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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

#181

It's unfortunate, but I think he's probably right. Some movies are just better in theater. The experience of watching Mad Max: Fury Road in theater vs at home is a night and day difference.

Depends on your home setup, a big screen and some big speakers go a long way

How big is your screen? I bet cinema screen is bigger.

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

#183
Ok, here's my problem with the movie theatre industry. There's 100+ years of fantastic historical content and we're not doing anything with it. 99% of what's shown in theaters is new releases. I understand we don't want to "go stale" as a society and that movie producers also need to make a living, but the balance is just way off.

I would pay good money to see "the good the bad and the ugly" with my kids in a couple of years. If you compare movie theatres to classical music we seem to play only 10% new content at concert halls, the rest are the 100+ year old classics.

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

#184

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 /…

I have a home theater. I love watching high-production quality shows like The Mandalorian on it - but I also like getting out of the house.

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

#185

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 t…

I believe that you ain't seen nothing yet. Superhero comic films are king but like, say, zombie media in the 2000s, it is a mammoth fad that will eventually be overthrown by another one. Once Hollywood finally figures out how to make a good video game movie adaptation, expect the true licensing deluge to begin. Marvel and DC are but two companies. Imagine the amount of IP adaptations that an entire industry will yiel…

I watched Captain Lou Albano play Mario in the 80s.

Resident Evil? Pokemon? Mortal Kombat? It's already here. I actually don't care, as long as they are good. Not all MCU is bad (and I might even say little/none of it is bad).

Maybe a different comparison: a lot of movies now feel like processed food. Consistent and made-to-please, but limits to how great it can be. It is not ideal to live only on processed food.

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

#186

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…

> Here are the top ten box office films of 2020

But see, 2020 was an aberration. You have to look at 2019.

Sequel, remake, sequel, sequel, comic, sequel, sequel/comic, remake, comic, sequel/remake,

Oh. Oh no. Let's keep going for top 20, yeah?

Sequel/remake, ORIGINAL, sequel, sequel, sequel, sequel, video game, ORIGINAL, comic, comic. (from boxofficemojo)

2 in the top 20.

Let's keep going?

ORIGINAL, remake, sequel-ish? sequel, sequel, (US) remake, ORIGINAL, sequel, ORIGINAL, remake, tv-to-film, ORIGINAL, comic, ORIGINAL, sequel, sequel, sequel, ORIGINAL, sequel, sequel, ...

Let's stop there, but don't assume for a second that all the remakes and sequels are top-loaded - they may dominate the top of the chart but they go pretty far down it too.

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

#187

Ok, here's my problem with the movie theatre industry. There's 100+ years of fantastic historical content and we're not doing anything with it. 99% of what's shown in theaters is new releases. I understand we don't want to "go stale" as a society and that movie producers also need to make a living, but the balance is just way off. I would pay good money to see "the good the bad and the ugly" with my kids in a couple…

Before everything shut down last year, my local theaters played a showing of a classic film each month, often Hitchcock. The few I went to had plenty of attendees.

Another local theater took the lockdown as an opportunity to do outdoor socially-distanced showings of previous blockbusters, like The Dark Knight. Plenty of attendees there, too.

I'd be happy to have more showings like that.

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

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a list somewhere of apps that use placer so that I can delete those apps off my phone forever?

Placer is one of many, many platforms that do this. Assume any app that requests location permissions is selling your data. Hopefully anonymized.

A few months ago I chose a random set of iOS apps to decompile and view their included libraries. Its amazing how much tracking is going on. One interesting that I recall was a Bluetooth library in a convenience store app. Seems like they had Bluetooth beacons around there store and it would use the phone to track you as you walked through the store.

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

#189

Ok, here's my problem with the movie theatre industry. There's 100+ years of fantastic historical content and we're not doing anything with it. 99% of what's shown in theaters is new releases. I understand we don't want to "go stale" as a society and that movie producers also need to make a living, but the balance is just way off. I would pay good money to see "the good the bad and the ugly" with my kids in a couple…

Before everything shut down last year, my local theaters played a showing of a classic film each month, often Hitchcock. The few I went to had plenty of attendees. Another local theater took the lockdown as an opportunity to do outdoor socially-distanced showings of previous blockbusters, like The Dark Knight . Plenty of attendees there, too. I'd be happy to have more showings like that.

Interesting! Where is this? In Amsterdam I know one theater that's showing old films and that's the 1% I was talking about ;)

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

#190
Before streaming, a movie studio actually had to convince an audience to leave their houses and buy a ticket to make money from a movie. This meant the studio had to pour a lot of money into marketing for each movie. The cost to market a movie could be up $30M to $50M range for a blockbuster movie. For a mid-budget drama like Meet Joe Black or A River Runs Through It, you could be looking at a marketing budget that matches the production budget ($30M production + $30M marketing). These big marketing costs for every movie meant that the quality of those movies needed to be pretty high to justify the marketing costs. Streamers don’t have to convince people to go out and buy a ticket for every movie they release. They just have to keep the existing subscribers paying and get more people signing up. So the marketing cost per title goes way down. This takes some pressure off to make quality content because the risk per title is lower. Also quality movies on streamers don’t necessarily get the marketing and fanfare they would have before streaming.
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