Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 492 posts

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

#161

Post by gregsadetsky »

impendia wrote: post #153
IAmGraydon wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Placer is able to track cell phones that have an app installed that uses their SDK. They currently have their SDK in over 500 mobile apps. The data is anonymized, but it would probably shock people how much information I can get from this system. I just pick a location and I can see how many people walked into that location over any time span in the past 4 years, where they live, how much money they make, where else…

I'll bite. Where I live and where I shop, I can understand. But how does my cell phone know how much money I make?

It might correlate it with other vendors and signals (e.g., your trail of visited web sites, completed purchases, etc.) and also deduce it by monitoring your geo position to find where your “home” is (wherever you spend most nights / wherever you use your apps late or early in the day) and then use zip code area demographics to get the average income for that area.

Oh… and, credit card companies selling data (to these same data aggregators) on their members’ buying habits and most probably demographics as well (age, income, etc.)

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

#162

Post by throwaway5752 »

It seems like the current movie business is mostly just a parasite on the back of 50 year old content (Marvel Silver age, Star Wars universe, Disney catalogs, Netflix 3rd party licensed content, et al.)

The long tail of good content is very long. I wouldn't be surprised if Casablanca still generates annual royalties in excess of it's entire original cost, 80 years later. A great movie is a piece of artwork and like the Mona Lisa centuries later, has a timeless aspect to it.

I don't disagree with Diller per se. In fact, "They ain't movies. They are some weird algorithmic process that has created things that last 100 minutes or so." is one of the best descriptions of modern film I've ever seen.

May it is just because of the limits of the article length, but I think it's far more about short form content and limits of human attention. I'd rather watch several 10-20 minute videos from niche Youtube creators in a week than one two hour movie most of the time, and I can't do both.

In that sense, Katzenberg /Quibli were probably onto something. You have to remember Diller created the anonymous content conglomerate of IAC and is commenting on Quibli from that perspective. He admits himself, at the end, that he's working on backing Broadway productions so he's not satisfied with the content landscape, either. Maybe someone will figure out what it means to make something that squares good content with the time/format demands of a modern viewer.

TL;DR: I'm sick of Fast & Furious and Marvel franchise spin offs. Feels like someone made the film analogue of discovering that kids like candy and will preferentially take it over healthier food when offered.

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

#163

Post by Animats »

Barry Diller is just having a "get off my lawn" moment.

It's like Bob Lutz saying the car business is over, which he did a few years back.

Some things have changed. The difference between "movies" and "TV" has narrowed considerably. Production values for TV are up, and there's not the big distinction between "film work" and "TV work" that there used to be. After all, today "film" is just 2K or 4K video projection.

Another thing that's changed is a few huge franchises sucking up the attention supply. This seems to reflect the Disney mindset of getting a franchise going and milking it for half a century or more. (A Mickey Mouse live-action movie is scheduled for 2022. Really.)

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

#164

Post by trynewideas »

reaperducer wrote: post #141
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…

Hollywood started churning out tons of remakes about as early in their history as they possibly could, and never stopped. Very true. From the 1930's until now, the percentage of Hollywood films that aren't recreations of an earlier film, a book, or a play is vanishingly small. To be sure, there is still a good number of original films, even big-name ones, but those are very few and far between.

Broadway celebrates revivals, but Hollywood is almost ashamed of remakes. There's a Tony award for best revival, but only a Raspberry for worst remake.

Both are a form of unoriginal profiteering, on at least a business level. Maybe it's the permanence of a film compared to the ephemerality of a live performance, but the vast difference in how they're received has always bugged me.

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

#165

Post by Apocryphon »

roland35 wrote: post #149
munificent wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Interesting lists, although I think maybe books based movies are more towards original side if we map this as a spectrum instead of a binary value :) New books with great stories are written every year, and I would rather watch that than spider man reboot #4 honestly.

On the other hand, would you want to watch another big-budget Harry Potter side story spin-off (Fantastic Beasts), an adaptation of bad or forgettable YA novel franchises (Twilight, Divergent, Percy Jackson), Fifty Shades of Grey, or the umpteenth adaptation of some Jane Austen novel?

Book adaptations themselves are a spectrum of originality and quality.

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

#166

Post by [deleted] »

ElViajero wrote: post #82
mihaic wrote: post #26

What 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…

> What argument can one make when the burden of proof is to show cultural regression? First, you will need to give examples of what kind of movies you find "creative" that were done in the past and there is no current equivalent for that level of creativity. "Jojo Rabbit", "Parasite", "Blade Runner 2049", "Coco", "Lady Bird", "Arrival", "The Nice Guys", ... that is the past 5 years with one almost missing because the…

[deleted]

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

#167

Post by mumblemumble »

afavour wrote: post #156
mumblemumble wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangentially, last night I half-listened to an interesting YouTube video that used the history of Robin Hood movies to describe this trend. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=428ZxrW6jhk It's a slowly escalating 45-minute rant, but I think that this quote from toward the end summarizes it fairly well: "I'm admittedly a little tired of seeing heroes always surrounded by worlds of gray, because, if they're there long enou…

I think the simple answer is that movies tend to reflect the world around them. Not to get too political on HN but I think no matter your political stripes we can agree that the general mood of the country has been not great since at least 2015 or so. You could argue that means we need more escapism, not less, but somehow that doesn't happen.

I think it goes both ways. The stories we tell reflect our thinking, and our thinking is shaped by the stories we tell.

The cynic in me thinks that another problem is that fun is bad for business. Fun makes people feel good, and people who feel good aren't as likely to engage in retail therapy, and modern movies make a whole lot of money off of merchandising.

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

#169

Post by elliekelly »

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 don't want to have to watch three previous movies and two TV shows to fully enjoy the movie that's in front of me.

I feel like I “missed” the beginning of all the super hero franchises and, even though I’m sure I’d enjoy them, I’m just not interested because getting caught up enough to understand what’s going on in the newer films feels like such a daunting undertaking.

At the start of the pandemic I thought maybe I’d finally watch them all only to find out there isn’t even really an agreed upon order they should be watched!

It’s an odd and (I think) new phenomenon: that someone can lack the prerequisites to watch a movie. Even worse: no one can quite agree on what exactly those prerequisites are.

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

#170

Post by sharken »

kbelder wrote: post #158
toast0 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think Godzilla vs Kong was one of the worst movies ever, I don't think you've watched very many movies. I'd put The Wickerman (either version), The Fountain, and The Final Countdown (1980, nothing to do with the song, sadly) as easily worse than Godzilla vs Kong, and that's just off the top of my head. It's certainly not a great movie, but it's well in-line with what you would expect from the title; slightly p…

Funny. I've watched quite a few movies, indy and studio, foreign and domestic, and The Fountain is the only movie I ever immediately re-watched the second it ended. I thought it was absolutely a masterpiece. But that's art for you; affects people differently.

Might want to give The Fountain a go then, sounds interesting.

To me the movie Memento is special, both the plot itself but also the question, what if it happened to me.

Post reply on HN