6 ms·

The cultural relevance of movies, and American made movies isn't going anywhere anytime soon, but I think the economics of streaming is finally playing out in t

by awongh 7mo ago

The cultural relevance of movies, and American made movies isn't going anywhere anytime soon, but I think the economics of streaming is finally playing out in the loss of the geographical concentration of power in Hollywood and California. This is the endgame of the feedback loop of streamers causing industry consolidation... the direct connection of dollars people spend to sit in a theatre seat was slowly declining, but now I think it's gotten so small that it no longer matters- and once the whole box-office feedback loop disappears a lot of the economics of how films are produced are being forced to change. One of the reasons that people have loved to make fun of Hollywood for literally it's entire existence (besides the fact that the meta talk is self-indulgent artist stuff) is that making movies with so much money and waste is fundamentally ridiculous. The optimistic viewpoint is that maybe new AI production tools will trigger a re-democratization of creative movies in the next wave, like in the 70s and the 90s indies.

sbarre 7mo ago
As much as I support unions and labour rights, the last SAG-AFTRA strike mostly just helped the big studios realize they could do more with less. Hollywood is a factory town at the end of the day, and we all know what happened to most factory towns in America. This one is just getting there a few decades after the others.
- awongh 7mo ago
  This is definitely another case where a union could either understand where the bigger economic forces are headed (in this case globalization, IP licensing, residuals that no longer make sense, attention economy fracturing the marketplace etc) and adapt to how people will consume content in the future, or double down on an economic model that is one generation behind. In theory the union is the only org capable of standing up to the streamers' buying power, but it has to make sense within a business model where consumers pay one monthly fee for content. I'm not even sure what that really looks like in the end. Maybe it's also that the FTC allowed all this monopolization to happen, and turns out that having three media companies in the US is bad.
  - raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
    How will unions help stand up to streamers? Many of the “Netflix originals” are already just co financed or licensed foreign films and many others are filmed in Canada. People always think unions are magic when I saw in my small town where I grew up in South GA was that when union demands got to onerous - factories just picked up and left. Just like software engineers scream unionization when tech companies can just expand departments overseas and as a bonus, they don’t have to worry about H1B shifting policies
- ThrowawayR2 7mo ago
  Ironic that pro-unionization people on HN frequently use SAG as an example of what a software industry union could look like. Ignoring that that's absurd (no other engineering union I know of works like that), just as the parent highlights, unions won't make a difference when the economics of an industry no longer make sense and that is what is happening to software right now.
  - shimman 7mo ago
    Don't really see anyone doing this, more like the pro-union arguments I see on HN are mostly about getting paid for on-call, wanting a worker elected member to the board, and having leadership actually held accountable for their decisions. Getting paid for being on-call seems straight forward to me.
  - awongh 7mo ago
    One of the main differences I've heard referenced is that acting and being a movie star means that the work is fundamentally differentiable via the end-product, where producing software is meant to have the same outcome no matter who creates it. That is just not the case with acting, where the end product being differentiable is part of the inherent value of the product. Also, it's probably true that SAG's loss of industry power has very much to do with the loss of the power of movie stars in general.
    - Jensson 7mo ago
      > One of the main differences I've heard referenced is that acting and being a movie star means that the work is fundamentally differentiable via the end-product, where producing software is meant to have the same outcome no matter who creates it. But that never happens. The different browsers should in theory be exactly the same but they are different in many ways due to engineers being different.
- bradchris 7mo ago
  Well, Hollywood is not the end all be all of Los Angeles (though that is the image Hollywood projects out onto the world). It’s not even Los Angeles’ biggest industry. Everything from China enters through the Port of Los Angeles, which is the biggest in the United States. In fact, the top two busiest ports in the USA are both Los Angeles and Long Beach (which directly borders Los Angeles). This is just one example, but Los Angeles, despite its own external projections and self-mythology to the contrary, is much more than just a one industry town. Aside from shipping and logistics, it’s also a center for auto+aerospace manufacturing, and a major healthcare hub. Downtown Los Angeles, which actually serves as a glorified rail freight hub, is still far and away the nation’s capital of garment manufacturing, with over 80%(!) of the nation’s made-in-USA clothing produced here (this is downstream of being the biggest port in the US). Los Angeles has always existed as a center of industry and agriculture before Hollywood, and while the decline of Hollywood certainly hurts the city, it will not kill it. SF, ironically, is actually moreso a factory town: if one day its tech champions decided to up and leave, there wouldn’t be much left relative to its current GDP. But one thing that may protect both SF and Los Angeles from ever becoming Detroit are their beautiful weather and geography. People will always want to live here, despite the costs. See Santa Barbara, a real city with no major industry to claim as its own, yet it still boasts some of the highest real estate prices in the world.
  - sbarre 7mo ago
    I never said Hollywood == Los Angeles. I meant Hollywood as the collection of all of the film/TV people and industry that are geographically located in that area. This was never about the city itself. Nor was it in comparison to, or competition with, San Francisco, but I guess projectors are inexpensive on Amazon these days. Sorry that I touched a nerve there.
fullshark 7mo ago
Cultural relevance of movies is already greatly diminished. Maybe these AI tools will trigger a reversion of movies to the days of the nickelodeons where plot, story, and character are irrelevant and people just shell out money (attention) as long as the moving image looks cool.
- awongh 7mo ago
  Can't it be both? In Marvel movies the plot, story, and characters are irrelevant and it's still the current greatest American cultural export.
  - philwelch 7mo ago
    They might have been in the last decade, but now it’s just yet another franchise audiences have stopped caring about.
  - fullshark 7mo ago
    There will be some creative people that can now tell stories they couldn't before with AI, but I think by and large the major use case is to create short form video clips to get attention on the internet (advertising). I don't foresee a "movie" (meaning narrative story told via visuals and sounds in 1-3 hours) renaissance happening, in part because I think the form is fully mature and there's not really much more that can be done with it. It's essentially gonna be where Jazz music is today in 40 years, it will have its fans, and there will be talented practitioners, but every year it will be more and more culturally irrelevant.
    - awongh 7mo ago
      It could be "film" as a medium is dead- but most likely 1+ hour video fictional story telling as a medium is just a very broad category and will probably continue to exist as a format that people enjoy. It could be that in 20 years the Oscars are like the Jazz awards (the Grammys? - I listen to Jazz but I can't name a single Jazz Grammy winner)
the_af 7mo ago
> The optimistic viewpoint is that maybe new AI production tools will trigger a re-democratization of creative movies I don't think so. Part of the downfall of movies -- blockbusters movies anyway, the kind where being a box office hit matters -- is that they have seemed produced like AI slop even before AI. Making it easier to produce more slop isn't going to fix this. Then there's one thing making noise in my brain. It's not polite to say it, but here it is anyway: should movies be democratized? And art in general? Maybe people without the means of making art that reaches millions shouldn't be enabled by AI. Maybe it's ok that not everyone can produce this kind of art. Maybe the world is saved from a crapton of, well, garbage. More than what's currently being produced, anyway. As for non-blockbuster art, it's already democratic. Everyone can grab a phone camera or a paintbrush and create art for their friends and family. And that's ok.
- jl6 7mo ago
  Anton Ego in Ratatouille gives this take on what democratization should mean: Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.
  - the_af 7mo ago
    That's a pretty good take, I think. What I object to is this notion that everyone should make art, and that AI empowers them. As in (and yes, I've read this, I'm not making this up) "people without writing skills can now write novels". That seems wrong to me. People without writing skills (or drawing, or movie making) should not be making those things.
    - mentalgear 7mo ago
      I would distinguish: they could make them for their own entertainment, but should not market them. But come to think about it, how much non-AI slop is out there that has become popular from entities with no or mediocre talent in it: generic Hollywood blockbusters, supplements, yellow papers, influencers ... all slop that became popular not due to its quality but secondary resources in form of marketing, placement and persistence of the propellants.
jrowen 7mo ago
I think the issue is that content creation and distribution has already been fully democratized. How many hours do people spend watching videos shot by individuals on their phones in their apartments? Combined with streaming, there's just an overabundance of "good enough" content at everyone's fingertips. The moat that protected big-budget feature films is gone. You don't see a trailer for a movie and salivate and wait for it to come out, it just blends in to the stream of 5000 other things you can watch right now.
- awongh 7mo ago
  Like I said elsewhere, I think people still want to watch 1+ hour fiction stories that are compelling. This is a broad category that I think people still want that's differentiated from 30sec vertical video, and that should exist in the cultural conversation. It doesn't feel fully democratized because if it was, you'd see more indie things in this same format competing with "big budget" movies on the same playing field.
  - jrowen 7mo ago
    > I think people still want to watch 1+ hour fiction stories that are compelling. I mean, "want to" is one thing, but the numbers show what they end up doing. Instagram and TikTok, like video games as someone else mentioned, have taken a significant share of the "entertainment hours" budget. I feel like the impact of the low-to-no-budget content creator is undeniable (this traces back to ebaumsworld and early YouTube, it was just internet dorks then, now it's been industrialized. Gen Z probably wholeheartedly prefers this type of content). My point was that content creation has been democratized -- unfunded individuals can now compete -- not that making traditional Hollywood-style movies has been. It's gone so far they've been phased out, the entire premise is largely untenable at this point. That specific sector was actually somewhat more democratized in the late stages of the heyday, when a Hollywood movie called Dude, Where's My Car was made, and indie films did flourish because the industry was healthy enough to support them.
    - epolanski 7mo ago
cnobody 7mo ago
American movies suck.
closewith 7mo ago
The cultural relevance of all kinds of American media has been declining as the U.S. is not cool or aspirational anymore.
- HerbManic 7mo ago
  For some nations there is still a sort of paternal fixation with US influence but it does seem to be fading with time. Couldnt point to any one factor than maybe just an overall sort of boredom of it.
- jrowen 7mo ago
  Can you comment further on this? As an American it's kind of hard to see that. Is this just kind of a temporary reaction to the Trump administration or a larger trend? What is taking its place? Are there more localized media pockets (e.g. is there a significant German-language Instagram influencer world)? Geographically which areas are you talking about?
  - shiroiuma 7mo ago
    People no longer look up to America like they did 40-50 years ago. It's been a slow decline, really starting I think in the early 2000s with GWB's "war on terror" and stupid invasion of Iraq, and the election of Trump accelerated it, and the re-election of Trump has really put the final nails in the coffin. Instead of a force for good that sometimes screwed up as America was formerly viewed, it's viewed as an empire in rapid decline with a toxic culture. It's not perceived quite as badly as Russia, but it's getting there.
    - jrowen 7mo ago
      That's not really about media though. While it does factor into the overall sentiment, a think a lot of people can enjoy America's cultural exports regardless of how they feel about the geopolitical side of things (certainly we can). I'm just curious because, for better or worse, American movies, music, and TV still seem globally dominant from my POV and it'd be interesting to know if and how that is changing. There's kind of a huge moat, other countries haven't built out these global powerhouse media industries. Another layer of the moat is how much that media and tech hegemony has entrenched English as the global language. Any culture based on a different language is going to have a really hard time getting beyond their borders. When someone says that the relevance of American media is in decline, that implies that something else is becoming more relevant. There has to be something there beyond "America sucks now."
epolanski 7mo ago
Small but important correction: the biggest issue for the movie industry aren't streaming services or them filming in locations with good tax incentives like UK or Australia but Youtube. It's hard to compete with millions of videomakers, some of them extremely skilled and able to produce interesting content on a budget.
groundzeros2015 7mo ago
> The cultural relevance of movies, and American made movies isn't going anywhere It already has. People under 20 do not have the connection to movies. They don’t have a share experience around it - maybe picking up a handful of family movies and the occasional marvel or spiderman.

by awongh 7mo ago

sbarre 7mo ago

As much as I support unions and labour rights, the last SAG-AFTRA strike mostly just helped the big studios realize they could do more with less. Hollywood is a factory town at the end of the day, and we all know what happened to most factory towns in America. This one is just getting there a few decades after the others.

awongh 7mo ago
This is definitely another case where a union could either understand where the bigger economic forces are headed (in this case globalization, IP licensing, residuals that no longer make sense, attention economy fracturing the marketplace etc) and adapt to how people will consume content in the future, or double down on an economic model that is one generation behind. In theory the union is the only org capable of standing up to the streamers' buying power, but it has to make sense within a business model where consumers pay one monthly fee for content. I'm not even sure what that really looks like in the end. Maybe it's also that the FTC allowed all this monopolization to happen, and turns out that having three media companies in the US is bad.
- raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
  How will unions help stand up to streamers? Many of the “Netflix originals” are already just co financed or licensed foreign films and many others are filmed in Canada. People always think unions are magic when I saw in my small town where I grew up in South GA was that when union demands got to onerous - factories just picked up and left. Just like software engineers scream unionization when tech companies can just expand departments overseas and as a bonus, they don’t have to worry about H1B shifting policies
ThrowawayR2 7mo ago
Ironic that pro-unionization people on HN frequently use SAG as an example of what a software industry union could look like. Ignoring that that's absurd (no other engineering union I know of works like that), just as the parent highlights, unions won't make a difference when the economics of an industry no longer make sense and that is what is happening to software right now.
- shimman 7mo ago
  Don't really see anyone doing this, more like the pro-union arguments I see on HN are mostly about getting paid for on-call, wanting a worker elected member to the board, and having leadership actually held accountable for their decisions. Getting paid for being on-call seems straight forward to me.
- awongh 7mo ago
  One of the main differences I've heard referenced is that acting and being a movie star means that the work is fundamentally differentiable via the end-product, where producing software is meant to have the same outcome no matter who creates it. That is just not the case with acting, where the end product being differentiable is part of the inherent value of the product. Also, it's probably true that SAG's loss of industry power has very much to do with the loss of the power of movie stars in general.
  - Jensson 7mo ago
    > One of the main differences I've heard referenced is that acting and being a movie star means that the work is fundamentally differentiable via the end-product, where producing software is meant to have the same outcome no matter who creates it. But that never happens. The different browsers should in theory be exactly the same but they are different in many ways due to engineers being different.
bradchris 7mo ago
Well, Hollywood is not the end all be all of Los Angeles (though that is the image Hollywood projects out onto the world). It’s not even Los Angeles’ biggest industry. Everything from China enters through the Port of Los Angeles, which is the biggest in the United States. In fact, the top two busiest ports in the USA are both Los Angeles and Long Beach (which directly borders Los Angeles). This is just one example, but Los Angeles, despite its own external projections and self-mythology to the contrary, is much more than just a one industry town. Aside from shipping and logistics, it’s also a center for auto+aerospace manufacturing, and a major healthcare hub. Downtown Los Angeles, which actually serves as a glorified rail freight hub, is still far and away the nation’s capital of garment manufacturing, with over 80%(!) of the nation’s made-in-USA clothing produced here (this is downstream of being the biggest port in the US). Los Angeles has always existed as a center of industry and agriculture before Hollywood, and while the decline of Hollywood certainly hurts the city, it will not kill it. SF, ironically, is actually moreso a factory town: if one day its tech champions decided to up and leave, there wouldn’t be much left relative to its current GDP. But one thing that may protect both SF and Los Angeles from ever becoming Detroit are their beautiful weather and geography. People will always want to live here, despite the costs. See Santa Barbara, a real city with no major industry to claim as its own, yet it still boasts some of the highest real estate prices in the world.
- sbarre 7mo ago
  I never said Hollywood == Los Angeles. I meant Hollywood as the collection of all of the film/TV people and industry that are geographically located in that area. This was never about the city itself. Nor was it in comparison to, or competition with, San Francisco, but I guess projectors are inexpensive on Amazon these days. Sorry that I touched a nerve there.

fullshark 7mo ago

Cultural relevance of movies is already greatly diminished. Maybe these AI tools will trigger a reversion of movies to the days of the nickelodeons where plot, story, and character are irrelevant and people just shell out money (attention) as long as the moving image looks cool.

awongh 7mo ago
Can't it be both? In Marvel movies the plot, story, and characters are irrelevant and it's still the current greatest American cultural export.
- philwelch 7mo ago
  They might have been in the last decade, but now it’s just yet another franchise audiences have stopped caring about.
- fullshark 7mo ago
  There will be some creative people that can now tell stories they couldn't before with AI, but I think by and large the major use case is to create short form video clips to get attention on the internet (advertising). I don't foresee a "movie" (meaning narrative story told via visuals and sounds in 1-3 hours) renaissance happening, in part because I think the form is fully mature and there's not really much more that can be done with it. It's essentially gonna be where Jazz music is today in 40 years, it will have its fans, and there will be talented practitioners, but every year it will be more and more culturally irrelevant.
  - awongh 7mo ago
    It could be "film" as a medium is dead- but most likely 1+ hour video fictional story telling as a medium is just a very broad category and will probably continue to exist as a format that people enjoy. It could be that in 20 years the Oscars are like the Jazz awards (the Grammys? - I listen to Jazz but I can't name a single Jazz Grammy winner)

the_af 7mo ago

> The optimistic viewpoint is that maybe new AI production tools will trigger a re-democratization of creative movies I don't think so. Part of the downfall of movies -- blockbusters movies anyway, the kind where being a box office hit matters -- is that they have seemed produced like AI slop even before AI. Making it easier to produce more slop isn't going to fix this. Then there's one thing making noise in my brain. It's not polite to say it, but here it is anyway: should movies be democratized? And art in general? Maybe people without the means of making art that reaches millions shouldn't be enabled by AI. Maybe it's ok that not everyone can produce this kind of art. Maybe the world is saved from a crapton of, well, garbage. More than what's currently being produced, anyway. As for non-blockbuster art, it's already democratic. Everyone can grab a phone camera or a paintbrush and create art for their friends and family. And that's ok.

jl6 7mo ago
Anton Ego in Ratatouille gives this take on what democratization should mean: Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.
- the_af 7mo ago
  That's a pretty good take, I think. What I object to is this notion that everyone should make art, and that AI empowers them. As in (and yes, I've read this, I'm not making this up) "people without writing skills can now write novels". That seems wrong to me. People without writing skills (or drawing, or movie making) should not be making those things.
  - mentalgear 7mo ago
    I would distinguish: they could make them for their own entertainment, but should not market them. But come to think about it, how much non-AI slop is out there that has become popular from entities with no or mediocre talent in it: generic Hollywood blockbusters, supplements, yellow papers, influencers ... all slop that became popular not due to its quality but secondary resources in form of marketing, placement and persistence of the propellants.

jrowen 7mo ago

I think the issue is that content creation and distribution has already been fully democratized. How many hours do people spend watching videos shot by individuals on their phones in their apartments? Combined with streaming, there's just an overabundance of "good enough" content at everyone's fingertips. The moat that protected big-budget feature films is gone. You don't see a trailer for a movie and salivate and wait for it to come out, it just blends in to the stream of 5000 other things you can watch right now.

awongh 7mo ago
Like I said elsewhere, I think people still want to watch 1+ hour fiction stories that are compelling. This is a broad category that I think people still want that's differentiated from 30sec vertical video, and that should exist in the cultural conversation. It doesn't feel fully democratized because if it was, you'd see more indie things in this same format competing with "big budget" movies on the same playing field.
- jrowen 7mo ago
  > I think people still want to watch 1+ hour fiction stories that are compelling. I mean, "want to" is one thing, but the numbers show what they end up doing. Instagram and TikTok, like video games as someone else mentioned, have taken a significant share of the "entertainment hours" budget. I feel like the impact of the low-to-no-budget content creator is undeniable (this traces back to ebaumsworld and early YouTube, it was just internet dorks then, now it's been industrialized. Gen Z probably wholeheartedly prefers this type of content). My point was that content creation has been democratized -- unfunded individuals can now compete -- not that making traditional Hollywood-style movies has been. It's gone so far they've been phased out, the entire premise is largely untenable at this point. That specific sector was actually somewhat more democratized in the late stages of the heyday, when a Hollywood movie called Dude, Where's My Car was made, and indie films did flourish because the industry was healthy enough to support them.
  - epolanski 7mo ago

cnobody 7mo ago

American movies suck.

closewith 7mo ago

The cultural relevance of all kinds of American media has been declining as the U.S. is not cool or aspirational anymore.

HerbManic 7mo ago
For some nations there is still a sort of paternal fixation with US influence but it does seem to be fading with time. Couldnt point to any one factor than maybe just an overall sort of boredom of it.
jrowen 7mo ago
Can you comment further on this? As an American it's kind of hard to see that. Is this just kind of a temporary reaction to the Trump administration or a larger trend? What is taking its place? Are there more localized media pockets (e.g. is there a significant German-language Instagram influencer world)? Geographically which areas are you talking about?
- shiroiuma 7mo ago
  People no longer look up to America like they did 40-50 years ago. It's been a slow decline, really starting I think in the early 2000s with GWB's "war on terror" and stupid invasion of Iraq, and the election of Trump accelerated it, and the re-election of Trump has really put the final nails in the coffin. Instead of a force for good that sometimes screwed up as America was formerly viewed, it's viewed as an empire in rapid decline with a toxic culture. It's not perceived quite as badly as Russia, but it's getting there.
  - jrowen 7mo ago
    That's not really about media though. While it does factor into the overall sentiment, a think a lot of people can enjoy America's cultural exports regardless of how they feel about the geopolitical side of things (certainly we can). I'm just curious because, for better or worse, American movies, music, and TV still seem globally dominant from my POV and it'd be interesting to know if and how that is changing. There's kind of a huge moat, other countries haven't built out these global powerhouse media industries. Another layer of the moat is how much that media and tech hegemony has entrenched English as the global language. Any culture based on a different language is going to have a really hard time getting beyond their borders. When someone says that the relevance of American media is in decline, that implies that something else is becoming more relevant. There has to be something there beyond "America sucks now."

epolanski 7mo ago

Small but important correction: the biggest issue for the movie industry aren't streaming services or them filming in locations with good tax incentives like UK or Australia but Youtube. It's hard to compete with millions of videomakers, some of them extremely skilled and able to produce interesting content on a budget.

groundzeros2015 7mo ago

> The cultural relevance of movies, and American made movies isn't going anywhere It already has. People under 20 do not have the connection to movies. They don’t have a share experience around it - maybe picking up a handful of family movies and the occasional marvel or spiderman.