alt Hacker NewsMy 2c: They should stop concentrating on appealing to the broadest audience. Formulaic heros' journeys, franchises, predictable characters acted by the same narrow set of the the most-attractive people etc.
Safety and mass-market appeal over creativity.
For contrast: Books, non-AAA video games, and movies from smaller studios still produce high-quality, creative efforts I continue to be excited about. Big-budget movies (and games), and Netflix shows are mostly bottom-feeder stuff.
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I think it’s the finance people. They have decided every creative movie made represents resources and time that can’t be used for a “sure-thing” franchise schlock movie.
I miss the inner journeys mostly. The heroic journey is boring if the hero doesn’t change.
Sure, but Spider-Man CXXVI is a sure bet for a safe ROI. Nobody knows what Chopper Chicks in Zombietown will yield.
Books are a great example - even popular books will now have a readership in the tens of thousands, at most. Nobody makes money - it’s an art, not an industry.
Except that pretty much as soon as movies started being made, people have said this about movies :)
- Theatrical releases are how movies make most of their money, not giving them away for free on streaming. Box office margins are huge, but renting licenses to streamers is limited and fungible with all the other mountains of content they license.
- Box office optimizes for novelty, streamers optimize for "don't churn" - very different criteria for investment.
- Disney cannibalized the box office with Marvel Star Wars, which killed the mid market and killed innovation. This is your point. Disney's success and tentpole successes in general killed innovation and diversity and made the market more winner-takes-all. Comedy movies barely exist anymore. There are few $50-75M films now. Little original content. Now films are engineered for maximum audience penetration and maximum box office revenue. This changes how films are written and who they are written for. The answer is "everyone", and that means "safe", "predictable", and "repeatable". No gambles. Everything else has to fight for table scraps.
- End of ZIRP puts us back in 2000. Money used to be free. Now it's expensive. It's not as easy to underwrite productions anymore. Less innovation.
- Dopamine machines fit into your pocket and suck up time and attention. Gaming is also huge now. Less people going to the movies because plenty of alternatives exist.
- The $400 80'' plus Netflix versus the expensive theater, concessions, and rude people have made theaters unattractive. Theaters are where film margins come from. Without that revenue, expensive movies will be scaled back.
- Labor costs less in Europe and Asia, even with ample tax subsidy. The LA and American jobs and infrastructure are drying up. These are lifelong careers that are ending.
- Global audiences want global stories. American culture isn't local, and local talent can now make high quality productions. Asia is turning out banger after banger.
- Youth want youth mediums. Movies feel slow and boring. TikTok is where it's at.
- AI is now a thing.
All of the fundamentals have changed.
I will debate one point you raised:
> most-attractive people
Most people prefer to look at attractive people. It's an almost universal preference. Tried and tested throughout time. In film, those attractive people also need charisma.
not appealing to the masses is DEI; perfect robotic formula are just common sense.
Obviously.
There are some studios who do this already (A24 for example who have produced a number of relatively popular films). But agreed that the big studios have focused on sequels and formulaic content for the most part