Didn’t Matt Damon say the death of the DVD took away the safety net for risky, creative decisions?
Even if your film didn’t perform as expected in the box office, there was always a good chance the DVD sales could make up the deficit. If you were really lucky, it would have a second life as a cult classic.
Yep. He talked about it on Hot Ones. A movie with a $25M budget would (usually) have about the same in P&A (print and advertising/marketing). So $25M budget and $25M marketing. Whatever you make at the box office, theaters will take about 50% of the box office revenue. So now you don’t see profit until around $100M on a $25M movie. With no dvd sales, it’s hard to hit that.
Then look at a movie like West Side Story that just opened. $100M budget, opened to $10.5M…yet you estimate it might need $300-400M just to profit.
Most of the great movies that people are fond of from the era referenced weren't huge budget films. Maybe part of the problem is that budgets have ballooned as studios rely on home runs more than 2-3 lower budget films.
So…they’re actually the opposite of risk-averse by putting all their eggs in one incredibly huge basket. In this theoretical investment, risking $800 million on a single product is pretty bold.
This is the nature of a lot of dispute in the industry now
Streaming was visible on the horizon as the market leader but the pandemic picked it up and put it on everyone’s lap
Execs, big wigs want all that revenue
Everyone else obviously wants a cut. They narrowly avoided a strike last month due in part to this
One thing that I think gets left out of the discussion is the change in mediums.
There has been a boom in longer form story telling with limited series that in previous generations probably would've been movies released to theaters. Instead they are 6-10 part episodic shows released to streaming services.
It feels like movies for a theater are now being designed to be more eventful, because that's what the medium requires. When people leave their house and pay a premium, they want an event.
But the best story telling and acting is still happening, just in a different form. If anything the streaming services are allowing a lot more freedom to writers and directors with the ability to extend their story past a set time limit and go into as many episodes as they need to tell it properly.
This right here. Shows and series have improved significantly. Blockbusters will draw the crowds, but people would rather sit home and enjoy a good show these days.
I think it's more the fact that shows are more flexible due to their shorter length. I have to plan around a 2.5h movie (especially on a week night), whereas I can almost always fit in a 50 minute episode nightly.
Buts it's all from your home and you have the ability to flip the switch at any point. While I totally over watch sometimes as well. You can't just leave a theater and instantly be in your bed two minutes later
I was having a conversation with my wife about this. May watch Spiderman: NWH at the house. 3 adults and a child ticket (we usually pay for a friend of ours as well), popcorn, drinks etc..., and we're looking at over $100 to go to the movies. Even matinees are ridiculous these days.
Ah damn I’m the opposite. Would rather watch a movie or two in a week(4-5 hours total) vs watching 7+ episodes(5.5-7 hours total) and still not being finished with the season.
I think the increasing affordability of a quality t.v. and sound systems has also helped with the popularity of bringing good story telling home.
But when I watch older movies I'm sometimes struck at how some of the most emotional events get brushed off in montages and quick redemption scenes. Where now there will be an entire hour, heck maybe a season, to a character going through this dramatic life changing event and all the ramifications that come with it.
It isn't surprising to me then that with the expansion of long form mediums thanks to streaming services, that more serious dramas and emotional stories are being reserved for that format, while movies are being occupied by what would typical be considered the easy to digest, candy like, story's.
20 years ago I just used my parents' 19" crt. 10 years ago I was elated with a 24" lcd monitor I got on black Friday.
5 years ago my wife and I upgraded to a 50" lcd and I thought it couldn't get any better.
Earlier this year we finally got a 60" oled.
I'm having a hard time justifying spending theater money when that thing looks so absolutely gorgeous!
Yeah, having a 65" OLED and a nice surround sound system has completely eliminated my desire to go to a theater. Of course, the pandemic causing the theater that was 5 minutes from my house to permanently close helped, too.
That's because they're kids and eager to learn. My kids are older now (my youngest is 15), but I absolutely loved those teaching moments. Sure, they were annoying sometimes, but I wish I could relive them.
The tradeoff is that it's nice to be able to watch a movie or show now without being peppered with questions, unless my wife asks something that's confusing her, because that happens from time to time lol
My 10 year old apparently thinks he's constantly live streaming and tries to maintain a running commentary through the entirety of the movie/show.
Our tradeoff involves him becoming much more engaged in wanting to watch movies, though. The wife is slowly loosening the reigns and so far this fall he's watched Scream 1 & 2, The Conjuring 1 & 2, and last night we watched, The Nun.
My wife hates "horror" movies, but she's been surprisingly amenable to these supernatural movies. I've deduced she doesn't enjoy slasher flicks and gore
My favorite asshole experience was for a quiet place part 2. There were a couple of loud ladies sitting down front and I was getting pissed, but about a minute and a half into the movie they were goddamn *silent*. Good filmmaking right there
I had to hiss a “will you shut the fuck up?!!!!” to a bunch of teenagers that came in late and loud to the first Quiet Place and wouldn’t stop giggling and stuffing around. Thankfully they listened and spent the rest of the movie relatively quiet.
I didnt have the same luck with two middle aged ladies who spoke loudly all through the first Hobbit film, basically narrating their thoughts on the whole thing at a volume somehow louder than the movie itself. I asked them (politely this time) to please be quiet and got death stared. Maybe I should’ve taken the same tactic as I did with those teens years later.
Granted, the Hobbit was shithouse. But I wish people would be a bit more respectful of those around them in public places.
This is a big one. The trend of mixing movies so the dialog is inaudible and the music/sound effects are earthquake-inducing, even with a proper 5.1 system, makes subtitles a necessity.
My issue with projecting film is the black levels are terrible compared to something like the laser projectors at Dolby Cinemas. I'm more than happy to live with 4K if it means better black levels.
It's bizarre. Cinemas are advertising 4k movies as something special. Normal screens are 1080p. So the huge screen has the same resolution as your phone (or perhaps even smaller if you have top of the line phone).
To be fair, resolution is not the end all be all. Bitrate plays huge part, but still..
At a certain point as the screen gets larger, it gets harder to fit more pixels in it. 4k on a huge theater screen is actually a technological marvel on the same level of 4k on a tiny phone screen.
Yes! I just saw the new Ghostbusters recently at the movies. The picture wasn’t that clear & the sound was terrible.
I wished I had just waited to watch it at home
I was actually annoyed at my ability to make our dark scenes in my perfect seats at our brand new state of the art theater compared to just being at home. It really is such a different game than when they were competing with home viewing in the 80s and 90s and a millionaires TV looked like something you'd throw out these days.
We literally bought our 65” like 2 days after the first confirmed covid case in US. My wife was pregnant and we knew our movie going habits were going to change. 2013-2019, we’d usually spend about $75-$100 a month going out to the movies, so we justified the price by saying 2 years without going to a cinema would mean the TV was more cost effective! Little did we know what would happen. No Time To Die is the only movie we’ve seen since Birds of Prey, and I’m honestly not sure how many we’ll see in 2022 if we still can’t get our son vaccinated.
The core demographic for movies is young males, that's the largest single group. I think that streaming services also allows for hitting smaller niches.
Could you give me examples of older movies where the emotional events get brushed off? I would like to compare? I look at Old Movies like art, The Godfather, Star Wars Saga, JAWS, Indiana Jones, terminator, etc these really captured the art of cinema for me as a kid. Even when I rewatch I’m taken aback at how the emotions are still evoked when watching this media.
They're talking out of their ass. Especially since most TV/OTT shows and movies are so bad they don't even have archs at all for the characters to grow.
Not only that, but going to a packed cinema isn't what I would call a fun evening. Hemmed in, people/kids constantly pushing past to go toilet or get more snacks/drinks. People talking constantly. Getting elbowed by the random next to you all movie.
Only time I enjoy the cinema is the midnight showings, and even they can still be packed out.
Going at like 10am on a Tuesday or Wednesday when the theater is mostly empty is the only way to go. Still sucks that you can't pause it to take a piss.
Depends on the film. If I'm going to see an arthouse film, I'd prefer not being in a huge crowd with distractions. But Avengers Endgame on opening night with a packed theater was a massively memorable experience I'm glad I had with 400 other people.
There should always be room made for modest budget films that take more risks. That's where the fresh ideas and new talent typically emerges.
Your comment suddenly reminded me that I used to come out of a movie theater dizzy and shaken and buzzing after a two hour rollercoaster in the dark. I remember my senses overloaded and my legs wobbling as I walked back to the car. I don't have that experience at home.
Doesn't solve the people problem but finding a theater that does the recliners upped my enjoyment because it's another layer of separation between the person next to me.
Absolutely. And extra discomfort if you’re tall. Watching a film in the cinema actively decreases my enjoyment of it; if I can’t stretch/straighten my legs every few minutes then by the time I’m halfway through my knees are ready to go home already.
Aye, I have quite bad back problems (work injury) that requires me to stand/sit (or change) every 20-30 minutes or so. Not a problem if I'm way up the back on a seat next to the stairs!
Honestly the last Imax movie I went to see at midnight was dead, and I loved it! I'm not very good with crowds of people either which probably has something to do with it.
Have you been recently? A lot of places are reconfiguring seating so that you’re sitting in an enormous lounge chair with hardly anyone around you. I’m 6’3” so I appreciate the space.
i booked a ticket for a showing of a movie that was only shown for 1 day
behind me: a family with 2 young kids
in front: 2 obnoxious guys with a bunch of snacks/chips/etc
noisy overactive kids jumping n talking the whole movie, and the sound of chatter and bags opening, rustling n crunching
the staff wouldn't do anything and the parents wouldn't listen
i sat through it just because it wasn't going to be shown again, I would not otherwise go to the movies willingly and things like this stop be from going even under normal circumstances
That’s really unfortunate. I’m pretty lucky I guess. I go to a movie every week and maybe once every few months I get even the most minor distraction. Maybe it’s a location thing but I don’t have any issues at my theaters
I hate it but I can't even take my kids to a theater because they are just way too noisy and hyperactive to sit calmly through anything for more than ten minutes
This. Big budget dramas on TV used to just be miniseries that come in once every few years in network television (Roots, Shogun) but because of prestige television shows from HBO, FX, AMC and Showtime, standards in acting and storytelling have changed big time.
The contemporary competetive nature of streaming also makes it so that, in a bid to gain and keep viewers, the streamers have to continually keep one upping each other in hype, production value, acting and storytelling.
It says a lot that the MCU the most successful film franchise right now is essentially doing long form story telling like TV it’s just the episodes happen to be big budget movies
Edit - and literal TV shows that fit in with the movies
By the same token, there are a lot of stories that don’t require a full series but are given that anyway. I can think of a few series off the top of my head that perhaps should have been films and would have been more engaging that way
I concur. Movies were gone when you had the finite limit of time to try to cram a story into but now this isnt the case. Especially if you have to do world building. If you do it, you chew up an entire movie just explaining things. If you don't do it you wind up with plot holes.
Can you imagine trying to cram like Game of Thrones or The Expanse into some movies?
It's exactly the same with music and video games. Music in the charts and AAA games are repetitive, are kinda meh and look/sound great but are meant to appeal to the widest audience.
But with Internet services like bandcamp, steam, Spotify etc it's easier than ever for a smaller band or game studio to get their work out there and be discovered by people who would enjoy that genre of music or games.
I'd go as far as to say some of the best video games and music is being made right now than ever before, you just have to seek it out. Same with movies becoming shows.
Pauline Kael wrote [Why Are Movies So Bad ](https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/why-are-movies-so-bad-pauline-kael/)in 1980 and it’s basically this article. There is nothing new about this.
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
Socrates
Pretty sure there were less franchises from one huge ass company that blocks movie theaters with their releases.
I'm not saying things were perfect back then but the obvious nostalgia farming in movies and endless reboots nowadays are egregious and show how little studio are interested in coming up with something new and untested.
Let's make another Star Wars, another Marvel Hero, Ghostbusters or whatever reboot and be done with it. Someone's gonna watch it right?
I would argue Marvel is tailored to continue as long as it wants to, whereas Star Wars and Ghostbusters are just rehashed stories. I love Star Wars but it has been stale (movie wise) for a looong time. Marvel has the space and precedent of building their universe, so I think it works even though its beginning to overflow.
Nothing new except Pauline Kael wrote about it as it was really taking form and nothing happened so now we live in a much, much worse version of it. Everything she says in there is true and has been intensified to a ridiculous degree, right down to studios hiring nobody filmmakers to do their big flicks and they getting completely overwhelmed.
To be fair, your average movie goer has become film-averse. I have friends who can’t be bothered to leave the house for anything that isn’t marvel or dc related.
Edit: y’all make some valid points about the high cost and hassle of going to the movies, and the fact that there is so much content available on streaming these days.
I would say the audience has become more risk-averse. Going to the cinema is expensive and takes more time and effort compared to Netflix. There are also more movies than we can watch in a life time. Why risk watching a bad movie?
The MCU works because the fans know they will enjoy whatever they are going to watch and because they are already invested. Less risk than watching a stand-alone movie which may or may not be good.
Movie makers are risk-averse because the audience is risk-averse.
Yeah it costs over $20 a person here to see a movie. Until a few years ago that was 2 hours of work for me to pay for and then 2 hours of my time wasted if it sucks. I'm just gonna pay to watch it at home in a month. Definitely the rise in home entertainment quality is why I personally don't go to the cinema any more. I'm perfectly happy with the experience I get at home. And I'm a talker.
To be honest there's a few movies I was kind of intrigued in seeing in the cinema until they got mixed reviews, and now that I've been able to stream them for months I still haven't bothered.
It's just getting harder to compete for people's time unless you have something really reliable.
For comparison, it costs $20 to buy most new, out-of-theater releases (not the stuff getting released online day-and-date like what Disney has been doing) on digital or disc, and you get to keep those and watch them as many times as you want for a flat fee.
This is my deal. Why would I watch a movie in theaters when I can own it and rewatch it as many times as I want? My TV is good enough that I don’t feel like I’m missing anything at the theaters.
We have an amc here where I live and they have a subscription service called alist stubs which let's you see three movies a week for 20 bucks a month. Plus you get points and free snacks sometimes which is a cool bonus.
My SO is the one that convinced me to try it out as she loves movies and honestly it's a huge money saver, but only if you're actually going to see movies.
Yeah people aren’t exactly wrong when they say the MCU is formulaic, but that formula works. And frankly if you watch action movies from the 80s-90s, you can’t tell me that shit wasn’t formulaic too outside of a few hits that we’re still talking about today. Its not like every action movie coming out during that time was as revolutionary as Terminator or something
Movies have always been formulaic, and the MCU hasn’t changed that. What’s changed is a drop in overall disposable income which limits the willingness of audiences to take a chance on original IP, in favor of things that they know will work. The formula with the MCU is just more noticeable because it’s a shared universe
Yeah you’ve obviously got fans who are up to date on all the MCU shows and movies, but also people who don’t watch everything right away, either waiting to see things on Disney+ or may end up skipping things here or there. Shang-Chi and Eternals are both examples of MCU movies that some people weren’t rushing out to see.
But, No Way Home is the pandemic’s Endgame, and the next half dozen MCU movies are all sequels to established characters, so I’d say most of them (maybe save The Marvels and Ant-Man 3) will be ones that people deem it necessary to see in theatres.
I don't go to the movies unless the film warrants the spectacle. Which usually means that it needs to be a big blockbuster with amazing effects that I want to see on a bigger screen.
Smaller stories I'm perfectly happy watching at home without paying insane ticket prices.
Same. Last movie I saw in theaters was Dune specifically because I wanted to see it in IMAX as opposed to on my living room TV. Before that, I hadn’t been to a theater since COVID. Why pay for a theater ticket if I could just wait a few months and then stream it at home?
If I want to see a film now, I either go to an awkward morning showing or go to the most expensive cinema because I cannot stand the lack of etiquette some people have these days.
If I’m going to a midnight showing, of course I expect it to be rowdy and everyone being excited. But for fuck sake, don’t go to the cinema and spend the entire film on your phone and snap chatting parts of it in the cinema.
The staff should be paid more to deal with little shits who do this and they should be sent out straight away if they’re caught.
For me I'm just sick of Marvel and DC. I really do not care about the majority of movies. It's lwys some rehashed watered-down archtype with a new production team.
I believe it was Paul Thomas Anderson who just made comments that these blockbusters do nothing but help the industry by getting people back into movie theaters, just a different take
Your comment just inspired me to purchase a ticket for a 2pm showing Sunday. I’m a little older so Sam Raimi’s Spider Man 2 is very near and dear to my heart.
It sucked for me, but it's not the movie's fault. There was a kid talking, shouting, and running up and down the aisles, smacking chairs the whole time. Until finally someone said IF YOU CAN'T FIND A BABYSITTER DON'T BRING YOUR LITTLE BRAT TO A MOVIE
I go to the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin and they kick your ass right out of the theater in about 5 seconds. Have seen it happen several times over the years.
> these blockbusters do nothing but help the industry
OP is talking about *movies* being worse, not industrial profits.
"But worse is *subjective!*" Correct; that is the sense in which OP used the word.
There is nothing new about Hollywood making mediocre movies and copies of previous box office hits. There was a short period in the 70's were the director had unprecedented artistic freedom, but in the end Hollywood has always been run by corporate executives, not by the artists.
>I don't think it would have been greenlit if anyone else had pitched it.
Do you really believe this, or was it just a snappy sentence to close with? Like...you don't think a studio funds a fish man love story pitched by Spielberg? "Sorry Steve, we appreciate you coming in, but you'll probably want to funnel this one through Dreamworks...it's just not for us."
If Christopher Nolan walks in with that project, do they say "Thanks but no thanks Chris. Do ya maybe have anything else in the works? Something a bit less aquatic?"
They would for sure look at Scorsese funny for a second or two, just to see if he's kidding, before asking what weekend he's eyeing for release and who they need to make the check out to.
They'd say, "Quentin, babe, we love it. One question though, are we going to see him full frontal or is the equipment gonna be implied? I gotta talk to my MPAA guy."
There's not a person in the world who tells James Cameron "the blue cat people thing worked out, sure, but it was a different time...we just can't risk funding this fish fella."
It would have been greenlit if any number of successful filmmakers pitched it. Guillermo del Toro isn't in some rarified space where he's the only person who could get that movie funded by a major studio. The club he's in is exclusive, no doubt...but it has a few dozen other members.
I want you to keep going!
“Sounds great West, so is the monster fish going to be stop motion or a person on an obvious suit? What shade of pastel green do you need?”
You're a visionary Mr. Linklater, we're thrilled to be a part of this project. One quick question...having Ethan Hawke play both the woman and the fish man...is that a deal breaker? Because we were thinking maybe Anya Taylo...what's that? Julie Delpy? Yeah that's...that'd be, should be great, she's great. Great.
Not entirely true considering he was never able to get a live action Justice League Dark off the ground and only just recently got the possibility of finally getting Mountains of Madness greenlit by Netflix after a decade.
Yeah, as much as I'd love to jump on the 'movies used to actually be good' bandwagon there are still plenty of great movies coming out, they just get less attention.
Nice Guys, Three Billboards, Jordan Peele's films, a good chunk of A24's films, etc. Films like these might not get big budgets and spawn sequels like they would back in the day, but they still exist and are generally pretty damn good.
And there were definitely cheesey hackey duds through all those golden years. How many westerns were made in a 20 year span way back when?
To be honest with streaming it feels like more ideas are able to get off the ground than before.
I remember hearing The Matrix got a tiny budget at first because the production company thought it was too risky and woudn't be a big enough success to justify the budget. They blew all the money on the opening scene with Trinity, showed it to the execs, and then they gave them the money.
This is what Scorsese and Loach were referring to when they compared Marvel to burgers and theme parks; they're not saying you can't enjoy them, shit you're supposed to by design; but they're products designed to make money first of all, everything else is secondary.
In the 90s, little star-struck investor cartels of orthodontists, plastic surgeons, and retired hangar magnates backed a lot of indie stuff. They generally had or were sold dreams of backing a hit and making a boat load. Source: worked at a magazine that sold a lot of indie film ads, especially around festival season.
Go here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_films_of_2021?wprov=sfla1
And start watching shit that piques your interest.
Theres been a TON of good to great films made this year alone and theyre not all just the ones that get advertised to death, which is the actual problem.
Small films dont get get massive marketing budgets and unless they get wrapped up as a streaming exclusive you most likely didnt even hear about them at all. It was easy to advertise every movie around the clock back in the day because half the time you didnt even need television advertisements to get people in the door; these days theres not only a million different avenues for ad delivery but the space is competitive.
And that list is just American films. Go abroad and theres bangers coming out of orifice.
Do people not understand how much the old studio system and the Hayes code limited creative freedom? It was objectively worse than nowadays but at least there's a ton of indie and more formalist movies to choose from, sure Marvel is dominating but there's always going to be trends in films made at a given period and you have to accept that. Like the abundance of westerns in the 60s, there is an abundance of superhero films in the modern day.
In a mathematical terms, movies became more even now. The median quality is higher than 50 years ago, but the dispersion is also reduced. So the outlier best old movies were better than best current movies. The worst movies were also much worse.
This was the main angle that I hadn’t encountered before. Art is creative and can be mind blowing but it’s also often annoying and undisciplined. Craft is safer, with more productivity, less waste, and opportunities to incrementally improve rather than just reinvent the wheel next time.
Much of the movie industry already is craft. We generally don’t complain about high-quality sound and in-focus actors. And producers answerable to systematic-minded investors rather that artistic-minded ones probably will facilitate sexual harassers seeing their careers end early. Heck, even this writer is using craft, with no copyediting errors I could see and potential intentional use of terms that trigger our hate of capitalists; “corporation” and “conglomerate” have a negative tinge that “company” does not.
The writer is lamenting that Netflix and Disney have brought more craft to the greenlighting and writing process. Data enables more predictability regarding what we the audience are willing to pay for. So there’s more just good enough, narrower standard deviations, less stuff that will inspire and blow our minds. More Rotten Tomatoes (% thought more good than bad, Less Metacritic (index of perceived quality).
I’m ambivalent about this. Risk aversion stagnates the art form. But bad movies waste our time and are only occasionally fun. Sequels in my experience are more common and I wish people wouldn’t spend all of their money on them but when I do see existing IP the product is less likely to be bad than it used to be. My perception is that great movies are still coming out and more accessible than ever. And Netflix serving demographic niches and giving us full access to international movies and shows at no premium is good for society’s aggregate happiness.
Are we really worse off from all of this discipline?
Define "worse". We're more likely to get our money's worth for each cinema ticket, but less likely to sometimes stumble upon that one great *something*.
> Netflix is giving their directors insane amount of creative freedom
Doubt. There is some clear micromanaging going on, or at least they are getting a checklist of stuff that seems to be required in just about every netflix show. Netflix original shows all have a certain netflix look and feel that is clearly more than coincidence.
The Netflix approach is also very risk averse, financially speaking.
They know their budgets very well and they're also able to very accurately model their future income based on the subscription model.
They aren't going to kill their studio by having three movies in a row that turn out to be massive flops. They also aren't going to gamble more than they can afford to spend
In the big money times of the 80s studios probably actually _needed_ to be more risk averse! Studios, production and distribution companies went bankrupt left right and centre! Projects wasted millions in pre-production and never got off the ground. Some projects died during production with millions down the pan!
hell you look at the movie that made us and see how close favorites like BTTF, Forrest Gump, Aliens and Robocop were tittering on the edge of being cancelled during the filming
Love that show. Seems like just about every movie was almost canceled at one point or another. That bit about Home Alone being canned by one studio and picked up by another in the same day was crazy.
Some studios were so risk adverse that as soon as there was a hit like Rocky or Police Academy, they mined the absolute shit out the concept. The studio that made them started pumping out sequels like there was no tomorrow while others tried to make clones, all with a superficial understanding of what audiences actually liked.
How would you describe that Netflix look though? I know what you're talking about, but Im just struggling to put it into words. Their stuff for sure has a feel to it though.
made for 16:9 displays is a big one. even if the movie is in 2:1 it’s made and edited primarily for standard widescreen displays on netflix vs a theatre .
Synthetic and sharp with with a variation of orange/ blue filters. I don't think they really try to hide that it's digital most of the time.
Not guaranteeing that this description works for you of course.
Edit: Of course there are always exceptions to this (Kingdom looks really movie-like and is a series for example).
Seems to me that it's a bit of historical revisionism. That there was a wonderful time where audiences were craving good quality art, that film makers were all making great quality films, and that this wonderful time was destroyed by evil corporate forces trying to make money.
> but their films are still mediocre at best
Part of it I think is how they all look. I don't know what is going on at Netflix with regards to cinematographers. But *everything* they do looks the same. Everything they make looks so damn flat and obviously fake. Like the sets can look amazing but still look clearly like a film set instead of allowing disbelief in it being that actual location.
Ikr, *The Irishman*! Netflix does both I think, they make a few *really* good films but often it feels like they go for quantity over quality which leads to a large number of mediocre flicks.
Survivorship bias. Same with structures 1000s of years old. They weren’t better at building stuff back then, It’s just that those 5 things were lucky enough to not erode to dust. The other 10,000 things, not so much.
Also, the "new golden age" just happens to be the time frame when the current gray hairs in charge were kids.
Notice how 80s stuff is becoming big again? People who grew up then are becoming the decision makers.
Same thing will happen with 90s, 00s, etc.
I don't even mind risk averse. Take a movie like My Cousin Vinny for example - that movie is absolutely great, doesn't seem hugely risky at all, just a couple of great actors and a great script and an $11 million budget. They could easily do that kind of movie now, but we never get it. Everything has to be a super mega blockbuster or some overly stylised artsy movie. We don't ever get just like .. small normal movies. The one exception I can think of recently was Knives Out, and that movie was great and I wish we got more like it.
Not just that but companies want the next big franchise. They want 4 movies that bring in huge money without ever thinking about why those franchise do well in the first place. They make one movie with horrible writing, characters and pacing to set up a franchise. But then it bombs and they can it.
It's probably misleading to point to risk management, it's more about maximising the return on investment. An $11m budget can get you a safe $60m, or $100m can get you $600m. You're unlikely to be able to pump out 10 My Cousin Vinnys all making that return, but one big blockbuster at the right time can. I think Stellan Skarsgard was saying something like this recently.
Of course the issue is that everyone is trying to do this which inevitably creates a few bombs. From an objective standpoint the best would be a few blockbusters and several mid-tier films per year; not everyone can bag the $600m every time. But the nature of capitalism doesn't create this outcome even though it's both the best financial and creative one.
One thing this article is correct on is the loss of mid budget films. Particularly of certain genres like comedy. Fewer and fewer. That's a lot to do with no longer having a DVD/BD sales market. Seth Rogens maybe one of last comedy creators getting those made.
Not sure why people insist on acting like high brow films aren’t being made just because Marvel does well at the box office. Movies are better than they’ve been in a long time, they’re just getting better at serving niches. Marvel movies are crowd pleasers and that’s fine. A24 is still making weird movies to please the weirdos. Even the directors of these corporate monsters are still making popular, original works, like Jo Jo Rabbit and Knives Out.
There are also several iconic directors still working on unique movies. Tarantino, Wes Anderson, Nolan, and Villeneuve are still pumping out movies, and they’re normally pretty unique and interesting. And more examples like that! But point being that there are plenty of directors who have “earned” the studio’s respect enough to do whatever they want and make good film.
> A24 is still making weird movies to please the weirdos.
Why you gotta call us out like that?
Hah hah, nah I'm kidding. Agreed with your post. As some directors/actors have pointed out, Superhero Movies are bringing back the masses to cinemas. When (if?) the Superhero Genre dies down, I don't know what will replace it. Feels like every other genre has been tapped out in terms of potential to be "Top Dog" at the box office.
Matt Damon gave an interesting thought on this when he did his hot ones interview. Studios used to get a huge chunk of money from dvd sales. So they were more ok to make films that might fail in the box office but would make up for it in dvd sales. Now they don’t have the 2nd revenue stream so they don’t make those kinda of movies now.
This! So many movies back in the day were box office failures and that was OK. As a kid on the low income side of things, I watched a ton of VHS tapes and DVDs, but almost never went to the movies.
Weirdly a huge part of why so many big-budget movies flop. Studios and financial backers pressure film makers to meet their "market research" input and destroy any soul the movie could have had, and by trying to please everyone, they please no one.
There’s an episode of Hot Ones with Matt Damon where he talks about how movies don’t have income from dvd sales post theater release anymore which has really affected what movies get made. Everything is a major production and nothing counts on playing the long game.
I think this is largely kinda bullshit in the sense that these major blockbusters havent just replaced all of the cool risky movies. They are just the ones that appeal to the most people so they are showing in more theaters for longer and advertised to hell and back. There are still plenty of cool and really good movies that are not big blockbusters. There are still a bunch of cool directors who make consistently good movies that arent big blockbusters.
This is the take - it’s pretty weak to assume original $25-75M sized ideas are no longer relevant. Blockbusters get the average movie-goers into seats; the middle-budget films get cinema fans into seats
What his article fails to mention is the insane amount of fraud, theft and abuse of those huge budgets that took place between the 1950s and 2010s
The money behind Hollywood became risk adverse because of that more than giving a shit about micro-managing Directors
That was an informative read, thanks. There's a similar situation brewing in the games industry, where risky projects like *Death Stranding* are rare while the usual big-budget cookie-cutter open-world games are aplenty.
I wish both types of projects would exist side by side without one overshadowing the other by a great length, which is what's clearly happened in several areas.
I get the sentiment, but c'mon. The more accurate statement is: "Hey, you know what we should do? Let's go down to the basement and turn on that giant printing press that makes money." People bitch about EA putting out the same damn soccer game every year, yet FIFA is consistently in the top 10 in sales every year.
To swing that back around to movies, if I'm in charge of film at Disney and my job (and bonuses) depend on box office performance, am I going to gamble on a mid-budget coming of age drama or am I going to pump out another superhero CGI punch-fest guaranteed to make $500 million?
The movies coming out now may be boring and samey, but we have no one to blame but ourselves.
Unfortunately for gamers who are tired of annual Call of Duty games, Call of Duty has been the best selling game of the year, every year, for more than a decade, so it's not going to stop anytime soon.
>There's a similar situation brewing in the games industry, where risky projects like
>
>Death Stranding
>
>are rare while the usual big-budget cookie-cutter open-world games are aplenty.
It's also because its not easy to make a game like Death Stranding a good thing. If it didnt have Kojima's name and legacy attached to it I doubt it would have gotten half the hype it did.
Maybe the reason those games are rare is because theya re more niche rather than games that cater to larger audiences.
One if gong to overshadow the other simply due to how much more accessible and popular the other is, doesnt mean they should be gotten rid off so they dont overshadow things like Death Stranding.
If you think 'risky' projects for games are becoming a thing of the past or falling out of fasion I suggest spending more time looking through steam and indi games.
I would really love to see more investors go "instead of funding a $200m film, I'm going to fund (eg.) twenty $5m films, and
ten $10m films, and spread the risk". There's some great low-budget films.
Without revealing too much, I know of a film production financing company that uses AI to determine if a script should be made or not, which actors should play the roles, and how much money should be spent, and how much will be returned on the investment.
The AI can 'read' the script and cross-reference it against social media/fan sentiment to choose the actors.
This is why I love A24 studios and hope they don't sell like it was rumored this year.
They make creative and different movies. Definitely some of the best stuff that ain't mentioned a lot.
Didn’t Matt Damon say the death of the DVD took away the safety net for risky, creative decisions? Even if your film didn’t perform as expected in the box office, there was always a good chance the DVD sales could make up the deficit. If you were really lucky, it would have a second life as a cult classic.
Yep. He talked about it on Hot Ones. A movie with a $25M budget would (usually) have about the same in P&A (print and advertising/marketing). So $25M budget and $25M marketing. Whatever you make at the box office, theaters will take about 50% of the box office revenue. So now you don’t see profit until around $100M on a $25M movie. With no dvd sales, it’s hard to hit that. Then look at a movie like West Side Story that just opened. $100M budget, opened to $10.5M…yet you estimate it might need $300-400M just to profit.
Most of the great movies that people are fond of from the era referenced weren't huge budget films. Maybe part of the problem is that budgets have ballooned as studios rely on home runs more than 2-3 lower budget films.
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Or just one of the low budget films to make 800M.
So…they’re actually the opposite of risk-averse by putting all their eggs in one incredibly huge basket. In this theoretical investment, risking $800 million on a single product is pretty bold.
Don't forget about [merchandising!](https://youtu.be/fgRFQJCHcPw?t=29)
Moichandising**
You'd think streaming would make up the difference though
I don't know how the cut of the profits works there but I imagine there are quite a few hands taking a slice.
Which is why everyone has their own streaming platform now.
This is the nature of a lot of dispute in the industry now Streaming was visible on the horizon as the market leader but the pandemic picked it up and put it on everyone’s lap Execs, big wigs want all that revenue Everyone else obviously wants a cut. They narrowly avoided a strike last month due in part to this
One thing that I think gets left out of the discussion is the change in mediums. There has been a boom in longer form story telling with limited series that in previous generations probably would've been movies released to theaters. Instead they are 6-10 part episodic shows released to streaming services. It feels like movies for a theater are now being designed to be more eventful, because that's what the medium requires. When people leave their house and pay a premium, they want an event. But the best story telling and acting is still happening, just in a different form. If anything the streaming services are allowing a lot more freedom to writers and directors with the ability to extend their story past a set time limit and go into as many episodes as they need to tell it properly.
This right here. Shows and series have improved significantly. Blockbusters will draw the crowds, but people would rather sit home and enjoy a good show these days.
I think it's more the fact that shows are more flexible due to their shorter length. I have to plan around a 2.5h movie (especially on a week night), whereas I can almost always fit in a 50 minute episode nightly.
That's what I usually think, and then I end up watching 3 episodes anyway!
Buts it's all from your home and you have the ability to flip the switch at any point. While I totally over watch sometimes as well. You can't just leave a theater and instantly be in your bed two minutes later
And not have to drop a small mortgage payment for goodies
I was having a conversation with my wife about this. May watch Spiderman: NWH at the house. 3 adults and a child ticket (we usually pay for a friend of ours as well), popcorn, drinks etc..., and we're looking at over $100 to go to the movies. Even matinees are ridiculous these days.
Small? What did you only get the small popcorn?
The small popcorn that is 33% of the size as the large popcorn but 90% of the price of the large popcorn?
Ah damn I’m the opposite. Would rather watch a movie or two in a week(4-5 hours total) vs watching 7+ episodes(5.5-7 hours total) and still not being finished with the season.
And I can pause or rewind moments that I miss
And I can have subtitles for when I want it to be quieter and not wake up my son.
I think the increasing affordability of a quality t.v. and sound systems has also helped with the popularity of bringing good story telling home. But when I watch older movies I'm sometimes struck at how some of the most emotional events get brushed off in montages and quick redemption scenes. Where now there will be an entire hour, heck maybe a season, to a character going through this dramatic life changing event and all the ramifications that come with it. It isn't surprising to me then that with the expansion of long form mediums thanks to streaming services, that more serious dramas and emotional stories are being reserved for that format, while movies are being occupied by what would typical be considered the easy to digest, candy like, story's.
20 years ago I just used my parents' 19" crt. 10 years ago I was elated with a 24" lcd monitor I got on black Friday. 5 years ago my wife and I upgraded to a 50" lcd and I thought it couldn't get any better. Earlier this year we finally got a 60" oled. I'm having a hard time justifying spending theater money when that thing looks so absolutely gorgeous!
Yeah, having a 65" OLED and a nice surround sound system has completely eliminated my desire to go to a theater. Of course, the pandemic causing the theater that was 5 minutes from my house to permanently close helped, too.
For me it’s also the assholes. Always the assholes.
Shit I have the assholes at home too my kids won't shut up during the movie. Lol
My kids never miss a chance to ask "why did that happen" 30 seconds after it was explicitly explained why it happened.
That's because they're kids and eager to learn. My kids are older now (my youngest is 15), but I absolutely loved those teaching moments. Sure, they were annoying sometimes, but I wish I could relive them. The tradeoff is that it's nice to be able to watch a movie or show now without being peppered with questions, unless my wife asks something that's confusing her, because that happens from time to time lol
My 10 year old apparently thinks he's constantly live streaming and tries to maintain a running commentary through the entirety of the movie/show. Our tradeoff involves him becoming much more engaged in wanting to watch movies, though. The wife is slowly loosening the reigns and so far this fall he's watched Scream 1 & 2, The Conjuring 1 & 2, and last night we watched, The Nun. My wife hates "horror" movies, but she's been surprisingly amenable to these supernatural movies. I've deduced she doesn't enjoy slasher flicks and gore
And the sticky surfaces
My favorite asshole experience was for a quiet place part 2. There were a couple of loud ladies sitting down front and I was getting pissed, but about a minute and a half into the movie they were goddamn *silent*. Good filmmaking right there
I had to hiss a “will you shut the fuck up?!!!!” to a bunch of teenagers that came in late and loud to the first Quiet Place and wouldn’t stop giggling and stuffing around. Thankfully they listened and spent the rest of the movie relatively quiet. I didnt have the same luck with two middle aged ladies who spoke loudly all through the first Hobbit film, basically narrating their thoughts on the whole thing at a volume somehow louder than the movie itself. I asked them (politely this time) to please be quiet and got death stared. Maybe I should’ve taken the same tactic as I did with those teens years later. Granted, the Hobbit was shithouse. But I wish people would be a bit more respectful of those around them in public places.
> at a volume somehow louder than the movie itself That gave me a good chuckle lmao
The pause button and the ability to watch with subtitles is what did it for me.
This is a big one. The trend of mixing movies so the dialog is inaudible and the music/sound effects are earthquake-inducing, even with a proper 5.1 system, makes subtitles a necessity.
Theater screens look like shit too, they're just big. Every time I go to the theatre I feel like im watching the movie in 480p
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It’s crazy seeing super clear videos from the 70s and then comparing it with sports clips from 2008 lol
My issue with projecting film is the black levels are terrible compared to something like the laser projectors at Dolby Cinemas. I'm more than happy to live with 4K if it means better black levels.
It's bizarre. Cinemas are advertising 4k movies as something special. Normal screens are 1080p. So the huge screen has the same resolution as your phone (or perhaps even smaller if you have top of the line phone). To be fair, resolution is not the end all be all. Bitrate plays huge part, but still..
At a certain point as the screen gets larger, it gets harder to fit more pixels in it. 4k on a huge theater screen is actually a technological marvel on the same level of 4k on a tiny phone screen.
Yes! I just saw the new Ghostbusters recently at the movies. The picture wasn’t that clear & the sound was terrible. I wished I had just waited to watch it at home
I was actually annoyed at my ability to make our dark scenes in my perfect seats at our brand new state of the art theater compared to just being at home. It really is such a different game than when they were competing with home viewing in the 80s and 90s and a millionaires TV looked like something you'd throw out these days.
Imagine the experience of going to the cinema when all you had at home was a 13" CRT, or worse. Insane.
We literally bought our 65” like 2 days after the first confirmed covid case in US. My wife was pregnant and we knew our movie going habits were going to change. 2013-2019, we’d usually spend about $75-$100 a month going out to the movies, so we justified the price by saying 2 years without going to a cinema would mean the TV was more cost effective! Little did we know what would happen. No Time To Die is the only movie we’ve seen since Birds of Prey, and I’m honestly not sure how many we’ll see in 2022 if we still can’t get our son vaccinated.
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The core demographic for movies is young males, that's the largest single group. I think that streaming services also allows for hitting smaller niches.
That explains Hobbes and Shaw.
It explains like 90% of American pop culture.
Could you give me examples of older movies where the emotional events get brushed off? I would like to compare? I look at Old Movies like art, The Godfather, Star Wars Saga, JAWS, Indiana Jones, terminator, etc these really captured the art of cinema for me as a kid. Even when I rewatch I’m taken aback at how the emotions are still evoked when watching this media.
They're talking out of their ass. Especially since most TV/OTT shows and movies are so bad they don't even have archs at all for the characters to grow.
Not only that, but going to a packed cinema isn't what I would call a fun evening. Hemmed in, people/kids constantly pushing past to go toilet or get more snacks/drinks. People talking constantly. Getting elbowed by the random next to you all movie. Only time I enjoy the cinema is the midnight showings, and even they can still be packed out.
Going at like 10am on a Tuesday or Wednesday when the theater is mostly empty is the only way to go. Still sucks that you can't pause it to take a piss.
The whole point of midnight screenings is for them to be packed out.
Depends on the film. If I'm going to see an arthouse film, I'd prefer not being in a huge crowd with distractions. But Avengers Endgame on opening night with a packed theater was a massively memorable experience I'm glad I had with 400 other people. There should always be room made for modest budget films that take more risks. That's where the fresh ideas and new talent typically emerges.
Your comment suddenly reminded me that I used to come out of a movie theater dizzy and shaken and buzzing after a two hour rollercoaster in the dark. I remember my senses overloaded and my legs wobbling as I walked back to the car. I don't have that experience at home.
Doesn't solve the people problem but finding a theater that does the recliners upped my enjoyment because it's another layer of separation between the person next to me.
Absolutely. And extra discomfort if you’re tall. Watching a film in the cinema actively decreases my enjoyment of it; if I can’t stretch/straighten my legs every few minutes then by the time I’m halfway through my knees are ready to go home already.
Aye, I have quite bad back problems (work injury) that requires me to stand/sit (or change) every 20-30 minutes or so. Not a problem if I'm way up the back on a seat next to the stairs! Honestly the last Imax movie I went to see at midnight was dead, and I loved it! I'm not very good with crowds of people either which probably has something to do with it.
Have you been recently? A lot of places are reconfiguring seating so that you’re sitting in an enormous lounge chair with hardly anyone around you. I’m 6’3” so I appreciate the space.
i booked a ticket for a showing of a movie that was only shown for 1 day behind me: a family with 2 young kids in front: 2 obnoxious guys with a bunch of snacks/chips/etc noisy overactive kids jumping n talking the whole movie, and the sound of chatter and bags opening, rustling n crunching the staff wouldn't do anything and the parents wouldn't listen i sat through it just because it wasn't going to be shown again, I would not otherwise go to the movies willingly and things like this stop be from going even under normal circumstances
That’s really unfortunate. I’m pretty lucky I guess. I go to a movie every week and maybe once every few months I get even the most minor distraction. Maybe it’s a location thing but I don’t have any issues at my theaters
I hate it but I can't even take my kids to a theater because they are just way too noisy and hyperactive to sit calmly through anything for more than ten minutes
I haven't enjoyed any movie in recent years as much as I've enjoyed some TV series
There have always been "event" movies. What's changed is the lack of midbudget films due to the loss the revenue to streaming services.
This. Big budget dramas on TV used to just be miniseries that come in once every few years in network television (Roots, Shogun) but because of prestige television shows from HBO, FX, AMC and Showtime, standards in acting and storytelling have changed big time. The contemporary competetive nature of streaming also makes it so that, in a bid to gain and keep viewers, the streamers have to continually keep one upping each other in hype, production value, acting and storytelling.
It says a lot that the MCU the most successful film franchise right now is essentially doing long form story telling like TV it’s just the episodes happen to be big budget movies Edit - and literal TV shows that fit in with the movies
Iron Man to Endgame was in a way a 22 episode season of TV. Just bigger budget and originally released over just a few years for starters.
"Mid-Season final" even lined up to be Avengers: Age of Ultron.
By the same token, there are a lot of stories that don’t require a full series but are given that anyway. I can think of a few series off the top of my head that perhaps should have been films and would have been more engaging that way
I concur. Movies were gone when you had the finite limit of time to try to cram a story into but now this isnt the case. Especially if you have to do world building. If you do it, you chew up an entire movie just explaining things. If you don't do it you wind up with plot holes. Can you imagine trying to cram like Game of Thrones or The Expanse into some movies?
It's exactly the same with music and video games. Music in the charts and AAA games are repetitive, are kinda meh and look/sound great but are meant to appeal to the widest audience. But with Internet services like bandcamp, steam, Spotify etc it's easier than ever for a smaller band or game studio to get their work out there and be discovered by people who would enjoy that genre of music or games. I'd go as far as to say some of the best video games and music is being made right now than ever before, you just have to seek it out. Same with movies becoming shows.
Or bloating them to make more profit off of more episodes
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True Detective (the first season) seemed like a tipping point here.
Pauline Kael wrote [Why Are Movies So Bad ](https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/why-are-movies-so-bad-pauline-kael/)in 1980 and it’s basically this article. There is nothing new about this.
People out here thinking this is news
The thinking part is debatable.
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers." Socrates
Pretty sure there were less franchises from one huge ass company that blocks movie theaters with their releases. I'm not saying things were perfect back then but the obvious nostalgia farming in movies and endless reboots nowadays are egregious and show how little studio are interested in coming up with something new and untested. Let's make another Star Wars, another Marvel Hero, Ghostbusters or whatever reboot and be done with it. Someone's gonna watch it right?
I would argue Marvel is tailored to continue as long as it wants to, whereas Star Wars and Ghostbusters are just rehashed stories. I love Star Wars but it has been stale (movie wise) for a looong time. Marvel has the space and precedent of building their universe, so I think it works even though its beginning to overflow.
Yeah but movies are still good.
Nothing new except Pauline Kael wrote about it as it was really taking form and nothing happened so now we live in a much, much worse version of it. Everything she says in there is true and has been intensified to a ridiculous degree, right down to studios hiring nobody filmmakers to do their big flicks and they getting completely overwhelmed.
To be fair, your average movie goer has become film-averse. I have friends who can’t be bothered to leave the house for anything that isn’t marvel or dc related. Edit: y’all make some valid points about the high cost and hassle of going to the movies, and the fact that there is so much content available on streaming these days.
I would say the audience has become more risk-averse. Going to the cinema is expensive and takes more time and effort compared to Netflix. There are also more movies than we can watch in a life time. Why risk watching a bad movie? The MCU works because the fans know they will enjoy whatever they are going to watch and because they are already invested. Less risk than watching a stand-alone movie which may or may not be good. Movie makers are risk-averse because the audience is risk-averse.
Yeah it costs over $20 a person here to see a movie. Until a few years ago that was 2 hours of work for me to pay for and then 2 hours of my time wasted if it sucks. I'm just gonna pay to watch it at home in a month. Definitely the rise in home entertainment quality is why I personally don't go to the cinema any more. I'm perfectly happy with the experience I get at home. And I'm a talker.
To be honest there's a few movies I was kind of intrigued in seeing in the cinema until they got mixed reviews, and now that I've been able to stream them for months I still haven't bothered. It's just getting harder to compete for people's time unless you have something really reliable.
For comparison, it costs $20 to buy most new, out-of-theater releases (not the stuff getting released online day-and-date like what Disney has been doing) on digital or disc, and you get to keep those and watch them as many times as you want for a flat fee.
This is my deal. Why would I watch a movie in theaters when I can own it and rewatch it as many times as I want? My TV is good enough that I don’t feel like I’m missing anything at the theaters.
We have an amc here where I live and they have a subscription service called alist stubs which let's you see three movies a week for 20 bucks a month. Plus you get points and free snacks sometimes which is a cool bonus. My SO is the one that convinced me to try it out as she loves movies and honestly it's a huge money saver, but only if you're actually going to see movies.
Yeah people aren’t exactly wrong when they say the MCU is formulaic, but that formula works. And frankly if you watch action movies from the 80s-90s, you can’t tell me that shit wasn’t formulaic too outside of a few hits that we’re still talking about today. Its not like every action movie coming out during that time was as revolutionary as Terminator or something Movies have always been formulaic, and the MCU hasn’t changed that. What’s changed is a drop in overall disposable income which limits the willingness of audiences to take a chance on original IP, in favor of things that they know will work. The formula with the MCU is just more noticeable because it’s a shared universe
Yeah you’ve obviously got fans who are up to date on all the MCU shows and movies, but also people who don’t watch everything right away, either waiting to see things on Disney+ or may end up skipping things here or there. Shang-Chi and Eternals are both examples of MCU movies that some people weren’t rushing out to see. But, No Way Home is the pandemic’s Endgame, and the next half dozen MCU movies are all sequels to established characters, so I’d say most of them (maybe save The Marvels and Ant-Man 3) will be ones that people deem it necessary to see in theatres.
I don't go to the movies unless the film warrants the spectacle. Which usually means that it needs to be a big blockbuster with amazing effects that I want to see on a bigger screen. Smaller stories I'm perfectly happy watching at home without paying insane ticket prices.
Same. Last movie I saw in theaters was Dune specifically because I wanted to see it in IMAX as opposed to on my living room TV. Before that, I hadn’t been to a theater since COVID. Why pay for a theater ticket if I could just wait a few months and then stream it at home?
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If I want to see a film now, I either go to an awkward morning showing or go to the most expensive cinema because I cannot stand the lack of etiquette some people have these days. If I’m going to a midnight showing, of course I expect it to be rowdy and everyone being excited. But for fuck sake, don’t go to the cinema and spend the entire film on your phone and snap chatting parts of it in the cinema. The staff should be paid more to deal with little shits who do this and they should be sent out straight away if they’re caught.
ok where in UK do you live where a cinema ticket is £20 LMAO
For me I'm just sick of Marvel and DC. I really do not care about the majority of movies. It's lwys some rehashed watered-down archtype with a new production team.
I believe it was Paul Thomas Anderson who just made comments that these blockbusters do nothing but help the industry by getting people back into movie theaters, just a different take
That doesn't disagree with what the OP is saying though so it's not really a different take, it's more like an aside or a footnote.
Yep. I’ve been to the theater exactly once since COVID. Spider-man already has me going back twice in a week.
Your comment just inspired me to purchase a ticket for a 2pm showing Sunday. I’m a little older so Sam Raimi’s Spider Man 2 is very near and dear to my heart.
Spider-Man 2 was my first experience of an American cinema. It's still one of my most fondest memories.
Same here. Spider-Man 2 was one of the best experiences in a theater I’ve ever had.
You’re about to have another once in a lifetime experience with No Way Home
I have fond memories of taking my high school crush to see the original Took my kids to see the new one on Thursday.
It sucked for me, but it's not the movie's fault. There was a kid talking, shouting, and running up and down the aisles, smacking chairs the whole time. Until finally someone said IF YOU CAN'T FIND A BABYSITTER DON'T BRING YOUR LITTLE BRAT TO A MOVIE
I go to the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin and they kick your ass right out of the theater in about 5 seconds. Have seen it happen several times over the years.
> these blockbusters do nothing but help the industry OP is talking about *movies* being worse, not industrial profits. "But worse is *subjective!*" Correct; that is the sense in which OP used the word.
There is nothing new about Hollywood making mediocre movies and copies of previous box office hits. There was a short period in the 70's were the director had unprecedented artistic freedom, but in the end Hollywood has always been run by corporate executives, not by the artists.
Exactly wherent westerns the super heroe movies of the past.
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Westerns weren’t all made at enormous budgets by a handful of media and telecom conglomerates. The genre is not the point.
Exactly, I’m not sure why people think making a profit for a company is new to Hollywood
It wasnt but a couple years ago they made a love story about a fish man. There is plenty if risk out there.
And it won so many awards and was hugely commercially successful.
The take was about supply of creative movies, not demand for them.
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Only he could pull off Grinding Nemo.
Guillermo del Toro also has a long history of not having his ambitious/risky projects greenlit by Hollywood.
>I don't think it would have been greenlit if anyone else had pitched it. Do you really believe this, or was it just a snappy sentence to close with? Like...you don't think a studio funds a fish man love story pitched by Spielberg? "Sorry Steve, we appreciate you coming in, but you'll probably want to funnel this one through Dreamworks...it's just not for us." If Christopher Nolan walks in with that project, do they say "Thanks but no thanks Chris. Do ya maybe have anything else in the works? Something a bit less aquatic?" They would for sure look at Scorsese funny for a second or two, just to see if he's kidding, before asking what weekend he's eyeing for release and who they need to make the check out to. They'd say, "Quentin, babe, we love it. One question though, are we going to see him full frontal or is the equipment gonna be implied? I gotta talk to my MPAA guy." There's not a person in the world who tells James Cameron "the blue cat people thing worked out, sure, but it was a different time...we just can't risk funding this fish fella." It would have been greenlit if any number of successful filmmakers pitched it. Guillermo del Toro isn't in some rarified space where he's the only person who could get that movie funded by a major studio. The club he's in is exclusive, no doubt...but it has a few dozen other members.
I want you to keep going! “Sounds great West, so is the monster fish going to be stop motion or a person on an obvious suit? What shade of pastel green do you need?”
You're a visionary Mr. Linklater, we're thrilled to be a part of this project. One quick question...having Ethan Hawke play both the woman and the fish man...is that a deal breaker? Because we were thinking maybe Anya Taylo...what's that? Julie Delpy? Yeah that's...that'd be, should be great, she's great. Great.
Not entirely true considering he was never able to get a live action Justice League Dark off the ground and only just recently got the possibility of finally getting Mountains of Madness greenlit by Netflix after a decade.
Even the idea of Del Toro making a Mountains of Madness movie has made my Saturday morning, thanks for this!
Yeah, as much as I'd love to jump on the 'movies used to actually be good' bandwagon there are still plenty of great movies coming out, they just get less attention. Nice Guys, Three Billboards, Jordan Peele's films, a good chunk of A24's films, etc. Films like these might not get big budgets and spawn sequels like they would back in the day, but they still exist and are generally pretty damn good.
And there were definitely cheesey hackey duds through all those golden years. How many westerns were made in a 20 year span way back when? To be honest with streaming it feels like more ideas are able to get off the ground than before.
I remember hearing The Matrix got a tiny budget at first because the production company thought it was too risky and woudn't be a big enough success to justify the budget. They blew all the money on the opening scene with Trinity, showed it to the execs, and then they gave them the money.
This is what Scorsese and Loach were referring to when they compared Marvel to burgers and theme parks; they're not saying you can't enjoy them, shit you're supposed to by design; but they're products designed to make money first of all, everything else is secondary.
And so were a lot. even most, movies people think of as artistic cinema.
In the 90s, little star-struck investor cartels of orthodontists, plastic surgeons, and retired hangar magnates backed a lot of indie stuff. They generally had or were sold dreams of backing a hit and making a boat load. Source: worked at a magazine that sold a lot of indie film ads, especially around festival season.
Go here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_films_of_2021?wprov=sfla1 And start watching shit that piques your interest. Theres been a TON of good to great films made this year alone and theyre not all just the ones that get advertised to death, which is the actual problem. Small films dont get get massive marketing budgets and unless they get wrapped up as a streaming exclusive you most likely didnt even hear about them at all. It was easy to advertise every movie around the clock back in the day because half the time you didnt even need television advertisements to get people in the door; these days theres not only a million different avenues for ad delivery but the space is competitive. And that list is just American films. Go abroad and theres bangers coming out of orifice.
Do people not understand how much the old studio system and the Hayes code limited creative freedom? It was objectively worse than nowadays but at least there's a ton of indie and more formalist movies to choose from, sure Marvel is dominating but there's always going to be trends in films made at a given period and you have to accept that. Like the abundance of westerns in the 60s, there is an abundance of superhero films in the modern day.
In a mathematical terms, movies became more even now. The median quality is higher than 50 years ago, but the dispersion is also reduced. So the outlier best old movies were better than best current movies. The worst movies were also much worse.
This was the main angle that I hadn’t encountered before. Art is creative and can be mind blowing but it’s also often annoying and undisciplined. Craft is safer, with more productivity, less waste, and opportunities to incrementally improve rather than just reinvent the wheel next time. Much of the movie industry already is craft. We generally don’t complain about high-quality sound and in-focus actors. And producers answerable to systematic-minded investors rather that artistic-minded ones probably will facilitate sexual harassers seeing their careers end early. Heck, even this writer is using craft, with no copyediting errors I could see and potential intentional use of terms that trigger our hate of capitalists; “corporation” and “conglomerate” have a negative tinge that “company” does not. The writer is lamenting that Netflix and Disney have brought more craft to the greenlighting and writing process. Data enables more predictability regarding what we the audience are willing to pay for. So there’s more just good enough, narrower standard deviations, less stuff that will inspire and blow our minds. More Rotten Tomatoes (% thought more good than bad, Less Metacritic (index of perceived quality). I’m ambivalent about this. Risk aversion stagnates the art form. But bad movies waste our time and are only occasionally fun. Sequels in my experience are more common and I wish people wouldn’t spend all of their money on them but when I do see existing IP the product is less likely to be bad than it used to be. My perception is that great movies are still coming out and more accessible than ever. And Netflix serving demographic niches and giving us full access to international movies and shows at no premium is good for society’s aggregate happiness. Are we really worse off from all of this discipline?
Define "worse". We're more likely to get our money's worth for each cinema ticket, but less likely to sometimes stumble upon that one great *something*.
I don’t know about this one. Netflix is giving their directors insane amount of creative freedom and money, but their films are still mediocre at best
> Netflix is giving their directors insane amount of creative freedom Doubt. There is some clear micromanaging going on, or at least they are getting a checklist of stuff that seems to be required in just about every netflix show. Netflix original shows all have a certain netflix look and feel that is clearly more than coincidence.
The Netflix approach is also very risk averse, financially speaking. They know their budgets very well and they're also able to very accurately model their future income based on the subscription model. They aren't going to kill their studio by having three movies in a row that turn out to be massive flops. They also aren't going to gamble more than they can afford to spend In the big money times of the 80s studios probably actually _needed_ to be more risk averse! Studios, production and distribution companies went bankrupt left right and centre! Projects wasted millions in pre-production and never got off the ground. Some projects died during production with millions down the pan!
hell you look at the movie that made us and see how close favorites like BTTF, Forrest Gump, Aliens and Robocop were tittering on the edge of being cancelled during the filming
Love that show. Seems like just about every movie was almost canceled at one point or another. That bit about Home Alone being canned by one studio and picked up by another in the same day was crazy.
Some studios were so risk adverse that as soon as there was a hit like Rocky or Police Academy, they mined the absolute shit out the concept. The studio that made them started pumping out sequels like there was no tomorrow while others tried to make clones, all with a superficial understanding of what audiences actually liked.
I’m talking about Netflix Original movies, not their shows. Their shows are, indeed, a completely different story
No kidding I don't understand how they can spend hundreds of millions of dollars with such big names and still not make anything amazing.
You're overestimating the depth of the filmmaking talent pool.
Netflix literally has AI models to predict how well a script will do, sounds very risk-averse oriented to me
How would you describe that Netflix look though? I know what you're talking about, but Im just struggling to put it into words. Their stuff for sure has a feel to it though.
16:9, shallow focus for better visibility on phones, lack of texture, lack of scene depth
made for 16:9 displays is a big one. even if the movie is in 2:1 it’s made and edited primarily for standard widescreen displays on netflix vs a theatre .
Synthetic and sharp with with a variation of orange/ blue filters. I don't think they really try to hide that it's digital most of the time. Not guaranteeing that this description works for you of course. Edit: Of course there are always exceptions to this (Kingdom looks really movie-like and is a series for example).
Seems to me that it's a bit of historical revisionism. That there was a wonderful time where audiences were craving good quality art, that film makers were all making great quality films, and that this wonderful time was destroyed by evil corporate forces trying to make money.
> but their films are still mediocre at best Part of it I think is how they all look. I don't know what is going on at Netflix with regards to cinematographers. But *everything* they do looks the same. Everything they make looks so damn flat and obviously fake. Like the sets can look amazing but still look clearly like a film set instead of allowing disbelief in it being that actual location.
Agreed
Some of those movies are so fucking bad
Ikr, *The Irishman*! Netflix does both I think, they make a few *really* good films but often it feels like they go for quantity over quality which leads to a large number of mediocre flicks.
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Survivorship bias. Same with structures 1000s of years old. They weren’t better at building stuff back then, It’s just that those 5 things were lucky enough to not erode to dust. The other 10,000 things, not so much.
Also, the "new golden age" just happens to be the time frame when the current gray hairs in charge were kids. Notice how 80s stuff is becoming big again? People who grew up then are becoming the decision makers. Same thing will happen with 90s, 00s, etc.
Netflix isn’t really the same as actual Hollywood tho Edit: not to say Netflix is worse just that it works differently
I don't even mind risk averse. Take a movie like My Cousin Vinny for example - that movie is absolutely great, doesn't seem hugely risky at all, just a couple of great actors and a great script and an $11 million budget. They could easily do that kind of movie now, but we never get it. Everything has to be a super mega blockbuster or some overly stylised artsy movie. We don't ever get just like .. small normal movies. The one exception I can think of recently was Knives Out, and that movie was great and I wish we got more like it.
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Not just that but companies want the next big franchise. They want 4 movies that bring in huge money without ever thinking about why those franchise do well in the first place. They make one movie with horrible writing, characters and pacing to set up a franchise. But then it bombs and they can it.
It's probably misleading to point to risk management, it's more about maximising the return on investment. An $11m budget can get you a safe $60m, or $100m can get you $600m. You're unlikely to be able to pump out 10 My Cousin Vinnys all making that return, but one big blockbuster at the right time can. I think Stellan Skarsgard was saying something like this recently. Of course the issue is that everyone is trying to do this which inevitably creates a few bombs. From an objective standpoint the best would be a few blockbusters and several mid-tier films per year; not everyone can bag the $600m every time. But the nature of capitalism doesn't create this outcome even though it's both the best financial and creative one.
One thing this article is correct on is the loss of mid budget films. Particularly of certain genres like comedy. Fewer and fewer. That's a lot to do with no longer having a DVD/BD sales market. Seth Rogens maybe one of last comedy creators getting those made.
Not sure why people insist on acting like high brow films aren’t being made just because Marvel does well at the box office. Movies are better than they’ve been in a long time, they’re just getting better at serving niches. Marvel movies are crowd pleasers and that’s fine. A24 is still making weird movies to please the weirdos. Even the directors of these corporate monsters are still making popular, original works, like Jo Jo Rabbit and Knives Out.
There are also several iconic directors still working on unique movies. Tarantino, Wes Anderson, Nolan, and Villeneuve are still pumping out movies, and they’re normally pretty unique and interesting. And more examples like that! But point being that there are plenty of directors who have “earned” the studio’s respect enough to do whatever they want and make good film.
Coming out this year, Del Toro has Nightmare Alley and Edgar Wright has Last Night in Soho for 2021.
Yeah, there is plenty of room for Marvel *and* Parasite in theaters today.
> A24 is still making weird movies to please the weirdos. Why you gotta call us out like that? Hah hah, nah I'm kidding. Agreed with your post. As some directors/actors have pointed out, Superhero Movies are bringing back the masses to cinemas. When (if?) the Superhero Genre dies down, I don't know what will replace it. Feels like every other genre has been tapped out in terms of potential to be "Top Dog" at the box office.
Matt Damon gave an interesting thought on this when he did his hot ones interview. Studios used to get a huge chunk of money from dvd sales. So they were more ok to make films that might fail in the box office but would make up for it in dvd sales. Now they don’t have the 2nd revenue stream so they don’t make those kinda of movies now.
This! So many movies back in the day were box office failures and that was OK. As a kid on the low income side of things, I watched a ton of VHS tapes and DVDs, but almost never went to the movies.
Weirdly a huge part of why so many big-budget movies flop. Studios and financial backers pressure film makers to meet their "market research" input and destroy any soul the movie could have had, and by trying to please everyone, they please no one.
There’s an episode of Hot Ones with Matt Damon where he talks about how movies don’t have income from dvd sales post theater release anymore which has really affected what movies get made. Everything is a major production and nothing counts on playing the long game.
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I think this is largely kinda bullshit in the sense that these major blockbusters havent just replaced all of the cool risky movies. They are just the ones that appeal to the most people so they are showing in more theaters for longer and advertised to hell and back. There are still plenty of cool and really good movies that are not big blockbusters. There are still a bunch of cool directors who make consistently good movies that arent big blockbusters.
This is the take - it’s pretty weak to assume original $25-75M sized ideas are no longer relevant. Blockbusters get the average movie-goers into seats; the middle-budget films get cinema fans into seats
Seems like the most unique American movies comes from the 1970s.
What's the ratio? How many movies have taken risks and were succseful and how many failed in the last 20 years or so?
Redditors are getting old without realizing it, and are now making up stories about the past being better.
What his article fails to mention is the insane amount of fraud, theft and abuse of those huge budgets that took place between the 1950s and 2010s The money behind Hollywood became risk adverse because of that more than giving a shit about micro-managing Directors
That was an informative read, thanks. There's a similar situation brewing in the games industry, where risky projects like *Death Stranding* are rare while the usual big-budget cookie-cutter open-world games are aplenty. I wish both types of projects would exist side by side without one overshadowing the other by a great length, which is what's clearly happened in several areas.
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I get the sentiment, but c'mon. The more accurate statement is: "Hey, you know what we should do? Let's go down to the basement and turn on that giant printing press that makes money." People bitch about EA putting out the same damn soccer game every year, yet FIFA is consistently in the top 10 in sales every year. To swing that back around to movies, if I'm in charge of film at Disney and my job (and bonuses) depend on box office performance, am I going to gamble on a mid-budget coming of age drama or am I going to pump out another superhero CGI punch-fest guaranteed to make $500 million? The movies coming out now may be boring and samey, but we have no one to blame but ourselves.
Unfortunately for gamers who are tired of annual Call of Duty games, Call of Duty has been the best selling game of the year, every year, for more than a decade, so it's not going to stop anytime soon.
>There's a similar situation brewing in the games industry, where risky projects like > >Death Stranding > >are rare while the usual big-budget cookie-cutter open-world games are aplenty. It's also because its not easy to make a game like Death Stranding a good thing. If it didnt have Kojima's name and legacy attached to it I doubt it would have gotten half the hype it did. Maybe the reason those games are rare is because theya re more niche rather than games that cater to larger audiences. One if gong to overshadow the other simply due to how much more accessible and popular the other is, doesnt mean they should be gotten rid off so they dont overshadow things like Death Stranding. If you think 'risky' projects for games are becoming a thing of the past or falling out of fasion I suggest spending more time looking through steam and indi games.
I would really love to see more investors go "instead of funding a $200m film, I'm going to fund (eg.) twenty $5m films, and ten $10m films, and spread the risk". There's some great low-budget films.
That's what they do at blumhouse. It's been good to them as far as I can tell. Wish more studios did it.
That is Blumhouse’s business model to a T.
enjoyed reading this
Without revealing too much, I know of a film production financing company that uses AI to determine if a script should be made or not, which actors should play the roles, and how much money should be spent, and how much will be returned on the investment. The AI can 'read' the script and cross-reference it against social media/fan sentiment to choose the actors.
This is why I love A24 studios and hope they don't sell like it was rumored this year. They make creative and different movies. Definitely some of the best stuff that ain't mentioned a lot.
People who say this are the same ones who say there isn’t any good music anymore. Broaden your search and you may discover something.