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"Because of the ongoing pursuit of Hollywood" A better analogy is obviously the best hollywood movie is the one with the most and fanciest special effects. Un

by VLM 11y ago

"Because of the ongoing pursuit of Hollywood" A better analogy is obviously the best hollywood movie is the one with the most and fanciest special effects. Unfortunately 95% of the population doesn't want to watch a special effects demo reel, not even for free. And the analogy is the same problem with graphics, true the demoscene subculture is fascinated with graphics and its very technologically impressive, but 95% of the population responds with "meh". (edited to add, the truly unfortunate part is the 5% of the population who want special effects reels is financially successful enough to completely prevent all advancement of the art other than the local maxima of special effects, so the 95% of the population who can't stand it are stuck, and are unserved by the monopoly / ogliopoly. The situation with games isn't as bad and the "casuals" are making huge piles of cash for non-3d developers, and the goal of the AAA studios and their journalist hangers on is to create and insert enough blocks in the marketplace to eliminate casual from competition and keep "gaming" a stereotypical pure 3-d WW2 FPS sequel experience, and the problem is technology has pretty much topped out eliminating "better graphics" as a marketing weapon)

maccard 11y ago
I think you're dramatically overestimating the number of people who don't want to see demo reels in the cinema. In our tight technical circles, sure, I agree that most people don't. But our tech circles are such a small percentage of the audience of hollywood films. There are plenty of movies that aren't drowning in VFX released every year, yet the numbers don't lie. Avengers, Harry Potter, Avatar, Pirates of the carribean (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films for more)style films blow others out of the water. It's extrememly clear that people want films that are knee deep in VFX. If they didn't, then they'd stop spending 1.5 billion dollars on going to see the avengers, and see something else instead.
- VLM 11y ago
  I see truth in what you write. However, given that I can't see a movie for less than $15, that $1.5B represents only 100M views, and if you theorize that only 1B of the world population is wealthy enough to occasionally blow $15 to watch a movie, that implies 90% of the population is uninterested in VFX demo reels, which isn't all that dramatically different from my engineering estimate, especially given we could cherry pick examples to "prove" either your claim or mine, or play games with $ per unit time to reach either conclusion. I completely agree that $1.5B is important business, yet it makes my point that appealing to a narrowcasted local maxima of VFX fans also simultaneously means perhaps 90% of the population will be uninterested. And the point I'm trying to make isn't that 10% of the population is irrelevant, but if someone could crack the code and disrupt the industry and instead of narrowcasting, make something of broad appeal that perhaps half the population would be interested in, that mysterious idea would be worth about $7.5B which is actually pretty good revenue for a startup. But it'll never happen if the entrenched oligopoly isn't disrupted. I honestly have no idea how to exploit the market, but "obviously" there's a huge under served market with possibly staggering revenue, for some future startup that can figure out how to make movies that appeal to more than about 10% of the population. Piles of money are sitting out there, waiting to be harvested... There are similar analogies and financials with pop music. Entrenched industries have pretty much figured out how to sell simple mass produced formulaic music to each generation's (each years?) teens. There seems no biological or psychological reason a better industry competitor couldn't sell 3 to 7 times as much if they could appeal to more than young kids. Eventually someone will crack that startup opportunity and make mid nine figures. Finally ditto, kind of, with sports. "Everybody is a baseball fan" but only about 5% of the population actually watches the world series. If you take existing advertising revenue and multiply it by a fraction representing some magic startup pixie dust that gets maybe 50% of the population to watch, that's some serious ad revenue money; in fact its "football" type money, LOL, which is a whole nother topic.

by VLM 11y ago

maccard 11y ago

I think you're dramatically overestimating the number of people who don't want to see demo reels in the cinema. In our tight technical circles, sure, I agree that most people don't. But our tech circles are such a small percentage of the audience of hollywood films. There are plenty of movies that aren't drowning in VFX released every year, yet the numbers don't lie. Avengers, Harry Potter, Avatar, Pirates of the carribean (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films for more)style films blow others out of the water. It's extrememly clear that people want films that are knee deep in VFX. If they didn't, then they'd stop spending 1.5 billion dollars on going to see the avengers, and see something else instead.

VLM 11y ago
I see truth in what you write. However, given that I can't see a movie for less than $15, that $1.5B represents only 100M views, and if you theorize that only 1B of the world population is wealthy enough to occasionally blow $15 to watch a movie, that implies 90% of the population is uninterested in VFX demo reels, which isn't all that dramatically different from my engineering estimate, especially given we could cherry pick examples to "prove" either your claim or mine, or play games with $ per unit time to reach either conclusion. I completely agree that $1.5B is important business, yet it makes my point that appealing to a narrowcasted local maxima of VFX fans also simultaneously means perhaps 90% of the population will be uninterested. And the point I'm trying to make isn't that 10% of the population is irrelevant, but if someone could crack the code and disrupt the industry and instead of narrowcasting, make something of broad appeal that perhaps half the population would be interested in, that mysterious idea would be worth about $7.5B which is actually pretty good revenue for a startup. But it'll never happen if the entrenched oligopoly isn't disrupted. I honestly have no idea how to exploit the market, but "obviously" there's a huge under served market with possibly staggering revenue, for some future startup that can figure out how to make movies that appeal to more than about 10% of the population. Piles of money are sitting out there, waiting to be harvested... There are similar analogies and financials with pop music. Entrenched industries have pretty much figured out how to sell simple mass produced formulaic music to each generation's (each years?) teens. There seems no biological or psychological reason a better industry competitor couldn't sell 3 to 7 times as much if they could appeal to more than young kids. Eventually someone will crack that startup opportunity and make mid nine figures. Finally ditto, kind of, with sports. "Everybody is a baseball fan" but only about 5% of the population actually watches the world series. If you take existing advertising revenue and multiply it by a fraction representing some magic startup pixie dust that gets maybe 50% of the population to watch, that's some serious ad revenue money; in fact its "football" type money, LOL, which is a whole nother topic.