16 ms·

The businessmen broke Hollywood

175 points by fortran77 3y ago

throwawaysleep 3y ago
> The quality of their product has ceased to matter. If people will still pay, you would of course cut quality to increase margins. Walmart figured out that quality was a secondary concern to the customer, who is quite happy to buy a lawnmower that starts twice for $90 over one that lasts years for $180.
- Spooky23 3y ago
  Bad example. That $90 mower works as well as a $600 Honda, it just has fewer fancy features. Walmart is the master of the commodity. It’s dumb not to buy many things there. Whole Foods will sell you a gallon of vinegar for $7, Walmart will same the same product probably made at the same place for $2.50.
  - jsiepkes 3y ago
    Can you buy a spare part for your $90 mower if it breaks?
    - selestify 3y ago
      Does it matter if the whole thing costs less than the replacement part for a more expensive mower? (Disclaimer: I have no idea about lawnmowers or their costs. I’m engaging based purely on economic decision making.)
      - CapstanRoller 3y ago
        >I’m engaging based purely on economic decision making. Unfortunately the environmental cost of producing disposable junk continues to be externalized and not factored into the economic decision-making spreadsheet.
        selestify 3y ago
        That’s a fair point. How could we ensure disposal-related externalities are factored into the cost of a product?
        jsiepkes 3y ago
        The EU is working on legislation to take the full product life cycle cost in to account when importing products. It means taking in to account the cost of disposal or recycling in import duties. Which seems fair. I mean why do I have to pay for the disposal of someone's 90 Euro lawn mower? Aside from environmental cost this is clearly also intended to reduce reliance on low-labour cost countries. Since these usually tend to have regimes which might not "philosophically fully align with ours". Western countries went to China and started selling opium. China went to the west and started selling low quality cheap stuff. I think the later might even be more addictive then the former...
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      Even if you could you'd probably have to fix it yourself, because the guy in town who used to run a general repair shop retired/died from old age 10 years ago and never managed to find a young guy to take over the business. I knew a guy who used to repair anything from work boots to sewing machines to televisions, but he gave it up in his 80s with nobody to replace him. I've heard this is very common, those kind of handyman repair shops mostly don't exist anymore.
    - Spooky23 3y ago
      For the engine, sure. It’s all made by like 2 companies. I use a Murray lawn mower that my dad bought for $40 in 1995 at Walmart. The evil of Walmart isn’t the products, it’s their predatory destruction of competition in rural areas. Once you hit the suburbs, they lose that power.
  - GauntletWizard 3y ago
    There's a ton of both. And there's a consumer problem where it's slow and painful and most importantly - expensive in the most valuable commodity, time, to do the research on products. America is built on the assumption that people have agency to make choices. We have been robbed of that time and agency by the deluge of things competing for our attention, but also by the amount of things that we need to think about. There should be economies of scale - it shouldn't matter which toothpaste you buy, because journalism should keep them honest, but it doesn't because there's too many options for that and they're all corrupt.
    - Spooky23 3y ago
      There’s always someone who trades convenience for $, is ignorant, or doesn’t really care. I don’t think toothpaste is “corrupt” per se, I think everyone needs toothpaste, and very subtle differences may equate to millions of units of sales.
- parker_mountain 3y ago
  They're not happy about it. I think a lot of people make that decision under a form of (personal financial) duress. Or put better than I could, by the master of pithy observations: The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
  - dooraven 3y ago
    it's just wrong though, the reason why people are rich is that they have more income streams by producing more valuable things, not consuming less. It's a nice idiom to have when you use labour to trade for income and your income doesn't increase by your efforts but the reason why people are rich is more based on their production than their consumption. The analogy makes sense for middle class folk though, but a rich person will stay rich regardless of what they buy as long as their production output is stil desirable.
    - CPLX 3y ago
      The reason people are still rich is the same reason nobody would watch sports if they didn’t reset the score at the end of each game. “Today the New York Yankees will play the Montreal Expos. Our game begins with the Yankees having a score of 79,613 runs and the Expos having a score of 12,177 runs.” If this is how baseball worked how much energy do you think the Yankees would spend recruiting a hot new pitcher versus starting one of the owners kids?
      - Terr_ 3y ago
        I'd like to add that those teams could have always been playing equally-well. This phenomenon happens even in simpler models, where it's easy to see that the eventual "winner" is only there through pure long-term luck, with zero distinguishing merit or intelligence etc.: > If you simulate this economy, a variant of the yard sale model, you will get a remarkable result: after a large number of transactions, one agent ends up as an “oligarch” holding practically all the wealth of the economy, and the other 999 end up with virtually nothing. > It does not matter how much wealth people started with. It does not matter that all the coin flips were absolutely fair. It does not matter that the poorer agent's expected outcome was positive in each transaction, whereas that of the richer agent was negative. Any single agent in this economy could have become the oligarch—in fact, all had equal odds if they began with equal wealth. In that sense, there was equality of opportunity. But only one of them did become the oligarch, and all the others saw their average wealth decrease toward zero as they conducted more and more transactions. To add insult to injury, the lower someone's wealth ranking, the faster the decrease. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine...
achow 3y ago
https://archive.is/I55sb https://archive.is/I55sb
- totetsu 3y ago
  Wow I just noticed that archive.is automatically appends selected text reigons to the link in the address bar. neat https://archive.is/I55sb#selection-887.146-887.383 https://archive.is/I55sb#selection-887.146-887.383
  - vector_spaces 3y ago
    It's such a great service. Can't really believe it's just one person maintaining it essentially as a public service given that it's quite expensive to run (based on a post I read in the last year or two). Basically all my techie and non-techie friends use it -- hoping that he finds a way to make it sustainable so that it sticks around! It's a much nicer experience than waybackmachine imo, at least for my use cases
    - WirelessGigabit 3y ago
      I wish it would support reading mode! It doesn't for me, at least not on Microsoft Edge.
      - fikama 3y ago
        Chromium on Android has this problem too, so it can be a chromium problem. On the other hand safari reader mode works flawlessly
    - selestify 3y ago
      I’m surprised they don’t open the code up to allow more people to pitch in.
      - tonfreed 3y ago
        I suspect it's to keep the secret sauce away from people that want to block it.
satvikpendem 3y ago
> The quality of their product has ceased to matter. Most people don't go to the theater (or even stream) to watch "quality," they go for entertainment. Artsy films might have a lot of artistic quality (like The Green Knight, for example) but most people don't care, they'll watch the latest blockbuster, which is where studios make the most money. For the people who do watch artsy films, understand that the blockbusters make the bulk of the revenue to even greenlight artsy films; without the mass market films, there wouldn't even be any artsy films (of a sizable budget like 10 to 50 million dollars, not true indie or art house films). Interestingly, it would be ironic if, were these strikes to go on for a longer time, studios would simply think to invest more into AI which doesn't have the sorts of problems mere humans might, hastening the demise of writers and actors. This must be why it was reported that negotiations broke down as soon as AI was thrown in there, they definitely want to bet on that as the future and I'm not sure what leverage actors and writers have, honestly. It seems like whichever way the strike goes, studios won't budge on that issue. Edit: removed art house label as it was inaccurate.
- OO000oo 3y ago
  > Most people don't go to the theater (or even stream) to watch "quality," they go for entertainment. A tell-tale sign of a decadent society where people are depressed and unfulfilled, more interested in escape from life than engagement with life because everything they might live for is compromised in the name of profit at the expense of everything else. I don't know what point you think you're making, but it's not helpful and there is nothing about this that anybody should be proud of.
  - dooraven 3y ago
    > A tell-tale sign of a decadent society where people are depressed and unfulfilled, more interested in escape from life than engagement with life because everything they might live for is compromised for profit at the expense of everything else. Not really, where exactly am I going to get dragons in real life?
    - OO000oo 3y ago
nostromo 3y ago
There is plenty of blame to go around. The writing for new shows is predicable and boring. Actors are featureless blobs that all look the same. Movies and shows seem to be eye-rollingly preachy and talk down to audiences. The whole industry is due for a sharp correction.
- lockhouse 3y ago
  Don’t forget the terrible sound mixing where the dialogue is inaudible while the sound effects and music are blaring.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    They got it in their minds that inaudible dialogue is more realistic and therefore has more artistic integrity than actors giving proper theatrical performances. A good stage actor can 'whisper' and be clearly heard across the room, but that's not realistic and is out of style. So now they have actors actually whisper and everybody has to watch the show with subtitles on. Actors should never be whispering or mumbling for real. Even an actor pretending to be drunk should be able to clearly enunciate their words while still making themselves sound drunk. I'm sure modern actors can still do this, but they're being given bad direction.
    - happymellon 3y ago
      Jonny Depp in the Pirates of the Caribbean, even though he wasn't drunk, is a good example of a drunk character that I could understand. I can't comment on the sequels.
      - bombcar 3y ago
        Jackie Chan's Drunken Masters got drunken across even through dubbing.
    - spaceman_2020 3y ago
      I need subtitles for practically every movie these days. Absurd.
gmerc 3y ago
Just end stage capitalism. At least these professions have balls and organization, something Silicon Valley is just barely comprehending as necessary when the good times run out
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  > end stage This is a silly meme, none of us have a crystal ball; there's really no telling how much further there is to fall. If this is the end stage, what are you going to call it in 50 years when people are getting themselves euthanized so they can sell off the last of their organs to put their child through elementary school?
  - tonfreed 3y ago
    Marx predicted this and has been wrong for 140 years. It'll come true this time you guys.
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      Indeed, the science of socialism makes some fair critiques of society but has a track record of poor predictive power. It totally failed to predict the economic prosperity of liberal democracies in the late 20th century, and the economic collapse of the Soviet Union. But I'm sure they've got things figured out now..
      - modo_mario 3y ago
        I'm not a socialist but this seems like some weirdly bad faith train of thought no? With weird homogenising wording such as "the science of socialism" to be considered and discarded as a whole. How did it fail to predict these things or should be expected to predict these things? Like are you talking about Marx who talked about capitalism in the context of western countries said capitalism was a necessary stage of development that brings about remarkable scientific and technological changes—changes that greatly increased aggregate wealth by extending humankind’s power over nature? Is he or his ideas the embodiment of this science of socialism or is it broader and how broad? Does it include critiques of the kind of economic determinism you have in mind? What did 'the science' say about the sino soviet rift, vietnam, etc? Is the science of capitalism embodied in Adam Smith or some similar amalgamation of concepts? Did the science make predictions about Free State Congo, the republic of china and modern day US?
areoform 3y ago
Hollywood’s CEOs are suffering. Not primarily from labor disputes or industry disruption or public-relations issues, but from vincible ignorance, which seems to be endemic in C-suites of all industries. Under pressure to deliver to Wall Street, too many CEOs have lost the plot of their own movie. They are not running companies to profitably deliver a good product, such as a book or a cup of coffee or, in this case, a movie or TV show. They are running companies to deliver good profit. The quality of their product has ceased to matter. I blame the general stagnation of our current age and its associated rent seeking on the MBA. MBAs have spent decades teaching and preaching that what the business does doesn't matter. All that matters is financial alchemy. "Forget building a better mouse trap! Take on venture debt, buy out all the mouse trap makers in your area, make their products worse (or keep them the same and sell them under a different brand name - whatever doesn't matter anyway) and jack up the prices. What are they gonna do? Go to someone else?" "Content business? What content business? Those old Hollywood studio executives were hacks! They still cared just a tiny bit (a vanishingly small bit) about making a 'great movie.' What phooey! Buy up licenses, sell them for as cheap as possible for a while and then flood the zone with generic content. They won't know the difference! It's all the same!" The reality? People do care. They might like slop, but they like well produced slop. Not just any generic, store-brand slop. No matter what the artistic merit of Friends and The Office is; hundreds of thousands to millions of people subscribed to Netflix to watch them over and over again. When those properties were gone, they slowly began to ebb away from the platform. Starting in 2019, when Netflix first lost the IP, "Netflix suffers first major loss of US subscribers, blames price hikes," https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/17/20694711/netflix-friends-the-office-earnings-q2-2019-subscribers-disney-hbo-apple-amazon-stock-drop https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/17/20694711/netflix-friends-... and continuing (with some ups) into 2023, "Netflix loses almost a million subscribers," https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62226912 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62226912 Their response to their decline wasn't to create better series or a better experience, but to crack down on sharing passwords. It made their subscriber numbers net positive for one or two quarters (so far), but you don't have to Fermi to predict how this will end. https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/9/23755156/netflix-subscriber-increase-paid-password-sharing-crackdown https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/9/23755156/netflix-subscribe...
- polygamous_bat 3y ago
mlsu 3y ago
I think the problem with streaming is that there is just too much of it. There is only so much content -- ahem, TV -- that people can watch in a given day. Especially because content includes stuff like TikTok. How many minutes of TV were produced last year? How many minutes were produced in 1990? Those legacy salaries are not possible, because if each American TV minute is worth $0.01, they're now splitting that $0.01 across 1,000 different shows, not a couple dozen. If I'm a young person who wants to perform on screen for a living, I know where I'm going: TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. There, I can control my own creative output, make my own brand deals, and own my own face.
- kennywinker 3y ago
  This would make sense if the companies in question weren’t making billions and funneling those profits to the execs, and investors, over the people who actually did the work. Expanding or contracting the industry is one thing. That’s not what’s happening here. This is a shift in how the money is distributed due to a tech “disruption”. Workers deserve to be paid well for the content they make happen.
- OO000oo 3y ago
  > If I'm a young person who wants to perform on screen for a living, I know where I'm going: TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. An extremely sad state of affairs by any historical measure of a successful society. Hollywood marks the absolute apex of American art. As this era of unquestionable greatness and human accomplishment draws to a close, we are nothing if not pathetic if we cannot at least acknowledge what it was. We should be nothing less than ashamed for letting it slip through our fingers, but here we are just making little quips about its outdatedness.
  - renegade-otter 3y ago
    "And the Oscar for the best 5-second hot girl gyrating and thinking she is dancing video goes to..."
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > If I'm a young person who wants to perform on screen for a living, I know where I'm going: TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. There, I can control my own creative output, make my own brand deals, and own my own face You also lose control of your distribution and are completely commoditised. Hence why the median full-time content creator makes $20,000/year, and I don’t think that includes production costs [1]. [1] https://www.epidemicsound.com/blog/the-future-of-the-creator-economy-report-2023/ https://www.epidemicsound.com/blog/the-future-of-the-creator...
gist 3y ago
I don't understand the entitlement. People choose a profession. The dynamics of earning a living with that profession have changed. The fact that others are making money from that profession (or companies) doesn't matter and shouldn't change that. The fact that other venues or ways to make money that formerly didn't exist shouldn't change that. It's capitalism not socialism at work. If actors/writers can't earn a living from the profession quite frankly 'too bad'. Am I the only one who was raised and was told that you can't earn a living doing acting or entertaining unless you are 'a star'? The problem was going down that road and becoming dependent on it and not thinking things might change. By the way what is going to happen to all of the people that have jobs in and around the industry that makes gasoline powered cars. Nobody seems to concerned about that. I don't mean just people who build gas powered cars but the entire industry supplying parts that will not be needed by EV (or parts for gas pumps etc you get the point).
ThinkBeat 3y ago
I know little about the behind the scenes machinations in the US film/tv world. The one union says they have been on strike since May. That is, in my opinion, a long time. Which may indicate that the other party is not hurting too much from it? On a sidenote: With the horrible quality of the major films and tv show these days, these guys should be on strike demanding higher quality productions. Soom seems to be "Ok give me an explosion here" "Move 3 steps" "Give me an explosion there" "You get on the motorcycle. " "I need 3 explosions there and then you four open up with machine guns" Some movies seem to have bypassed the script writing entirely
- toyg 3y ago
  > That is, in my opinion, a long time. It's basically a blip in AV production times. Hollywood movies will typically take one or two years to be made; so you won't see the economic effects of a strike for some time. TV starts hurting faster but it also hurts less, because you have sports, news, and reruns, to pick up most of the slack. If this was, say, a NBA strike, we'd currently be towards the end of pre-season.
- anonymousab 3y ago
  > these guys should be on strike demanding higher quality productions That is one of the goals around getting some baseline requirements around writer's rooms; they want to stop a hollowing-out race to the bottom with writing in Hollywood that has been going on for a while.
- ryathal 3y ago
  Most movies seem to be "written" as a collection of scenes that the directors and producers want to see and then they tell the writers to make those fit together in a story.
solatic 3y ago
The strike will break Hollywood. There are simply too many other options available. Streaming distributors (e.g. Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV) will simply go abroad and market foreign productions to American audiences, which is little different from living in a foreign country and having mostly American productions marketed to you. Consumers will pick and choose between what's still available on streaming distributors, YouTube, and other non-video entertainment sources like video games. The cost of an average blockbuster production, compared to the cost of independent productions on platforms like YouTube, is insane. There's a reason why the cost of seeing a movie in a theater is so much higher today. But the value proposition is profoundly difficult. Spend $20/person/night at a movie theater, or $12/month for ad-free YouTube, where the production values of the top content producers have increased as per-episode views have reached into the millions? YouTube democratized content production, and gave anybody with sufficient talent access to the video entertainment market without needing to deal with the Hollywood gatekeepers. Think that the talent behind YouTube productions are going to unionize? That genie is out of the lamp. Once the consumers leave Hollywood, good luck to Hollywood trying to get them back. And because the union's agreement doesn't extend to foreign productions, good luck trying to prevent actors and screenwriters from going abroad, whether to be part of a foreign production or an American production for YouTube, the longer the strike goes on.
- ishanmahapatra 3y ago
  The foreign unions are all looking to see how this plays out. The shape of the deal for SAG and WGA lays the groundwork for what they will be able to negotiate for.
- pjc50 3y ago
  > Streaming distributors (e.g. Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV) will simply go abroad and market foreign productions to American audiences Very skeptical about this. You'll see a bit of it while the strike is on, but the quality difference is real and the average US audience hates both sub and dub content. You might get a bit of e.g. Scandinavian murder mystery or Korean drama, especially following the breakthrough of Squid Game.
  - 3y ago
toyg 3y ago
I've heard these critiques since the '90s at least. I'm sure there were plenty even during times that are now regarded as a golden age of artsy moviemaking, like the '70s. The reality is simply that the sector rides waves, and at some point the wave ends. VHS was a wave. DVD was a wave. Mega-CGI (from The Matrix to Lord of the Rings to Marvel) was a wave. Streaming was a wave (Netflix threw money at productions almost senselessly, for a few years). Now that those waves are over, bosses' largesse is in scarce supply. Unions will do what unions are supposed to do. The only novel bit, in this dispute, is the role of AI and computer-generated characters; but tbh we could see this development coming for a long time. A simple example: the brother of Spider-Man 2099, in the comic, is a film director who makes movies completely on his own, via digital means. This was published 25 years ago.
Simulacra 3y ago
I can see that the system is messed up, but it also just seems like a lot of rich people yelling at other rich people. I can't seem to find any sympathy for the strikers.
asdjy 3y ago
The modern songwriting process goes like this: gather multiple teams of 20-year-olds with laptops into a conference room. Give them 2 hours to write a song. Pick the best song. When I heard about this process on an NPR podcast I said yup that explains everything. In contrast, a member of the Allman Brothers was holed up in a motel or cabin trying to write a song. In frustration with writer’s block he went out to the local store. Inside a woman was chasing her young daughter down the aisle calling her name. He liked the name and went back and wrote the song “Melissa.”
- conradfr 3y ago
  Not saying that the current Top 40 isn't terrible but even legendary artists and songs were produced in a variation of this way back in the days. https://medium.com/@shelrochaleal/motown-the-star-making-production-line-8526f445ff40 https://medium.com/@shelrochaleal/motown-the-star-making-pro...
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Pop music was overproduced in the late 60s too. There are still plenty of bands writing songs about mundane experiences they've had after holing out in a motel or cabin for a while.
- Kye 3y ago
  Writing a song has always been the easy part. It's all the other stuff that takes time and money. At that level, everything is a whole production. Everything. I don't see how this is any different from a writer's room for a TV show or movie. Those scripts go pretty quick, too. Maybe not 2 hours, but they have to deliver scripts in time for production to get it ready for narrow release windows. You're always going to get a factory process when a lot of people are involved because there are deadlines and checkpoints written into contracts. That doesn't make the output bad.
RickJWagner 3y ago
[flagged]
costanzaDynasty 3y ago
You've spent the last 5 years making clickbait assembly line garbage and anytime anyone has any valid criticism they are labeled ism. It's not surprising that most people have moved on. The customer isn't always right, but at the very least the customer deserves respect. You need our money more than we need to give it to you.
- draw_down 3y ago
  I saw an interesting thought, that the recent popularity of anime among Americans is because our entertainment now is not only constantly moralizing, but also poorly made. Anime doesn’t appeal to me but I thought that was a funny idea.
  - Ylpertnodi 3y ago
    >because our entertainment now is not only constantly moralizing ...been that way for several decades, not just 'now'.
    - bacchusracine 3y ago
      >...been that way for several decades, not just 'now'. Yes, yes, but they've forgotten a key truth that used to be understood. People like to be moralized to. Persuasive speech is interesting to people because done well it evokes a response on an intellectual and emotional level. Moralizing is not the problem. The problem is that if you're going to preach at people you need to make it entertaining preaching or people aren't going to stand for it, never mind pay for the privilege.
  - dreamcompiler 3y ago
    > ...but also poorly made. This. Linked video [0] is entirely CGI generated in real time, and it looks better than the CGI in most modern Hollywood blockbuster movies, which can spend 10 minutes rendering each frame if they need to. I'm not a gamer but people familiar with modern video games probably already know this. There's no excuse for the lack of quality in modern movie CGI other than "we refuse to pay what good CGI artists are worth." [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU0gvPcc3jQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU0gvPcc3jQ
baryphonic 3y ago
> Hollywood’s CEOs are suffering. Not primarily from labor disputes or industry disruption or public-relations issues, but from vincible ignorance, which seems to be endemic in C-suites of all industries. Under pressure to deliver to Wall Street, too many CEOs have lost the plot of their own movie. They are not running companies to profitably deliver a good product, such as a book or a cup of coffee or, in this case, a movie or TV show. They are running companies to deliver good profit. The quality of their product has ceased to matter. Has there ever been a time when the suits weren't ignoramuses? And if they're optimizing everything to deliver a profit, why aren't they profitable? The suits are to blame in terms of accountability, because the buck stops with them. But the product as far as I can tell has never been more expensive. The new Indiana Jones movie had a production budget of approximately $300M, plus marketing costs (between $50M & $150M). If we assume Disney will pocket 50% of the gross box office, they'd need to make $700M-900M just to break even. So far, more than two weeks after release, the film has made just over $300M worldwide.[0] That movie alone is very likely to lose hundreds of millions. Movies losing money is the norm, but not to the tune of hundreds of millions. What's gone wrong? 1) The writing has deteriorated. Stories have become boring & tendentious, filled with unlikeable characters, hackneyed plots and preachy dialogue. 2) The studios have become completely risk-averse. I can kind of understand why they'd want to be risk averse with budgets of $300M, but audiences tire of remakes, reboots and distant sequels. (I think the creative types have gotten wise, which is why "explorable" IP with large worlds like Star Wars or Middle-Earth have been cannibalized to tell stories that are tonally and thematically quite different than the source material, because the suits have zero clue. Sometimes it even works, like with Andor. Though even Andor has struggled to find its audience amongst all of the noise.) 3) The costs have gotten too high. I'm not sure if the streaming wars or golden age of TV or even just low interest rates are responsible, but the costs of production are staggering. This is in a day and age where technology should have made it cheaper to produce films & TV. When I look at Oppenheimer's budget of $100M, I can almost understand why it is so expensive. I can't explain the Indy 5 budget. When I was younger, I could almost always find a movie I wanted to watch on a Friday night. Those days are long gone. At some point, Hollywood stopped producing anything worth seeing, and now they're paying the price. [0]https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl2776598017/?ref_=bo_hm_rd https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl2776598017/?ref_=bo_...
rmk 3y ago
I don’t see many non superhero or non franchise movies coming out of Hollywood. It sure sounds like the moneymen’s influence: why not milk a sure thing?
- TrackerFF 3y ago
  Yes, there's a reason why, excuse the expression, capeshit movies have dominated the cinemas for the past 10-12 years. MCU movies probably pay for a lot of other high-quality movies - but they rely on those franchise movies to bring in the bucks. The good thing is that most serious movie goes can easily ignore these movies, if they want to. The negative thing is that, well, those movies really do dominate they cinemas, and will get first priority on pretty much everything. I'm from a small rural place, and back home they would screen nothing but the latest superhero movies for 3-4 weeks straight, when they got released. Other movies would either get passed on, or get screening time much later in the season. More often than not it was the former.
  - nebula8804 3y ago
    What that shows is your market is so small and costs have grown enough over the years that if it weren't for the addressable market of the superhero movies, they wouldn't be showing anything in your region at all. Maybe the big chains might exit your market regardless. AMC almost went bankrupt(they were saved by meme investors). Regal did go bankrupt. Hell even Alamo went bankrupt (but emerged successfully to live another day). How much time do you think is left? As AMC continues to decline they will chop the rural areas first. You'll be maybe left with mom n pop outlets that may not be worth dealing with from the point of view of the distributors(we'll see). Ive said it before but i'll say it again(and get downvoted again). Living in a rural region confers many benefits one of which being likely low taxes...but another way to look at it is you are still paying a tax, just in other ways.
- pnt12 3y ago
  This month, there were Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan and Asteroid City by Wes Anderson. It does show that HN is a website for techies and not for cinema enthusiasts; there's good stuff out there, but you won't get to it if you only scratch the surface.
rednerrus 3y ago
At some point we have to talk about how much of the money investors should expect. The real issue is that investors expect more and more of the pie.
- nebula8804 3y ago
  There is no real mechanism to force a complete market wide wide behavior change other than maybe a great reset(how that could happen is beyond me).
KBme 3y ago
I would guess it's ESG and activism more than that. People aren't buying the racist, classist and overtly indoctrinating sludge that has been coming out of there for the last decade+. It's boring drivel nobody is interested in.

175 points by fortran77 3y ago

> The quality of their product has ceased to matter. If people will still pay, you would of course cut quality to increase margins. Walmart figured out that quality was a secondary concern to the customer, who is quite happy to buy a lawnmower that starts twice for $90 over one that lasts years for $180.

Spooky23 3y ago
Bad example. That $90 mower works as well as a $600 Honda, it just has fewer fancy features. Walmart is the master of the commodity. It’s dumb not to buy many things there. Whole Foods will sell you a gallon of vinegar for $7, Walmart will same the same product probably made at the same place for $2.50.
- jsiepkes 3y ago
  Can you buy a spare part for your $90 mower if it breaks?
  - selestify 3y ago
    Does it matter if the whole thing costs less than the replacement part for a more expensive mower? (Disclaimer: I have no idea about lawnmowers or their costs. I’m engaging based purely on economic decision making.)
    - CapstanRoller 3y ago
      >I’m engaging based purely on economic decision making. Unfortunately the environmental cost of producing disposable junk continues to be externalized and not factored into the economic decision-making spreadsheet.
      - selestify 3y ago
        That’s a fair point. How could we ensure disposal-related externalities are factored into the cost of a product?
        jsiepkes 3y ago
        The EU is working on legislation to take the full product life cycle cost in to account when importing products. It means taking in to account the cost of disposal or recycling in import duties. Which seems fair. I mean why do I have to pay for the disposal of someone's 90 Euro lawn mower? Aside from environmental cost this is clearly also intended to reduce reliance on low-labour cost countries. Since these usually tend to have regimes which might not "philosophically fully align with ours". Western countries went to China and started selling opium. China went to the west and started selling low quality cheap stuff. I think the later might even be more addictive then the former...
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    Even if you could you'd probably have to fix it yourself, because the guy in town who used to run a general repair shop retired/died from old age 10 years ago and never managed to find a young guy to take over the business. I knew a guy who used to repair anything from work boots to sewing machines to televisions, but he gave it up in his 80s with nobody to replace him. I've heard this is very common, those kind of handyman repair shops mostly don't exist anymore.
  - Spooky23 3y ago
    For the engine, sure. It’s all made by like 2 companies. I use a Murray lawn mower that my dad bought for $40 in 1995 at Walmart. The evil of Walmart isn’t the products, it’s their predatory destruction of competition in rural areas. Once you hit the suburbs, they lose that power.
- GauntletWizard 3y ago
  There's a ton of both. And there's a consumer problem where it's slow and painful and most importantly - expensive in the most valuable commodity, time, to do the research on products. America is built on the assumption that people have agency to make choices. We have been robbed of that time and agency by the deluge of things competing for our attention, but also by the amount of things that we need to think about. There should be economies of scale - it shouldn't matter which toothpaste you buy, because journalism should keep them honest, but it doesn't because there's too many options for that and they're all corrupt.
  - Spooky23 3y ago
    There’s always someone who trades convenience for $, is ignorant, or doesn’t really care. I don’t think toothpaste is “corrupt” per se, I think everyone needs toothpaste, and very subtle differences may equate to millions of units of sales.
parker_mountain 3y ago
They're not happy about it. I think a lot of people make that decision under a form of (personal financial) duress. Or put better than I could, by the master of pithy observations: The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
- dooraven 3y ago
  it's just wrong though, the reason why people are rich is that they have more income streams by producing more valuable things, not consuming less. It's a nice idiom to have when you use labour to trade for income and your income doesn't increase by your efforts but the reason why people are rich is more based on their production than their consumption. The analogy makes sense for middle class folk though, but a rich person will stay rich regardless of what they buy as long as their production output is stil desirable.
  - CPLX 3y ago
    The reason people are still rich is the same reason nobody would watch sports if they didn’t reset the score at the end of each game. “Today the New York Yankees will play the Montreal Expos. Our game begins with the Yankees having a score of 79,613 runs and the Expos having a score of 12,177 runs.” If this is how baseball worked how much energy do you think the Yankees would spend recruiting a hot new pitcher versus starting one of the owners kids?
    - Terr_ 3y ago
      I'd like to add that those teams could have always been playing equally-well. This phenomenon happens even in simpler models, where it's easy to see that the eventual "winner" is only there through pure long-term luck, with zero distinguishing merit or intelligence etc.: > If you simulate this economy, a variant of the yard sale model, you will get a remarkable result: after a large number of transactions, one agent ends up as an “oligarch” holding practically all the wealth of the economy, and the other 999 end up with virtually nothing. > It does not matter how much wealth people started with. It does not matter that all the coin flips were absolutely fair. It does not matter that the poorer agent's expected outcome was positive in each transaction, whereas that of the richer agent was negative. Any single agent in this economy could have become the oligarch—in fact, all had equal odds if they began with equal wealth. In that sense, there was equality of opportunity. But only one of them did become the oligarch, and all the others saw their average wealth decrease toward zero as they conducted more and more transactions. To add insult to injury, the lower someone's wealth ranking, the faster the decrease. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine...

achow 3y ago

https://archive.is/I55sb https://archive.is/I55sb

totetsu 3y ago
Wow I just noticed that archive.is automatically appends selected text reigons to the link in the address bar. neat https://archive.is/I55sb#selection-887.146-887.383 https://archive.is/I55sb#selection-887.146-887.383
- vector_spaces 3y ago
  It's such a great service. Can't really believe it's just one person maintaining it essentially as a public service given that it's quite expensive to run (based on a post I read in the last year or two). Basically all my techie and non-techie friends use it -- hoping that he finds a way to make it sustainable so that it sticks around! It's a much nicer experience than waybackmachine imo, at least for my use cases
  - WirelessGigabit 3y ago
    I wish it would support reading mode! It doesn't for me, at least not on Microsoft Edge.
    - fikama 3y ago
      Chromium on Android has this problem too, so it can be a chromium problem. On the other hand safari reader mode works flawlessly
  - selestify 3y ago
    I’m surprised they don’t open the code up to allow more people to pitch in.
    - tonfreed 3y ago
      I suspect it's to keep the secret sauce away from people that want to block it.

satvikpendem 3y ago

> The quality of their product has ceased to matter. Most people don't go to the theater (or even stream) to watch "quality," they go for entertainment. Artsy films might have a lot of artistic quality (like The Green Knight, for example) but most people don't care, they'll watch the latest blockbuster, which is where studios make the most money. For the people who do watch artsy films, understand that the blockbusters make the bulk of the revenue to even greenlight artsy films; without the mass market films, there wouldn't even be any artsy films (of a sizable budget like 10 to 50 million dollars, not true indie or art house films). Interestingly, it would be ironic if, were these strikes to go on for a longer time, studios would simply think to invest more into AI which doesn't have the sorts of problems mere humans might, hastening the demise of writers and actors. This must be why it was reported that negotiations broke down as soon as AI was thrown in there, they definitely want to bet on that as the future and I'm not sure what leverage actors and writers have, honestly. It seems like whichever way the strike goes, studios won't budge on that issue. Edit: removed art house label as it was inaccurate.

OO000oo 3y ago
> Most people don't go to the theater (or even stream) to watch "quality," they go for entertainment. A tell-tale sign of a decadent society where people are depressed and unfulfilled, more interested in escape from life than engagement with life because everything they might live for is compromised in the name of profit at the expense of everything else. I don't know what point you think you're making, but it's not helpful and there is nothing about this that anybody should be proud of.
- dooraven 3y ago
  > A tell-tale sign of a decadent society where people are depressed and unfulfilled, more interested in escape from life than engagement with life because everything they might live for is compromised for profit at the expense of everything else. Not really, where exactly am I going to get dragons in real life?
  - OO000oo 3y ago

nostromo 3y ago

There is plenty of blame to go around. The writing for new shows is predicable and boring. Actors are featureless blobs that all look the same. Movies and shows seem to be eye-rollingly preachy and talk down to audiences. The whole industry is due for a sharp correction.

lockhouse 3y ago
Don’t forget the terrible sound mixing where the dialogue is inaudible while the sound effects and music are blaring.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  They got it in their minds that inaudible dialogue is more realistic and therefore has more artistic integrity than actors giving proper theatrical performances. A good stage actor can 'whisper' and be clearly heard across the room, but that's not realistic and is out of style. So now they have actors actually whisper and everybody has to watch the show with subtitles on. Actors should never be whispering or mumbling for real. Even an actor pretending to be drunk should be able to clearly enunciate their words while still making themselves sound drunk. I'm sure modern actors can still do this, but they're being given bad direction.
  - happymellon 3y ago
    Jonny Depp in the Pirates of the Caribbean, even though he wasn't drunk, is a good example of a drunk character that I could understand. I can't comment on the sequels.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Jackie Chan's Drunken Masters got drunken across even through dubbing.
  - spaceman_2020 3y ago
    I need subtitles for practically every movie these days. Absurd.

gmerc 3y ago

Just end stage capitalism. At least these professions have balls and organization, something Silicon Valley is just barely comprehending as necessary when the good times run out

mcpackieh 3y ago
> end stage This is a silly meme, none of us have a crystal ball; there's really no telling how much further there is to fall. If this is the end stage, what are you going to call it in 50 years when people are getting themselves euthanized so they can sell off the last of their organs to put their child through elementary school?
- tonfreed 3y ago
  Marx predicted this and has been wrong for 140 years. It'll come true this time you guys.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    Indeed, the science of socialism makes some fair critiques of society but has a track record of poor predictive power. It totally failed to predict the economic prosperity of liberal democracies in the late 20th century, and the economic collapse of the Soviet Union. But I'm sure they've got things figured out now..
    - modo_mario 3y ago
      I'm not a socialist but this seems like some weirdly bad faith train of thought no? With weird homogenising wording such as "the science of socialism" to be considered and discarded as a whole. How did it fail to predict these things or should be expected to predict these things? Like are you talking about Marx who talked about capitalism in the context of western countries said capitalism was a necessary stage of development that brings about remarkable scientific and technological changes—changes that greatly increased aggregate wealth by extending humankind’s power over nature? Is he or his ideas the embodiment of this science of socialism or is it broader and how broad? Does it include critiques of the kind of economic determinism you have in mind? What did 'the science' say about the sino soviet rift, vietnam, etc? Is the science of capitalism embodied in Adam Smith or some similar amalgamation of concepts? Did the science make predictions about Free State Congo, the republic of china and modern day US?

areoform 3y ago

Hollywood’s CEOs are suffering. Not primarily from labor disputes or industry disruption or public-relations issues, but from vincible ignorance, which seems to be endemic in C-suites of all industries. Under pressure to deliver to Wall Street, too many CEOs have lost the plot of their own movie. They are not running companies to profitably deliver a good product, such as a book or a cup of coffee or, in this case, a movie or TV show. They are running companies to deliver good profit. The quality of their product has ceased to matter. I blame the general stagnation of our current age and its associated rent seeking on the MBA. MBAs have spent decades teaching and preaching that what the business does doesn't matter. All that matters is financial alchemy. "Forget building a better mouse trap! Take on venture debt, buy out all the mouse trap makers in your area, make their products worse (or keep them the same and sell them under a different brand name - whatever doesn't matter anyway) and jack up the prices. What are they gonna do? Go to someone else?" "Content business? What content business? Those old Hollywood studio executives were hacks! They still cared just a tiny bit (a vanishingly small bit) about making a 'great movie.' What phooey! Buy up licenses, sell them for as cheap as possible for a while and then flood the zone with generic content. They won't know the difference! It's all the same!" The reality? People do care. They might like slop, but they like well produced slop. Not just any generic, store-brand slop. No matter what the artistic merit of Friends and The Office is; hundreds of thousands to millions of people subscribed to Netflix to watch them over and over again. When those properties were gone, they slowly began to ebb away from the platform. Starting in 2019, when Netflix first lost the IP, "Netflix suffers first major loss of US subscribers, blames price hikes," https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/17/20694711/netflix-friends-the-office-earnings-q2-2019-subscribers-disney-hbo-apple-amazon-stock-drop https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/17/20694711/netflix-friends-... and continuing (with some ups) into 2023, "Netflix loses almost a million subscribers," https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62226912 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62226912 Their response to their decline wasn't to create better series or a better experience, but to crack down on sharing passwords. It made their subscriber numbers net positive for one or two quarters (so far), but you don't have to Fermi to predict how this will end. https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/9/23755156/netflix-subscriber-increase-paid-password-sharing-crackdown https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/9/23755156/netflix-subscribe...

polygamous_bat 3y ago

mlsu 3y ago

I think the problem with streaming is that there is just too much of it. There is only so much content -- ahem, TV -- that people can watch in a given day. Especially because content includes stuff like TikTok. How many minutes of TV were produced last year? How many minutes were produced in 1990? Those legacy salaries are not possible, because if each American TV minute is worth $0.01, they're now splitting that $0.01 across 1,000 different shows, not a couple dozen. If I'm a young person who wants to perform on screen for a living, I know where I'm going: TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. There, I can control my own creative output, make my own brand deals, and own my own face.

kennywinker 3y ago
This would make sense if the companies in question weren’t making billions and funneling those profits to the execs, and investors, over the people who actually did the work. Expanding or contracting the industry is one thing. That’s not what’s happening here. This is a shift in how the money is distributed due to a tech “disruption”. Workers deserve to be paid well for the content they make happen.
OO000oo 3y ago
> If I'm a young person who wants to perform on screen for a living, I know where I'm going: TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. An extremely sad state of affairs by any historical measure of a successful society. Hollywood marks the absolute apex of American art. As this era of unquestionable greatness and human accomplishment draws to a close, we are nothing if not pathetic if we cannot at least acknowledge what it was. We should be nothing less than ashamed for letting it slip through our fingers, but here we are just making little quips about its outdatedness.
- renegade-otter 3y ago
  "And the Oscar for the best 5-second hot girl gyrating and thinking she is dancing video goes to..."
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> If I'm a young person who wants to perform on screen for a living, I know where I'm going: TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. There, I can control my own creative output, make my own brand deals, and own my own face You also lose control of your distribution and are completely commoditised. Hence why the median full-time content creator makes $20,000/year, and I don’t think that includes production costs [1]. [1] https://www.epidemicsound.com/blog/the-future-of-the-creator-economy-report-2023/ https://www.epidemicsound.com/blog/the-future-of-the-creator...

gist 3y ago

I don't understand the entitlement. People choose a profession. The dynamics of earning a living with that profession have changed. The fact that others are making money from that profession (or companies) doesn't matter and shouldn't change that. The fact that other venues or ways to make money that formerly didn't exist shouldn't change that. It's capitalism not socialism at work. If actors/writers can't earn a living from the profession quite frankly 'too bad'. Am I the only one who was raised and was told that you can't earn a living doing acting or entertaining unless you are 'a star'? The problem was going down that road and becoming dependent on it and not thinking things might change. By the way what is going to happen to all of the people that have jobs in and around the industry that makes gasoline powered cars. Nobody seems to concerned about that. I don't mean just people who build gas powered cars but the entire industry supplying parts that will not be needed by EV (or parts for gas pumps etc you get the point).

ThinkBeat 3y ago

I know little about the behind the scenes machinations in the US film/tv world. The one union says they have been on strike since May. That is, in my opinion, a long time. Which may indicate that the other party is not hurting too much from it? On a sidenote: With the horrible quality of the major films and tv show these days, these guys should be on strike demanding higher quality productions. Soom seems to be "Ok give me an explosion here" "Move 3 steps" "Give me an explosion there" "You get on the motorcycle. " "I need 3 explosions there and then you four open up with machine guns" Some movies seem to have bypassed the script writing entirely

toyg 3y ago
> That is, in my opinion, a long time. It's basically a blip in AV production times. Hollywood movies will typically take one or two years to be made; so you won't see the economic effects of a strike for some time. TV starts hurting faster but it also hurts less, because you have sports, news, and reruns, to pick up most of the slack. If this was, say, a NBA strike, we'd currently be towards the end of pre-season.
anonymousab 3y ago
> these guys should be on strike demanding higher quality productions That is one of the goals around getting some baseline requirements around writer's rooms; they want to stop a hollowing-out race to the bottom with writing in Hollywood that has been going on for a while.
ryathal 3y ago
Most movies seem to be "written" as a collection of scenes that the directors and producers want to see and then they tell the writers to make those fit together in a story.

solatic 3y ago

The strike will break Hollywood. There are simply too many other options available. Streaming distributors (e.g. Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV) will simply go abroad and market foreign productions to American audiences, which is little different from living in a foreign country and having mostly American productions marketed to you. Consumers will pick and choose between what's still available on streaming distributors, YouTube, and other non-video entertainment sources like video games. The cost of an average blockbuster production, compared to the cost of independent productions on platforms like YouTube, is insane. There's a reason why the cost of seeing a movie in a theater is so much higher today. But the value proposition is profoundly difficult. Spend $20/person/night at a movie theater, or $12/month for ad-free YouTube, where the production values of the top content producers have increased as per-episode views have reached into the millions? YouTube democratized content production, and gave anybody with sufficient talent access to the video entertainment market without needing to deal with the Hollywood gatekeepers. Think that the talent behind YouTube productions are going to unionize? That genie is out of the lamp. Once the consumers leave Hollywood, good luck to Hollywood trying to get them back. And because the union's agreement doesn't extend to foreign productions, good luck trying to prevent actors and screenwriters from going abroad, whether to be part of a foreign production or an American production for YouTube, the longer the strike goes on.

ishanmahapatra 3y ago
The foreign unions are all looking to see how this plays out. The shape of the deal for SAG and WGA lays the groundwork for what they will be able to negotiate for.
pjc50 3y ago
> Streaming distributors (e.g. Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV) will simply go abroad and market foreign productions to American audiences Very skeptical about this. You'll see a bit of it while the strike is on, but the quality difference is real and the average US audience hates both sub and dub content. You might get a bit of e.g. Scandinavian murder mystery or Korean drama, especially following the breakthrough of Squid Game.
- 3y ago

toyg 3y ago

I've heard these critiques since the '90s at least. I'm sure there were plenty even during times that are now regarded as a golden age of artsy moviemaking, like the '70s. The reality is simply that the sector rides waves, and at some point the wave ends. VHS was a wave. DVD was a wave. Mega-CGI (from The Matrix to Lord of the Rings to Marvel) was a wave. Streaming was a wave (Netflix threw money at productions almost senselessly, for a few years). Now that those waves are over, bosses' largesse is in scarce supply. Unions will do what unions are supposed to do. The only novel bit, in this dispute, is the role of AI and computer-generated characters; but tbh we could see this development coming for a long time. A simple example: the brother of Spider-Man 2099, in the comic, is a film director who makes movies completely on his own, via digital means. This was published 25 years ago.

Simulacra 3y ago

I can see that the system is messed up, but it also just seems like a lot of rich people yelling at other rich people. I can't seem to find any sympathy for the strikers.

asdjy 3y ago

The modern songwriting process goes like this: gather multiple teams of 20-year-olds with laptops into a conference room. Give them 2 hours to write a song. Pick the best song. When I heard about this process on an NPR podcast I said yup that explains everything. In contrast, a member of the Allman Brothers was holed up in a motel or cabin trying to write a song. In frustration with writer’s block he went out to the local store. Inside a woman was chasing her young daughter down the aisle calling her name. He liked the name and went back and wrote the song “Melissa.”

conradfr 3y ago
Not saying that the current Top 40 isn't terrible but even legendary artists and songs were produced in a variation of this way back in the days. https://medium.com/@shelrochaleal/motown-the-star-making-production-line-8526f445ff40 https://medium.com/@shelrochaleal/motown-the-star-making-pro...
HDThoreaun 3y ago
Pop music was overproduced in the late 60s too. There are still plenty of bands writing songs about mundane experiences they've had after holing out in a motel or cabin for a while.
Kye 3y ago
Writing a song has always been the easy part. It's all the other stuff that takes time and money. At that level, everything is a whole production. Everything. I don't see how this is any different from a writer's room for a TV show or movie. Those scripts go pretty quick, too. Maybe not 2 hours, but they have to deliver scripts in time for production to get it ready for narrow release windows. You're always going to get a factory process when a lot of people are involved because there are deadlines and checkpoints written into contracts. That doesn't make the output bad.

RickJWagner 3y ago

[flagged]

costanzaDynasty 3y ago

You've spent the last 5 years making clickbait assembly line garbage and anytime anyone has any valid criticism they are labeled ism. It's not surprising that most people have moved on. The customer isn't always right, but at the very least the customer deserves respect. You need our money more than we need to give it to you.

draw_down 3y ago
I saw an interesting thought, that the recent popularity of anime among Americans is because our entertainment now is not only constantly moralizing, but also poorly made. Anime doesn’t appeal to me but I thought that was a funny idea.
- Ylpertnodi 3y ago
  >because our entertainment now is not only constantly moralizing ...been that way for several decades, not just 'now'.
  - bacchusracine 3y ago
    >...been that way for several decades, not just 'now'. Yes, yes, but they've forgotten a key truth that used to be understood. People like to be moralized to. Persuasive speech is interesting to people because done well it evokes a response on an intellectual and emotional level. Moralizing is not the problem. The problem is that if you're going to preach at people you need to make it entertaining preaching or people aren't going to stand for it, never mind pay for the privilege.
- dreamcompiler 3y ago
  > ...but also poorly made. This. Linked video [0] is entirely CGI generated in real time, and it looks better than the CGI in most modern Hollywood blockbuster movies, which can spend 10 minutes rendering each frame if they need to. I'm not a gamer but people familiar with modern video games probably already know this. There's no excuse for the lack of quality in modern movie CGI other than "we refuse to pay what good CGI artists are worth." [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU0gvPcc3jQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU0gvPcc3jQ

baryphonic 3y ago

> Hollywood’s CEOs are suffering. Not primarily from labor disputes or industry disruption or public-relations issues, but from vincible ignorance, which seems to be endemic in C-suites of all industries. Under pressure to deliver to Wall Street, too many CEOs have lost the plot of their own movie. They are not running companies to profitably deliver a good product, such as a book or a cup of coffee or, in this case, a movie or TV show. They are running companies to deliver good profit. The quality of their product has ceased to matter. Has there ever been a time when the suits weren't ignoramuses? And if they're optimizing everything to deliver a profit, why aren't they profitable? The suits are to blame in terms of accountability, because the buck stops with them. But the product as far as I can tell has never been more expensive. The new Indiana Jones movie had a production budget of approximately $300M, plus marketing costs (between $50M & $150M). If we assume Disney will pocket 50% of the gross box office, they'd need to make $700M-900M just to break even. So far, more than two weeks after release, the film has made just over $300M worldwide.[0] That movie alone is very likely to lose hundreds of millions. Movies losing money is the norm, but not to the tune of hundreds of millions. What's gone wrong? 1) The writing has deteriorated. Stories have become boring & tendentious, filled with unlikeable characters, hackneyed plots and preachy dialogue. 2) The studios have become completely risk-averse. I can kind of understand why they'd want to be risk averse with budgets of $300M, but audiences tire of remakes, reboots and distant sequels. (I think the creative types have gotten wise, which is why "explorable" IP with large worlds like Star Wars or Middle-Earth have been cannibalized to tell stories that are tonally and thematically quite different than the source material, because the suits have zero clue. Sometimes it even works, like with Andor. Though even Andor has struggled to find its audience amongst all of the noise.) 3) The costs have gotten too high. I'm not sure if the streaming wars or golden age of TV or even just low interest rates are responsible, but the costs of production are staggering. This is in a day and age where technology should have made it cheaper to produce films & TV. When I look at Oppenheimer's budget of $100M, I can almost understand why it is so expensive. I can't explain the Indy 5 budget. When I was younger, I could almost always find a movie I wanted to watch on a Friday night. Those days are long gone. At some point, Hollywood stopped producing anything worth seeing, and now they're paying the price. [0]https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl2776598017/?ref_=bo_hm_rd https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl2776598017/?ref_=bo_...

rmk 3y ago

I don’t see many non superhero or non franchise movies coming out of Hollywood. It sure sounds like the moneymen’s influence: why not milk a sure thing?

TrackerFF 3y ago
Yes, there's a reason why, excuse the expression, capeshit movies have dominated the cinemas for the past 10-12 years. MCU movies probably pay for a lot of other high-quality movies - but they rely on those franchise movies to bring in the bucks. The good thing is that most serious movie goes can easily ignore these movies, if they want to. The negative thing is that, well, those movies really do dominate they cinemas, and will get first priority on pretty much everything. I'm from a small rural place, and back home they would screen nothing but the latest superhero movies for 3-4 weeks straight, when they got released. Other movies would either get passed on, or get screening time much later in the season. More often than not it was the former.
- nebula8804 3y ago
  What that shows is your market is so small and costs have grown enough over the years that if it weren't for the addressable market of the superhero movies, they wouldn't be showing anything in your region at all. Maybe the big chains might exit your market regardless. AMC almost went bankrupt(they were saved by meme investors). Regal did go bankrupt. Hell even Alamo went bankrupt (but emerged successfully to live another day). How much time do you think is left? As AMC continues to decline they will chop the rural areas first. You'll be maybe left with mom n pop outlets that may not be worth dealing with from the point of view of the distributors(we'll see). Ive said it before but i'll say it again(and get downvoted again). Living in a rural region confers many benefits one of which being likely low taxes...but another way to look at it is you are still paying a tax, just in other ways.
pnt12 3y ago
This month, there were Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan and Asteroid City by Wes Anderson. It does show that HN is a website for techies and not for cinema enthusiasts; there's good stuff out there, but you won't get to it if you only scratch the surface.

rednerrus 3y ago

At some point we have to talk about how much of the money investors should expect. The real issue is that investors expect more and more of the pie.

nebula8804 3y ago
There is no real mechanism to force a complete market wide wide behavior change other than maybe a great reset(how that could happen is beyond me).

KBme 3y ago

I would guess it's ESG and activism more than that. People aren't buying the racist, classist and overtly indoctrinating sludge that has been coming out of there for the last decade+. It's boring drivel nobody is interested in.