9 ms·

They Took Our Myths

104 points by AndrewDucker 11y ago

rayiner 11y ago
Nothing stops storytellers of today from releasing their works as creative commons or public domain. And nothing stops the public from taking up these public domain works instead of the for-profit products released in movie theaters or in print.
- normloman 11y ago
  Their publishing company / record label / film studio stops them from releasing their work as CC / Public Domain. Because the middlemen of the entertainment industry want to ensure a profit. They're also the one's lobbying the government to make the copyright term longer and longer. So changing this is beyond the means of the lone storyteller or fan embracing an alternative. We need shorter copyright terms.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    So film the thing on your GoPro and publish directly on the internet.
    - coldtea 11y ago
      In the dellusional hope that "nothing" stops a self-budgeted GoPro filmed internet movie from competing with hundrend-million budget, non stop marketing, major studio distribution movie?
      - rayiner 11y ago
        That really kind of proves the point, doesn't it? If studios spending hundreds of millions to make/market movies is what gets people to watch them, then aren't they the ones adding most of the value of the movie? And if so, why should any proceeds from that process ever accrue to anyone who didn't make that original capital investment?
  - waterlesscloud 11y ago
    You don't need a publishing company / record label / film studio. You might use one to finance your work. Or market your work, which is their best talent these days. But you don't need them. You can produce and release your work freely without them.
    - tjradcliffe 11y ago
      Sure you can, but no one will read them. My novel "Darwin's Theorem" (available on Amazon for a nominal price in e-book format, a less-nominal price in paperback) is published under a CC license but that doesn't mean anyone will read it. The fundamentally borken part of the indie ecosystem is marketing/discovery. Publishers still act as gatekeepers for the reading public. Most people don't read and what they do read is almost entirely determined by the amount of marketing done for it, and while marketing is a learnable skill (I've run my own consulting shop, so done a lot of it) it is difficult to do on the kind of budget most indie authors have available for what amounts to a hobby. The indie music industry has done a better job of discovery but that's in part because music is consumable in much smaller pieces than novels. The solution to this in writing has been--to some extent--to return to serialization, but while that has worked a bit in non-fiction (people write blogs they turn into books) it has so far seen only one or two successes in fiction, and they have been... not notable for the quality of writing, for the most part. I've experimented with a couple of alternative forms to see if this can be overcome, but no luck so far. One was an illustrated serial prose format (finished version here: http://www.siduri.net/songsofalbion/songs_of_albion.html http://www.siduri.net/songsofalbion/songs_of_albion.html), the other an somewhat informal poemed illustrations format (http://www.siduri.net/cindylooyou/index.html http://www.siduri.net/cindylooyou/index.html) that appeared on the artist's blog and developed as a kind of jazz work as we tossed themes back and forth. The latter actually got a bigger following, although we promoted the former a lot more heavily. Go figure. So far it looks like conventional serial narratives--probably pod-cast--are the best bet for the indie author. Some kind of serial pod-cast will likely be my next move, more in the spirit of exploration than anything else. I'm fortunate to have some training as a voice actor, but the number conditions on an idie author to be successful are many, and the difficulty for readers in discovering work they might enjoy is considerable.
- AgentME 11y ago
  The problem is that nearly nothing opts in to do that (they don't have any incentive to; the system rewards the lucky ones that don't do that), so authors are blocked from using elements of modern culture and myths.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    If the shared "culture and myths" are so important, why don't people reward those that contribute to it?
    - advael 11y ago
      Because the short-term incentive of turning a profit doesn't match up with the long-term incentive of benefiting everyone. The latter can lead to the former, but it's neither sufficient nor necessary.
    - CamperBob2 11y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons The system is set up in a way that ensures that individual creators (or, rather, their rightsholders) can profit, at the expense of the public domain that no powerful entities can profitably defend. Basically, copyright is now a one-way street, when it was supposed to be a two-way bargain.
    - darkmighty 11y ago
      We're stopping people from growing and contributing to the mythos in favor of rewarding the original creators. But for current law the original creators are long dead by the copyright expiration date. No fantasy author in their right mind would think "Wow, my work will stop being censored only 90 years from now, even though I will be dead! I will refrain from writing it because my ancestors will make less money."
      - tzs 11y ago
        A fantasy author is getting a little bit too caught up in their fantasy world and forgetting how the real world works if they they think their decisions now will affect how much money their ancestors will make. :-)
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Try to make a movie using say Aladdin and i'm sure you will get some very nasty letters from Disney about trademarks etc.
  - dllthomas 11y ago
    If you did so without using Disney art (or things strongly resembling Disney art) I would actually be surprised if they managed to make trouble for you. Which isn't to say there's no chance I'll be surprised...
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      Well Apple Computers got into hot water with Apple Records (the Beatles label) not once but twice. First when the company was founded, and then when they started selling music via iTunes.
      - dllthomas 11y ago
        Sure, but that's a bit of a different area of law, and Apple Records ultimately lost :-p
- deciplex 11y ago
  Under what circumstances should a work enter the public domain, if ever?
- coldtea 11y ago
  >Nothing stops storytellers of today from releasing their works as creative commons or public domain. Yeah, nothing except no studio would touch those works if you tell them you want to put them out as public domain / CC, much less fund them (so visually they wont be able to compete in the first place). Besides, movie theaters have distrubution deals with those same studios and distributions companies, and as they wont be taking those movies, theaters wont get them either. >And nothing stops the public from taking up these public domain works instead of the for-profit products released in movie theaters or in print. Yeah, nothing except of actual non availability at a movie theater near them, or (especially for web based distribution) the relative power of hundrends of millions of advertising and marketing vs the obscurity of some new indie movie.
thwest 11y ago
Pinning a massive culture shift away from ancient mythos on something as particular as copyright law seems absurd. The move away from historical knowledge in general and towards a permanent-present is evidenced across our media, from entertainment to news to politics.
- zyxley 11y ago
  > pinning a massive culture shift away from ancient mythos on something as particular as copyright law I don't understand how you got from the article to this. The article's claim is more like there isn't enough of a culture shift, because ever-extending copyright terms means nothing is ending up in the public domain anymore.
Bognar 11y ago
This isn't relevant to the main point of the article, but the paragraph about the power of mythology reminded me of Frank Herbert's Dune. The book does an excellent job of dropping you into a new universe starting with the very first pages. Herbert relentlessly uses new terminology from that universe without explanation, but you gradually learn what the words mean through context. For me this is an immense aid to immersion since you are surrounded by the new universe, similar to learning a new language by living in the country that speaks it. If you haven't read Dune, go pick it up. It's a great piece of science fiction with a mythical element like the article describes.
- Jtsummers 11y ago
  Ursula Le Guin does a similar thing in all the novels of hers I've read. Even character/race descriptions sometimes are only provided piecemeal over the course of the novel rather than all up front. Allowing you to reexamine what you thought you knew or understood about the world and its peoples.
  - johnchristopher 11y ago
    Personally I think it's a cheap story-telling trick. http://english.bouletcorp.com/2010/05/21/fantasy/ http://english.bouletcorp.com/2010/05/21/fantasy/
- stuxnet79 11y ago
  William Gibson is really great at doing this as well.
  - johnchristopher 11y ago
    I disagree and I copy paste the comment I made last time (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8510478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8510478): In the sprawl trilogy, the big black character that gives the hero his mission he's [sic] using a fax machine embedded in the seat of the cab where they first met. A fax machine. That spit out paper with ink on it. It was already old tech and weird when I first read the book 4 years after the published date. In Dune, they are reading texts on ridulian crystal. When I read it in the 90's I thought "must be some kind of indestructible paper". Herbert didn't describe the item which incidentally allowed the 2000's SciFi series to show ridulian crystal as some kind of a very thin and intelligent screen reader. Ridulian crystal will never age but FAX machine, e-mail[0], etc will and they will pull you out of that suspension of disbelief state. With that said, and for what it's worth, I prefer Gibson to Herbert and I dislike made-up name such as `ridulian system`. [0] But let's not get into __that__ debate.
arifos1977 11y ago
Remember when this site was about tech?
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Copyright and tech is intertwined thanks to software...
- imgabe 11y ago
  Remember when this site didn't have comments bemoaning the decline in quality? Me neither.
- x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
  Technology is the study of applied knowledge. I think knowledge of culture and its effect on humans easily falls under that that umbrella.
- DanBC 11y ago
  Please could you post an archive.org link to the site when it was about tech? Maybe a link to an old version of the guidelines before they said "anything that good hackers would find interesting".
bhickey 11y ago
The article doesn't explain why Lovecraft's works are in the public domain. Lovecraft's intention was that R.H. Barlow serve as executor of his literary estate. My recollection is that this was never properly carried out, so control over the estate devolved to his aunt, Annie Gamwell. Gamwell turned Lovecraft's papers over to Barlow who deposited most of them in the John Hay Library at Brown University. Throughout all of this, the copyright remained vested in Gamwell. In the 1940s, Derleth approached Gamwell's survivors and requesting permission to reprint his work and later fraudulently asserted copyright over the entire literary estate. Derleth also bought out the reprint rights for volumes of Weird Tales that contained Lovecraft's work, but Lovecraft had retained copyright for all stories in Weird Tales published after 1926. His output between 1924 and 1926 amounts to six stories as far as I can tell. Derleth may have legitimately obtained the copyright on these stories, but I can't say with any certainty. S.T. Joshi probably knows for sure. As for everything published after 1926, Gamwell's survivors never renewed the copyright on Lovecraft's work, so the body entered the public domain. Edit: I'll add that I'm disappointed that Lovecraft's letters aren't freely available. Arkham House hasn't printed his collected letters in nearly 40 years. If Brown were willing to make digital copies of his correspondence freely available, I'd be willing to contribute toward their digitization.
aaron695 11y ago
> It's very easy to see that this trend has developed and accelerated over the last 30 years. In 1981, 7 out of 10 of the year's top-grossing movies were original material. In 2014, it was 1 out of 10. The best reason for this I've seen is repeated material plays well in the Asian etc markets. The initial movie becomes essentially an ad for the squeals. Because of the huge copyright infringement in these markets, ads are to expensive to run to the whole population to get them to the movies. But once the first movie is out the profit by sheer numbers in these markets on squeals makes it worth while.
- beachstartup 11y ago
  > The best reason for this I've seen is repeated material plays well in the Asian etc markets. The initial movie becomes essentially an ad for the squeals. wait, what? this is how sequels work everywhere, not just asia.
  - aaron695 11y ago
    Here's a discussion, not entirely. Bad movies can devalue in western culture, an anti-ad. This doesn't seem to be happening as much elsewhere. (Plus in the US they can afford real ads, ie new movies have a chance) http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2013/08/21/why-hollywood-is-obsessed-with-sequels/ http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2013/08/21/why-holly...
- e12e 11y ago
  I'm more interested in what those 20 movies are. I found: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=1981 http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=1981 1 Raiders of the Lost Ark 2 On Golden Pond 3 Superman II 4 Arthur 5 Stripes 6 The Cannonball Run 7 Chariots of Fire 8 For Your Eyes Only 9 The Four Seasons 10 Time Bandits Of which I guess 2, 3, 8 isn't original. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2:w014 http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2:w014 1 American Sniper 2 The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 3 Guardians of the Galaxy 4 Captain America: The Winter Soldier 5 The LEGO Movie 6 The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies 7 Transformers: Age of Extinction 8 Maleficent 9 X-Men: Days of Future Past 10 Big Hero 6 Of which only 10 is original.
vacri 11y ago
> It's very easy to see that this trend has developed and accelerated over the last 30 years. In 1981, 7 out of 10 of the year's top-grossing movies were original material. In 2014, it was 1 out of 10. Most articles on the subject tend to treat this as a mistake. The assumption is that Hollywood executives are greenlighting these projects because they're "safe". I'm really not convinced by that. Big-budget movies are a business, and are more expensive than ever. If you're going to be looking at the top 10, then yes, you're going to find 'safe' titles. A better analysis would be looking at all movies.

104 points by AndrewDucker 11y ago

Nothing stops storytellers of today from releasing their works as creative commons or public domain. And nothing stops the public from taking up these public domain works instead of the for-profit products released in movie theaters or in print.

normloman 11y ago
Their publishing company / record label / film studio stops them from releasing their work as CC / Public Domain. Because the middlemen of the entertainment industry want to ensure a profit. They're also the one's lobbying the government to make the copyright term longer and longer. So changing this is beyond the means of the lone storyteller or fan embracing an alternative. We need shorter copyright terms.
- rayiner 11y ago
  So film the thing on your GoPro and publish directly on the internet.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    In the dellusional hope that "nothing" stops a self-budgeted GoPro filmed internet movie from competing with hundrend-million budget, non stop marketing, major studio distribution movie?
    - rayiner 11y ago
      That really kind of proves the point, doesn't it? If studios spending hundreds of millions to make/market movies is what gets people to watch them, then aren't they the ones adding most of the value of the movie? And if so, why should any proceeds from that process ever accrue to anyone who didn't make that original capital investment?
- waterlesscloud 11y ago
  You don't need a publishing company / record label / film studio. You might use one to finance your work. Or market your work, which is their best talent these days. But you don't need them. You can produce and release your work freely without them.
  - tjradcliffe 11y ago
    Sure you can, but no one will read them. My novel "Darwin's Theorem" (available on Amazon for a nominal price in e-book format, a less-nominal price in paperback) is published under a CC license but that doesn't mean anyone will read it. The fundamentally borken part of the indie ecosystem is marketing/discovery. Publishers still act as gatekeepers for the reading public. Most people don't read and what they do read is almost entirely determined by the amount of marketing done for it, and while marketing is a learnable skill (I've run my own consulting shop, so done a lot of it) it is difficult to do on the kind of budget most indie authors have available for what amounts to a hobby. The indie music industry has done a better job of discovery but that's in part because music is consumable in much smaller pieces than novels. The solution to this in writing has been--to some extent--to return to serialization, but while that has worked a bit in non-fiction (people write blogs they turn into books) it has so far seen only one or two successes in fiction, and they have been... not notable for the quality of writing, for the most part. I've experimented with a couple of alternative forms to see if this can be overcome, but no luck so far. One was an illustrated serial prose format (finished version here: http://www.siduri.net/songsofalbion/songs_of_albion.html http://www.siduri.net/songsofalbion/songs_of_albion.html), the other an somewhat informal poemed illustrations format (http://www.siduri.net/cindylooyou/index.html http://www.siduri.net/cindylooyou/index.html) that appeared on the artist's blog and developed as a kind of jazz work as we tossed themes back and forth. The latter actually got a bigger following, although we promoted the former a lot more heavily. Go figure. So far it looks like conventional serial narratives--probably pod-cast--are the best bet for the indie author. Some kind of serial pod-cast will likely be my next move, more in the spirit of exploration than anything else. I'm fortunate to have some training as a voice actor, but the number conditions on an idie author to be successful are many, and the difficulty for readers in discovering work they might enjoy is considerable.
AgentME 11y ago
The problem is that nearly nothing opts in to do that (they don't have any incentive to; the system rewards the lucky ones that don't do that), so authors are blocked from using elements of modern culture and myths.
- rayiner 11y ago
  If the shared "culture and myths" are so important, why don't people reward those that contribute to it?
  - advael 11y ago
    Because the short-term incentive of turning a profit doesn't match up with the long-term incentive of benefiting everyone. The latter can lead to the former, but it's neither sufficient nor necessary.
  - CamperBob2 11y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons The system is set up in a way that ensures that individual creators (or, rather, their rightsholders) can profit, at the expense of the public domain that no powerful entities can profitably defend. Basically, copyright is now a one-way street, when it was supposed to be a two-way bargain.
  - darkmighty 11y ago
    We're stopping people from growing and contributing to the mythos in favor of rewarding the original creators. But for current law the original creators are long dead by the copyright expiration date. No fantasy author in their right mind would think "Wow, my work will stop being censored only 90 years from now, even though I will be dead! I will refrain from writing it because my ancestors will make less money."
    - tzs 11y ago
      A fantasy author is getting a little bit too caught up in their fantasy world and forgetting how the real world works if they they think their decisions now will affect how much money their ancestors will make. :-)
digi_owl 11y ago
Try to make a movie using say Aladdin and i'm sure you will get some very nasty letters from Disney about trademarks etc.
- dllthomas 11y ago
  If you did so without using Disney art (or things strongly resembling Disney art) I would actually be surprised if they managed to make trouble for you. Which isn't to say there's no chance I'll be surprised...
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Well Apple Computers got into hot water with Apple Records (the Beatles label) not once but twice. First when the company was founded, and then when they started selling music via iTunes.
    - dllthomas 11y ago
      Sure, but that's a bit of a different area of law, and Apple Records ultimately lost :-p
deciplex 11y ago
Under what circumstances should a work enter the public domain, if ever?
coldtea 11y ago
>Nothing stops storytellers of today from releasing their works as creative commons or public domain. Yeah, nothing except no studio would touch those works if you tell them you want to put them out as public domain / CC, much less fund them (so visually they wont be able to compete in the first place). Besides, movie theaters have distrubution deals with those same studios and distributions companies, and as they wont be taking those movies, theaters wont get them either. >And nothing stops the public from taking up these public domain works instead of the for-profit products released in movie theaters or in print. Yeah, nothing except of actual non availability at a movie theater near them, or (especially for web based distribution) the relative power of hundrends of millions of advertising and marketing vs the obscurity of some new indie movie.

thwest 11y ago

Pinning a massive culture shift away from ancient mythos on something as particular as copyright law seems absurd. The move away from historical knowledge in general and towards a permanent-present is evidenced across our media, from entertainment to news to politics.

zyxley 11y ago
> pinning a massive culture shift away from ancient mythos on something as particular as copyright law I don't understand how you got from the article to this. The article's claim is more like there isn't enough of a culture shift, because ever-extending copyright terms means nothing is ending up in the public domain anymore.

Bognar 11y ago

This isn't relevant to the main point of the article, but the paragraph about the power of mythology reminded me of Frank Herbert's Dune. The book does an excellent job of dropping you into a new universe starting with the very first pages. Herbert relentlessly uses new terminology from that universe without explanation, but you gradually learn what the words mean through context. For me this is an immense aid to immersion since you are surrounded by the new universe, similar to learning a new language by living in the country that speaks it. If you haven't read Dune, go pick it up. It's a great piece of science fiction with a mythical element like the article describes.

Jtsummers 11y ago
Ursula Le Guin does a similar thing in all the novels of hers I've read. Even character/race descriptions sometimes are only provided piecemeal over the course of the novel rather than all up front. Allowing you to reexamine what you thought you knew or understood about the world and its peoples.
- johnchristopher 11y ago
  Personally I think it's a cheap story-telling trick. http://english.bouletcorp.com/2010/05/21/fantasy/ http://english.bouletcorp.com/2010/05/21/fantasy/
stuxnet79 11y ago
William Gibson is really great at doing this as well.
- johnchristopher 11y ago
  I disagree and I copy paste the comment I made last time (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8510478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8510478): In the sprawl trilogy, the big black character that gives the hero his mission he's [sic] using a fax machine embedded in the seat of the cab where they first met. A fax machine. That spit out paper with ink on it. It was already old tech and weird when I first read the book 4 years after the published date. In Dune, they are reading texts on ridulian crystal. When I read it in the 90's I thought "must be some kind of indestructible paper". Herbert didn't describe the item which incidentally allowed the 2000's SciFi series to show ridulian crystal as some kind of a very thin and intelligent screen reader. Ridulian crystal will never age but FAX machine, e-mail[0], etc will and they will pull you out of that suspension of disbelief state. With that said, and for what it's worth, I prefer Gibson to Herbert and I dislike made-up name such as `ridulian system`. [0] But let's not get into __that__ debate.

arifos1977 11y ago

Remember when this site was about tech?

digi_owl 11y ago
Copyright and tech is intertwined thanks to software...
imgabe 11y ago
Remember when this site didn't have comments bemoaning the decline in quality? Me neither.
x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
Technology is the study of applied knowledge. I think knowledge of culture and its effect on humans easily falls under that that umbrella.
DanBC 11y ago
Please could you post an archive.org link to the site when it was about tech? Maybe a link to an old version of the guidelines before they said "anything that good hackers would find interesting".

bhickey 11y ago

The article doesn't explain why Lovecraft's works are in the public domain. Lovecraft's intention was that R.H. Barlow serve as executor of his literary estate. My recollection is that this was never properly carried out, so control over the estate devolved to his aunt, Annie Gamwell. Gamwell turned Lovecraft's papers over to Barlow who deposited most of them in the John Hay Library at Brown University. Throughout all of this, the copyright remained vested in Gamwell. In the 1940s, Derleth approached Gamwell's survivors and requesting permission to reprint his work and later fraudulently asserted copyright over the entire literary estate. Derleth also bought out the reprint rights for volumes of Weird Tales that contained Lovecraft's work, but Lovecraft had retained copyright for all stories in Weird Tales published after 1926. His output between 1924 and 1926 amounts to six stories as far as I can tell. Derleth may have legitimately obtained the copyright on these stories, but I can't say with any certainty. S.T. Joshi probably knows for sure. As for everything published after 1926, Gamwell's survivors never renewed the copyright on Lovecraft's work, so the body entered the public domain. Edit: I'll add that I'm disappointed that Lovecraft's letters aren't freely available. Arkham House hasn't printed his collected letters in nearly 40 years. If Brown were willing to make digital copies of his correspondence freely available, I'd be willing to contribute toward their digitization.

aaron695 11y ago

> It's very easy to see that this trend has developed and accelerated over the last 30 years. In 1981, 7 out of 10 of the year's top-grossing movies were original material. In 2014, it was 1 out of 10. The best reason for this I've seen is repeated material plays well in the Asian etc markets. The initial movie becomes essentially an ad for the squeals. Because of the huge copyright infringement in these markets, ads are to expensive to run to the whole population to get them to the movies. But once the first movie is out the profit by sheer numbers in these markets on squeals makes it worth while.

beachstartup 11y ago
> The best reason for this I've seen is repeated material plays well in the Asian etc markets. The initial movie becomes essentially an ad for the squeals. wait, what? this is how sequels work everywhere, not just asia.
- aaron695 11y ago
  Here's a discussion, not entirely. Bad movies can devalue in western culture, an anti-ad. This doesn't seem to be happening as much elsewhere. (Plus in the US they can afford real ads, ie new movies have a chance) http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2013/08/21/why-hollywood-is-obsessed-with-sequels/ http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2013/08/21/why-holly...
e12e 11y ago
I'm more interested in what those 20 movies are. I found: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=1981 http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=1981 1 Raiders of the Lost Ark 2 On Golden Pond 3 Superman II 4 Arthur 5 Stripes 6 The Cannonball Run 7 Chariots of Fire 8 For Your Eyes Only 9 The Four Seasons 10 Time Bandits Of which I guess 2, 3, 8 isn't original. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2:w014 http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2:w014 1 American Sniper 2 The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 3 Guardians of the Galaxy 4 Captain America: The Winter Soldier 5 The LEGO Movie 6 The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies 7 Transformers: Age of Extinction 8 Maleficent 9 X-Men: Days of Future Past 10 Big Hero 6 Of which only 10 is original.

vacri 11y ago

> It's very easy to see that this trend has developed and accelerated over the last 30 years. In 1981, 7 out of 10 of the year's top-grossing movies were original material. In 2014, it was 1 out of 10. Most articles on the subject tend to treat this as a mistake. The assumption is that Hollywood executives are greenlighting these projects because they're "safe". I'm really not convinced by that. Big-budget movies are a business, and are more expensive than ever. If you're going to be looking at the top 10, then yes, you're going to find 'safe' titles. A better analysis would be looking at all movies.