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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Excellent summation and glad you could share your perspective. Like you point out, it genuinely takes money to create a quality product that meets expectations - you know, feels like a good film. I guess that's why it's kind of funny to watch knock-offs / direct-to-VOD like "Transmorphers" and instantly see why "Transformers" cost something like $100,000 per day during some of their more elaborate scenes (outlier I'm sure but I believe that figure / rumor).
The professionals in industries like yours make things look easy, so to speak, in that understanding behind-the-scenes effort and organization is absolutely staggering to witness first hand. I've done some minor level sound work (boom mic) but also drop in on some sets when filming around town, like Fox's cancelled "The Good Guys" and I can really appreciate the intensity and costs associated with such productions.
The internet is a lot like an open mic night, and in this regard, there are some gems to be found, but it's going to take wading through a whole lot of...ugh...
I've long heard people talk about Spielberg's $150k+ average per shooting day, for 45-60+ days, plus second unit (and more even), plus set construction, plus actors. So, it's not far-fetched for big movies.
I don't want to spend 30 bucks stroking Speilberg's ego just to show my (hypothetical) kids giant robots fighting for two hours.
They'll get several seasons of Power Rangers, a quality production that required the work of many professionals in the same industry. A lot of whom were probably new to the industry, building experience required to land jobs under people like Spielberg in the future.
> Not everything can be made on a small budget with innovative story. Some products can, but not majority.
Honest question, have there ever been any attempts to vary the price of content based on cost to produce?
If a studio wants to pump out high quality, low budget teen slasher flicks, why cant they sell at half the price of a CGI blockbuster?
Would those straight-to-dvd or midday movies do better if their value wasn't directly compared to AAA titles? Sure, it may not have been The Godfather, but it was a quarter of the price to see, so I don't feel ripped off.
If a movie uses unknown actors (which to me always feels more immersive than trying to imagine a star as yet another persona...), why does it have to cost me the same as a movie with individual actors paid an order of magnitude more than the previous film's entire budget?
Why do foreign films have to compete with American films at an equal price point (for local tickets)? Would more people choose a random Bollywood flick over the generic rom-com on date night if tickets were half the price at the same theater?
Maybe that's what we're seeing with original programming on things like Netflix?
Low budget made-for-tv films look better than 30 years ago.
With those budgets you can't hire top crew talent, and without A list cast you can't attract audience. So you will have a film that doesn't look like A budget film and you won't sell tickets. A list cast costs that much because they have brand value. With a product like that you're destined for TV and rental market. It exists and it works, but it can't fight in the same arena for viewer tickets.
There's also a feedback loop. New actors are introduced along established ones. That's how they become established themselves. And the cycle repeats. Doing a movie with whole unknown cast is extremely risky. Because you lose any brand value coming from actors. Two questions when considering watching a movie are: What is it about? Who's in it?
True. They say producing movies is extremely expensive, but only because they force blockbusters upon us and because they use stars from an extremely reduced pool of actors. Example: There are thousands of muscular guys worldwide who beg to act in better movies, why always require the same few US actors? Example: The French movie industry makes money, although they focus on a romantic/comedy market with much lower production costs and much reduced (French) market. Movies don't necessarily have to be worldwide-reaching to be pleasant. I'm confident it's possible to build action movies or thrillers without 3D, with much fewer battle scenes, with a much better scenario (Jason Bourne I'm looking at you), with younger actors and in other countries than USA without harming the audience's pleasure too much. But that requires not having the existing marketing-pumped blockbusters as competitors.
Hi, I'm the guy who wrote this article. Good comments. Some thoughts:
* It takes a lot of people to write software, too. Those SoMoLo SaaS world-changers don't design and code themselves.
* But, the tech industry has found ways to bootstrap ideas that do not involve eight- or nine-figure up-front bets. The only difference between "high end" movies and "indie film" is that indies merely require six- or seven-figure up-front bets.
* Every industry that is disrupted goes through two revolutions: (1) it is digitized, i.e. it joins the "World Of Bits" (VGR) or the "IT Era" (Stratechery's phrasing); and (2) it is networked, i.e. the Internet enables new business models and production modes.
* That first revolution usually benefits incumbents. It lets them do the same exact things, more efficiently.
* Further, that first revolution is commonly confused with "disruption". But if it's not unseating incumbents -- it ain't.
* Filmed entertainment is still at the tail end of this first revolution. (I had the first two RED cameras, so I've had a front row seat to this.) But many pieces of the supply chain are still mired in Paper Belt mentality.
I mainly wrote this to stimulate discussion and thought among my film industry peers. Ironically, there's been far more engagement from y'all hackers instead. Probably because hackers, like rappers, tend to think of themselves as entrepreneurs by default. Filmmakers: you need to catch up.
It is also an environment unlike most others. One where investors make hundred million dollar decisions to develop a product in just a few months. A product that could flop within a week of being released.
How many products out there, say hardware products, have that kind of a dynamic. Imagine someone investing a hundred million dollars on an idea for a gadget based on nothing more than a description of the gadget and, maybe, the people who will be involved in the execution of the project.
OK, maybe that scenario had happened a few times. Well, in the movie industry this happens multiple times per year. If you lower the budget from the hundred million mark it probably happens dozens of times a year. I don't think there's a parallel for that almost anywhere.
When all the smoke and bullshit clears out[0] it isn't about the technology but rather about a product consumers will want to buy.
[0] Usurping part of a famous line by legendary race car builder Smokey Yunick. I went something like this: "When all the smoke and bullshit clears out you have to get out to the track and race".
To be honest, and I can't find sources now (trust me, ha!), average idea-to-release cycle around the world for anything moderate and above budget is 7 years. Not only those few months of production. That's plenty of time to prep and release a product. There's also other thing which other industries rarely have. Longevity. Movies generate money looooooong time after their release. They live on TV stations and cables, and somewhat on rentals as well. That's, IMO, primary reason why you see distribution not disrupted. It, kind of, works. And I mean no disruption in global distribution. It works, because TV/cable stations buy rights for certain amount of time and geographic distribution. Multiply that around the globe and you have a constant steady stream, for all practical purposes, forever. If that were to be disrupted, that flow would be gone into the unknown direction. And we can't have that, right? (says the $100mil investor)
Yeah, you are right. It's easy to forget what happens before someone writes a $100M check, funny as that may sound.
Distribution is/was it's own mafia. Back around the turn of the century (how cool does that sound?) I was CTO of a startup in Holly-weird that, among other things, back then, aimed to be a combination of what today might be Youtube and Netflix mashed together in a strange way. The CEO had been CEO of one of the major film studios for over a decade before coming on-board the startup.
Side note: I was in awe of how easily he could raise money with what amounted to total bullshit.
We had many, many conversations over coffee about the industry and how it worked. I remember thinking that distribution was a particularly disgusting, dirty, mafia-like sounding affair. I don't know how it is now, back then this "mafia" had a lot to do with the difficulty in opening theaters up for digital distribution.
To this day I remember the surreal board meetings where I'd explain on the whiteboard that the financials for what they wanted to build simply did not make any sense (connectivity and streaming were outrageously expensive back then) and the need to pivot. Nobody listened. Total echo chamber effect due to the other high-flyers who were involved. They believed their own bullshit. Damn the numbers. Ultimately they burned through an obscene amount of money before they realized I was right.
Oh, man. You've described exactly how it works in this business on all and every level! It's a constant stream of smoke and mirrors. You can't fight that, and if you can't join-in on that it's just best to nod in situations like that. Parlour tricks, fancy and fake bling, and lots of cash moving around.
Problem arises when, on the operating level, you have to 'keep it real'. BS echoes still and people need time in order to snap back to the real world, stop believing their lies, and get something done. It's a wonderful chaos, but that's how it works. It's not any different in 'normal' business, this is jus amplified because people are well-versed in agitprop.
Distribution is still kind of like that, it got M&A over the years so the octopus is bigger, less fragmented.
If anyone is thinking of disrupting this and is reading this. Here's a thought you need to solve. It's simple to understand. Let's say I'm holding rights to 100 movies. Average, Hallmark type of movies, nothing special. Each distributor (who sells to TV and cable stations) or TV stations themselves out there are willing to pay me $10,000 (ballpark, but not far out) for a right to show that movie for three years (also ballpark) in one or up to several small countries. That's $10k for three years, per movie, per country (or several smaller). That's a $1m potential to fully unload my library to one area over three years. Let's say there are 20 areas in the world where I can unload my full library and more (lots) which will take a partial library (I and them deal with multiple titles only, it's easier that way for both and one title gets out only if it's special). That's, roughly, $20m over three years for my library. Every three years. Forever. Each station for each (unlimited, but it varies) showing sells advertising and recuperates my cost and they earn something back.
For you to disrupt that, if you go global, you would need to offer the same amount (at least) on your shaky non-established platform for my library (and others). TV/cable/distributors won't touch my library anymore because now it's global and they lost exclusivity. Why so? That makes it harder for them to sell advertising for some reason, that's what they say at least.
For you to offer a platform where you offer me a share of revenue will not work. Why? Because those TV/cable/distro give me cash, secure cash, predictable cash, each and every cycle. With your offering I would have to take care of marketing (or you would) in order to push my old library of movies to viewers.
That's what you need to solve. Secure stream of cash for library holders which is at least equal to their realised potential and upwards. How you secure that stream? That's what you need to solve.
And that's why one of my favorite quotes, by Mark Twain, is:
"A man holding a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way"
As is often the case, technology is a minuscule part of the real business. It's an enabler, not the whole business. The mistake engineers without business experience make time and time again is to start with technology.
A LOT more pronounced. Pre-production has to be done to a minute level and production takes A LOT of time with A LOT of people.
Let me give you a little back of the envelope type of breakdown for a feature film (not animated). Average feature length is 90 minutes. Let's say you have all the expensive gear for free (including cameras, grip, lights). Let's also say you have all the locations and sets for free. 'Natural' locations for example - those are the ones that you use locations as-is, like friend's apartment that looks nice, local coffee shop, that kind of stuff. Locations where you can't get the lights exact as you want, but at least they don't need much of, if any set dressing.
Let's also say you are writing your own script (90 minutes / ~90 pages), and you will be doing your own editing, sound design, mixing and mastering, as well as color grading and a few cheap, but semi good-looking vfx shots that you've found tutorials on how to make them from videocopilot or whatever. You can do only a few since they take a lot of time to make. Your friend of a friend will take up distribution and marketing, and your mom will pay the bills and prep food for you during the first few months while you write your script and do location scouting, script lining/breakdown/storyboard and the other stuff needed for pre-production.
Now, you have everything for free - you 'just need to shoot the movie'. What does that entail?
Most optimistic projections for a 90 minute feature-length movies are around 30 days worth of shooting. That's three minutes per day, which might sound little, but is actually a lot. Between each setup (changing camera location), you have to move/change lights, get actors ready and shoot. That takes time.
Here's an optimistic skeleton crew for something decent. On the set you will have yourself as a director, cameraman/director of photography and his assistant (at least one for focus at least, since you're shooting with prime lenses). You will also have a sound mixer and a boom guy (the one with the fishing rod). You will also have two friends who move the lights around and two that will help with grip and set (one will move dolly around, one will arrange apple boxes and help decorate the set. He's a wonderful guy, he can do all of that by himself). You will also have your assistant that will take care of notes for your editing later (a script supervisor) and she will occasionally hit the slate and help the actors with their lines. One other friend will help with make-up and her friend with hair and wardrobe that you borrowed from somewhere too. You will also need your three actors. That's all your innovative script needs. Except those two scenes where you need people sitting near-by them in the coffee shop and that scene where extras are in the public transportation bus around them,, but we won't talk about that.
That's: 1 you, 1 your assistant/scriptie, 1 DP and 1 his assistant, 1 sound guy and 1 boom guy, 2 light guys that also run around with their cars if something needs to be fetched, 2 grip guys that have keen decorating sense to double for set design, 1 make-up girl/guy and 1 hairdresser / wardrobe, 3 actors. That's 15 people.
15 people that will work for 15+ hours for 30 days straight. Of those 15 people, 8 people will need to work two weeks ahead of shoot, also long hours. They will need to prep. Actors will need to read lines, learn them, you will need to block action with them, block action on set, rehearsals, rehearsals... DP and assistant will need to design lighting around locations you've found, scriptie will prep for her notes, make-up and wardrobe will need to prep what will be look of actors.
That's 15 people for 30 days straight, 8 people for 2 weeks straight. For 15+ hour days. You will need to move them around and feed them like babies. Because empty-stomached set is not a good set. And no, you can't eat pizza for 30 days straight. Crafty table also doesn't count as a full meal, which you need if you work for 15+ hours, mostly standing and/or pushing heavy objects.
That's the skeleton indie movie. On the borderline of possible.
Now, take animation. It's kind of the same, but your friends can't help because they can't draw / 3d model, and those that can can't animate. I'm helping a friend finish his ~5 minute animation just these days. With my help and a few others (not full-time, I took few shots from him as well as other's have.), his full-time, 10+ hour days accumulate to about three and a half years. That's on a whole other level of people bottleneck. I actually started out as an animator, then layout artist, then switched to VFX TD (I programmed for a long time, still do for fun) then from there to editing, script and then direction and creative. That's where I'm at today.
edit:
you'll also have squabbles after the first week or two, when people are over-worked. You'll hear something like 'Fuck you and your stupid-ass movies. I'm out. Deduct from my pay. That's right, you're not paying, buddy!' and then you will make peace, and you will end the shoot for the day. And after a month+ of emotional rollercoaster you will be alone for a couple of more months in your mother's bedroom editing the movie. While at it, you will look at the shots and then you will have thoughts along the following: 'This scene looks like shit. Look at that damn acting. I shouldn't have listened to what people were suggesting to me on the set'. And you would be right. Along with all of the stress, you will be, due to in-experience, gullible to all of the advices on the set. Everyone has them, from dolly operator to actors. And you will, in your insecurity, listen to them and depart from your vision and settle for a compromise. One that will compromise your original vision and you can't go back once you're in the editing with crappy shots. All of the advisors will be doing other stuff by then, and you will have to take those shots and put your name first on that shit pie. Not theirs, yours. Yet, you weren't calling the shots, you were compromising because you thought you can't make people listen to your vision because you didn't pay them.
As somebody who has written and produced a feature-length film for $10k, and turned out nothing close to Christopher Nolan's Following, I have to say that this comment is spot on.
I congratulate you on going through that from start to finish. People have no idea what a mountain that is. Yet, you've climbed it. If nothing else, the height of your climb is an achievement worth congratulating.
The article's Part 1 refers to an old HN thread and buried in there is a good comment from
anactofgod about "disrupting Hollywood":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3491584
His analysis has similar to themes to the misunderstanding of "gatekeepers" like Netflix / Amazon Video / HBO and why they exist.
Gatekeepers are an emergent property 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.
There was a recent HN thread where people were frustrated that they had to pay for multiple streaming services (Netflix/Hulu/Amazon) to get all 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]?
> Gatekeepers are an emergent property of artists ... 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.
This exact same argument can also be made wrt Musicians. Justin Bieber has no interest in managing a web server farm to distribute his music to fans. And yet, I'm able to go online and purchase specific Justin Bieber songs/albums that I'm interested in, without having to pay monthly fees to some Netflix-type aggregator.
> Gatekeepers are an emergent property of artists not having money to self-finance their projects
This seems like a much stronger argument, and I agree that making a TV show is vastly more expensive than making songs. But the vast majority of new musicians do not self-finance their first few albums either. They sign up with a record label, and the record label finances the production/marketing/distribution costs. And ultimately, when consumers pay money to buy the songs/albums, a cut of that money goes back to the record company in order for them to recoup their investment.
The exact same model can work for television shows as well. HBO bankrolls David Fincher $100M to produce Utopia. Customers who want to watch Utopia can pay money just to watch Utopia, without having to sign up for HBO. And as "equity holders", a percentage of that customer money goes back to HBO.
I'm sure there are many other niggling issues that need to be worked out, but at a fundamental level, I don't see why this revised model can't work. Allowing consumers to pay only for the shows that they want to watch, instead of forcing them to pay for an entire monthly bundle, seems like it should be much more economically efficient.
> But the vast majority of new musicians do not self-finance their first few albums either. They sign up with a record label, and the record label finances the production/marketing/distribution costs.
Is that really the case? I'm heavily into the local music scene in my city, I'm friends with loads of musicians, go to shows almost nightly and talk to the bands, etc. Based on my experience most artists do pay for their first couple releases. With the exception of my friends who started their own "label" I only know one band who has any corporate involvement, and even in that case they're only paying to finish an album that was already being worked on.
> And yet, I'm able to go online and purchase specific Justin Bieber songs/albums that I'm interested in, without having to pay monthly fees to some Netflix-type aggregator.
I pay Spotify so I don't have to deal with a site per band. Going distributed has its costs; especially differences on the UI endpoint for the end-user is something bad, IMO.
Also, self-hosting MP3s is trivial (payment gateways, less so). At worst, you have to throw a couple bucks to a hosting company and hire a guy for couple hours a month to manage it. Hosting videos, however, is much bigger deal.
> Allowing consumers to pay only for the shows that they want to watch, instead of forcing them to pay for an entire monthly bundle, seems like it should be much more economically efficient.
It would be economically efficient, but honestly, I believe economic efficiency is the problem in arts, not the goal. That is, if users are paying for particular movies, then producers are incentivized to invest only in movies that are likely to be paid for. Which creates a feedback loop that promotes dumb, trivial content at expense of something that could be meaningful, but doesn't look sellable from the get-go.
>And yet, I'm able to go online and purchase specific Justin Bieber songs/albums that I'm interested in, without having to pay monthly fees to some Netflix-type aggregator.
Almost all TV is available from the same sort of places that sell you Beiber songs for a per episode price.
But even the music industry is moving away from that sort of model. Flat fee is more convenient.
> songs/albums that I'm interested in, without having to pay monthly fees to some Netflix-type aggregator.
Many music lovers subscribe to Spotify which has 30+ million tracks to choose from. However, it doesn't have the Taylor Swift albums because she pulled them. If those customers want to hear Taylor Swift, they have to buy them from Apple Itunes or Amazon Music.
T Swift made a voluntary choice to net her the best paying deal which means digital music customers have to pay for more than one service. Add up thousands of different musicians each looking after their self-interests for the best deal and it ends up creating several intermediaries.
> Customers who want to watch Utopia can pay money just to watch Utopia, without having to sign up for HBO.
It's not about being a monthly subscriber or an on-demand occasional payer -- it's about the mystery of HBO even existing as an intermediary that often puzzles techies.
> Many music lovers subscribe to Spotify which as 30+ million tracks to choose from
I'm not opposed to bundle-options being available, as long as I can choose to avoid them and pay ala carte. I don't even mind having to use 5 different sites in order to buy all my favorite content, as long as I'm only paying for the specific content I want on each of those sites.
That's my biggest complaint with television. For most popular TV shows, if I want to watch the latest episodes, I have to sign up and pay for an entire bundle that I'm not interested in. That strikes me as being both consumer-unfriendly, and economically-inefficient.
You paying for the entire bundle is what makes me, a person who likes less-than-most-popular TV shows, to be able to watch those shows - they probably would never exist without that economic inefficiency in the first place! So that's why I'm probably biased, but I do believe economic efficiency leads to lowest-common-denominator products, which I find to be a bad thing in arts.
Even if an artist doesn't finance production, you can still show up at the record company with a demo tape and a fan following. There is also a long history of artists starting their own studios and record labels.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Since 1990 the earnings of the top leading actors have increased exponentially while the salaries of nearly all other actors have been systematically driven down. In many cases, the earnings of established character actors have been rolled back by 60-70 percent. This occurs, in large part, because the working professional (as opposed to the star) is at a disadvantage when negotiating in the new corporatized production environment. We do not possess a unique, marketable (and often media exploited) brand, and consequently lack the power to make or break the existence or profitability of a film. Consequently, respected, veteran actors with numerous credits and hard-earned “quotes” now routinely receive “take-it-or-leave it” offers, often at “scale”—a beginners wage."
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that the major studios aren't actively trying to improve their bottom line even if it means screwing over their employees and actors. Just that from the perspective of a working journalist, the influence and ubiquity of union work in film was very surprising, because I could not imagine such a situation in journalism. When my roommate had a drought of work, she looked for blogging gigs, which she did a decade ago and was compensated for as a freelancer. She was genuinely shocked when outlets who paid her in the past said she should be happy to now blog for free for the exposure.
Thanks for finding that again. All three aspects seem to affect the outcome, additional technological outlets, the make or break cost of a block buster, and the outsized role that social media plays in getting mindshare.
Like the author of the original piece I don't think this situation is very stable.
> John Resig seems like a great human being but that's not the main reason for jquery's dominance
But if John Resig released something new that isn't jquery, and does a useful thing, it would immediately be a lot more popular than if Random Joe Programmer releases the same useful thing.
Celebrity does work in the programming world as well.
It's a type of distribution channel. The more eyes are on you, the more audience you can pull, the more successful your projects are going to be. If for no other reason than more people giving them a shot and seeing what's up.
True. And in the movie industry, it's not unheard of for nobodies to become superstars (JLaw was apparently spotted by a talent scout during a NYC family vacation). But I think film has inherently bigger barriers to entry, from top to bottom. At the blockbuster level, which is where some disruptive action would have to happen before the mass media starts declaring the disruption of film, I don't see any films while skimming over Boxofficemojo [0] that aren't either part of a franchise, anchored by an A-list actor, or based on a property like Marvel or a popular book/toy.
Let's imagine that a group of immensely talented and attractive folks have a brilliant video series idea, manage to attract the technical resources and funding to bootstrap it, and it becomes a hit on YouTube. Granted, that's a fantasy scenario, because as much as YouTube has democratized video-making, it is absolutely dominated by corporate content [1].
What's more likely, that this plucky group remains on the independent path while continuing to remain popular? Or that they choose to join the club and follow the rules so that their revenue and exposure can increase by several orders of magnitude? It's not just the movie-making part of film that is entrenched, it's the distribution networks that have longstanding ways of doing business, things that occasionally piss people off here (region-locked content).
On the other side of things, there isn't much motion like there is in tech, e.g. Facebook and its open source projects. The only thing that comes to mind in entertainment (besides actors doing stints at Shakespeare in the Park) is Louis C.K. setting up his own production and distribution channel. The work is great, but it is definitely not scalable in any forseeable way [2]
>At the blockbuster level, which is where some disruptive action would have to happen before the mass media starts declaring the disruption of film, I don't see any films while skimming over Boxofficemojo [0] that aren't either part of a franchise, anchored by an A-list actor, or based on a property like Marvel or a popular book/toy.
There are some exceptions. Avatar, whatever you think of it as a film, was a blockbuster film with a blockbuster budget. Though, in that case, it was the director who was the A list so maybe that's just an addition to your list.
But, to your basic point, with the amount of money that a blockbuster-type film takes to create, the finance guys are definitely looking for factors that will help bring people into the theaters.
He might not be a blockbuster movie superstar, but he does have the most subscribed YouTube channel (5mio subs) and he won GQ man of the year. For doing 10min vlogs.
He kind of moved from the inside to the outside. Before he was on youtube he was shooting movies and had his HBO series. Even now he's still shooting commercials and appearing in them. Youtube brought him a lot of recognition but he wasn't doing too bad before it either.
I'd say it's about social objects. One of the important thing about culture in general is the feeling of sharing it, which in particular means knowing that you'll have someone to talk with about what you jut experienced. That's why I believe culture tends to gravitate towards the same small set of works (with additional "notable works" in ever expanding amount of genres), and it doesn't matter whether or not it's a good work - it has just to be decent enough and get popular fast enough to stick.
As for old vs. new movies, I guess I go to cinemas because a) good, big screen and loud audio gives an experience that I can't reproduce at home, and b) cinemas generally don't play old movies! And even if they did, then c) old movies I can stream/Torrent on-demand, it's the new movies that are difficult to get. As for the reason to go see them vs. wait until they're streamable on-line, it's social objects again - when I go and watch the new Avengers movie while it's still in cinemas, I can join the conversation with my friends who just watched it too.
It's not aesthetics for me as much as sufficiently older movies are a lot closer to stage plays in how they're filmed and storyboarded, and I generally dislike plays and musicals whatever the content is (case in point: I don't have any interest in Hamilton nor Disney movies). Then comes a lot of older movies having pacing that doesn't fit the time and mental energy commitment I am capable of making.
I can appreciate classics like Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, and the Deer Hunter, but I generally don't have 3+ contiguous hours to do anything anymore let alone watch a movie and I feel ashamed I can't honor such works with a proper, conscious viewing either. For "pop" arthouse movies closer to something like Begotten or Valhalla Rising, the effort to get value is even worse because I am not understanding what the symbols are and it becomes more of an exercise in "let's analyze scenes!" than "let's watch a movie to stimulate our minds." Some people don't like video games for similar reasons I feel - they want passive, decision-free entertainment.
It's probably different to different people, but I'm having trouble with old movies for a similar reason - they feel too slow to me. The plot doesn't develop fast enough; sometimes I actually can't make heads or tails of it, because some events are spaced out in a way that breaks the casual relationship in my mind.
The what it differs from what you described is that I don't mind active, decision-rich entertainment. I love video games. I just have too short of an attention span to really enjoy old, slow-paced movies :/.
To me, it goes so much further than just something like the HD.
It looks old the same way an old photograph looks old. The colors are all off: The jokes aged. The sound seems weird. The special effects - even if they were amazing at the time - were off. The movies were obviously made for a different time.
Granted, there are exceptions - a few movies age well, but the vast majority do not.
I agree with your last sentence but there usually is a reason a classic is a classic. Same applies to literature.
However if there is one thing I have learned is that everyone has different tastes. My wife cannot watch any film made before she was born while my golden age of film is about 1940 to 1970. I will take All About Eve, Double Indemnity, the Thin Man, and anything with Humphrey Bogart over anything released these days. That is not even getting into classic foreign films.
A key component of classic films is that they weren't able to distract special effects, or even colors for some, so plot was that much more important. I can't imagine that mumblecore will survive the test of time but I could be wrong.
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 see 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).
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.
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.
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).
> under estimate the amount of work a polished product takes
I agree in general. On the other hand, Youtube shows that less polished can be enjoyable as well. This provides more and smoother ways for amateurs to level up in skill and/or professionalism. Those who survive Youtube criticism probably have a thick skin.
Oh absolutely! That's why I don't want to disparage the early works, I mean I had to begin somewhere as well.
I think the 'distribution' of film has genuinely been disrupted (I recall the days on dial-up ouch) as Netflix moving from DVDs to streaming revenue indicates. The content creation though? Much bigger picture. It will take a lot of little disruptions to add up to something major, because the current model, well, just works for now.
At the end of the day though the "industry" part of film or music or whatever really doesn't give a shit what they are selling as long as they are making a handsome profit on whatever it is.
>The content creation though? Much bigger picture.
A lot of it is that, YouTube video stars notwithstanding, "we" have long become accustomed to pretty high levels of technical craft in video that takes a fair bit of effort and money to create. Some of the equipment has come down in price a lot. My DSLR, in the right hands, can produce technically stunning footage. But you need a lot of expertise and, often, things like lighting gear to turn that into professional-looking footage.
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, https://redef.com/original/the-future-of-film-part-i-us-film... .
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 has 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.
I seriously doubt Twitch and YouTube personalities have had a significant impact on movie watching. What I could believe but don't have numbers to prove is that subscription streaming TV--much of which is in serial form--is pulling audiences away from film especially given that subscription streaming movie catalogs are pretty thin.
I agree, and that matches my own behavior, but I was looking more at what kids are doing as a sign of the disruption. This is just anecdotal observation as a parent, but I see my kids and their friends spend hours a day watching YouTube and Twitch, rarely Netflix, and never broadcast/cable TV. They'll watch a movie once every couple weeks, and go to a theater a few times a year. To them Rosanna Pansino is a HUGE star, and they don't know who Steven Spielberg is.
Fair enough. I was thinking about adults. Though, as a kid, I watched few movies--but, then, I didn't have anything like the opportunities to do so that one does today.
No, but movies are only one of a myriad of entertainment/spare time options. I do suspect that "What's on Netflix?" (or Amazon Prime) is often going to be a default and if a film isn't there, it will lose out.
I do seek out specific films for home viewing--I have a Netflix DVD subscription--but I suspect I'm increasingly in the minority.
The reason why two people can start a world changing technology company is because tools have evolved to reduce the cost of production.
The same thing has to happen in the movie industry. This is happening, but slowly.
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.
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.
your point is valid... however i think its going to get into the same feedback loop as regular movie studios. fundamentally even if you have 100 million to make 5 films, you really cant afford a 20 million dollar flop. As long as your a rational actor your going to start chasing hits and trying to minimize flops by 'standardizing' your films.
The fundamental problem is in my opinion we want folks with millions on the line to not act like rational actors but instead do it 'for the art'... this will happen from time to time but will not really be the norm i think.
Yeah, really the point I was trying to make (obliquely) was that the reason there aren't many new entrants to the business side of film is that it's incredibly expensive and risky, even to make a single film. Occasionally you hear of an ultra-low budget horror that earned millions despite being made for less than the cost of a house, but those are a rarity. If you're a new entrant and you can actually get a film financed, you're going to make friends in the industry very easily.
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).
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...
Youtube? Piracy? Online streaming? Digital cameras?
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.
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.
There was a really good article about this (wish I could find it) about how the majority of these aren't making much, if any money. From the outside it appeared that the artists are rolling in cash; from the inside, they were still working waiter/waitress jobs to make ends meet.
Yeah I heard from one YouTuber (over email) that only ~1000 worldwide are currently making a living solely from their YouTube career. And that includes certain successful channels that employ 20+ people.
Film has shown through history that it's a robust medium. Film has already been disrupted a bunch of times through technological and cultural change. It survived the arrival of color and sound. It survived TV and videocassette. It survived all sorts of changes to its cultural and social context. It has also disrupted.
The article notes a lot of things about the film industry which have analogies with industries in other mediums. (Note the parallels with the game industry!)
Fifteen years ago, TV shows was what housewives view, and something you can throw in when no blockbusters are on the screen.
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.
It's great, Stranger Things definitely seemed less fun as a result of having watched this first.
On the other hand, it's an extremely successful crowdfunding effort, and still probably didn't make anybody any real money. In fact some people paid to be in it. And being a pastiche of bad movies allows a lot of latitude in production value. It's incredibly impressive for the budget, but no serious film would work with those production values. It's also a third of the length of a feature film.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.