He's right and it's sad.
One positive note though is that 2 hours is very short - often not long enough to explore a story.
Series formats mean they can take the time they need.
That said, often they end up being filler.
Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back
71–80 of 492 posts
Re: Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I won't mourn movie theatres (though I hope places emulate the likes of Alamo Drafthouse and do dinner, drinks and let us make an evening out of watching a movie), but I do worry about things like movie financing. It feels the industry has split in two, either making super-expensive superhero blockbusters or super cheap indie films. I'm informed by my cinemaphile friend that exactly this phenomenon has been much re…
> People who complain that nothing good is made anymore must just be looking at what's advertised heavily I can't speak for everyone but I think it's hard to find anything 'fun'. The indie films inevitably seem to be deadly serious, whether it's terrible crimes or failing relationships or the inevitably of death. If a viewer wants 'fun' then they're stuck with formulaic superhero blockbusters. It feels different. Spi…
That's a broader cultural issue for all sorts of art today, not a movie specific thing.
The depressed/angry mood has been building for a couple decades or more, and getting more widespread. Even something intentionally over the top like Fast and Furious or Marvel has more "serious issue" stuff in many of the installments from the last 5 years than previously.
It's easier in the news to see all the bad stuff that used to get hidden behind the scenes, so until something happens about that or people just tired of seeing it both in the news and in art, I imagine it'll be here for a little longer.
Re: Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back
#73We're arguably repeating history, where 100 years ago film was the upstart (but rapidly growing) business and vaudeville was the established incumbent. Film offered far more creative possibilities and were dramatically more immersive than the entertainment it replaced. Today the film industry is the incumbent - profits have peaked, and the upstart video game business has already eclipsed it. Once again, video games h…
...but there is a huge percentage of the population that doesn't like / play video games.
Re: Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back
#74I love how he ends the article by saying, “I’m gonna produce plays on Broadway”
My understanding is that musicals have the exact problem of being way too commerical and basically adaptations of already, mediocre, work. The difference is that the indie scene is even smaller due to the relative costs of creating musicals.
There's certainly a fairly steady diet of musicals/plays on Broadway/West End that are adapted from popular films. And, while many are well done, they also just feel utterly unnecessary in most cases. (There are exceptions--Network for example.)
Re: Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back
#75I think "Movies", as we remember them from the decades of yore, will have a resurgence in the near future due to 2 things:
1) The demand for movies outside of what the streaming services are making.
2) Most aspects of movie production go completely digital to bring costs down astronomically.
The easiest way to embrace digital is to just make an animated movie that looks animated with some interesting cool art style / rendering techniques. Maybe the boomer generation doesn't respond well to animation, but Gen X and Millennials are fine with it.
Otherwise, just look at The Mandalorian for an example of what they've been able to do digitally. A huge huge huge Unreal Engine powered screen, instead of your typical green screen. It is linked to the camera so you get proper depth and angles as the camera moves. The lighting is realistic since the screen is actually shooting light onto the actors and props. And the director can see the composition of the shot in real time.
As more aspects of production will go digital like this, costs will go way down. And hopefully we can have our "movies" again =)
Re: Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I won't mourn movie theatres (though I hope places emulate the likes of Alamo Drafthouse and do dinner, drinks and let us make an evening out of watching a movie), but I do worry about things like movie financing. It feels the industry has split in two, either making super-expensive superhero blockbusters or super cheap indie films. I'm informed by my cinemaphile friend that exactly this phenomenon has been much re…
What would have been considered a mid budget film?
Not a great link, but this covers the gist of it:
https://www.flavorwire.com/492985/how-the-death-of-mid-budge...
It quotes a (clearly a bit exaggerated for effect, at the low end) range of $500,000-$80,000,000 as "mid budget", and gives examples of the category including Blue Velvet, The Godfather, and Hairspray.
It's not that no films are made in that range anymore, just that it's much harder to find financing for a project in that range for a film intended for wide release and any amount of promotion. The money guys want a nothing-budget movie that might become a hit (the startup model), or huge can't-lose projects with likely outcomes that don't include a loss, or not much of one (the formulaic international-friendly [by which I mean China-friendly] action blockbuster that everyone seems to hate, but that nonetheless consistently make piles of money)
It quotes a bunch of mid-budget directors complaining about this, some leaving filmmaking entirely because their options seem to be to go back to making shoestring-budget movies like they did when they were starting out, or start working on projects they don't like (huge-budget films), aside from self-financing. They seem to be concerned about how the next generations of directors will develop their careers, without stable financing for directors who've "made it" but don't want to make Marvel movies and such—IMO we're probably heading back to something resembling the studio system, largely, so the era of lots of Important Directors who Really Matter may be on its way out, anyway, at least for a while.
[EDIT] Also, searching things like "the death of the mid-budget film" turns up tons of material like this.
Re: Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you recommend some good movies from last/this year? Have been digging into old movies to get my fix recently thinking there wasn't anything good out.
If you watched the film "Happy Death Day" (if not the lesser sequel) and enjoyed its exploration of a kind-of goofy mashup (Ground Hog Day x Teen Slasher), the same director made a film built on, roughly, a similar concept, just called "Freaky". If you already suspect you might like it, don't read anything and just watch, though you may be able to guess the mash-up from the one-word title. It's fun, and well-made. I'…
Happy Death Day was a great, and unique, idea I loved it. I even thought the second was not bad even if I don’t think they needed to try and explain what was happening scientifically. I forgot about Freaky and will have to watch that.
I actually think TV shows are where good film comes from these days, especially with them not being made for syndication so we now can get 6 episode seasons. Mare of East Town was a great mystery that just came out. It is true that the superhero genre has hijacked a lot of talent.
Re: Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back
#78The actual quote (with my emphasis added): > "The movie business *as before* is finished and will never come back." And I think that's correct. Superhero blockbusters taking over all box office receipts was one thing, but now those blockbusters are becoming deeply tied to streaming services like Disney+ that's bringing content into people's homes and away from movie theatres. I won't mourn movie theatres (though I ho…
TV shows have also gotten more prestigious, and so the people who would have been telling their stories as movies may be making TV shows instead. The article compares traditional movies to movies from streaming services, and I just think that’s avoiding the elephant in the room. The change started happening slowly in the late 1990s, but at this point I’d say that the change has happened and we’re in a golden age of t…
I think Breaking Bad really set the stage for TV shows being good film. Whether you like the show or not it had a clear and defined story and ended after 5 seasons where most shows before would just run until their ratings dropped.
Re: Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back
#79I think "Movies", as we remember them from the decades of yore, will have a resurgence in the near future due to 2 things: 1) The demand for movies outside of what the streaming services are making. 2) Most aspects of movie production go completely digital to bring costs down astronomically. The easiest way to embrace digital is to just make an animated movie that looks animated with some interesting cool art style /…
Which will impact the QUANTITY of movies produced, but not necessarily the QUALITY. Granted, there's always been B-movies (and D-list actors), but surfacing interesting storytelling is going to be harder, the more we create.
Re: Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back
#80What I find exhausting is having any systemic criticism of the movie/music industry met with arguments along the lines of: "It was just different, you're merely nostalgic/you have golden age syndrome", and have a hard time answering back with anything except: "It really was better, sometime things do get substantially worse". While technologically everything has improved, creativity feel like going from the golden ag…
It's hard to refute, cause it really is true that everyone's most instrumental pop culture experiences happened when they were 10-25 years old. I think one thing that is fascinating is how popular iconography and music/films from 20+ years ago still is. Like I see teenagers wearing t-shirts with NOFX or Van Halen on them, instead of Billie Eilish.
https://www.hottopic.com/tees/music-tees/?cm_sp=LP-_-TeesGri...
Ultimately the post WW2 period was the birth of mass media youth culture, this was a truly revolutionary thing culturally speaking, and everything else has been a series of progressively less meaningful waves as we have 75 years of music/films artfully expressing what it means to be young.