You hear this every year. And it's still true. Hollywood is wall-to-wall sequels, IP translations (games, comics, tv shows, etc. to movies), remakes, and the remake's newer cousin the "reboot".
Yet even so good films are still being made. The Social Network, True Grit (a remake even!), Toy Story 3 (a sequel!), The Fighter, Black Swan, How to Train Your Dragon, and Inception were all great films from 2010 (I haven't seen The King's Speech or 127 Hours yet but I hear those were good too). If this is what the system pumps out while it's horribly broken, I'm ok with more of the same.
There's always going to be a ready supply of churned out pap in any medium. Just go to a bookstore and look at all the crap that they keep pumping out. But that doesn't necessarily stop truly excellent works being published as well. Some of my most loved books have been published in the last several years. And with the internet it's easier than ever to sift through the dross to find the gems.
I don't think you're really disagreeing with the author--I think his point is that there are fewer original ideas with the potential to redefine genres, push boundaries, etc.:
"I don't mean that there are fewer really good movies than ever before (last year had its share, and so will 2011) but that it has never been harder for an intelligent, moderately budgeted, original movie aimed at adults to get onto movie screens nationwide."
To stretch an analogy, the Googles and Facebooks are still creating great new features, but the startups are in trouble, and even though Google and Facebook are dynamic in a lot of ways, it's just not quite the same.
Hollywood is a business just like any other business. While many movies have been made at microbudget levels, most movies are going to cost a studio at least a couple million.
Sequals, movies based on other media formats, etc. offer a built-in client base. The studio will probably at least make their money back, and if they are lucky, they might turn a large profit.
Now, I love movies. I've even dabbled in trying to write my own screenplay (never getting far, but I've tried). I always enjoy seeing something new. But, again, Hollywood is a business, and it's going to act like a business.
With that in mind, let's look ahead to what's on the menu for this year: four adaptations of comic books. One prequel to an adaptation of a comic book. One sequel to a sequel to a movie based on a toy. One sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a movie based on an amusement-park ride. One prequel to a remake. Two sequels to cartoons. One sequel to a comedy. An adaptation of a children's book. An adaptation of a Saturday-morning cartoon. One sequel with a 4 in the title. Two sequels with a 5 in the title. One sequel that, if it were inclined to use numbers, would have to have a 7 1/2 in the title.
Was he talking about Hollywood or Silicon Valley? Hard to tell anymore.
That's a pretty good counterpoint. I remember when I was a kid in the early 90s and every single movie had a one-liner that started with "A tough cop..."
I have recently rediscovered the book. (Well, mostly eBooks via Kindle apps...)
I read a lot when I was younger, but for some reason kind of stopped for a while. Now I read quite often again, and I love it. eBooks make it easy too. Click, boom, done, and if the author publishes directly or has a decent contract they get 50-70% of my purchase price.
There is a ton of very good literature out there: smart dramas, mysteries, sci-fi, quirky stuff like Gaiman's American Gods, classics I've never bothered to read, etc. The field is a lot larger, due in part to the fact that the capital requirements are essentially nonexistent. Anyone can write a book.
I'm not holding my breath on Hollywood. If movies have hope, it's from the indy scene doing interesting things on small budgets.
> I'm not holding my breath on Hollywood. If movies have hope, it's from the indy scene doing interesting things on small budgets.
Yes, and foreign films from some of the worlds great directors like Pedro Almodovar, Michael Haneke, Claire Denis, and Fatih Akin. Some of the best of cinema is coming from as you mentioned independent projects, and foreign titles like A Prophet (Un prophete) and Dogtooth (Kynodontas).
The Departed was based on the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs. It has a prequel as well as a sequel too. I don't understand Chinese and had to rely on subs.
But, I had watched Infernal Affairs before Departed came. Martin Scorcese was awesome, Walhberg and Damon are my favs, but still, I liked the original more than the Hollywood adaptation.
I think you watched Departed first and then the original, which would have caused the original to look inferior with the Hollywood one.
For good stories, and especially intelligent stories, novels have it all over movies. That is the main reason most of the movies I watch are action or special effects oriented, that is the only thing the medium has that decent novels don't. Even in those cases though, novels can have some advantage - the novelization of the first Iron Man movie had lots of back story and asides that made the movie more interesting.
As Hollywood wanes, indie filmmakers rise. Don't forget that a decade ago, a HD-quality camera was out of reach for anyone but Hollywood directors. Today, you can get one for $1,000.
Bad times for Hollywood film? Yup.
Good times for the art of filmmaking? It's never been better.
So movie-making is becoming more geographically and capital diverse, good for us! Note how little Monsters costed (under half a mil), or District 9 in 2009, for that matter. Some cool movies made outside of Hollywood and released last year: http://www.dailytitan.com/2011/01/01/the-best-little-movies-...
The Top Gun era sent the ambitions of those who wanted to break into the biz spiraling in a new direction. Fifteen years earlier, scores of young people headed to film schools to become directors. With the advent of the Reagan years, a more bottom-line-oriented cadre of would-be studio players was born, with an MBA as the new Hollywood calling card. The Top Gun era shifted that paradigm again—this time toward marketing. Which was only natural: If movies were now seen as packages, then the new kings of the business would be marketers, who could make the wrapping on that package look spectacular even if the contents were deficient.
I see the same thing happening right now in tech. I see a lot of fairly vapid, not very innovative ideas being driven by a lot of marketing and salesmanship.
Top Gun : Movies
Twitter : Tech
When you put marketers in charge of everything, you get a culture of pandering and recycled old ideas. That's what we have.
While I don't necessarily agree that Twitter is marketing fluff, as you seem to suggest (although I would say it's somewhat overhyped but not as much as, say, Quora), I will add this:
At any particular time there is a Zeitgeist in Silicon Valley. Currently that Zeitgeist is "social". Anything remotely "social" gets hyped into orbit. What's more, you see companies playing into that. VCs/angels are interested in social... entrepreneurs will start "social" companies.
A lot of these "Zeitgeist echoes" seem (at least to me) like they're built to get funding and built to flip. As such, the product is, at best, secondary. Instead you see the focus on getting publicity, getting stories written in TechCrunch, having the New York Times write about you, getting known for being hot amongst Valley insiders and so on.
Thing is, almost none of this translates to the mass market. Twitter at least has some mass market appeal but (at least it seems to me) its use case is narrower than envisioned, largely limited in being a communication vehicle for celebrities to send short messages to a large number of people (rather than being a tool for mass status update distribution, which is more Facebook's sphere of influence).
So I guess int hat respect it is like the movie analogy. Movies are clearly seen as products, almost a factory line in which you can put ingredients such as big-name stars, directors and writers and $100+ million and out comes a blockbuster.
You also see this in hardware it occurs to me. Like all the Android tablets. Motorola etc seem to have no idea of what they're marketing or who they're marketing too. They're simply trying "shotgun marketing" and hoping something sticks. It seems like only Apple and a handful of others really have a coherent vision and strategy (agree with it or not).
The percentage of good movies coming out of Hollywood has always been low. This idea that there was a mythical time when movies were great is nonsense.
The problem is, we tend to only remember the handful of great movies made back when. Nobody recalls the acres of dreck.
The other issue that Hollywood can't recognize a hit in the making was always true. Nobody ever thought Casablanca would be anything other than a throwaway time filler. Star Wars was a completely unanticipated hit, even by the people who made it. Etc.
Shakespeare's plays were almost exclusively based on earlier works. Pure originality is mythical and overrated. What matters is quality, not conformance to some particular checklist of artistic purity characteristics.
The basic misconception is that Hollywood is in the business of making good films. Nope. Hollywood is just in the business. I.e. making money, profit. The sequel 7 1/2 is an evolutionary developed model for that. Note: there is no contradiction with the fact that some years ago doing good films was good for business.
1) It's been demonstrated, statistically, that most studio development executives perform worse than random chance at picking hits.
2) In absence of any proven system for picking winners, studios have entered a game of risk mitigation rather than benefit maximization. What does this mean? Fewer gambles on unknown IP, less new IP all around, and so forth -- essentially, fewer chances taken on unknown commodities. More bet-hedging on sequels and reboots, and more rehashing of formulaic content.
tl;dr: Marketers control Hollywood production and are risk-averse gatekeepers. A bubble in independent/boutique production disrupted that side-channel.
It's not a complete picture; why doesn't the independent/boutique side fire back up? I think a better explanation is technology/distribution, i.e. HDTV + cable/internet. TV's mentioned in the article, but only as kind of a silver-lining; really it seems more like a classic disruptive technology. Shows like Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad are highly visual and would until recently have been better as movies; now plenty of people have nice TVs, and they work fine there.
So the movie theater's niche is now reduced to material which needs to be huge in size, enormously loud, 3D, or seen primarily by people who refuse to or can't buy HDTVs. Everything else seems transitional.
The mass-market movie model just doesn't lend itself to making high quality product. It compliments high-marketability products - known franchises, sequels, etc.
In movies, you do a big marketing campaign where you spend tens of millions of dollars before opening day, then hope the movie makes that back in its first two weeks.
In television, with multi-week runs, you can hope to build audience, get good buzz, etc with a quality product that you didn't market a ton. See: The Wire, Mad Men, Sopranos, Breaking Bad, etc. The niche audience seeking quality will find the product.
This is why we are seeing movies move towards huge, low-risk, low-intellect tentpole movies targeted at non-discerning teenagers, and increasing success of relatively intellectual, high quality, long-form television series that create massively loyal followings, lots of rewatching and good DVD sales for years.
(And I'd argue it's a reversal of the 60s-70s, when you saw great, groundbreaking movies like Bonnie & Clyde while most of the TV stuff on networks was middle-of-the-road dreck.)
Movie theatres have an important place for North American society. It's a place that teenagers can go and mostly stay out of trouble. If they want to watch shitty movies, they're welcome to that. :)
I'm fine with this situation. If creative people make TV and movies for adults and they do it on HBO or AMC, that's fine. The cable channels have changed the rules the game - you can be creative without Hollywood.
These days, I think the theatre experience is negative for most of us. We'd rather be at home watching on our flatscreens anyway.
It's similar to what Conan did by moving to TBS. It shows that the existing power structure, (network TV) can be circumvented using other means. The web makes it possible for word of mouth to travel quickly, I can watch Conan online for free, he gets ad revenue just like he did before and everyone's happy except an irrelevant NBC.
The infantilizing of movies has been very disappointing for me personally. I seem to have a lot of friends that only want to see CG movies, usually from Pixar or Dreamworks. Sit them down to watch a live action drama and in fifteen minutes the iphones come out to play Angry Birds. Very frustrating.
Didn't everyone know how awesome Inception was going to be the moment it was announced? Though I agree with some of his points, I don't know where his evidence is coming from. Another thing to point out is that it's really hard nowadays to come up with a truly original idea that feels refreshing to people since Hollywood's gone such a long way. People should really focus more on execution.
Right on the money for why over-25's with kids don't go out to see many movies any more. And this goes double for dramas - a moderately priced home theatre will easily approach what you get in a multi-plex, quality-wise. If I'm going to deal with the logistics of going out, I'm going to choose the movies most enhanced by a huge screen and sound system - and that means comic book movie most times.
So, here's my stupid suggestion: make prestigious straight-to-DVD dramas, work out a deal with distributors to charge a little more (to separate out your movies from the garbage straight-to-DVD releases), and effectively do an end-run around the theatre system, which you'll never beat in a world with DVDs & home theatres anyway. This also may take the stigma off releasing NC-17 movies, if they're marketed right.
This article points out that movies are now excessively marketing-driven, and suggests that the reason is that the generation born in the 1960s suffers from "arrested development" — i.e. psychological neoteny — to a unique degree, and that they now control Hollywood. Although it does not offer any evidence to support either of these propositions, it suggests that Top Gun or the Reagan administration might be the cause of the neoteny.
In reality, marketing-driven movie are nothing new. In the 1960s, they were called "exploitation" films; "exploitation" was the 1960s movie-biz term for "marketing". The crucial question is, why is so much of the movie business organized around exploitation films today? And an unsupported psychological hypothesis doesn't cut it as an answer.
Here's an idea that seems at least as good as the answer proffered by the article. The internet makes word-of-mouth travel a lot faster now. It used to be that the box-office receipts of a stinker movie would decline over the first few weeks after its release. Now, they decline even during the opening weekend. (I haven't verified that, but it seems like it ought to be easily verifiable.) People tweet about how bad the movie is even before they've finished watching it.
In turn, this word-of-mouth heightens the winner-take-all nature of the film industry; hit movies take home a bigger share of the total box-office receipts of the industry (unverified, but should be verifiable), with the result that more movies these days fail to even make back their production costs (unverified, but should be verifiable). In short, film production is a riskier investment than it used to be, and there's less that marketing money can do to rescue a stinker.
An economically rational response to this situation (assuming I'm correct!) would be to work harder to figure out which films are going to be hits and which are going to be flops, make the hits bigger hits, and spend less on the flops. For example, you could do any of the following:
• Value talent more highly. Talent can't stop a flop from being a flop, but it can make the difference between a hit and a mega-blockbuster.
• Don't spend anything on marketing. Release films in a single theater or a single city. If it takes off, print more copies. If GQ is to be believed, this would cut the cost of filmmaking in half, which would mean you could make twice as many movies.
• Release movies to audiences in episodes; start by releasing a half-hour pilot, and if it takes off, call the actors and director back to make another hour. This could cut the cost of filmmaking by more than a factor of 2, especially if the first part goes easy on the special effects, the music, that kind of thing. (In a way, that's what's happening with the sequel craze that the article is complaining about, but the difference is that you need to have the story arc planned out: Dune or Star Wars Episode IV or Babylon 5, not Fast Five.)
• Instead of a first episode, release an abridged version, maybe a half-hour. This has been done unintentionally and on a small scale for many years; think of Blade Runner and Blade Runner: the director's cut. The difference is that you can actually save money by not shooting the parts of the story that you leave out. Maybe instead of showing it in theaters, you can show it on Lifetime or HBO or something, or just on your web site.
• Instead of a pilot episode or abridged movie, do the first installment of the movie as a comic book. Comics have a lot in common with films: they're intensely visual and powerfully immersive, they even use cinematographic techniques, and a "graphic novel" is a lot closer in length to a movie than it is to War and Peace. These days, online, maybe you could even add a voiceover to your comic book. (Admittedly, filmstrips never really took off as a dramatic medium.) Again, in a sense, studios are doing this already; they're just not funding the production of the comics in the first place. They ought to. If there were ten times as many graphic novels coming out every year, they'd have a much better selection of audience-proven storyboards.
• Post trailers and teaser episodes on BitTorrent before you're done filming in order to see if they take off. It's no guarantee — lots of people will be willing to watch the movie for free even if they wouldn't shell out for a ticket — but if it flops there, it'll probably flop in the theater too.
• Cancel more films before they're even finished shooting. If your early indications are that it's not going to work out, don't try to rescue your investment by sending good money after bad, hiring a famous film editor to try to salvage something from the wreckage, nonsense like that. You need some kind of interim feedback on quality, of course, which is impossible to do reliably, although some of the approaches above might help. The big returns are going to go to the mega-hit films. Invest the money you would have invested in finishing the film in something that has a chance to be a mega-hit instead.
• Leave room in filming budgets for expansion. If early feedback (from the first episode, or just during screenings) is that the film is good, double the special-effects budget. Splurge on ADR and better music.
• Make more films, which means making a lot of low-budget films.
• Diversify your film investments; we should see more multi-studio films, just like we see lots of multi-VC-firm startups.
• Share the risk with the fans. Sell nonrefundable opening-night tickets before you're finished shooting, in order to raise money for the film. Give them cash back if the movie is a hit. Or sell the advance tickets in groups of four. (If the movie's worth watching, they can treat three of their friends for free.)
However, although as I said above, the studios are using some of these approaches, we're mostly seeing something else entirely. When you're used to a certain level of risk, and that level of risk goes up, your natural inclination is not to figure out how to take advantage of the new risk; it's to try desperately to push the risk back down. So, instead, we're seeing stupid moves like these:
• Release the film initially in more theaters, not less. That way, if it sucks, you might still make your money back before everyone sees their friends tweet about how it was so bad they walked out of the theater.
• Make films that people will want to see before they hear from anyone who's actually seen them: sequels, comic strips, toy brands. This is a necessary complement to releasing the film in a lot of theaters at once.
• Spend more on pre-release marketing instead of less. This slashes your maximum possible return on investment, but you have to do it if you're going to get people into all those theaters on opening weekend instead of a week later.
(The author's grudge against comic books is pretty embarrassing. Are you going to tell me Watchmen was infantilizing, not aimed at adults?)
Now, I admit I know little about business and nothing about the business of movies. So maybe these ideas are stupid.
Releasing the film in more cinemas, and focusing on opening weekend, are also responses to film piracy, rampant outside developed countries. If enforcement gets harsher in the US, people can go for a "movie week" in some third world city every year, and watch a year of good movies for free in a friend's apartment. Realistically, the movie industry needs to focus on blitzing the opening weekend.
>Release movies to audiences in episodes; start by releasing a half-hour pilot, and if it takes off, call the actors and director back to make another hour. This could cut the cost of filmmaking by more than a factor of 2, especially if the first part goes easy on the special effects, the music, that kind of thing
There are a lot of fixed costs in movie theaters that make this impractical - you've got to get people seated and then get them out of the theater, for instance, which takes 20-30 minutes. Given that you can't charge more than $3 for a thirty minute movie, that decrease in utilization-percentage hurts their bottom line. Plus who is going to buy popcorn or a soda when they'll be in the theater for too short of a time to eat/drink it? And who's going to drive to a theater to watch something that's shorter than the average TV show?
Not to mention, who wants to watch 30 minutes of a story and then wait a year to watch the next hour? And I'm skeptical about people being willing to go to a movie when there's a realistic chance it'll get cut off before they see the end.
And many movies are still warming up at the half-hour mark - in "Star Wars: A New Hope", you've only just met Obi-Wan at the 30 minute mark. You haven't seen light-sabers, X-Wings, the word "Jedi", Han Solo, the Death Star, or the Millennium Falcon yet. In "Back to the Future", you're only just going back in time at that point. In the remake of King Kong, you don't even see Kong until like an hour into the film. At 30 minutes into Gladiator, you're still a good 20-30 minutes from seeing the inside of an Arena. At 30 minutes into Fellowship of the Ring, you've still met like half of the Fellowship. You'd have to rework the whole scripting paradigm if you want an accurate representation of what the film's about in that 30-minute episode.
>Instead of a pilot episode or abridged movie, do the first installment of the movie as a comic book.
This will lead to a very biased output, as only a subset of the movie-going population reads comic books.
>Don't spend anything on marketing. Release films in a single theater or a single city. If it takes off, print more copies. If GQ is to be believed, this would cut the cost of filmmaking in half, which would mean you could make twice as many movies.
With this approach, you've really got to hope that word-of-mouth generators like film blogs like the movie or that everyone in the audience is an active Tweeter. And you've really got to hope that everyone in your target audience is an active Web 2.0 user or has a close friend who is.
Hmm, I find it hard to feel so pessimistic. I don't go to the cinema very often, but all the films I saw this year were outstanding (Kickass, Inception, Social Network, Kings Speech, True Grit were the latest). Also, sequels aren't necessarily going to be any worse than non-sequels. Often great art arises from restricted subject matter. For instance all the paintings of religious figures, or all the Shakespeare plays that were reworkings of popular stories/dramas.
In a sense, Netflix is making Hollywood compete with itself. If Hollywood doesn't make anything new worth watching, I'll watch something worth the time from years past.
This is why I'm not concerned with the percentage of new "good" films decreasing, if that is in fact what is happening (which is up for debate.) Because we can always watch the very best films of any year, at any time, approximately speaking. If you want to see a recently produced film, regardless of quality, Hollywood will provide that. If you want to see a good film, regardless of when it was made, that's possible too. It's up to the individual to choose. Onus on the chooser.
Sturgeon's Second Law applies just as much to the movie industry as anything else. Which was the notion/observation that "90% of everything is shit." Movies, books, songs, politicians, artificial foods, software, companies, predictions, websites, etc.
From LA Times, Warner gambles on an unproven commodity. Quoting the first line:
"The studio and its partner have invested $160 million in 'Inception,' a film that is not a sequel, adapted from a comic book or inspired by a toy. They're hoping it follows the path of 'Matrix.'"
I have a couple of points to make.
1) Inception is a great idea .i.e. similar to Matrix, for which the entire world fell at its feet.
2) But unlike Matrix, it's difficult to make a series out of Inception.
3) And last, Inception production cost was $160 million and Warner Bros spend the equivalent amount in marketing ($100+)
So, even good films, those which are born out of new ideas, needs a good marketing plan. The only thing is that the studios should believe in the film!!
A question to all:
When the nominees for this year's Academy Awards were released, one film was missing out. Even, it was missing out from all major film awards.
The Shutter Island.
It was a wonderful psych-thriller by master Scorcese, had some power packed performance by Leo, but didn't make it to any movie awards. Any takes?
Didn't read the article, just the title, but I'd like to chime in to say I'm pretty sure I saw around a dozen good movies in the last year. Subset includes Inception, Social Network, King's Speech, True Grit, Star Trek (too far back? not sure), and The Fighter.
Yet even so good films are still being made. The Social Network, True Grit (a remake even!), Toy Story 3 (a sequel!), The Fighter, Black Swan, How to Train Your Dragon, and Inception were all great films from 2010 (I haven't seen The King's Speech or 127 Hours yet but I hear those were good too). If this is what the system pumps out while it's horribly broken, I'm ok with more of the same.
There's always going to be a ready supply of churned out pap in any medium. Just go to a bookstore and look at all the crap that they keep pumping out. But that doesn't necessarily stop truly excellent works being published as well. Some of my most loved books have been published in the last several years. And with the internet it's easier than ever to sift through the dross to find the gems.