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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

#301

Post by chrisseaton »

hallarempt wrote: post #148
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.

My wife and I used to buy a DVD in the second-hand books/new dvd's shop round the corner every Friday for a Friday-night movie viewing. He knew our tastes -- it must be sweet, funny with a happy ending and no adultery or rape -- but the shop closed. We regularly ask each other "Where's Roman Holiday but with a cute girl instead of Gregory Peck. Audrey Hepburn can stay."? Why all the drama in movies these days? We jus…

> Why all the drama in movies these days? We just wanna see two girls kiss and walk away in the twilight, hand-in-hand.

I don’t see how that’s enough to support a film? No challenge to overcome or issue to resolve? That’s a basic of storytelling. What’s left without it?

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

#302

Post by ganoushoreilly »

ant6n wrote: post #236
david927 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it looks strange -- the stock price reflects a short squeeze on naked shorts, not value or growth.

I thought the short squeeze was in jan/feb, what’s that late spring jump?

> https://imgur.com/a/jTkXhtx

The thesis that appears to be correct with AMC and GME is that the shorts never really covered, they simply kicked the can through some creative vehicles.

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

#303

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

deadbolt wrote: post #227
nebula8804 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I recall the CVS app requesting Bluetooth permissions when I installed it. I can imagine them implementing something like this, but couldn't they just passively listen for Bluetooth beacons from people's phones using the devices in the store, without needing the app to be installed on a customers phone? I suppose I'm not familiar enough with Bluetooth - I figured phones with Bluetooth enabled are constantly sending o…

The beacons in the store are pretty dumb, so they can be cheap (on the order of a few dollars each) and plentiful, moving the real logic of tracking to the app.

You're correct in that it could be reversed and the BLE radios in the store could track the phones instead, but then they'd need far more intelligence and network connectivity, which would make them more expensive and in turn they'd be fewer of them deployed.

Source: spent the last few years writing code for wireless devices, including BLE beacons.

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

#304

Post by [deleted] »

Apocryphon wrote: post #155
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #99

I think this interview that gets at a broader point that I find depressing/scary: that the availability of so much data and analysis has ended up "quantizing" creative endeavors to the point where formulaic output is just much, much easier, and that any truly innovative or "misunderstood" productions become much harder to sustain. I really see this issue everyone nowadays, from movies, TV and music to things like the…

Optimization is eating the world.

[deleted]

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

#305

Post by MivLives »

jtwaleson wrote: post #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…

The smaller independent theaters near me tend to do more of this sort of thing. The one near me is doing an entire month of a Samurai movies. Also Month Python and the Holy Grail, and War of the Worlds (2005). All their first run movies tend to be independent ones.

Not saying that chains shouldn't rerun old movies, just saying those types of theaters do exist. It's the only way I can truely get a movie theater experience for things made before I was born.

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

#306

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#307

Post by clydethefrog »

jtwaleson wrote: post #189
GormanFletcher wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

Which theatre in Amsterdam? Lab111?

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

#308

Post by smolder »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #185
Apocryphon wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think video game adaptations are almost universally bad, when they don't always have to be. We used to get pretty bad superhero movies, too, from directors that didn't seem to understand or respect what they were adapting.

Video games seem difficult to adapt generally --they often don't provide the building blocks for a good narrative. Potentially studios can do like what Detective Pikachu did, get a bit crazy, and still make something decent. Going in the other direction and making something which treats the source seriously hasn't generally worked well, even when it could have with better writing and direction.

It seems to me like Hollywood looks down on video games as an inferior medium, so their hearts (and budgets) are never in it fully. An "Iron Man moment" is possible, I think, where they put out something high quality that's faithful to the source, and its success leads to other high quality adaptations.

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

#309

Post by cbanek »

jtwaleson wrote: post #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…

Totally agree here. Especially since a lot of the newer projectors and movies I think are digital formats. There's a local art theater here that is excellent that does a lot of older movies and movie marathons. But I think also getting the rights can be a trick too.

I just want to say being able to see Wrath of Khan in a theater was really worth it!

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

#310

Post by MeinBlutIstBlau »

onelastjob wrote: post #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 m…

I think this is why I've been struggling with finding good films to watch nowadays. Shows are doing great but movies have been suffering. Take the movie "Nobody" for instance. How the hell that movie got the ratings it did I will never know. Not only is it not good, but it was nothing what it was marketed as.

My solution to this is to watch actual films that are made with artistic intent or to see certain things that are submitted into festivals instead of just the main films shown to everyone. It's helped tremendously but it becomes a chore quick when there are a lot of "artsy" movies that tell the exact same story you've seen a million times.

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