8 ms·
This is just sad, I get the impression from the comments and up votes that tech does not get Hollywood. Hollywood business only work because only Hollywood is w
by rockarage 15y ago
This is just sad, I get the impression from the comments and
up votes that tech does not get Hollywood. Hollywood business only work
because only Hollywood is willing to give Christopher Nolan 200+ million
dollars to make Dark Knight, ditto with James Cameron's Avatar. When Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook or Yahoo decides to give a Christopher Nolan or James Cameron $200million+ to make a movie, things will be different. Then these multinationals can distribute to everyone who wants to buy the movie without DRM, without regional restriction and at a competitive price. Until then everything is just
posturing, indie budgets will not change Hollywood.
Tech world has competition, but only Hollywood is making these big budget productions.
edit: not sure why this is getting down voted, it would be interesting to see a counterpoint.
- panza 15y agoYou've just proposed an odd dichotomy: that big budget films can only be funded through Hollywood with DRM and other restrictions, or by technology companies without DRM and other restrictions. You're going to need to elaborate on that, because on the face it, this sounds absurd.
- rockarage 15y agoThat is not correct, DRM and other restrictions do not fund big budget films. Those things actually take away profits from film in the form convoluted distribution cost. see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3514416 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3514416 . Big budget films can only be funded by companies with the money and will to do so. Large tech companies have the money and means to produce & distribute big budget films, they just have to be willing to do it.
- mathattack 15y agoInteresting comment. I think the Avatars go away in a post-Hollywood world, but the smaller movies will thrive.
- InclinedPlane 15y agoI don't think they would. Hollywood budgets are partly due to Hollywood accounting. If movies were set up along startup lines (where only some folks get a guaranteed salary and the vast majority of earnings by everyone comes in the form of profit sharing) then I think you'd still see very big, expensive to make movies.
- rockarage 15y agoHollywood losses are partly due to Hollywood accounting. The budgets for production are real cost. In these high budget movies, there are major expenses apart from just salary. In the Dark knight, the batmobile and other machines are real vehicles, the sets are made with real materials, live effects are not cheap, permits are not free, not everything is done on a computer. This only scratch the surface of the expense involved in making a big budget film.
- InclinedPlane 15y agoProduction budgets are inflated because the only way to get a share of the profit is to get a share of the gross. But that is not nearly as scalable so it is necessarily limited. This forces the remainder of returns to contributors to be in the form of direct payments. Thus, actors earn 10s of millions up front, for example. But that also extends to everyone down the line. Effects houses need to charge a lot for their services because they rarely get a cut. There are indeed very real major costs to making a movie but those costs are low compared to the effects I've outlined. More so, the limits of independently funding a movie are not necassarily any lower than what Hollywood can provide. It's just that Hollywood has historically proven to be the easiest route so it has been popular, but who's to say what the limits of competition are? VCs have pumped more money into tech startups for less return than some hollywood big budget movies, for example.
- jordan0day 15y agoI've heard of "hollywood accounting" and the like before, but this particular effect is something new to me. The effect you mention with effects houses, big-name-actors, etc. charging lots of up-front fees to compensate for the fact that the studio would try to screw them out of their cut of the profits sounds surprisingly similar to the health care situation in the US. Hospitals charge patients that they know can pay (private or gov't insured) much higher fees, because they know there are many, many patients who will not. There's also different affects related to which insurers are willing to pay which rates, etc.
- saulrh 15y agoOn the other hand, Apple gives Steve Jobs $200million+ to make an iPad, and Microsoft certainly gives someone 200 million dollars to make Windows.next. Google gave someone $200 million to develop Android. We just don't see it as much because software doesn't depend on personalities as much.
- rockarage 15y agoYes, and Microsoft is spending billions on Bing, if Google pulled a so called Hollywood move, by making Google search a pain to use, people will start using Bing more. We don't have that with big budget films. DRM died in the music industry, in part, because a number of popular artist, like Trent of NIN were not afraid to go direct to fans without DRM.
- jordan0day 15y ago"DRM died in the music industry" I'm not confident that's a factual statement.
- bigiain 15y agoReally? I can't think of anywhere I could go to buy DRMed music right now if I tried... iTMS watermarks music files, but they're not sold DRMed music files for years. Magnatune has _never_ sold DRMed files. ihearmusic.com - no drm. All the direct from artist music I've bought in the last few years - no drm. Soundcloud or artist "Pay what you want" deals - no drm. I can't recall having purchased any "big four" owned music directly online (as opposed to via someone like Apple), but at least in _my_ little world, DRM does appear to be dead...
- wanorris 15y agoDoesn't Spotify use DRM? Which is not to say that it's wrong for them to use DRM on music you didn't buy -- that's a different question. But "only used for music you don't own" isn't the same the same thing as "dead".
- naner 15y agoit would be interesting to see a counterpoint. Sure. 1. Just because this is the way things work doesn't mean this is the only way things can work. Or 2. We aren't entitled to have Dark Knights and Avatars. Lets assume that, for whatever reason, in New Hollywood it will only be feasible to fund smaller budget movies. So what? People will still watch and enjoy the smaller-budget movies.
- peterhunt 15y agoBut I, and many other people, am willing to pay for these big budget movies even if I have to sit through ads. I like big-budget flicks.
- philwelch 15y agoI like Bell Labs and indestructible black Western Electric telephones, but did they justify the Bell monopoly?
- cookiecaper 15y agoI for one think it'd be really interesting if a tech conglomerate paid for a bunch of moderate-budget movies and distributed them exclusively through YouTube or other online sources, or distributed them to cinemas but did something Google-y with admissions and tickets. If Google just took 50% of opening revenues I am sure the cinemas would be thrilled to accommodate. Hollywood would seriously wig out. That is the kind of business we need to kill off the wickedness of the MPAA.
- meta 15y agoLike? Require all ticket purchases be done on a G+ account and before you get to the theatre. Mine the purchases for the most relevant ad from all the people who purchased tickets (80% of the G+ accounts like..., 50% like..., etc). Show the ads in stock that are most relevant and also re-sell the ticket stats back to the advertisers. Offer a discount on your next ticket purchase if you blog/comment/review the movie (and feed that back into your G+ data-mine profile). Feedback to advertisers will increase relevant ad pool to make better matches from ticket purchases. Advertisers get more data to target their ads to a better audience. G+ profile gets more data for profiling. Win win win. ;)
- drumdance 15y agoBlockbusters are not the only movies that get made. Let Hollywood keep Batman. In the meantime, it's not hard to imagine a new way of making and distributing Mad Men and Portlandia.
- cynicalkane 15y agoMad Men is a big-budget TV show. Its per episode budget is north of $2 million.
- hapless 15y agoMad Men produces 13, 45-minute episodes a season. 13 hours of content for $33 million (at 2.5 million an episode.) That's $55,000 a minute, versus $1,462,962 a minute for Avatar. An order of magnitude difference. Each minute of Avatar cost nearly as much as a small episode of Mad Men. That's exactly the kind of feature a shrunken Hollywood, not focused on blockbuster hits, might produce.
- fabjan 15y agoA counterpoint to what, exactly? Your comment seems to have nothing at all to do with the link.
- tomjen3 15y agoIt is properly downvoted because it is wrong. Until Bieber came along, the most watched clip ever (Charlie bit my finger), having been seen 100 of millions of times cost a few cents of electricity to produce. This indicates that there is an entire market out there which Hollywood is incapable of satisfying but which could easily be filled by a start up.
- cageface 15y agoI shudder to think of a future in which gimmick YouTube videos make up the bulk of commercially available entertainment.
- jiggy2011 15y agoI'm not sure there's an entire market out there wanting to pay to watch "charlie bit my finger" and if there are I don't want anything to do with them! Having said that there are a load of genuinely quite funny and well put together pieces of content on youtube that come from amateurs. Problem is most of them distribute the content for free because they want to use it as a stepping stone to a job with BigMediaCo who can pay them $$$.
- rockarage 15y agoLong before youtube, there was a show called American funniest home videos. You should check it out.
- alextingle 15y agoDo you seriously believe that a $200 million movie is ten times better than a $20 million movie? Or a hundred times better than a $2 million movie??
- Fargren 15y agoIt surely takes less time to see than on hundred $2 million movies. I'd much rather watch one good movie than 10 decent ones. Not that movie budget has anything to do with quality, but still.
- alextingle 15y agoExactly this. A big budget is not required for a movie to be good. Even dramatic special effects no longer need megabucks. Good writing, good acting, good cinematography, are all pretty cheap, relatively speaking.
- teamonkey 15y agoNo, but it might be over 10 times more profitable than a $20 million movie, or over 100 times more profitable than a $2 million movie. Big budget movies have a greater potential RoR.
- nextparadigms 15y agoSilicon Valley doesn't have to take on Hollywood head-on. That's almost always the wrong strategy to try to beat an incumbent. The way you beat an incumbent leader is by changing the rules of the games so it's very hard for that company to play that new game, whether it's because they lack the competency or because the have internal conflicts of interest for doing that (think of the TV networks not really wanting to go full-web because it would eat into their much larger profits from traditional advertising). Of course you don't just change the rules for the sake of changing the. This new game must also feel like the "future" of that market, and you need to be able to attract not only Hollywood "non-consumption", but also be able to transition Hollywood's "consumers" over time to your company (or companies - I still think that what would kill Hollywood is an entire different ecosystem for creating, distributing and watching movie, and not just a movie juggernaut like Hollywood).
- eftpotrm 15y agoSignificantly, tech already has. How often do we hear numbers quoted that the gaming industry now grosses more than films? Displacing the influence of the old leader in the community mindset is certainly a known problem and one that we've seen in other sectors. But, there's no disputing it - the kids are spending their time playing games rather more than watching films, and Hollywood isn't set up to produce interactive, dynamic content. The rules of the game have been changed, and tech has won. Gaming beats films, and sooner or later people will realise it.
- contextfree 15y agoWhat is "tech"? I think the game development world, at least big console games, is mostly closer to Hollywood than it is to the "web startup" world. Hollywood uses and develops plenty of technology too (e.g. in computer graphics) - it's silly to talk about "tech" as something cohesive.
- Hemospectrum 15y agoBut the game industry isn't desperately fighting the internet the way Hollywood is. A lot of smaller game studios (and a couple big ones) clearly understand that clinging to an obsolete business model is futile nonsense, and have embraced the online market. And they're absolutely thriving for it. The console market isn't making the transition nearly as quickly, but I'm certain this is chiefly a matter of getting value out of existing investments (deployed hardware).
- darklajid 15y agoAt which point in the past did we establish that these wages are in _any_ way reasonable. We talk about a 'bubble' in our sector every other day. And you seem to imply (please, correct me if I missed the point) that these are 'market rates' and need to be payed by someone to get a decent end result. Which then kind of defends the existence of Hollywood as the one to make it happen. I'd argue that this is turning the thing on its head. The Hollywood crowd overcharges from the position of a quasi monopoly that is protected by IP and copyright laws in most places of the world. They dictate the prices and are therefor able to sustain the costs of having to pay ridiculous (you can argue, but there's no way in hell I change my pov on this one) amounts of money to single persons for 'a project'. Take away the quasi monopoly and yes, dear god: 200million+ might be a tad too much. But the market will adapt and we'll find awesome actors that are happy to do that job for 300.000 USD per year. Or less. No idea - let's find out.
- MrScruff 15y agoGreat, but how are you planning on paying the rest of the production, which after all makes up the majority of that $200 million.
- cookiecaper 15y agoDirectors get huge payouts for the same reason athletes or other performers get huge payouts: simply because they generate a TON of money AND because the pool of potential candidates is so small that there is no one to undercut the rate. That $xx million ($200 mil was the budget for the whole film fyi) that the director got paid is a fraction of the total revenue generated by a major blockbuster like The Dark Knight, just as the 10-30 million an athlete receives is a fraction of the revenue he generates for the owners. You simply can't get around the fact that many people will spend a lot of money on entertainment, and even if we don't think actors and directors deserve all of that money in terms of social contributions and the long-term redeeming value of their work, the numbers don't lie: they get big payouts simply because they generate lots of money. The same principle applies in other jobs, the values are just much smaller.
- wazoox 15y agoChristopher Nolan doesn't deserve, or need 200 millions. The fact that Hollywood celebrities receive so much money is a symptom that something isn't right.
- o1iver 15y agoI never get arguments like this. In a perfect market every entity tries to get as much money as the market is willing to pay. There are some pretty extreme example such as this one, but in the whole that is a good thing!
- fdkz 15y agoBut what is a perfect market? What if misleading the consumers brings in the most money? If it was possible to somehow find out and compare the environmental impact of manufacturing things we can buy, I'm sure our decisions of what to buy would be very different. Similarly, if the movie posters had the actor/millions printed on them, then the "market" would be better informed to say enough is enough. Maybe.
- wazoox 15y ago> In a perfect market every entity tries to get as much money as the market is willing to pay. Where did you ever see such a thing as a perfect market entity? In the wonderful magical Hollywood kingdom where you can't watch the DVD you bought in Europe back in the US, certainly not.
- jonhohle 15y agoChristopher Nolan is given command of a 200 million budget, that's not his compensation for directing, writing, and producing. He probably earns a few million per movie - for creating something that brings his employer over a billion in revenue. That means he is only making a thousandth of what he generated. That seems like a fair return to me.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- paganel 15y agoWe did very fine, thank you, before Nolan's "Dark Knight" or Cameron's "Avatar" hit the screens, and I'm saying this as a movie freak. In fact, I'd say that the only difference between Melies' movies (which he did as an independent producer back in the day) and "Avatar" is only a technological one, not an artistic one.
- technoslut 15y ago>This is just sad, I get the impression from the comments and up votes that tech does not get Hollywood. Hollywood business only work because only Hollywood is willing to give Christopher Nolan 200+ million dollars to make Dark Knight, ditto with James Cameron's Avatar. Your comment is somewhat ridiculous because these examples are not risks. Christopher Nolan was well known before Batman Begins in writing Memento. James Cameron wrote the script for the original Terminator and directed Aliens, T2 and the highest grossing film of all time in Titanic. Anyone would've bet on these two individuals.