It's a multi-tiered problem with each one with its own complexities. I don't want to write a long story now, but I want to emphasise one and one thing only.<p>If you want to disrupt film and/or tv industry then you have to disrupt people, not technology (by much). It's a people problem.<p>It takes a lot of people in a collaborative manner to work on a product like that, with each person being skilled and expensive. You need a lot of people like that for a long time. You also need wood, nails, paint, cars, space, energy... lots of those in order to build sets. And someone to imagine them and someone to design them.<p>Having a fancy camera, grip, lenses is a tiny tiny proportion of any reasonable-sized budget. Most of the money goes to people and towards materials, rentals and space for sets.<p>It's a lot of money too, if you want to make something reasonable. Not everything can be made on a small budget with innovative story. Some products can, but not majority.<p>What it means is that you need a lot of cash, and for that you need investors (or deep pockets and then you don't care, maybe). With investors there are expectations of return on investment. And with that you're in the realm of distribution.. and then real complexities come forward.<p>You can't expect to raise anything moderate in crowd-funding for these types of products. It's too much for the level where that is now.<p>Note: I work in this industry. I have or have access to free state-of-the-art cameras, grip, lenses, even studio facilities and more, yet I can't make a movie just like that. I still need to pay lots of people to do their job and pay the materials for (at least some) sets or set dressing.<p>It's a people problem. They need to eat and pay bills and they don't care (much) about your grand vision if you're not paying.
The article's Part 1 refers to an old HN thread and buried in there is a good comment from
anactofgod about "disrupting Hollywood":
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3491584" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3491584</a><p>His analysis has similar to themes to the misunderstanding of "gatekeepers" like Netflix / Amazon Video / HBO and why they exist.<p>Gatekeepers are an <i>emergent property</i> of artists not having money to self-finance their projects -- and -- also not wanting to mess around with tasks that are unrelated to creativity such as managing a web server farm to distribute their videos to their fans.<p>There was a recent HN thread where people were frustrated that they had to pay for multiple streaming services (Netflix/Hulu/Amazon) to get <i>all</i> the shows they wanted. Several suggested that we need to move towards a decentralized P2P distribution platform. Unfortunately, as techies and programmers, we don't consider the underlying economic forces that created the centralized gatekeepers in the first place. For example... if director/producer David Fincher wants the highest payment for his project, he can go to Netflix execs and convince them give him $100 million[1]. How would he get that kind of payday from decentralized systems such as IPFS / Sandstorm / DECENT[2]?<p>[1]<a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/netflix-outbids-hbo-david-fincher-167882" rel="nofollow">http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/netflix-outbids-hbo-da...</a><p>[2]<a href="https://decent.ch/" rel="nofollow">https://decent.ch/</a>
One factor that I didn't see mentioned in this post or the author's previous post is the strength and influence of the union. I lived with an actress who had moderate enough success to do acting full time, have an agent, and be in the Screen Actors Guild. I was amazed at how much money she could pull in for just having a split-second role in a nationally broadcast ad, when it seems likely a company could finds hundreds of attractive, willing people to show up in an ad for a few hundred bucks. My impression from her was that doing non-union work as SAG member could easily kill your career, considering how most studios do not work with non union folks, as SAG would push back hard on them.<p>That said, the film industry is very much built on sentiment and brand. I'm a fan of movies from all eras, so I don't understand why people are so thrilled to pay money to see a new movie when there are so many great movies in the past few decades, nevermind the past year. But people today really want to see Jennifer Lawrence's new work, no matter how many other equally great actresses have had great roles in years past.<p>Same deal with franchises, in movies and in games. A fan-remake could remove Nintendo characters and assets and still have the exact same game mechanics and quality, but very few people would give a shit. We want to see the characters and worlds we grew up with and loved, regardless of whether the actual vehicle (movie, game, etc) isn't particularly noteworthy.<p>Edit: Contrast film with other industries that have been disrupted. I like Seymour Hersh, but I don't care if a great investigative reporting scoop comes from him or from a blogger, I just care about its veracity and impact. Same with software; John Resig seems like a great human being but that's not the main reason for jquery's dominance. Meanwhile, if Star Wars Force Awakens refused Harrison Ford's demands and put someone else in as Han Solo, people would not be so accepting.<p>Note: I'm not saying the union is bad. It's probably more useful to see the strength of the union as a reflection of the inherent strength and value that actors wield in moviemaking.
It might help if "disrupt the film industry" would be defined. Seriously, what does that even mean? Disrupt it so "the little guy" can make movies? You can put together a feature-length movie with an iPhone, a good microphone, and free editing software. Actors might help, too. Want some snazzy vfx? You can do your own. Want your product to be seen all over the world? Thanks to the magical internet, you can have it up for sale on numerous sites. So what do we mean by "disruption"? Oh, you want people to actually <i>see</i> your masterpiece? That doesn't require disruption; what you're talking about is old-fashioned marketing. You need a "Paranormal Activity"-style marketing campaign (a movie, BTW, which cost $10K to make).<p>Chances are, though, your movie is crap (as 95% of anything is) so nobody is going to want to see it anyway.
Always troublesome trying to balance art and commercial value in a discussion - film, music, whatever.<p>Want to see what disruption of a formerly 'high barrier' artistic industry looks like? Photography. I'm pretty sure the ubiquity of cameras and the assists and tricks and filters that are available now have had a significant impact on the income of professional photographers.<p>The last elephant in the room is that a large swath of people who attempt creative endeavors drastically over estimate their talent and under estimate the amount of work a polished product takes. Everybody has to start somewhere, sure. I've just noticed the modern mindset a little more expecting praise rather than understanding it needs to be earned sometimes and then crying about bullying when valid criticism comes rolling in (see: either Corey Feldman performance on the Today Show this year).
It's worth reading the entire series, beginning with <a href="http://endcrawl.com/blog/film-not-disrupted-yet-part-1/" rel="nofollow">http://endcrawl.com/blog/film-not-disrupted-yet-part-1/</a> .<p>While large tech companies are great at attracting talent, that doesn't create a dearth of talent going into smaller startups. The driver here is Part 1: the capital requirements for any high-quality project are huge and up-front. And as entertainment is getting increasingly saturated, there's no real way for a "unicorn" franchise to be born out of an indie flick. No upstart VC will take a bet on you making the next Star Wars, even if you're already an industry insider... and in that case, per the OP, it's much more reliable for you to work within the current system. And on top of that, industry fundamentals don't look good: from one of the links in Part 4, <a href="https://redef.com/original/the-future-of-film-part-i-us-film-is-not-a-growth-business" rel="nofollow">https://redef.com/original/the-future-of-film-part-i-us-film...</a> .<p>Perhaps film is truly an industry in decline, and the disruption is already happening - not from Netflix and other content producers, but in the form of interactivity and mainstream gaming. Perhaps the monetization model there is simply better. Time will tell.
It seems more that the film industry <i>has</i> been disrupted, it's just that small studios have been hurt and large conglomerates were the ones to seize power. Technology changed the economics of the film industry in a disruptive way, and "disruption" shouldn't be a term reserved for small startups taking advantage of those shifts as opposed to large companies.
Film isn't being disrupted by new ways to make the same old film product, it is being disrupted because they time and money that used to be spent watching movies is now being spent in other ways, like watching game streams on Twitch, or YouTube personalities.
The reason why two people can start a world changing technology company is because tools have evolved to reduce the cost of production.<p>The same thing has to happen in the movie industry. This is happening, but slowly.<p>Final Draft costs $249 for a text editor, and Amazon is creating a cloud version for free. You can take a lot of interesting shots with drones that would have costs lots of money to shoot with a helicopter in the past.<p>There will come a day when someone can create an MVP of their movie using animation software on there iPad. Use this to spark imagination in investors and produce a full movie at much lower cost because all the shots have been fully planned.
Megan Ellison's had a pretty good stab at breaking into film financing. I don't think it's impossible as long as you have, say, a hundred million dollars at your disposal. If you don't, that's basically game over as that's what you need to finance a handful of decent indie films.
John Waters, in my opinion, has done way more for "disruption" of the film industry than anyone else I can think of. Maybe Herschell Gordon Lewis, but John Waters was basically using the same tools but didn't have nearly the commercial slant that the H.G. Lewis movies did (since Lewis was, by trade, an advertising executive...he basically made movies on the side for fun).<p>You can make films, and release them to the public, without involving Hollywood (called "the film industry" in this article, which is just as incorrect as calling the 5 major record labels "the music industry", though not 100% inaccurate) right now. I don't understand where the "disruption" part comes in. As far as I can tell, it's already been disrupted...
The film industry has been disrupted.<p>Youtube? Piracy? Online streaming? Digital cameras?<p>Bigger tent pole movies are still traditional becuase theyre less art and more so investment sschemes. Nobody wants disruption there: thats for quirky indie mmmovis
Movies are not being disrupted because like recorded music they are being displaced by the game industry. Just take a gander at Sony's income breakdown and games are as big as music and film put together. You don't want to disrupt an industry that's being displaced you want to get into the new industry that's displacing it.<p><a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/297533/sony-sales-worldwide-by-business-segment/" rel="nofollow">https://www.statista.com/statistics/297533/sony-sales-worldw...</a>
Isn't the first question to ask is ... why? Why certain industry will need to be disrupted and why it is considered a good thing? I didn't see any content creation industry has been disrupted, only the funnels/media are. There are just that many people on this planet can produce high quality music/movies/stories and even proven figures could lead to high profile failures. The risk is HIGH, and there isn't too much technology could do to improve that.
It was definitely disrupted. By TV shows.<p>Fifteen years ago, TV shows was what housewives view, and something you can throw in when no blockbusters are on the screen.<p>Today, movies are laughable. Characters are so unnatural. Plots are so old. FX take so much screen time. On top of that they're so awfully long while lacking enough detail and consideration. TV shows are so much superior these days it's not even funny.
While slapstick, check out Kung Fury for an example of successful collaborative filmmaking:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS5P_LAqiVg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS5P_LAqiVg</a>