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Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back

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Re: Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back

#111

Post by handrous »

WalterBright wrote: post #107
iNane9000 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do I find these movies? Amazon has some old, mostly low quality movies, but nothing good or recent. They got rid of the criterion collection years ago. Sincere question: How does one even find or acquire films today? I’d love to watch a movie, but literally don’t know how to go about it anymore. Netflix is not an answer as most of their content are not movies and basically spam to me.

The TCM channel does a good job of organizing films into categories. I've been watching their Film Noir picks every Saturday night. Lots of fun movies I never knew existed.

HBO's streaming service rotates a decent selection of TCM material, too, complete with the intros.

Re: Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back

#112

Post by nmz »

mentos wrote: post #106

I have no clue how they're making money on these movies that are going straight to streaming platforms? With a movie releasing in theatres there was a sense of urgency to see it on the big screen with big sound and big lights. Being able to stream it whenever you want from home now means you never will. Not sure if any platforms do it already but they should try to create a sense of scarcity by offering only a limite…

That's how you get piracy.

Re: Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back

#114

Post by esperent »

iNane9000 wrote: post #93
handrous wrote: post #23

Earlier 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…

How do I find these movies? Amazon has some old, mostly low quality movies, but nothing good or recent. They got rid of the criterion collection years ago. Sincere question: How does one even find or acquire films today? I’d love to watch a movie, but literally don’t know how to go about it anymore. Netflix is not an answer as most of their content are not movies and basically spam to me.

If it's an old film and it's not easily available on a streaming service, I torrent it.

Re: Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back

#115

Post by watwut »

handrous wrote: post #23
afavour wrote: post #13

The 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…

> 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[0] must just be looking at what's advertised heavily, is all I can figure.

That would be me. I am utterly uninterested in superheroes and found movies I seen last years somewhere between boring repetitive and annoying. Tho I liked parazite and some of other international splash making movies. At minimum they used different tropes.

I have no idea where those fun indie movies are nor how to find them. Like, where should I go to be able to find some I might like?

Re: Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back

#116

Post by Arainach »

iNane9000 wrote: post #93
handrous wrote: post #23

Earlier 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…

How do I find these movies? Amazon has some old, mostly low quality movies, but nothing good or recent. They got rid of the criterion collection years ago. Sincere question: How does one even find or acquire films today? I’d love to watch a movie, but literally don’t know how to go about it anymore. Netflix is not an answer as most of their content are not movies and basically spam to me.

justwatch.com lets you search and discover what services have what movies.

Alternatively, DIY. As streaming became more popular, optical media and hard drives became far more cheap. Over the last 10-15 years I've ended up with more than 500 movies, all of which I own legally and most of which cost me $5 or less. They get to all of my devices through Plex (I used to use Kodi, which is fine over a LAN if that's all you care about).

A significant number of them aren't available for streaming anywhere at the moment, and plenty more would require obscure services I don't feel a need to pay for. It was a gradual upfront cost, but not that extravagent compared to the cost of paying for a couple of streaming services over that time - to say nothing of the 6-10 I'd have to subscribe to to actually have access to all of it.

Re: Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back

#117

Post by toofy »

Damogran6 wrote: post #79
socialist_coder wrote: post #75

I 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.

> Which will impact the QUANTITY of movies produced, but not necessarily the QUALITY.

Absolutely.

We have a signal/noise issue. We need to figure out how to find the signal.

I think one of the issues we really need to come to terms with is our absolute overReliance on algorithmic recommendations when it comes to completely subjective areas like film, music, fashion, food, art, etc… We’re just unable to reduce these things to algorithmic recommendations without the content being… algorithmic.

When discussing this I have to often repeat to people, I’m absolutely not a luddite–I work, live, and breathe-in technology. I firmly believe science and technology are part of the key fundamentals to carry us forward. However, one area where I consistently get much better results is when these things are recommended by other humans. It really is no contest in how much better human curation is when it comes to recommendations.

Obviously untested and obviously just pulling numbers out, but for me, I think algorithmic recommendations are just plain wrong about 95% of the time. Friend’s recommendations are close/spot-on about 75+% of the time. And human curation (from online reviews, real life DJs, critics, etc…) are decent maybe 60+% of the time. Far better results from humans.

I think you’re correct that we’ll have a lot more quantity and we’re going to need human curation in there if we have any hope for the quality to gain footholds, to find the signal in the ever growing noise.

Re: Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back

#118

Post by IAmGraydon »

Through my work, I have access to Placer.ai, which allows me to track foot traffic to any retail location or chain via visitors' cellphone GPS. Here's AMC's nationwide foot traffic from January 2017 through July 4, 2021.

https://i.imgur.com/s3H7EYj.png

Re: Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back

#119

Post by throwawayboise »

munificent wrote: post #102
handrous wrote: post #23

Earlier 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…

> Then there's "it's all remakes now"—but 1) it's not, It really is, if by "remake" you mean all ways of leveraging existing IP. Here are the top ten box office films of 2020: * Bad Boys for Life (sequel) * Sonic the Hedgehog (videogame) * Birds of Prey (comic book) * Dolittle (book) * The Invisible Man (book) * The Call of the Wild (book) * Onward (original) * The Croods: A New Age (sequel) * Tenet (original) * Wond…

Airplane was not strictly an original, it was a remake/spoof of Zero Hour from 1957 and more broadly spoofing the "disaster" film concept.

Re: Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back

#120

Post by jfengel »

edgyquant wrote: post #78
klodolph wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

HBO had been doing it for a few years, with shows like The Wire and Deadwood. But Breaking Bad helped bring it to a wider audience, since AMC is basic cable rather than premium. (AMC had launched into that a year before with Mad Men, which was similarly TV as good film.)
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