5 ms·

Reel Inequality: Charting the Vanishing Middle Class of Movies

32 points by tennisprince 3y ago

snoopsnopp 3y ago
I feel like consumer choice has kinda gone too far with movies, people never cross genres because they never have to go along with something they don’t like.
- arglebargle123 3y ago
  You should see the book requests posted to communities like r/printsf now. We have genre readers that have evolved into "I only read material containing this exact set of tropes" it's straight up weird.
aethros 3y ago
I wonder how valuable this is as a metric, since much of what gets viewed is a function of art as much as it is marketing, production, or other elements. Some years studios make movies that are just bad--I wouldn't necessarily expect the income distribution to remain balanced across years. Furthermore, these graphs don't appear to take into account the production cost of movies. If a low-budget film garners critical acclaim, it means more than a studio movie that just broke even, although their gross incomes could be pretty similar.
rob74 3y ago
I'm not sure 2023 is a good year to compare against, what with the actors' and writers' unions striking for several months? If you look at the list of "2023 movies", you see titles such as Coraline (Remastered), Star Wars Episode VI, Titanic (25 yr Anniversary) and probably some others that I missed which are not really 2023 movies...
mjr00 3y ago
2023 had a lot of big-budget bombs. Ant-Man, Indiana Jones, Mission Impossible, Transformers, The Flash, Fast X, Blue Beetle, Elemental, Shazam!, and the Marvels all underperformed somewhere on the scale from "disappointment" to "disaster". On the other hand, aside from the massive big-budget hits of Barbie and Mario, there were also a number of mid-budget films that did very well: John Wick 4, Sound of Freedom, Five Nights at Freddy's, Cocaine Bear and M3GAN all exceeded expectations. So it's hard to interpret this as the "middle class" of movies disappearing. I'd say it's the opposite, in fact. People have gotten sick of the big-budget crap that follows the same formula (note how most of those bombs are superhero movies). It's really the big-budget films that are falling apart.
- justrealist 3y ago
  To be more precise, those mid-budget films all did well relative to their budgets. Marvels still made far more money, but the budget was so bloated that Marvel took a loss.
  - jerf 3y ago
    Five Nights at Freddy's: $286,595,570 The Marvels: $197,035,186 That's how badly Marvel movies are bombing now. FNaF actually straight-up beat Marvel, and by a very comfortable margin. There is no minimizing this. This is disastrous for Disney.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      They lost at the box office, but reviews for The Marvels suggest it's the better movie (although not by much). That's even taking into account the fact that horror tends to get worse reviews as a genre. There are a lot of reasons why The Marvels might have performed so much worse in ticket sales (I'm guessing superhero fatigue, and the character(s) not being very popular to begin with had a lot to do with it), but Disney's MCU can recover as long as they're willing to put more effort into giving people a story worth watching. The NYT's review was titled: "You’ve Seen This Movie 32 Times Before"
- g9yuayon 3y ago
  > 2023 had a lot of big-budget bombs. Ant-Man, Indiana Jones, Mission Impossible, Transformers, The Flash, Fast X, Blue Beetle, Elemental, Shazam!, and the Marvels all underperformed somewhere on the scale from "disappointment" to "disaster". And rightly so. The so-called special effects in those superhero movies are really getting exhausting. What's the point of having superpower yet battling like a peasant in medieval times? What's the point of having super intelligence yet making so many illogical decisions? What's the point of having the best technologies on earth yet having your tribe living in dirt and fighting with rhinos and using duels to elect your leaders? I can even tolerate such plot holes if the movies have good stories or interesting characters, but do they?
intalentive 3y ago
I miss “smart” mid-budget movies of the kind Miramax used to put out in the 90s. With a few exceptions they don’t seem to be as prevalent. The market has changed.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  I miss the cheesy but wholesome comedies and parodies of the 1990s and 2000s: Anger Management, Rush Hour, The Cable Guy, American Pie, Scary Movie, Bruce Almighty, Eurotrip, Tropic Thunder, Hot Shots, Borat, Idiocracy, How High, White Chicks, etc. We can't have any like those in this age because someone on Twitter will claim to be offended. Good thing to back-up those old gems as well before they get cancelled/edited to comply with modern sensibilities.
  - metabagel 3y ago
    > We can't have any like those in this age because someone on Twitter will claim to be offended. I think this is mostly an exaggeration. I think there will always be an audience for tasteless and raunchy movies. It might be a good long while before we see another white actor in blackface though, I'll grant you that.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      > I think there will always be an audience for tasteless and raunchy movies. There still is an audience but that audience is not cared to by Hollywood for fear of social media backlash. That's why nobody's making edgy comedies and parodies anymore and the movies currently been made massively alter their original IP to conform to modern identity politics("put a brown chick in it and make her lame and gay") South Park are the only ones left because they're not Hollywood.
  - bsder 3y ago
    It's the economics. John Wick is a really good example. Without the DVD aftersales, John Wick would never have gotten a second movie. Without DVD aftersales, movies in the $10-$25 million range simply can't exist. Matt Damon talks a lot about this.
whartung 3y ago
Isn't this because the mid range is going straight into the streaming services, rather than through (an I assume expensive) distribution process into theaters? Theater going is expensive (I think it's expensive), the alternatives are "pretty good", so that impacts overall theater presence. Having a "block buster" that can justify the expense of marketing and distributing to the now weaker theater market seems like a prudent thing for the studios and it's just part of the current reality of entertainment. I know I don't see many movies in the theater. I don't know if I've seen anything since Top Gun. I was hoping to see Dune 2, but it's delayed. I will be seeing the Ferrari bio-pic, simply because I'm a Mann nut. Otherwise, we rented Barbie. We rented GoG3, we'll be renting Oppenheimer. And whatever other random stuff I sleep through from Netflix.
- smileysteve 3y ago
  Theater going is expensive relative to watching at home. Examples; Theater: $6 discount discount tickets, $12-$20 normal tickets, $20+ Imax (light) ticket; $10+ in refreshments per person. At Home: $13/month streaming service, $20 purchase, $2.99->$5.99 rental for 2-6 people. Soft drink; $1, Popcorn $1 Then consider the comforts: No drive; no other patrons on cell phones or making noise, can pause a 2hr+ (more commonly 3) for bathroom and refreshment breaks.
lapcat 3y ago
I think that the data is missing something crucial, because it only talks about percentages. It's also important to know the total absolute (inflation-adjusted) revenue for each year. I'd like to know if the non-top movies are doing worse than before, in absolute terms, which we can't tell from the charts.
BeetleB 3y ago
Please, please, do not override my mouse scroll wheel behavior!
- Probiotic6081 3y ago
  Please, please, please let me scroll where I want, lord knows it would be the first time
AlbertCory 3y ago
I don't think that "inequality" is even a thing when it comes to movies. Who said that all movies should be equal? Some watercolor "art" sells for $15 at an art-and-wine street fair while other pieces have five figure prices (or, of course, much more). Secondly, as others have pointed out, the mid-budget movies are now on streaming or cable channels. But yes, special effects extravaganzas are going to die out, just like Westerns and musicals did. Until they get revived.

32 points by tennisprince 3y ago

I feel like consumer choice has kinda gone too far with movies, people never cross genres because they never have to go along with something they don’t like.

arglebargle123 3y ago
You should see the book requests posted to communities like r/printsf now. We have genre readers that have evolved into "I only read material containing this exact set of tropes" it's straight up weird.

aethros 3y ago

I wonder how valuable this is as a metric, since much of what gets viewed is a function of art as much as it is marketing, production, or other elements. Some years studios make movies that are just bad--I wouldn't necessarily expect the income distribution to remain balanced across years. Furthermore, these graphs don't appear to take into account the production cost of movies. If a low-budget film garners critical acclaim, it means more than a studio movie that just broke even, although their gross incomes could be pretty similar.

rob74 3y ago

I'm not sure 2023 is a good year to compare against, what with the actors' and writers' unions striking for several months? If you look at the list of "2023 movies", you see titles such as Coraline (Remastered), Star Wars Episode VI, Titanic (25 yr Anniversary) and probably some others that I missed which are not really 2023 movies...

mjr00 3y ago

2023 had a lot of big-budget bombs. Ant-Man, Indiana Jones, Mission Impossible, Transformers, The Flash, Fast X, Blue Beetle, Elemental, Shazam!, and the Marvels all underperformed somewhere on the scale from "disappointment" to "disaster". On the other hand, aside from the massive big-budget hits of Barbie and Mario, there were also a number of mid-budget films that did very well: John Wick 4, Sound of Freedom, Five Nights at Freddy's, Cocaine Bear and M3GAN all exceeded expectations. So it's hard to interpret this as the "middle class" of movies disappearing. I'd say it's the opposite, in fact. People have gotten sick of the big-budget crap that follows the same formula (note how most of those bombs are superhero movies). It's really the big-budget films that are falling apart.

justrealist 3y ago
To be more precise, those mid-budget films all did well relative to their budgets. Marvels still made far more money, but the budget was so bloated that Marvel took a loss.
- jerf 3y ago
  Five Nights at Freddy's: $286,595,570 The Marvels: $197,035,186 That's how badly Marvel movies are bombing now. FNaF actually straight-up beat Marvel, and by a very comfortable margin. There is no minimizing this. This is disastrous for Disney.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    They lost at the box office, but reviews for The Marvels suggest it's the better movie (although not by much). That's even taking into account the fact that horror tends to get worse reviews as a genre. There are a lot of reasons why The Marvels might have performed so much worse in ticket sales (I'm guessing superhero fatigue, and the character(s) not being very popular to begin with had a lot to do with it), but Disney's MCU can recover as long as they're willing to put more effort into giving people a story worth watching. The NYT's review was titled: "You’ve Seen This Movie 32 Times Before"
g9yuayon 3y ago
> 2023 had a lot of big-budget bombs. Ant-Man, Indiana Jones, Mission Impossible, Transformers, The Flash, Fast X, Blue Beetle, Elemental, Shazam!, and the Marvels all underperformed somewhere on the scale from "disappointment" to "disaster". And rightly so. The so-called special effects in those superhero movies are really getting exhausting. What's the point of having superpower yet battling like a peasant in medieval times? What's the point of having super intelligence yet making so many illogical decisions? What's the point of having the best technologies on earth yet having your tribe living in dirt and fighting with rhinos and using duels to elect your leaders? I can even tolerate such plot holes if the movies have good stories or interesting characters, but do they?

intalentive 3y ago

I miss “smart” mid-budget movies of the kind Miramax used to put out in the 90s. With a few exceptions they don’t seem to be as prevalent. The market has changed.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
I miss the cheesy but wholesome comedies and parodies of the 1990s and 2000s: Anger Management, Rush Hour, The Cable Guy, American Pie, Scary Movie, Bruce Almighty, Eurotrip, Tropic Thunder, Hot Shots, Borat, Idiocracy, How High, White Chicks, etc. We can't have any like those in this age because someone on Twitter will claim to be offended. Good thing to back-up those old gems as well before they get cancelled/edited to comply with modern sensibilities.
- metabagel 3y ago
  > We can't have any like those in this age because someone on Twitter will claim to be offended. I think this is mostly an exaggeration. I think there will always be an audience for tasteless and raunchy movies. It might be a good long while before we see another white actor in blackface though, I'll grant you that.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    > I think there will always be an audience for tasteless and raunchy movies. There still is an audience but that audience is not cared to by Hollywood for fear of social media backlash. That's why nobody's making edgy comedies and parodies anymore and the movies currently been made massively alter their original IP to conform to modern identity politics("put a brown chick in it and make her lame and gay") South Park are the only ones left because they're not Hollywood.
- bsder 3y ago
  It's the economics. John Wick is a really good example. Without the DVD aftersales, John Wick would never have gotten a second movie. Without DVD aftersales, movies in the $10-$25 million range simply can't exist. Matt Damon talks a lot about this.

whartung 3y ago

Isn't this because the mid range is going straight into the streaming services, rather than through (an I assume expensive) distribution process into theaters? Theater going is expensive (I think it's expensive), the alternatives are "pretty good", so that impacts overall theater presence. Having a "block buster" that can justify the expense of marketing and distributing to the now weaker theater market seems like a prudent thing for the studios and it's just part of the current reality of entertainment. I know I don't see many movies in the theater. I don't know if I've seen anything since Top Gun. I was hoping to see Dune 2, but it's delayed. I will be seeing the Ferrari bio-pic, simply because I'm a Mann nut. Otherwise, we rented Barbie. We rented GoG3, we'll be renting Oppenheimer. And whatever other random stuff I sleep through from Netflix.

smileysteve 3y ago
Theater going is expensive relative to watching at home. Examples; Theater: $6 discount discount tickets, $12-$20 normal tickets, $20+ Imax (light) ticket; $10+ in refreshments per person. At Home: $13/month streaming service, $20 purchase, $2.99->$5.99 rental for 2-6 people. Soft drink; $1, Popcorn $1 Then consider the comforts: No drive; no other patrons on cell phones or making noise, can pause a 2hr+ (more commonly 3) for bathroom and refreshment breaks.

lapcat 3y ago

I think that the data is missing something crucial, because it only talks about percentages. It's also important to know the total absolute (inflation-adjusted) revenue for each year. I'd like to know if the non-top movies are doing worse than before, in absolute terms, which we can't tell from the charts.

BeetleB 3y ago

Please, please, do not override my mouse scroll wheel behavior!

Probiotic6081 3y ago
Please, please, please let me scroll where I want, lord knows it would be the first time

AlbertCory 3y ago

I don't think that "inequality" is even a thing when it comes to movies. Who said that all movies should be equal? Some watercolor "art" sells for $15 at an art-and-wine street fair while other pieces have five figure prices (or, of course, much more). Secondly, as others have pointed out, the mid-budget movies are now on streaming or cable channels. But yes, special effects extravaganzas are going to die out, just like Westerns and musicals did. Until they get revived.