Hollywood as We Know It Is Over

Production cost is a problem, and technology has made it worse. Look at that long, long list of animators and technicians at the end of any effects-heavy film today. A cast of thousands.<p>In the late 1990s, when I was working on physics engines for animation, I was talking to a major Hollywood director. He&#x27;d done some of the first films that had both live and photorealistic CGI characters. He wanted to get the cost down, so he could make $20 million movies. At $20 million, he could direct; at $100 million, he was running a huge operation that had to have everything pre-planned in great detail.<p>His model was the early CGI cartoon, &quot;Reboot&quot;. Reboot was a weekly half hour cartoon made by a staff of about 30. He wanted to get to that level of productivity at theater quality - make a 2 hour film in a month with 30 people.<p>That didn&#x27;t happen. Not even close.<p>It&#x27;s been tried. &quot;Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow&quot; started as a low-budget picture rendered on Macs. In that film, if nobody touches it, it&#x27;s CG. Ended up costing $70 million. Worldwide box office $50 million. Fail. &quot;Iron Sky&quot; was made for €7.5 million. Worldwide box office $11.5 million. Fail.<p>There were successful low budget directors in the past, Roger Corman being the prime example. (His autobiography is titled &quot;How I made a hundred movies in Hollywood and never lost a dime&quot;.) It&#x27;s harder to do that today. Viewers today expect incredible production value. Most TV shows have more production value today than 70s movies did. Hollywood has so many people on set because they bring a team together on short notice to do a job, then disband the team. They need many competent people with different skills to make that work. If you cut corners, it looks like Youtube crap.<p>On big movies, we&#x27;ve mostly replaced set painters and carpenters with people who sit at workstations and do the same job with CG models. &quot;Big&quot; is now cheap, but &quot;detailed&quot; remains expensive. Procedural visual content generation can generate good landscapes and vegetation now (check out SpeedTree), but as yet, nobody has been able to procedurally generate one convincing block of a city street seen at ground level. Making GTA V cost $265 million. Not seeing an incoming reduction in production cost.<p>Netflix has no huge advantage. HBO is in the same position - they make content to sell to their own customers, and know exactly what sold. Data collection is retrospective. Trying to figure out what movies will be box office failures in advance remains hard. That&#x27;s why Hollywood generates so many sequels - predictability.

I love movies. Whenever I visit my dad (other side of the country), we go to see movies. However, most of the year I live with my girlfriend who falls asleep in theaters and can&#x27;t justify the cost. This leads to me not seeing movies in theaters anymore.<p>Now, I am subscribed to two streaming services. I don&#x27;t pirate. I refuse to watch anything with ads, happy to pay, and somewhat ironically, the only ads I watch to completion are trailers that I haven&#x27;t seen. I would love to catch movies as they are released but I have to wait until they&#x27;re available on the streaming service. When they are available it is usually 5$ for a &quot;rental&quot;. Is that a joke? I used to pay that at Blockbuster, and they had a physical location and employees! They&#x27;ve priced their digital content in such a way that I will only pay to see the movies that I really want to see. If it was cheaper, I&#x27;d be a constant consumer.<p>It seems that is how most things in society get priced. Not for ultimate consumption, but to maximize the profit curve. I get that is how capitalism works, but that logic doesn&#x27;t make sense to me for digital goods. They are practically zero cost to distribute once they are manufactured and your competition is people pirating them. If you&#x27;re worried about audience size, lower the cost. You&#x27;ll enable a lot more people to see a lot more movies.

&gt; An algorithm generally provided better suggestions than an actual in-store clerk.<p>Could use another pass or two of editing. And the whole thing smells like an anti-union hit piece.<p>Funny thing, I was just in a shared ride with a production person from Hollywood. They might agree on the face of it, &quot;Hollywood as we know it is over&quot;, because you and me baby, we KNOW Hollywood. But that Netflix and Amazon have fueled an explosion of new content that is outside of normal channels and normal timelines. Production houses all over the country have more work than they know what to do with. If the title was, &quot;Hollywood as we know it is transforming&quot; it wouldn&#x27;t sound so dramatic.

The article reads more like an anti-union piece than anything else. Yet, Hollywood has been making TV shows in Vancouver for the last 20 years to avoid this union overhead, so it&#x27;s not really news to anyone paying attention.<p>Lord of the Rings was famously filmed in New Zealand and brought accents to our movies. Now you&#x27;d be hard pressed to watch a recent film without a couple accents.<p>Post-production is pretty much all that&#x27;s left in Los Angeles.<p>Edit: Sorry, in my quick commenting, I meant to imply that accents are more a symbol that Hollywood films its big blockbusters outside the US now. In re-thinking it, it was a bad form.

The &#x27;raindrop story&#x27; is meant to emphasize the union aspect, but the author apparently knows nothing about continuity in filming and editing. If the actor is supposed to have drops of rain on their shoulder, thats a part of wardrobe, and seeing a wiped off shoulder before it rained (because editing) is the reason they are so fastidious. For example, a filmed discussion over drinks where the actors glasses gradually fill up rather than empty.<p>continuity fails: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=WibfRyQK0kY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=WibfRyQK0kY</a>

The writer has little sense of history and doesn&#x27;t understand what &quot;Hollywood&quot; as a business, is. Hollywood is content creation. When Netflix creates their own content, they are becoming part of that business. The theater business is a different thing and the author neglects to mention that long ago the studios also owned theaters, so integration of that kind is not new. The author thinks that the fact that the price paid for studios recently means something. The history going back thirty years or more is of companies paying too much for studios because of the glamour of the business and later selling when they realize they have no idea how this crazy business works.

Which really isn&#x27;t a bad thing. If we can kill off the big budget movie that is all terrible writing and only effects (Ben-Hur, $100 million budget, $26 million gross) and replace it with smaller budget movies with great scripts and acting (Hidden Figures, $25 million budget, $104 million gross), I&#x27;m completely fine with that.<p>Add in movie theaters like Metrograph in Manhattan, where I can buy an assigned seat for, say, a Kurosawa double feature, then I think we&#x27;re moving in a good direction.

<i>And it’s only a matter of time—perhaps a couple of years—before movies will be streamed on social-media sites. For Facebook, it’s the natural evolution. The company, which has a staggering 1.8 billion monthly active users, literally a quarter of the planet, is eventually going to run out of new people it can add to the service. Perhaps the best way to continue to entice Wall Street investors to buoy the stock—Facebook is currently the world’s seventh-largest company by market valuation—will be to keep eyeballs glued to the platform for longer periods of time. What better way to do that than a two-hour film?<p>This might begin with Facebook’s V.R. experience. You slip on a pair of Oculus Rift glasses and sit in a virtual movie theater with your friends, who are gathered from all around the world. Facebook could even plop an advertisement next to the film, rather than make users pay for it. When I asked an executive at the company why it has not happened yet, I was told, “Eventually it will.”</i><p>Really interesting point - would expect to see Facebook&#x2F;Netflix converge on this idea, perhaps even enter some type of M&amp;A action. If it were legal, perhaps Alphabet would be wise to move first and bolster YouTube with Netflix content to create a quasi monopoly on video content - both user created and studio produced. The other giant player to consider would be Amazon with Twitch and their original series as well.<p>Seems like a bit of a fight to the bottom, but I&#x27;m not sure what the margins&#x2F;financials look like for these businesses.

There are two kinds of &quot;disruption&quot;:<p>* The first merely inconveniences people who already work in a given industry, by forcing them to learn new tools or workflows.<p>* The second unseats incumbents and fundamentally shifts power dynamics.<p>&quot;Hollywood&quot;, &quot;Film&quot; et al have by and large not been disrupted yet, in the second sense. Digital change came late to film &amp; tv. We are just now on the tail end of digital transformations that will enable the second wave of disruption.<p>I&#x27;ve written about this extensively, it&#x27;s kind of my bag: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;endcrawl.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;two-digital-revolutions-disruption&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;endcrawl.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;two-digital-revolutions-disruption&#x2F;</a>

It occurred to me that the cinema as we knew it would be soon over as soon as I saw the first episode of Lost. Technology is definitely driving the price of content production but also content consumption to the bottom and there is no way escaping it, except maybe what Netflix is currently doing - original content - which they are getting better and bette at.<p>It is kind of a medium between hollywood productions and youtube - fun, engaging and most importantly agile. According to Netflix reports they spent a lot of money last year but the amount of original content produced in a single year is astonishing. That being said, younger generation prefer watching youtube which is 95% free - and I can see the appeal.<p>I doubt that we will stop watching movies anytime soon but I am more than certain that the format will change to make it bite-size, more engaging and instantly available for a small fee that makes it actually rather annoying to use torrents to consume pirated content.<p>Netflix is right there but what I find even more interesting is what Amazon is doing because of the way they package everything up into a single service. Let&#x27;s be honest, the most annoying thing with subscription services, regardless how less you are charged, is the renewal. I know this first hand because I run my own SaaS. Amazon packages everything into their prime subscription which is annual and for a small fee not only you get to receive expedited delivery on many of the items but also original content and music and that is quite a killer feature that is hard to compete with. Combine this with the fact that almost every modern TV you can buy since 2016 is preloaded with Netflix and Amazon Video - you start to get the bigger pictures.<p>I am sure others such as Google and Apple will follow but they might be too late in the game.

The three act structure of most &quot;film&quot; is also killing it. Television, cable, streaming and Youtube have introduced much richer versions of content formats... a 100 minute action movie, or historical drama, will follow so many familiar beats nowadays that there&#x27;s almost no way to make it compelling.

Article mentioned the CGI characters in Rogue One, but those ruined the movie for me, among other reasons. For one I think I&#x27;ve seen better graphics in video games and while I concede it must have been the contrast between real and fake, what really pissed me off is the realization that either they lacked the imagination to come up with a credible alternative story or that this was some sort of sinister &quot;fan service&quot;.<p>The other thing that pissed me off is that in Rogue One, like in other recent movies, nobody is kissing anymore, but people dying of violent deaths is totally OK.<p>The primary reason for why Hollywood is having problems is because they make really shitty movies, full of CGI but with no story. I can even understand the violent deaths, after all, given the lack of story, you can&#x27;t relate to those characters, so they might as well die spectacularly, before the audience dies of boredom.<p>Oh yes, I&#x27;m not from the US, so not sure what audience they are targeting, but it ain&#x27;t me. I like some kissing to go with my action.

Seems relevant:<p>* Kim Dotcom on Twitter: &quot;How to stop piracy: 1 Create great stuff 2 Make it easy to buy 3 Same day worldwide release 4 Fair price 5 Works on any device&quot; || <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;KimDotcom&#x2F;status&#x2F;288199968932630528" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;KimDotcom&#x2F;status&#x2F;288199968932630528</a>

Unions and filesharing are not killing hollywood. (Did the mpaa write this?) The fact that 70% of revenue comes from overseas is to be expected. 70+% of people live there.<p>Unionized, wage earning, labour costs are not high. Look any large production. Compare the headliner (stars, directors etc) takehome to the union workers. The rise in production costs has far more to do with on-camera talent than cameramen.<p>&quot;Hollywood&quot; is dieing, but only if you are one of the old guard, the handful of old production studios that make up the mpaa. Netflix, youtube and amazon show us that there is plenty of money out there should you produce something people actually want to watch, delivered in a way people actually want.<p>Ditch the commercials. Stand up to your a-list talent during negotiations. Actually pay the writers (see the Goodfella fiasco). Cut the focus groups. And make something worth my time to watch.

YC RFS9: Kill Hollywood<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;paulg&#x2F;status&#x2F;160491053080776706" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;paulg&#x2F;status&#x2F;160491053080776706</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=3491542" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=3491542</a><p>Mission complete?

&gt; “We’re different,” one producer recently told me. “No one can do what we do.”<p>Any industry whose leaders make a claim similar to this is probably one you can safely bet on a severe disruption to come, if one is not already in progress.

Hollywood, as we know it is dead for 10+ years. The mass of super hero movies is appalling.<p>Where are the action movies and funny comedies, that were so great in the late 1980s, 1990s and earlier 2000s.<p>Last year&#x27;s San Andreas was pretty good, but so many other movies are just boring, unfunny, too dark, too shaky camera, too much CGI, etc. That TV series got too much attention by Hollywood studies hurts movies a lot. The only TV series I saw last year was Silicon Valley, I don&#x27;t know were people have the time to watch that many series - I would trade TV series for great movies all day.

My personal belief is what will kill (and is killing) Hollywood is what (effectively) killed TV: Scale, and blandness. Hollywood had a hard enough time being interesting when it had to appeal to a broad swath of Americans. Now they want to make world-friendly films, which has already sparked a race to the bottom in terms of common denominator. This will continue as more and more markets are able to access maintstream films, and the end result will be nothing but the least-offensive, most-broadly-kinda-appealing pablum.

I guess $COMIC-$REBOOT-7 isn&#x27;t all that appealing.

This is (to me) the most revealing quote of the article:<p><i>Some 70 percent of box office comes from abroad, which means that studios must traffic in the sort of blow-’em-up action films and comic-book thrillers that translate easily enough to Mandarin</i>

Who cares about Hollywood? In the last few years I&#x27;ve seen a handful of movies in the theaters: Frozen (I have a 4-year old), that documentary about Anthony Wiener (not Hollywood), and Fantastic Beasts. Almost all my consumption has been Netflix, Amazon, and HBO original content. These companies are hitting it out of the park when it comes to good storytelling.<p>(Which, incidentally, is a good illustration of the good side of copyright. Not being able to just be a cheap distribution outlet for existing Hollywood content forced Netflix and Amazon to start making their own content. And the movie&#x2F;TV industry is far better for that.)

The upside of this is that there will be fewer celebritites who think that because we are interested in their acting we are also interested in their political views.

Globalization, technology, union decline, foreign-bankrolled censorship (of course original Red Dawn is wildly propgandistic), feedback loop of banality, monopolization---for one, Netflix and co practicing the same vertical integration that was broken up at the end of the golden age. It&#x27;s all here.<p>The article adopts the classic disruptor snide and glee, but seeing the political blowback of the past few months, and the inherent dubious benefit of some of the things I listed, I&#x27;d have adopted a more ambiguous tone.<p>It&#x27;s one thing for David to kill Goliath, it&#x27;s another for Goliath to kill his parents.

I LOVE going to see movies in movie theatres. When I watch movies at home it&#x27;s hard to focus. Pretty much constantly someone will feel the urge to check their phone. They will talk during movies, get up, etc...<p>At a theatre that ever happens. Everyone is focused and there are, in general, few distractions.

Things have evolved based on time and change in people&#x27;s habits due to technological advancement. You noticed that the TV industry is thriving, particularly the studios which are positioned to deliver slow-paced but epic shows like Games of Thrones (which stands as a barometer for the others to compete). People are just better suited to keep up with their entertainment needs, in different settings and environment. The movie industry would need to adjust itself.

In another part of the world which consumes movies voraciously. An Indian movie called &quot;Bahubali&quot; which had lot of special effects (of varying quality), was made for 40 million USD. It is a two-part release so each one cost about 20 million and made ~100 million. The second part is yet to be released.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Baahubali:_The_Beginning" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Baahubali:_The_Beginning</a><p>One can imagine the special effects from efforts like these become mainstream, reducing the cost.<p>A related read: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;674547&#x2F;hollywoods-special-effects-industry-is-cratering-and-an-art-form-is-disappearing-along-with-it&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;674547&#x2F;hollywoods-special-effects-industry-is...</a><p>Another movie that was heavy on special effects and story (but light on the wallet) was Pan&#x27;s Labyrinth (Cost 20 Million USD, made ~80 Million USD).

I live in Los Angeles, specifically the west side; hardly a day goes by that I don&#x27;t see a Ferrari pull out of the Sony Studios facility, a 50-person crew filming 2 actors talking next to a cafe, or an action scene that closes down part of a freeway, with 100s of police, security, helicopters, etc. around. Many scenes of Grey&#x27;s Anatomy are filmed in what is almost my back yard, and they often involve a dozen camera-crew trucks, staff of 60+ people, etc. I just cringe when I think of the cost.<p>What most people want is a great story, and great dialog. I&#x27;m not talking about the audience for a Transformers movie, I don&#x27;t watch them but some do; that is a different story, and the animation can be done, and is being done, more cheaply outside of Hollywood already. But what I&#x27;m saying is that if you can write a great script and have a great story with great dialog, there are plenty of hungry, often young (age isn&#x27;t relevant BTW) people with RED 4K cameras who can film and edit and put together a great product for $3M, not $30M or $100M.<p>The days of Brad Pitt getting $30M for a movie, of Julia Roberts getting $25M, are coming to and end. It might take 5 years, or 10 years, or even a generation, but it will happen. Same thing to studio execs; the days of drinking champagne for breakfast and lighting Cuban cigars with $100 bills will end. IT JUST IS NOT SUSTAINABLE, NECESSARY, OR COMPETITIVE ANYMORE. (Sorry for shouting, but that is the crux of my point). 30 years ago, there was no internet to speak of, there were no RED (or Canon, etc.) cameras, there were no &quot;prosumer&quot; drones with HD cameras, non-western countries were isolated and not part of the global workforce, etc.<p>That has all changed. It is just very easy to put together a great product for less, and all must adjust. It happened to IT, computing and programming, and it&#x27;s happening to entertainment.

&gt; If you could give a computer all the best scripts ever written, it would eventually be able to write one that might come close to replicating an Aaron Sorkin screenplay.<p>This is nonsense. Children&#x27;s programming, however, Thomas the Tank Engine episodes, are ripe for disruption.

Hollywood is dieing because of tech and stuff so we should kill unions?

It&#x27;s worth noting that a big part of what hit Big Print and Big Music was democratization, not just SV. Where it used to be only a few people could publish blogs and make music to the quality of a Real Recording Artist, regular Joe&#x27;s and Jane&#x27;s all over (and a number of big name DJ&#x27;s) all got started making shit with Garageband and the like. Audio editors used to be exclusive software and required beefy (for the time) computers to use, now? A low end Macbook can easily stand in for the majority of what you&#x27;d find in a recording studio, as long as you output in mp3 at a reasonable bitrate, the mainstream consumer could never tell the difference.<p>Same thing is now happening to movies, GIF makers on Imgur belt out effects that look like pro movie work for the cost of Adobe After Effects (or not, their morals depending) and I&#x27;ve seen fan films for various franchises that could easily stand toe to toe with budget movies.<p>I think this trend toward the costs of entertainment creation going down are what&#x27;s really going to eat the creative industry&#x27;s lunch, including Netflix and the like eventually. Once we get to the point where a few friends can create something on the level of, just pulling something out here, Orange is the New Black over a few weekends at an investment of 20 grand? Why even pay Netflix at that point? We&#x27;re already seeing a near infinite amount of free content created by people who just wanted to make things, without even intending to get rich in the process. Sure, the quality is hit and miss but how is that terribly different from Hollywood these days?<p>Sorry for the ramble, hope I got my point across.

It&#x27;s wonderful to witness the fall of these rotting &quot;industries&quot;. It&#x27;s taken way too long.<p>Being required to organize my time around some TV channel&#x27;s programming just isn&#x27;t good service. Internet-based services like Netflix have no such requirements. Yet these aging TV companies are still relevant to me just because they have exclusive rights to the series I like and won&#x27;t let Netflix have them.<p>Why do I have to go to the cinema just to watch a new movie? To me it&#x27;s not that good an experience. I&#x27;m basically paying more than a single month&#x27;s worth of Netflix to watch a single movie on worn out and uncomfortable seats in a crowded theater with half an hour of irrelevant ads before the film actually starts. My only other choice is waiting months until it finally arrives on TV, only appearing on Netflix much later if at all.<p>Even when they do arrive, it&#x27;s significantly delayed just because I&#x27;m not American. It&#x27;s beyond irritating to discover I can&#x27;t view something on Netflix or even YouTube just because I&#x27;m not in the US. Maybe it&#x27;s due to some copyright issue I&#x27;m supposed to care about.<p>This &quot;industry&quot; treats me like a third rate customer and acts as if I was lucky to get whatever scraps of stale content they decided to make available. In reality, most of the movies and series they release aren&#x27;t that good. Given enough convenience I&#x27;d watch them but as it is now it costs way too much in terms of money, time and dignity. The only relatively new movie I&#x27;d actually pay to see again in theaters is Mad Max: Fury Road.<p>Is it any wonder people pirate stuff? Pirates consistently provide much better service with much lower operational costs. If anything, they&#x27;re the state of the art.

The &quot;disruption&quot; of the music industry by the Internet, Napster, etc.. ultimately led to users being given greater control over the music they listen to. You can now legally purchase DRM-free single tracks from the various online stores.<p>Maybe a similar thing needs to happen with movies? I think the fansub community, the Tolkien edit of The Hobbit, and MST3K and Riftrax are examples of what &quot;greater control&quot; could look like.<p>Suppose there were a standard video format that accepted a separate stream of commands to skip or re-order scenes, insert audio or subtitles or splice in video from external sources and remove or alter vocal&#x2F;sound effects&#x2F;music from the original content.<p>Now, users could create alternative versions of their favorite movies and share them with each other. Suppose a movie with an alternative sound track requires songs that you already own? No problem, it just uses them. Suppose it requires songs that you don&#x27;t already own? Maybe it pops up a window &quot;would you like to buy these tracks from Amazon&#x2F;iTunes&#x2F;whatever for 99 cents each?&quot; and then when you buy them it adds them to your music library. If you don&#x27;t want to buy all the tracks, maybe there&#x27;s just no music in that part of the movie.<p>I could see this as a really great way for movies to increase music sales, and for people to get excited about and re-watch old movies and have a way to participate in the creative process. It also can be done in a way that&#x27;s respectful of copyright law, by giving users a convenient way to purchase all of the copyrighted content they need to watch the movie in its edited form. I suspect a lot of traditional Hollywood types will hate the idea of people watching movies in any way other than how the director originally intended, but I think they should just get over it.

The XBox mention was interesting. I wonder if there&#x27;s a market for a machinima-style series, with distribution done via the Microsoft Store (if they have subscription pricing). Lots of Hollywood actors do voice-over work on the side. And since it&#x27;s all virtual, you wouldn&#x27;t have the overhead of union-rate costumers, craft-services, lighting techs, and so on.

Sounds good to me. Hollywood is a trash heap and every single person on Earth would be better off if it didn&#x27;t exist.

Called this five years ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rocknerd.co.uk&#x2F;2012&#x2F;10&#x2F;08&#x2F;no-film-is-not-in-unique-need-of-blockbusterism&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rocknerd.co.uk&#x2F;2012&#x2F;10&#x2F;08&#x2F;no-film-is-not-in-unique-n...</a> Not that it wasn&#x27;t obvious.<p>Filmmakers plead their uniqueness and that only they can deliver blockbusterism. Record companies did the same! and then the studio turned out to be a computer with a DAW program on it, and you can literally record something of full professional quality at home. You <i>can</i> use a full studio if you want, but now it&#x27;s <i>optional</i>.

&quot;This might begin with Facebook’s V.R. experience. You slip on a pair of Oculus Rift glasses and sit in a virtual movie theater with your friends, who are gathered from all around the world. Facebook could even plop an advertisement next to the film, rather than make users pay for it. When I asked an executive at the company why it has not happened yet, I was told, “Eventually it will.”&quot;<p>This is so profoundly implausible, I have to assume it is a paid advertisement from Facebook.

I&#x27;m a bit surprised Amazon, as an example, has not been more disruptive to Hollywood. Take &quot;Manchester by the Sea&quot; - gross about $40m in box office. Amazon has chosen a traditional window approach to the film.<p>Now imagine, instead, the released it for 2 weeks (or whatever the requirement is for Oscar consideration) then pull it from theaters and make it available on Prime. I wonder if they would have made more than $30m on new Prime subscriptions. That to me would be more disruptive.

Claim: Hollywood movies are going to become less profitable and less viable to make!<p>Sane response: What was the last Hollywood movie that actually turned a profit on paper for tax purposes?

I think hollywood&#x27;s main issue is that there are too many over-paid &amp; useless actors who drain the resources that can be used to make a better movie.

Technology has also created a market where the number of high quality films available for movie goers increases at a constant rate. If someone has a collection of high quality movies to watch, a new film coming to market is competing with the previous titles. It wasn&#x27;t too long ago when an improvement in CGI meant the movie got an automatic increase in quality.

Regarding the raindrop thing. Why would the production company ever hire someone for that? The article makes it sound like they are forced to.

The big studios with big budgets for big blockbuster movies are a very proven model. At least until the model goes bust with too many losses compared to wins. Happens with Music Labels plenty as well.<p>I like to think &quot;Hollywood&quot; is changing, and A24 is at the forefront of doing things right.

Here&#x27;s Lynda Obst talking about what, how and why it happened: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=t_oHW31jQfg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=t_oHW31jQfg</a><p>tl;dw; DVD dead, Netflix ruins it further, New markets

And good riddance!

Carpenter&#x27;s debut: Darkstar (1974) is estimated to have a budget of 60k...<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dark_Star_(film)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dark_Star_(film)</a>.

In summary, Hollywood is a dinosaur on its deathbed losing their strength to control the market as SV seeps into every crevice of consumers lives providing solutions Hollywood was too stubborn to embrace.

The assertion at the end of the article is absurd - &quot;The good news, however, is that we’ll never be bored again.&quot; No matter what changes, people will find a way get bored of it.

I have been thinking about how lawyers took over Hollywood and the recording industry in the first place. Remember the Betamax case, not to mention the history of DAT tape too.

Great, it&#x27;ll be like the novel-rewriting apparatus from 1984, except instead of Winston Smith switching around names and scenes, it&#x27;ll be a neural network.<p>I&#x27;ll bet $100 that in the next ten years we will be able to create content on the fly. Instead of one single <i>Game of Thrones</i> that everybody watches, the TV microphones will pick up on people&#x27;s sentiments and adjust the plot line accordingly. Don&#x27;t want your favorite character to die? They survive. Hate another&#x27;s guts? They&#x27;ll be gone. Prefer a lighter tone? The entire set has been replaced with Disney World and the cast now consists of the characters from <i>Arrested Development.</i>

Hollywood isn&#x27;t over. The &quot;we&quot; in the article title is hollywood, i.e how it understands itself. We as HN, and pretty much everyone else knew this in 2010.

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.the-numbers.com&#x2F;market&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.the-numbers.com&#x2F;market&#x2F;</a><p>The whole article is based on false assumptions.

Hollywood is being disrupted as we speak. Look at the incredible success of Annapurna, A24, and the original content by Netflix and Amazon.

People want to watch movies. Maybe at theaters, maybe not. Hollywood will be fine.

What a coincidence that this gets written right as I decide to ditch television and begin going out to see films again. I already watch the least television out of anyone in my peer group(when I do watch anything, it&#x27;s usually educational &amp; self-development content on Youtube), yet I feel that I&#x27;ve come to an understanding about what this &quot;television renaissance&quot; really is.<p>* from here on out, I&#x27;m using the word &quot;television&quot; to mean both TV &amp; streaming.<p>While there we have seen some excellent writing for television in recent years, and while there are more than 400 scripted shows being produced for both television and streaming, I&#x27;d argue that most of it is trash. Now hear me out, because I know that word gets used in a relative sense, but I&#x27;m trying to be objective here. I call it trash because as well-produced as these shows are(in terms of acting, sets, effects), few people that I know, including myself, actually watch these shows all the way through to their last season. From the conversations I&#x27;ve had with people, it sounds like a common thing to binge through a couple of seasons of a given show, get bored of it, and then move on to another one of the hundreds of available shows. Is this really such a good thing? Is this better than the state of the film industry at its height? I&#x27;ve started asking myself these questions a lot lately, as my experience tells me the average person isn&#x27;t getting a whole lot of lasting satisfaction out of a given show yet they are spending an inordinate amount of time &quot;bingeing&quot;.<p>The film industry screwed itself in the behind for more reasons than are in the linked story. Big studios are well-known for destroying the creative process and watering down what might otherwise become a classic. Evidence of this can be found in interviews by writers &amp; producers who, years after they&#x27;ve cut their ties with studios, feel safe to talk about what &quot;could have been&quot; if the executives didn&#x27;t return scripts with a bunch of notes and lines crossed out. So not only did we end up seeing a lot of inferior products at the cinema, but we were paying out the ass for it; somehow we were paying over $20 to watch mediocre films while sitting in dirty theaters, and people gradually caught on to the fact that it sucks. On top of that, we they began subjecting us to loud video advertisements before the trailers would run.<p>But then why would I go back to film, you might ask? Well, I&#x27;m fortunate to live in LA, and we do have a lot of &quot;arthouse&quot; cinemas that have a far superior experience, if you are willing to look for them. There are still lots of independent and foreign films being made that are at least decent and break the mold of the average Hollywood blockbuster. More importantly, I think it&#x27;s healthier to see a film every once in a while, and actually be around other human beings, than be at home eating diet ice cream while Netflix autoplays. Films also tend to have a story that has to be complete in at least 1.5 hours; contrast that with the J.J. Abrams style of television show that&#x27;s common these days, where we&#x27;re lead by a carrot on a stick for several episodes(possibly entire seasons!) by some idea that seems neat but actually has very little payoff, only to be then redirected to a more enigmatic carrot on a stick(e.g. Lost&#x27;s &quot;hatch&quot; or the &quot;maze&quot; in Westworld). With film, the worst that can happen is you lost a couple hours out of your life, and that doesn&#x27;t happen that often for me. Meanwhile, I&#x27;ve known people who watch entire seasons of mediocre shows just because those shows are new, and that&#x27;s a lot of hours that could definitely be spent doing something better. What a coincidence that those same people have energy levels far below what they should have for their age!<p>EDIT: I forgot to include the real point I want to make: people will realize that they are overvaluing the time they are spending in front of the tube, and there will come a point where the film industry makes a comeback.

Facebook, Youtube, Instagram and Snap are the new Hollywood.

There&#x27;s definitely a move from the theater to on-demand streaming platforms for all movies except giant movies like Star Wars, so I think the author is right that the theatrical experience will see audience attendance continue to drop. Also making movies that can play for audiences around the world does mean that the dialogue has to be very simple and&#x2F;or reduced. I think Jason Bourne had 50 lines of dialogue total in the latest Bourne movie for this reason. Without dialogue it does get harder for great actors to shine (Chaplin &amp; Keaton excepted). As movies have gotten less culturally specific, they&#x27;ve also gotten less culturally relevant and this minimizes the importance of directors, writers, actors, and movies as art.<p>The author&#x27;s inexperience in the industry shows though in this article. Crews are extremely efficient. Movies are made one shot at a time and when you have big crews made up of different departments (art, camera, sound, lighting, vfx) they have to work essentially in very quick shifts. For example, the camera move is set, then the actors step out and the lighting crew lights the scene, then lighting steps out, art dept. steps in and works, then the actors come back in, etc. To an outsider it looks like 90% of the crew is just standing around doing nothing, but it&#x27;s much more efficient to work that way and safer too. So I think the author is putting too much blame on union crews for inefficiency.<p>Also, the author completely omits the marketing costs of films which increased hugely once TV advertising was used to market movies. Marketing costs are one of the main reasons that movies have to basically be blockbusters to make money. A TV ad spot for Star Wars costs the same as a TV ad spot for an indie film.<p>The idea that CG actors are going to replace real actors en masse is not realistic. I work in visual effects and, trust me, it&#x27;s a lot more work than this author realizes and is not cost effective unless an actor has died in the middle of your shoot.<p>I also don&#x27;t see editors getting replaced by A.I. for films or TV&#x2F;streaming. Maybe for wedding and vacation videos or perhaps as a tool for reality TV editors to help select shots from the massive amount of footage. But film&#x2F;TV editing is now an extremely efficient process thanks to digital editing tools like Avid or Premiere. A single editor can cut a film almost as fast as they can think at this point (okay a bit slower). Having to screen 50 versions of an edit produced by AI (and then do rounds of editing notes that way) would take longer than having a good editor just cut the movie.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, the theatrical movie experience is going to keep going down hard. I think the biggest threat to movies is that for the most part they don&#x27;t matter much to the culture any more. But this author&#x27;s lack of experience in the industry makes some of his predictions suspect.

about time