywood finally figures out how to make a good video game movie adaptation, expect the true licensing deluge to begin. Marvel and DC are but two companies. Imagine the amount of IP adaptations that an entire industry will yield.
    • throwaway5752 5y ago
      I watched Captain Lou Albano play Mario in the 80s. Resident Evil? Pokemon? Mortal Kombat? It's already here. I actually don't care, as long as they are good. Not all MCU is bad (and I might even say little/none of it is bad). Maybe a different comparison: a lot of movies now feel like processed food. Consistent and made-to-please, but limits to how great it can be. It is not ideal to live only on processed food.
• Animats 5y ago
  Barry Diller is just having a "get off my lawn" moment. It's like Bob Lutz saying the car business is over, which he did a few years back. Some things have changed. The difference between "movies" and "TV" has narrowed considerably. Production values for TV are up, and there's not the big distinction between "film work" and "TV work" that there used to be. After all, today "film" is just 2K or 4K video projection. Another thing that's changed is a few huge franchises sucking up the attention supply. This seems to reflect the Disney mindset of getting a franchise going and milking it for half a century or more. (A Mickey Mouse live-action movie is scheduled for 2022. Really.)
• truthwhisperer 5y ago
  And too much woke content
• master_yoda_1 5y ago
  Totally agree on this "They ain't movies. They are some weird algorithmic process that has created things that last 100 minutes or so." look at "The Tomorrow War"
  • croes 5y ago
    "The Tomorrow War" is not an Amazon movie, they only bought the distribution rights. It's a Paramount Pictures film.
• moomin 5y ago
  I mean, I don’t disagree with him, but he dates back to the birth of the blockbuster, which was the 70s version of “algorithmic things that last 100 minutes”. The movie industry has had seismic shifts every couple of decades and has been shrinking since the 1950s.
• cwp 5y ago
  I hate this kind of article. It's an opinion from a knowledgeable person, but it offers no insight at all. The only difference between what Diller said and my uninformed curmudgeonly grumpy opinion is that he used to run a studio.
• jtwaleson 5y ago
  Ok, here's my problem with the movie theatre industry. There's 100+ years of fantastic historical content and we're not doing anything with it. 99% of what's shown in theaters is new releases. I understand we don't want to "go stale" as a society and that movie producers also need to make a living, but the balance is just way off. I would pay good money to see "the good the bad and the ugly" with my kids in a couple of years. If you compare movie theatres to classical music we seem to play only 10% new content at concert halls, the rest are the 100+ year old classics.
  • GormanFletcher 5y ago
    Before everything shut down last year, my local theaters played a showing of a classic film each month, often Hitchcock. The few I went to had plenty of attendees. Another local theater took the lockdown as an opportunity to do outdoor socially-distanced showings of previous blockbusters, like The Dark Knight. Plenty of attendees there, too. I'd be happy to have more showings like that.
    • jtwaleson 5y ago
      Interesting! Where is this? In Amsterdam I know one theater that's showing old films and that's the 1% I was talking about ;)
      • GormanFletcher 5y ago
        I'm in Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina, USA.
      • eatonphil 5y ago
        Sharing from somewhere totally different: NYC has a number of theaters that show (mostly or half-half) not-new kids films, art films, and cult classics like Miyazaki or Blaxploitation films. These theaters are typically small businesses owned by locals who have been in the business for decades. But there are also some US chains like Alamo Drafthouse that do this too. On a slight tangent, in the suburbs of Lancaster, PA the chain theaters ran free re-runs of children's movies in the summer each Wednesday morning.
• onelastjob 5y ago
  Before streaming, a movie studio actually had to convince an audience to leave their houses and buy a ticket to make money from a movie. This meant the studio had to pour a lot of money into marketing for each movie. The cost to market a movie could be up $30M to $50M range for a blockbuster movie. For a mid-budget drama like Meet Joe Black or A River Runs Through It, you could be looking at a marketing budget that matches the production budget ($30M production + $30M marketing). These big marketing costs for every movie meant that the quality of those movies needed to be pretty high to justify the marketing costs. Streamers don’t have to convince people to go out and buy a ticket for every movie they release. They just have to keep the existing subscribers paying and get more people signing up. So the marketing cost per title goes way down. This takes some pressure off to make quality content because the risk per title is lower. Also quality movies on streamers don’t necessarily get the marketing and fanfare they would have before streaming.
  • alisonkisk 5y ago
    It takes off the pressure to make popular content. Quality content can be unpopular, niche, wonderful content. Popular content needs to be tolerable by as many people as possible, which means taking fewer risks on high-quality slightly controversial or intellectual or unfamiliar material.
    • blooalien 5y ago
      > Quality content can be unpopular, niche, wonderful content. I was about to say this exact thing. I've seen some amazing content on various streaming services that would have simply not even existed in prior decades. Even some of the "big boys" of media have been able to produce some shockingly good content these days thanks to the lowered risks and costs of available outlet channels for their more "experimental" media offerings.
  • agumonkey 5y ago
    It's funny, I keep seeing this era the same way. There used to be such a different structure behind things. Everything was more expensive but we went to grab them because they were so superb. Also it imposed some kind of order.. those who managed to fabricate large things in front of the random nature of workgroups, social trends and audience desires got to grab the hero / fame status (for better or worse). Today, available means flattens the whole landscape, you can indeed do everything at a fraction of the cost but so the goal vanished because there's nothing of greatness now ? (and many groups are in the "availability is key for .. whatever" .. I find the idea too naive) This weird tension, or contrast, is interesting.
• nathias 5y ago
  popular culture was always intolerable, you're just old enough to notice
• johnohara 5y ago
  The Allen and Co. Sun Valley Conference is winding down. The pandemic forced a lot of reaction to, realignment of, and reflection on, all of the current paradigms. But nobody was able to meet last year and many conversations that needed to happen were left hanging in abeyance. As the many attendees represent organizations that pull heavy carts as it is, there is no doubt an eagerness to get the wheels turning again. The sooner the better. But they have also had a year to completely evaluate what was causing them to be so laden prior to February 1st, 2020. This year's conference will be remembered as a watershed moment. Great food and real-world golf scores notwithstanding.
• mdoms 5y ago
  What's ruining cinema is the utter dreck that most people are gagging to watch. I look at my local cinema today and every single movie, save for The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard, is either lazy nostalgia bait, generic marvel film #4715, yet another sequel to a summer blockbuster franchise or a kid's movie. And you people just eat this garbage up.
• okareaman 5y ago
  I don't work in the movie industry, but it seems to me the superhero and fast and furious type movies are designed to appeal to young people in America, China, India and Europe. A movie like that offers an incredibly large potential audience. Three films I watched recently that might have a hard time getting made today are Broken Flowers by Jim Jarmusch starring Bill Murray, After Hours by Martin Scorsese and The Muse by Albert Brooks. I know Martin Scorsese and others have been complaining about the death of cinema, but I don't understand why the two types of movies can't coexist on streaming media. The audience for the latter type is nowhere near as big as the former, but it's not nothing. The world still wants thought provoking art.
• wolverine876 5y ago
  Barry: Call me. I'll show you where you can find great art in movies, an order of magnitude more than what was available before. I'm a big believer in data and not personal anecdotes, but if I can do it, Barry can (and you can). I never imagined so much incredible art existed on video as what I've seen in the last 5+ years on streaming. The standard for what I will watch has risen dramatically - I don't have to compromise; I don't have the time and energy to see everything incredible thing I want to. I rarely go to movie theaters because what is available on streaming is so much better, it's not a close call. Partly that's due to the availability of old stuff - what is the chance that the movie in this theater this weekend is at the level of the best movies in history? What is the chance that it's close enough to be worth the extra money and time for the better video and audio? But the new quality stuff has exploded in volume too, and yes some is structured episodically (i.e., like TV) but why should the director be restricted in form? And I have access to new stuff from all over the world, from small to large productions. And I can take a risk on something new and change my mind, which isn't really practical at the movie theater. I live in cinephile heaven. I'm not sure where Barry is?
  • Y_Y 5y ago
    Where's the data? Let's have some references to all this high quality stuff.
    • hughrr 5y ago
      Well The Expanse quite frankly teabags to death 20 years of science fiction moves. I can't watch anything else now.
      • DubiousPusher 5y ago
        The quality of genre work has increased mightily but it really does feel like the budget has fallen out of more high minded stuff like "MOON" and "GATTACA". Maybe this isn't real. After all, we've had some pretty good snooty stuff. Ex Machina, Interstellar, Arrival, etc. Very much could be just how much Avengers flicks have absolutely dominated the marketing. I think it's akin to how music seems to have died of you listen to the radio because the decline in listenership has resulted in more pop stations playing the absolutely most widely appealing stuff. But there is a thriving ecosystem off to the side that's way fuller and more varied than anything we had in the 90s.
• MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  Trying to shoehorn a meaningful story into 1.5 hours is not great for storytelling. The production costs for 8 hours of streaming television isn't that much different from 2 hours of movie filming when filming for the same genre in the same manner. Try to get 1.5 hours of meaningful story out of the recent Netflix production of Shadow and Bone, or any of the Game of Thrones books, without sacrificing major parts of the story (that weren't already being sacrificed in their expanded versions).
• hujun 5y ago
  movie theaters should become smaller, a place with many smaller rooms, a room for only ten people with top video/audio equipments, with good drink, food; make it more like going to a party with friends
• sammalloy 5y ago
  Just as the rise of the internet changed the way people read and pay attention to information, so too did the advent of streaming change the way audiences engage with entertainment. I can barely sit still through anything that's more than an hour long now, and I can't imagine how I used to sit through entire films back in the day. I've also noticed that I prefer the series arc format over the superficial cinematic, one and done story, making standard film releases less entertaining for me.
• sida 5y ago
  As a quick tangent, has anyone tried watching movies in VR? If you haven’t, try it. I have been watching stuff in my oculus quest 2 and it is pretty darn awesome. I think this is the future, most definitely. Oculus quest 2 still is not perfect. But I cannot imagine going to the theater with a few more generations of VR. (Oculus quest 5 maybe???)
  • moralestapia 5y ago
    Ugh, I love watching movies on my 2D screen while talking to other people and having some snacks. I can't imagine myself (EVER!) changing that experience to one that isolates me and requires me to have a crappy headset squeezing my temples for two hours or so. Just, no. NOOOOO!
• BTCOG 5y ago
  Good deal. Maybe they'll have to go back to the drawing board and quit making spinoffs of remakes, of remakes. And these lame duck "superhero" movies. Puke.
• sanj 5y ago
  I spent a while in London and the cinema theater experience there was worth going out: - couches - beer - good food Sure it was expensive, but it was a far far cry from my experience in the US.
• rglover 5y ago
  Studios should create "backlot" theaters where you can come to the set, do Q&A/photos with actors/crew, and see the movie (or, similar to kickstarter, see the dailies/weeklies in progress) with regular screenings and events. Charge a premium for it, minimal cost to operate, and fans would love it. Would revitalize the role of the actor while generating a unique revenue stream. If multiple studios did it, you could have a meta business around doing "backlot screening" tours.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• specialist 5y ago
  That interview was rough. TLDR: The studio and distributor's chokehold on movies is dead. Hallelujah, good riddance, piss off. For some historical perspective, 99% had a nice episode about movie theaters. The Megaplex! https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-megaplex/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-megaplex/ TLDR: The movie theater biz has always been in flux, now is no different. PS- After the dust settles, I'm sure new gatekeepers will arise. Same as it ever was.
  • clouddrover 5y ago
    > The studio's chokehold on movies is dead. No, the reality is studios are consolidating control over their content. For example, Disney controls distribution and access more than ever before with their Disney+ streaming service. Disney produces the content and directly distributes it to the end user: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney%2B https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney%2B https://www.disneyplus.com https://www.disneyplus.com
    • specialist 5y ago
      > No, the reality is studios are consolidating control over their content. Ya, it sure seems like everyone's pulling their own content in tighter. I couldn't quickly find out how many movies, shows, etc are published every year. If anything, it seems like the entertainment industry is in a free-for-all. I'm almost curious how it shakes out. Can we agree that the prior theatrical distribution system, so near and dear to Barry Diller's heart, got mooted?
• birdyrooster 5y ago
  Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid would be excellent in theatres
• magwa101 5y ago
  Most movies do not age well.
• madrox 5y ago
  Ed Catmull once pointed out that the movie industry is actually quite cooperative and wants everyone to succeed. The more successful someone else's movie was last week tends to positively influence whether the audience will come back to theaters to see your movie the following week. It occurs to me that this idea is gone from streaming movies. In fact, you're more at odds with your competitors than ever, since you'll basically be competing for the same subscription dollars in the minds of your audience. I'm very interested in what that will mean in the future.
• jimbob45 5y ago
  Oh go fuck yourself, Diller. This happens every 30 years and movie executives act like the sky is falling because they’ve gotten greedy and forgotten that movies should be vehicles to share human experiences and not vehicles to make money. It’s your own fault that you didn’t pay attention to Katzenberg’s warnings 30 years ago. https://www.wnd.com/2017/06/see-what-1991-disney-memo-predicted-for-hollywood/ https://www.wnd.com/2017/06/see-what-1991-disney-memo-predic...
• aaron695 5y ago
  Misses China. The figures are there for anyone to see. They are probably a bigger force that streaming. He's wrong Quibi was a bad idea, but he's right with to say they didn't build to iterate - "It was a bad idea that had no testing ground other than a big-scale investment," Diller said. "Otherwise, it would have slithered around for a while. But it was such a big-scale thing that it lived and died in a millisecond."
• xanaxagoras 5y ago
  I can count the number of times I've been to a theater in the last 10 years on one hand. I ended up seeing The Lorax in theaters when it came out for some work thing. I was there to be entertained, I didn't like being lectured at. Things are much, much worse now. You all do what you want, I'm more than happy with old movies.
• TrispusAttucks 5y ago
  This shouldn't be surprising. The Internet geographically decentralizes everything. Movies and theaters are no different. - movies - music - retail - dating - groceries - work/office - government paper work - etc. That is the progress of a society evolving. All the incessant coming and going and driving and flying. Good riddance. Stay home. Plant a garden. Watch new movies. Save the planet.