11 ms·

They can't compete with what they once were, so they bury the past. I suspect many industries are like this. If classic movies were played alongside new Holly

They can't compete with what they once were, so they bury the past. I suspect many industries are like this. If classic movies were played alongside new Hollywood releases, the new movies would probably be choked out. Accordingly, Disney will even restrict the availability of their old movies on DVD. They can't stand competing with their former great selves.

zadler 4y ago
Yea. Google actively forgets everything in order to encourage new content and paying customers. Not to mention, many products hit their peak of usability, and then the publishers go ahead and make it a little worse each year just so some product person can look like they did something.
blockwriter 4y ago
With movies, I find it to be the opposite. I might recognize the old movies as better in many ways, but their pacing is excruciatingly slow compared to modern movies. It takes a layer of appreciation to get through many of them.
- acdha 4y ago
  There is definitely an element of conditioning here. People have grown accustomed to frenetic action and the studios like it because it’s easier than hiring good writers – especially since they’re hoping for global sales and humor, subtly, and nuance are hard to translate – but that’s a learned preference based on what dominates the market. If different things came back on the market people would get used to them, too.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    Older movies are full of filler too, but it's generally less exciting filler - looooong shots of a car driving through the countryside or plot beats that could be 1 minute stretching to 10 without having any reason to be as long as they are. Over time movies have learned to cut a lot of fat.
    - cld8483 4y ago
      It's about conveying atmosphere and mood, not conveying plot-points as rapidly as possible. Same reason a book might spend two pages describing a lazy dog laying on a porch swatting flies with his tail, instead of cutting straight to who said/did what.
      - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
        OK, so movies have gotten better at setting the mood without derailing the story's momentum.
        yamtaddle 4y ago
        A lot of great modern movies have pacing similar to those older ones you don't like. It's not that they "leveled up" into some new form and obsoleted what came before—the other sorts of pacing remain entirely valid and in heavy use.
        SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
        I'm not saying no one uses long shots or takes anymore and they aren't totally ineffective - I just watched Mandy over the weekend and it has plenty and they are used effectively but it's also a move that seems to have people regarding it in extremes - it's really a love or hate because of the choices they make. But what I'm trying to say is there are other tools in the toolbox now - I haven't heard anyone say that Everything Everywhere All At Once was bad, it's a great movie, absolutely full of deliberately chosen mood, and it never has to resort to extremely long shots that take the wind out of the story's sails.
        yamtaddle 4y ago
        Ah, OK—I may not have followed what you meant re: pacing in older movies, then. I can think of a lot of older movies I'd not touch the pacing on. I don't think it'd improve the film. Then again, I admit I've bounced off a couple because of extremely-flat cinematography and slow-as-molasses pacing (the original Oceans Eleven comes to mind—I don't drop many movies that I start, but I'm not sure I even made it to the 20 minute mark on that one). Maybe I'm misjudging what you mean by "old"—I'd kinda assumed you meant "before digital editing", say, 80s and earlier. I don't think films from the '70s tend to feel terribly different from modern ones (we've developed new and more-chaotic ways to assemble very bad action scenes, but that aside, not much different) for example, but would grant that it's probably possible to divide cinema into silent/middle/modern period as far as the feel or what's asked of the viewer, and that the former two do feel pretty different from modern films—but I'd say we were already transitioning out of "middle" and into "modern" in the '60s, so you've got to go pretty old to get into what I'd judge to be notably different. Now, film films do tend to look very different from modern movies, even as recently as the 90s, but that's because easy digital color grading hadn't ruined the artform yet. :-)
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > especially since they’re hoping for global sales On top of that, a lot of actually interesting content has the potential to cause shitstorms. Like, especially anything LGBT and women's rights won't fly in China, Russia, Arabia and lots of Asian countries. Black lead actors lead to massive shitstorms from the far-right in the USA and parts of Europe [1] - and so, producers leave all that "potentially troubling for sales" content out. Everything "mainstream" is just the same bullshit now, white- and dumbwashed. [1] Black Panther and the 3rd Star Wars trilogy were surrounded by some of the most vile harassment campaigns I've seen, for example
    - cld8483 4y ago
      > [1] Black Panther and the 3rd Star Wars trilogy were surrounded by some of the most vile harassment campaigns I've seen, for example Or, movie studios have exaggerated the impact of (real, but not very numerous) internet trolls to protect their own egos from valid criticisms. The third Star Wars trilogy was an incoherent mess. And for reasons I still don't understand, the end of Black Panther was released in a rough half-rendered state. But the people making these films don't want to hear criticism of their baby, so online critics get dehumanized as "trolls". Rare instances of real trolling from the likes of 4chan get highlighted and blown out of proportion as a defense mechanism.
      - mschuster91 4y ago
        I agree that the SW trilogy was a mess, but that does not excuse Black actors being blasted with n-bombs and other slurs on Twitter and other social media, nor does it excuse the amount of sexist comments against Daisy Ridley. For BP, it was the same. The whine from the far-right about "who wants to see <N-word>s in movies", "we're being ethnically replaced", "this is our future" etc. was unacceptable.
        cld8483 4y ago
        > but that does not excuse Black actors being blasted with n-bombs and other slurs on Twitter and other social media, I'm not denying, much less excusing that. What I am saying is that such trolls are an irrelevant minority who's voices are amplified by those to whom nutjobs are a convenient excuse for their own failures. Black Panther sold many millions of tickets in America, and had maybe a few thousand 4chan-style trolls complaining about it. Am I really expected to believe those few thousand trolls were the reason the movie got less than flawless glowing reviews from critics, rather than flaws in the movie itself being to blame? And if the Star Wars trilogy failed to perform as Disney expected, it certainly wasn't the fault of trolls. Star Wars fans outnumber trolls a million to one. If the Star Wars trilogy under-performed, it was because the Star Wars trilogy was flawed. Trolls are just a convenient excuse for the people involved in the production who don't want to face the facts about the quality of their product.
- NackerHughes 4y ago
  That only speaks of how severely the attention span of the average person has plummeted in recent decades. It's impossible to sit through a movie without enough dopamine-inducing distractions or MTV-style jump cuts every few seconds.
  - mkaic 4y ago
    Definitely disagree with this take. I'd argue that all it means is that filmmakers have learned to make more exciting films. Cinema is a young art form and hasn't even been around for 200 year, it's no surprise to me that the movies of today are fundamentally different and more engaging than movies from last century.
    - _5uxp 4y ago
      They are more dumb tho, scripts and dialogues are so much simple. They rarely give you the feeling of once a lifetime seeing experience. Most of them have too much CGI and sometimes not even looking rea at all.
      - ssully 4y ago
        Sorry, but you are just generalizing based on the top blockbuster movies. Films have never been more diverse in their style and quality and, in my opinion, offer something for everyone. If you are looking for movies that focus on strong dialogue and character work those movies are still being made and are fantastic.
        JohnFen 4y ago
        But they all seem to be locked up in streaming services and the like.
        somenameforme 4y ago
        Mind if I pick your brain? I enjoy compelling era pieces, though some fantasy or sci-fi is also great. I dislike identity politics and infantilizing exposition. By contrast I enjoy subtle metaphor and stories with nuance. My favorite films would include Das Boot, I Claudius, and Seventeen Moments of Spring. For something more contemporary, I also enjoyed The Expanse. Any recommendations? Films or series in any language are okay.
- TimMurnaghan 4y ago
  Obligatory counterexample, comedies. A quickfire screwball classic like "His Girl Friday" has lots of smart lines per minute where recent Hollywood ones will have two jokes in 90mins that they've had to put into the trailer, and slow build ups so that everybody can get the lame joke.
ace32229 4y ago
[dead]
mynameishere 4y ago
Movies probably not. But I wonder what would happen if a band like the Beatles ever showed up again. Would they suck the air out of the room? Would they get trapped on a five year tour after two albums? Would they get ignored?
- sdwr 4y ago
  You mean Taylor Swift?
  - wing-_-nuts 4y ago
    Taylor Swift has actually grown on me
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - amanaplanacanal 4y ago
      It's not really my kind of music, but huge respect for her. She's obviously got tons of talent and has figured out how to turn it into big $$$$.
- rchaud 4y ago
  You make it sound as if Beyonce, Drake, Taylor Swift and Bieber don't already account for 80% of Spotify's artist payouts.
stuckinhell 4y ago
This seems to be happening with many works of fiction. They can't compete so they remake or redo things with modern audiences sensibilities. These usually fail because people liked those works of fiction for their historical sensibilities. Even Roald Dahl is having his works censored and rewritten. I believe its due to reaching "Peak Content".
- Applejinx 4y ago
  Not so much peak content as minimum friction. If things are more localized, you can build up more momentum as a home team kind of competitor and gain skills. If you have to compete on an even playing field with everybody else in the world from the word go, it wildly distorts things and produces really weird results. It's still optimized, but it's optimized for a mass audience that is SO huge, and applies more pressure on anything that doesn't comply. That's what the Angry Birds thing is like. The original has to compete on the grounds of 'produce more money', not just proliferate. As such it's cannibalizing stuff that produces more money.
  - stuckinhell 4y ago
    When you are competing with your own greatest hits, I think that exemplifies "peak content". People have so much content, they don't even need or want new things from your. They are satisfied, and have enough.
- archon1410 4y ago
  [dead]
- JohnFen 4y ago
  In all honesty, that's nothing new. Remakes and the like have been the bane of movies from very early on. It still sucks, though. But it does make movie selection a little easier -- if it's a remake, there's a 90% chance that it's going to be terrible.
jollyllama 4y ago
Welcome to the USA; everything just gets cheaper (in quality), shinier, and more extractive.
apozem 4y ago
> Accordingly, Disney will even restrict the availability of their old movies on DVD. I don't know if this applies to Disney given they just launched a massive streaming service containing almost all of their back catalogue.
- hedora 4y ago
  What is this service you speak of? Disney+ only has a tiny fraction of their back catalog. (For instance, it is missing all of miramax)
  - acomms 4y ago
    They are referring to films created by Walt Disney Animation Studios. Also Miramax is owned by Paramount - so that would explain why it's missing.
- cld8483 4y ago
  In that case, they're selling a subscription instead of selling movies, no? (I haven't used it, I don't know the details of how it works.)
ye-olde-sysrq 4y ago
I don't think Disney can quite be put in the same breath. (disclaimer: shareholder, though not in any grandiose quantities) I always imagine Disney as basically 3 apparatuses: 1. A squeaky-clean princess printing machine that reliably churns out 50 billion dolla- I mean, a new Disney Princess franchise every 5-10 years. No expense is spared on making the movie a lavishly animated, voiced, scripted, and instantly treasured addition to any childhood. (Because they know every dollar there will throw off a thousand in merchandising and Disney World tickets) 2. Weird creative stuff. Pixar is in this bucket, imo. Soul and Inside Out and such were amazing, amazing movies but they're obviously not going to put merchandise on the shelves. But they still sell out theaters and help build (maintain) brand prestige. 3. An oracle-tier legal/financial arm that is essentially independent of 1 and 2 that just views itself as having a giant stack of copyrights and money and it needs to turn it into more money. So while (imo, this is subjective obviously) I think 1 and 2 are roughly as good as they ever were (and remember that Disney almost died multiple times due to not actually being very good for decade long stretches), 3 doesn't care about that and if some tactic with DVD supply or whatever will help juice sales, they'll do it because it's their job. Disney gets a lot of flack, and rightly so! They're a big reason why copyright in the US is so fucked up, and I do hate them for that. But at the same time, I think they honestly do contribute more to artistry and enduring culture in the West than lots of other companies with even-worse legal departments do.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > But at the same time, I think they honestly do contribute more to artistry and enduring culture in the West than lots of other companies with even-worse legal departments do. Counterpoint: they saturate the market with so many MCU, Star Wars and other high-profile (Avatar!) content that it is all but impossible for anyone else to get enough people into cinemas or onto streaming. Like, people only have so much money and time to set aside for entertainment, cinema is one hell of an expense as it is [1] and now, when alone the MCU pumps out four movies a year, there is no budget left for anyone but them. Streaming? The same. There's an insane amount of high quality content on Disney+, and they got all the "cool and popular" stuff. On top of that, Disney's treatment of, say, VFX studios is fucking up the market there as well: the more market share Disney has on the client side, the less choice studios and other suppliers have. Either they accept the sometimes disgusting behavior from Disney (especially ridiculous deadlines) or they don't have other clients and shut down. Between the Mouse just gobbling up everything they can, Netflix pushing for a washed-down uniform standard [2] and small cinemas closing down left and right, entertainment is in for dark, dark times. Disney needs to be broken up and since the movie industry didn't get the hint from the music industry that rightsholders should take care of offering access to multiple streaming services, government has to mandate that as well. The lack of competition hurts everyone. [1] a typical MCU movie for two people will be anything from 50-100$, including tickets, 3D surcharge, long-duration surcharge, popcorn, soda, parking/public transport [2] https://www.vice.com/de/article/ake3j5/warum-sieht-beim-netflix-look-alles-gleich-aus https://www.vice.com/de/article/ake3j5/warum-sieht-beim-netf...
permo-w 4y ago
I agree with the sentiment, but is Disney a good example? has Disney not recently had a pretty strong run of form critically and commercially?
- cld8483 4y ago
  If you're buying a DVD for your child, but only have the budget for one, would you buy Snow White, or Snow White 5: The Slushening? In most cases, the classic original is the no-brainer. The sequels to Disney movies are pale cash-grab imitations with far less cultural significance.
  - permo-w 4y ago
    once again, I agree with your sentiment - this culture of simulation and replication is extremely tiresome - but as a case in point, Disney doesn’t fit the bill to illustrate, the realistic choice would be to choose between Snow White and Frozen and Moana. to be clear, this isn’t me blindly supporting Disney: I don’t watch their films, I don’t work for them, I don’t own their stock. moreover, I in fact have swathes of scepticism for colossal nation-shaped megacorps; nevertheless it’s a bad example weakening a good hypothesis, and this I have a problem with
shp0ngle 4y ago
Disney is a WEIRD choice here. Nobody is releasing their own old movies and pushing them on all possible markets and marketing them as much as Disney does.
insane_dreamer 4y ago
> Disney will even restrict the availability of their old movies on DVD that's because they'd rather you sign up for Disney+
- joseda-hg 4y ago
  But they've been doing it long before Streaming services became a thing, as long as it makes financial sense and doesn't dilute/diminish brand image they're game
isk517 4y ago
I was going to make a snarky comment about how when comparing the present to the past the past has the advantage because you can just ignore all of the garbage that wasn't worth remembering but then I thought, that would actually be a pretty neat (if not particularly practical) experiment. Setup two theatres in the same area, have one just be a regular theater and the other be a theater that only features all of the movies that would have been in the theaters exactly 45 years ago and see how they compare.

zadler 4y ago

Yea. Google actively forgets everything in order to encourage new content and paying customers. Not to mention, many products hit their peak of usability, and then the publishers go ahead and make it a little worse each year just so some product person can look like they did something.

blockwriter 4y ago

With movies, I find it to be the opposite. I might recognize the old movies as better in many ways, but their pacing is excruciatingly slow compared to modern movies. It takes a layer of appreciation to get through many of them.

acdha 4y ago
There is definitely an element of conditioning here. People have grown accustomed to frenetic action and the studios like it because it’s easier than hiring good writers – especially since they’re hoping for global sales and humor, subtly, and nuance are hard to translate – but that’s a learned preference based on what dominates the market. If different things came back on the market people would get used to them, too.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  Older movies are full of filler too, but it's generally less exciting filler - looooong shots of a car driving through the countryside or plot beats that could be 1 minute stretching to 10 without having any reason to be as long as they are. Over time movies have learned to cut a lot of fat.
  - cld8483 4y ago
    It's about conveying atmosphere and mood, not conveying plot-points as rapidly as possible. Same reason a book might spend two pages describing a lazy dog laying on a porch swatting flies with his tail, instead of cutting straight to who said/did what.
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      OK, so movies have gotten better at setting the mood without derailing the story's momentum.
      - yamtaddle 4y ago
        A lot of great modern movies have pacing similar to those older ones you don't like. It's not that they "leveled up" into some new form and obsoleted what came before—the other sorts of pacing remain entirely valid and in heavy use.
        SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
        I'm not saying no one uses long shots or takes anymore and they aren't totally ineffective - I just watched Mandy over the weekend and it has plenty and they are used effectively but it's also a move that seems to have people regarding it in extremes - it's really a love or hate because of the choices they make. But what I'm trying to say is there are other tools in the toolbox now - I haven't heard anyone say that Everything Everywhere All At Once was bad, it's a great movie, absolutely full of deliberately chosen mood, and it never has to resort to extremely long shots that take the wind out of the story's sails.
        yamtaddle 4y ago
        Ah, OK—I may not have followed what you meant re: pacing in older movies, then. I can think of a lot of older movies I'd not touch the pacing on. I don't think it'd improve the film. Then again, I admit I've bounced off a couple because of extremely-flat cinematography and slow-as-molasses pacing (the original Oceans Eleven comes to mind—I don't drop many movies that I start, but I'm not sure I even made it to the 20 minute mark on that one). Maybe I'm misjudging what you mean by "old"—I'd kinda assumed you meant "before digital editing", say, 80s and earlier. I don't think films from the '70s tend to feel terribly different from modern ones (we've developed new and more-chaotic ways to assemble very bad action scenes, but that aside, not much different) for example, but would grant that it's probably possible to divide cinema into silent/middle/modern period as far as the feel or what's asked of the viewer, and that the former two do feel pretty different from modern films—but I'd say we were already transitioning out of "middle" and into "modern" in the '60s, so you've got to go pretty old to get into what I'd judge to be notably different. Now, film films do tend to look very different from modern movies, even as recently as the 90s, but that's because easy digital color grading hadn't ruined the artform yet. :-)
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > especially since they’re hoping for global sales On top of that, a lot of actually interesting content has the potential to cause shitstorms. Like, especially anything LGBT and women's rights won't fly in China, Russia, Arabia and lots of Asian countries. Black lead actors lead to massive shitstorms from the far-right in the USA and parts of Europe [1] - and so, producers leave all that "potentially troubling for sales" content out. Everything "mainstream" is just the same bullshit now, white- and dumbwashed. [1] Black Panther and the 3rd Star Wars trilogy were surrounded by some of the most vile harassment campaigns I've seen, for example
  - cld8483 4y ago
    > [1] Black Panther and the 3rd Star Wars trilogy were surrounded by some of the most vile harassment campaigns I've seen, for example Or, movie studios have exaggerated the impact of (real, but not very numerous) internet trolls to protect their own egos from valid criticisms. The third Star Wars trilogy was an incoherent mess. And for reasons I still don't understand, the end of Black Panther was released in a rough half-rendered state. But the people making these films don't want to hear criticism of their baby, so online critics get dehumanized as "trolls". Rare instances of real trolling from the likes of 4chan get highlighted and blown out of proportion as a defense mechanism.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      I agree that the SW trilogy was a mess, but that does not excuse Black actors being blasted with n-bombs and other slurs on Twitter and other social media, nor does it excuse the amount of sexist comments against Daisy Ridley. For BP, it was the same. The whine from the far-right about "who wants to see <N-word>s in movies", "we're being ethnically replaced", "this is our future" etc. was unacceptable.
      - cld8483 4y ago
        > but that does not excuse Black actors being blasted with n-bombs and other slurs on Twitter and other social media, I'm not denying, much less excusing that. What I am saying is that such trolls are an irrelevant minority who's voices are amplified by those to whom nutjobs are a convenient excuse for their own failures. Black Panther sold many millions of tickets in America, and had maybe a few thousand 4chan-style trolls complaining about it. Am I really expected to believe those few thousand trolls were the reason the movie got less than flawless glowing reviews from critics, rather than flaws in the movie itself being to blame? And if the Star Wars trilogy failed to perform as Disney expected, it certainly wasn't the fault of trolls. Star Wars fans outnumber trolls a million to one. If the Star Wars trilogy under-performed, it was because the Star Wars trilogy was flawed. Trolls are just a convenient excuse for the people involved in the production who don't want to face the facts about the quality of their product.
NackerHughes 4y ago
That only speaks of how severely the attention span of the average person has plummeted in recent decades. It's impossible to sit through a movie without enough dopamine-inducing distractions or MTV-style jump cuts every few seconds.
- mkaic 4y ago
  Definitely disagree with this take. I'd argue that all it means is that filmmakers have learned to make more exciting films. Cinema is a young art form and hasn't even been around for 200 year, it's no surprise to me that the movies of today are fundamentally different and more engaging than movies from last century.
  - _5uxp 4y ago
    They are more dumb tho, scripts and dialogues are so much simple. They rarely give you the feeling of once a lifetime seeing experience. Most of them have too much CGI and sometimes not even looking rea at all.
    - ssully 4y ago
      Sorry, but you are just generalizing based on the top blockbuster movies. Films have never been more diverse in their style and quality and, in my opinion, offer something for everyone. If you are looking for movies that focus on strong dialogue and character work those movies are still being made and are fantastic.
      - JohnFen 4y ago
        But they all seem to be locked up in streaming services and the like.
      - somenameforme 4y ago
        Mind if I pick your brain? I enjoy compelling era pieces, though some fantasy or sci-fi is also great. I dislike identity politics and infantilizing exposition. By contrast I enjoy subtle metaphor and stories with nuance. My favorite films would include Das Boot, I Claudius, and Seventeen Moments of Spring. For something more contemporary, I also enjoyed The Expanse. Any recommendations? Films or series in any language are okay.
TimMurnaghan 4y ago
Obligatory counterexample, comedies. A quickfire screwball classic like "His Girl Friday" has lots of smart lines per minute where recent Hollywood ones will have two jokes in 90mins that they've had to put into the trailer, and slow build ups so that everybody can get the lame joke.

ace32229 4y ago

[dead]

mynameishere 4y ago

Movies probably not. But I wonder what would happen if a band like the Beatles ever showed up again. Would they suck the air out of the room? Would they get trapped on a five year tour after two albums? Would they get ignored?

sdwr 4y ago
You mean Taylor Swift?
- wing-_-nuts 4y ago
  Taylor Swift has actually grown on me
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - amanaplanacanal 4y ago
    It's not really my kind of music, but huge respect for her. She's obviously got tons of talent and has figured out how to turn it into big $$$$.
rchaud 4y ago
You make it sound as if Beyonce, Drake, Taylor Swift and Bieber don't already account for 80% of Spotify's artist payouts.

stuckinhell 4y ago

This seems to be happening with many works of fiction. They can't compete so they remake or redo things with modern audiences sensibilities. These usually fail because people liked those works of fiction for their historical sensibilities. Even Roald Dahl is having his works censored and rewritten. I believe its due to reaching "Peak Content".

Applejinx 4y ago
Not so much peak content as minimum friction. If things are more localized, you can build up more momentum as a home team kind of competitor and gain skills. If you have to compete on an even playing field with everybody else in the world from the word go, it wildly distorts things and produces really weird results. It's still optimized, but it's optimized for a mass audience that is SO huge, and applies more pressure on anything that doesn't comply. That's what the Angry Birds thing is like. The original has to compete on the grounds of 'produce more money', not just proliferate. As such it's cannibalizing stuff that produces more money.
- stuckinhell 4y ago
  When you are competing with your own greatest hits, I think that exemplifies "peak content". People have so much content, they don't even need or want new things from your. They are satisfied, and have enough.
archon1410 4y ago
[dead]
JohnFen 4y ago
In all honesty, that's nothing new. Remakes and the like have been the bane of movies from very early on. It still sucks, though. But it does make movie selection a little easier -- if it's a remake, there's a 90% chance that it's going to be terrible.

jollyllama 4y ago

Welcome to the USA; everything just gets cheaper (in quality), shinier, and more extractive.

apozem 4y ago

> Accordingly, Disney will even restrict the availability of their old movies on DVD. I don't know if this applies to Disney given they just launched a massive streaming service containing almost all of their back catalogue.

hedora 4y ago
What is this service you speak of? Disney+ only has a tiny fraction of their back catalog. (For instance, it is missing all of miramax)
- acomms 4y ago
  They are referring to films created by Walt Disney Animation Studios. Also Miramax is owned by Paramount - so that would explain why it's missing.
cld8483 4y ago
In that case, they're selling a subscription instead of selling movies, no? (I haven't used it, I don't know the details of how it works.)

ye-olde-sysrq 4y ago

I don't think Disney can quite be put in the same breath. (disclaimer: shareholder, though not in any grandiose quantities) I always imagine Disney as basically 3 apparatuses: 1. A squeaky-clean princess printing machine that reliably churns out 50 billion dolla- I mean, a new Disney Princess franchise every 5-10 years. No expense is spared on making the movie a lavishly animated, voiced, scripted, and instantly treasured addition to any childhood. (Because they know every dollar there will throw off a thousand in merchandising and Disney World tickets) 2. Weird creative stuff. Pixar is in this bucket, imo. Soul and Inside Out and such were amazing, amazing movies but they're obviously not going to put merchandise on the shelves. But they still sell out theaters and help build (maintain) brand prestige. 3. An oracle-tier legal/financial arm that is essentially independent of 1 and 2 that just views itself as having a giant stack of copyrights and money and it needs to turn it into more money. So while (imo, this is subjective obviously) I think 1 and 2 are roughly as good as they ever were (and remember that Disney almost died multiple times due to not actually being very good for decade long stretches), 3 doesn't care about that and if some tactic with DVD supply or whatever will help juice sales, they'll do it because it's their job. Disney gets a lot of flack, and rightly so! They're a big reason why copyright in the US is so fucked up, and I do hate them for that. But at the same time, I think they honestly do contribute more to artistry and enduring culture in the West than lots of other companies with even-worse legal departments do.

mschuster91 4y ago
> But at the same time, I think they honestly do contribute more to artistry and enduring culture in the West than lots of other companies with even-worse legal departments do. Counterpoint: they saturate the market with so many MCU, Star Wars and other high-profile (Avatar!) content that it is all but impossible for anyone else to get enough people into cinemas or onto streaming. Like, people only have so much money and time to set aside for entertainment, cinema is one hell of an expense as it is [1] and now, when alone the MCU pumps out four movies a year, there is no budget left for anyone but them. Streaming? The same. There's an insane amount of high quality content on Disney+, and they got all the "cool and popular" stuff. On top of that, Disney's treatment of, say, VFX studios is fucking up the market there as well: the more market share Disney has on the client side, the less choice studios and other suppliers have. Either they accept the sometimes disgusting behavior from Disney (especially ridiculous deadlines) or they don't have other clients and shut down. Between the Mouse just gobbling up everything they can, Netflix pushing for a washed-down uniform standard [2] and small cinemas closing down left and right, entertainment is in for dark, dark times. Disney needs to be broken up and since the movie industry didn't get the hint from the music industry that rightsholders should take care of offering access to multiple streaming services, government has to mandate that as well. The lack of competition hurts everyone. [1] a typical MCU movie for two people will be anything from 50-100$, including tickets, 3D surcharge, long-duration surcharge, popcorn, soda, parking/public transport [2] https://www.vice.com/de/article/ake3j5/warum-sieht-beim-netflix-look-alles-gleich-aus https://www.vice.com/de/article/ake3j5/warum-sieht-beim-netf...

permo-w 4y ago

I agree with the sentiment, but is Disney a good example? has Disney not recently had a pretty strong run of form critically and commercially?

cld8483 4y ago
If you're buying a DVD for your child, but only have the budget for one, would you buy Snow White, or Snow White 5: The Slushening? In most cases, the classic original is the no-brainer. The sequels to Disney movies are pale cash-grab imitations with far less cultural significance.
- permo-w 4y ago
  once again, I agree with your sentiment - this culture of simulation and replication is extremely tiresome - but as a case in point, Disney doesn’t fit the bill to illustrate, the realistic choice would be to choose between Snow White and Frozen and Moana. to be clear, this isn’t me blindly supporting Disney: I don’t watch their films, I don’t work for them, I don’t own their stock. moreover, I in fact have swathes of scepticism for colossal nation-shaped megacorps; nevertheless it’s a bad example weakening a good hypothesis, and this I have a problem with

shp0ngle 4y ago

Disney is a WEIRD choice here. Nobody is releasing their own old movies and pushing them on all possible markets and marketing them as much as Disney does.

insane_dreamer 4y ago

> Disney will even restrict the availability of their old movies on DVD that's because they'd rather you sign up for Disney+

joseda-hg 4y ago
But they've been doing it long before Streaming services became a thing, as long as it makes financial sense and doesn't dilute/diminish brand image they're game

isk517 4y ago

I was going to make a snarky comment about how when comparing the present to the past the past has the advantage because you can just ignore all of the garbage that wasn't worth remembering but then I thought, that would actually be a pretty neat (if not particularly practical) experiment. Setup two theatres in the same area, have one just be a regular theater and the other be a theater that only features all of the movies that would have been in the theaters exactly 45 years ago and see how they compare.