Price of 1 movie ticket: $15 Price of small popcorn: $8 Price of small drink: $8 Price of small candy: $5 Total: $36 Time it took to drive to theater: 10 mins Time it took to wait in line for food: 10 mins Time it took to watch trailers: 25 mins Total: 45 mins Buying the movie and watching it my house costs no more than $20 (when it first comes out) and I can make whatever I want to eat and don't have to drive anywhe…
Added advantage for me : no one making irritating sounds eating their $8 small popcorn or unwrapping their $5 candy.
The Slow Death of Hollywood
111–120 of 267 posts
Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
>But Hollywood have always done this - recycling old ideas in new wrapping. Yes, but I think it's safe to say that there were a lot more original movies a few decades ago than there are now. Hollywood used to take more risks. >According to Wikipedia, Aladdin grossed "$923.7 million, against a production budget of $183 million". So despite you and your nephew, Disney seem to manage OK. Exactly. People are bemoaning th…
"Hollywood" has never, ever taken more risks than they are taking today. Netflix alone spent $12 billion on new content in 2018. They expect to spend $15 billion in 2019, and expect this to hit almost $18 billion in 2020.[1] There is more new, original content being produced than anyone could ever expect to watch in one lifetime. Compare this to a few decades ago when you had 3 or 4 networks on TV each making a dozen…
When they produce a movie, they want to sell it to auditory, to lure us into theaters and make to pay for tickets. They are attaching stars and buying stories and making trailers and posters.
The only purpose of TV-serie is to work out a Pavlov dog reflex: they want us to be before a TV every week at the same time. So they are making cliffhangers and misterious faces, and are filling all the emptyness with action scenes and dialogs.
NB: I am aware that some of Netflix production are not series but feature movies.
Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, what mailing lists are you on that give you weekly tickets to mainstream cinemas? I'd love to get on that.
The main one is my health insurance, which consistently gives me a free cinema ticket ever fortnight (was every week) for walking distances I'd've walked anyway. Mubi gives me free cinema tickets each week to a designated film. My phone network gave free ones occasionally for a while too, have switched networks since but I believe they still do.
Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> everyday people are catching on to the fact that they're just being resold the same stuff they've already bought. But Hollywood have always done this - recycling old ideas in new wrapping. And Hollywood have always been criticized for being vapid entertainment, empty spectacle etc. "catching on to the fact" suggest that this is some secret insight which undermines the enjoyment of the movie. But I'm pretty sure mos…
>But Hollywood have always done this - recycling old ideas in new wrapping. Yes, but I think it's safe to say that there were a lot more original movies a few decades ago than there are now. Hollywood used to take more risks. >According to Wikipedia, Aladdin grossed "$923.7 million, against a production budget of $183 million". So despite you and your nephew, Disney seem to manage OK. Exactly. People are bemoaning th…
This probably depends on your definition of original. Franchises dominates today, but lots of older movies are based on books or plays or are remakes of even older movies.
Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood
#115I wasn't aware that Netflix was strategically aiming for 2 seasons show now. I kinda like that. I might like 3 better. But so many shows in the past have driven forward until they were unwatchable and cancelled. And with a timebox of 2 seasons, the writers can know exactly how big their story arc is, and can wrap everything up cleanly. As far as the impact on Hollywood that this all has... I'm not trying to be rude,…
Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood
#116I have another guess: Rising inequalities in the U.S. means fewer and fewer people can have access to high quality movies. This means the internal market, which is the fuel of Hollywood, is dying and that's why Hollywood is dying. It's just an intuition and a guess. EDIT: Also, it could mean that the concentration of money inside a few hands in Hollywood mean they try to make fewer movies so they get more return on i…
Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood
#117Hollywood is hanging itself by its own velvet rope. Remakes are seen as an excellent investment because, so long as they are properly stylized and full of dazzle, they are low-risk and have reasonable returns. Usually. This won't work for them forever, and I think everyday people are catching on to the fact that they're just being resold the same stuff they've already bought. The other day, my cousin's 11 year old so…
> everyday people are catching on to the fact that they're just being resold the same stuff they've already bought. But Hollywood have always done this - recycling old ideas in new wrapping. And Hollywood have always been criticized for being vapid entertainment, empty spectacle etc. "catching on to the fact" suggest that this is some secret insight which undermines the enjoyment of the movie. But I'm pretty sure mos…
I'd love to see you back this up with data in comparison to previous years. Even a cursory glance at opening weekends over the years on Box Office Mojo tells me you're misinformed.
Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood
#118Hollywood is hanging itself by its own velvet rope. Remakes are seen as an excellent investment because, so long as they are properly stylized and full of dazzle, they are low-risk and have reasonable returns. Usually. This won't work for them forever, and I think everyday people are catching on to the fact that they're just being resold the same stuff they've already bought. The other day, my cousin's 11 year old so…
Recycling culture nakedly has always been Disney's thing, the familiarity of the stories has always been a selling point with much of the market (and the “its just recycling what I've already experienced” has always been the refrain of another part of the market.) That's also true of Hollywood more generally. To the extent Hollywood is dying it's because new media (that are no less enthusiastic about recycling cultur…
1) The problem is that a lot of the remakes/sequels and reboots are quite frankly crap. I don't care too much about Disney. But other remakes and sequels are generally awful.
So lets take some case studies:
* Robocop (2013). The movie except for on 2 minute scene was dire. It was a PG-13 remake of what was at the time a shockingly violent film (the effects look awful now, but they were quite convincing back in the mid-90s still) that completely missed the point of the original movie.
* Ghostbusters (2016) was another movie that not only looked completely awful in the trailer, it completely again misunderstood the original movie, added nothing much new and they outright attacked the fandom after they said to the studio "What the hell are you doing". The original Ghostbusters movie wasn't really a comedy movie, it was a Action Horror with some Jokes. The new movie was just a comedy movie, which looked like a Spoof along the lines of "Scary Movie". I have no idea who they were marketing it towards.
Lets take sequels:
* They have also totally squandered two solid Sci-fi Action Movie franchises (Alien and Predator) to the point where the previous low points of the franchises look good (Alien vs Predator and Alien 3 & Alien 4: Resurrection).
* Star Wars has been completely ruined from a fan's perspective. The prequels (in the 2000s) has some terrible acting, iffy CGI now but I can at least appreciate what they were attempting to do and it was an honest attempt by Lucas to flesh out Star Wars universe. However the new Sequels go from "This is Okay, but it is the 1977 movie retold essentially" to terrible (The Last Jedi).
The Last Jedi doesn't make any sense on quite a number of levels. It also ruins one of beloved characters on screen and it was probably intentionally written to not only upset the fans but also kill the franchise i.e. there is at least one scene where Kylo Ren says to audience pretty much "Let the past die, kill if you have to", which is the director pretty much sticking his middle finger up to the fans. Yes in the scene he was speaking to whoever the main character is that doesn't seem to have a personality, but it was really a message from the director to the fans.
They also attacked the fan base (not a good move) because they didn't like a terrible movie. While the movies made money, they have tarnished the brand in the long term.
Disney bought Lucas Film because of Star Wars and monetising the fan base. Lucas Film under Kathleen Kennedy have tried driving away their a dedicated fan base. This strategy is madness.
2) The Hollywood Elite (and they are Elite) have forgotten they are actors and actively show distain for the audience. I don't really want to get into a political commentary, but they literally had The Avengers do an online piece of activism where they told the Electoral college to defy the 2016 Presidential Election result. This doesn't go unnoticed by the average movie goer. Just under half of the Country voted for the current president and then they do an advert where they are pretty much putting a middle finger up at the people who voted for Trump. A lot of those people took their kids to see those movies or saw went to see them themselves.
Audiences will forgive actors for quite a lot of things, but if they continually keep on pushing this audiences will associate them with their politics and not what roles they played.
They are actors. I want them to pretend to be Black Widow, not lecture me about Politics. I will go and listen to a political commentator if I wanted that.
3) Bollywood and the rest of Asia are making their own movies which kick ass. Take "The Raid 2". It has plenty of brutal fight scenes, but it also has a top quality plot about gangs, undercover cops etc. It is amazing to watch. A lot of guys are looking at overseas cinema because Hollywood isn't catering to them.
4) User generated content. I think the only movie I've watched recently was John Wick 1, 2 and 3. I recently listened to a recorded lecture series of the History of Islam on Youtube made by some guy who lives in Azerbaijan. I can listen for effectively nothing 1000s of hours of interviews of Joe Rogan and a Guest just talking for 3 hours about sometimes absolute nonsense or talking about say Leaving a Cult (Megan Phelps interview). I recently watched a series of lectures about the database as a filesystem from some Linux conference. There is a guy who made loads of mini-documentaries about old defunct computers systems and the quality now is on par with the Discovery Channel shows of the late 1990s.
5) Longer stories. Game of Thrones, The Wire and other shows that have very long running stories, lots of characters and complicated plots with lots of Lore have proven that audiences want more complicated stories. There is a guy called Alt-Shift-X on Youtube and he has huge number of people watching him and he just explains the Game of Thrones Lore of the Book vs the TV-series. Most Hollywood movies are pretty simple affairs in comparison.
Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
>But Hollywood have always done this - recycling old ideas in new wrapping. Yes, but I think it's safe to say that there were a lot more original movies a few decades ago than there are now. Hollywood used to take more risks. >According to Wikipedia, Aladdin grossed "$923.7 million, against a production budget of $183 million". So despite you and your nephew, Disney seem to manage OK. Exactly. People are bemoaning th…
> I think it's safe to say that there were a lot more original movies a few decades ago This probably depends on your definition of original. Franchises dominates today, but lots of older movies are based on books or plays or are remakes of even older movies.
Re: The Slow Death of Hollywood
#120Couldn't this simply be an artefact of more authors entering the market (and filling out surveys). It doesn't seem conclusive as a scare metric.
As for the general article, at the moment more art seems to be produced than ever before. No matter what endgame Netflix has in mind, I don't see how they could achieve a monopoly situation as with the Hollywood firms if the past. There is now the internet, everybody can publish.
Diacoverability, maybe - so they would become the Google of movie search engines? How would they prevent for example Google becoming the Google of movie search engines? Google retains its dominance because it is also pretty good, so far.