ASK & DISCUSS INDEX

10 years, 7 months ago - Peter Ward

I'm not sure Sony represents any kind of tipping point. It's clear the big screen movie has been moribund for a while, between the studios' bad choices and piracy.

10 years, 7 months ago - Bill Hayes

One of the largely unreported email exchanges from the Sony hacking revealed that the legal department of Sony were instructed to explore ways to sue actor Bill Murray and force him to make an additional film in the Ghost-busters franchise. Although he had no interest in being involved they were happy to chain Murray to the studio floor like a performing monkey.

They have since scrapped that stupid idea and now Ghostbusters is to come back with an all female cast.

Studio execs have been doing this sort of nonsense and making very bad decisions since Hollywood began. When Sam Goldwyn tried to persuade George Bernard Shaw to write for Hollywood, Shaw sent him packing when he explained "Ah, Mr Goldwyn, you and I are interested in different things. You're interested in Art and I'm interested in Money"

10 years, 7 months ago - Charles Harris

Everything changes and nobody expects the unexpected. I've been around long enough to remember the early 1970s, when mainstream movies were generally flat and predictable and predictions were that Hollywood was being destroyed by TV. Recognise any of that?

What nobody expected then was the sudden arrival of a host of great young talents (Scorsese, Spielberg, Hopper, Friedkin, Coppola, etc) who broke the mould. New technology meant that films could be made cheaper, faster, on location, in low light and the rest is history.

But the point is, that backing these names was a risk. Nobody likes taking a risk, but the riskiest thing is not taking a risk at all. It's a lesson everyone, including Hollywood, needs to keep learning, or they die.

What's the next big twist? All we can guarantee is (a) that it won't be what we expect. The new "cutting edge" never looks like the old cutting edge. Maybe it will be very slow, very long, very short, very middle class, very literary!

And (b) it will involve taking a risk. An intelligent risk but a real one.

At LSF, Linda Aronson and I were talking over coffee about the demise of the A movie; everything seemed to be big franchise movies or very cheap indies. Suddenly we have a host of great middle budget movies - my Bafta screeners are full of them.

Good news or bad news? Depends on what you write. But the lesson for all of us, as ever, is we have to take risks.

10 years, 7 months ago - Karel Bata

The audience, by and large, go and see what is there, and what marketing has pitched at them.

I'm hoping these five-year business plans all go arse over tit as the audience loses interest (it must do eventually? Surely?) and the studios then scramble to find new content.

But I'm not holding my breath.

The reason all this matters is that while our cinemas are filled to the brim with superheroes and franchises - 110 in the next year! - other content gets squeezed out. Or never made.

10 years, 7 months ago - George Brian Glennon

What Karel is saying was my point. The audience will go see what is pitched to them. Specifically from those 10 movies a year that have M&P into the tens of millions. Jimmy Iovine, one of the most influential people in the music industry once said you could take Moe from the Three Stooges...put enough M&P behind him and he could have a platinum album. All of this is much worse in the age of social media. The public couldn't begin to understand the millions spent on viral marketing teams (sometimes called farms), and the impact this has on the bottom line.

10 years, 7 months ago - Karel Bata

LOL.

10 years, 7 months ago - Marlom Tander

Hollywood would LOVE to spread their risks across 100 movies at 10M rather than having to make big bets on 10 at 100M, but Hollywood's problem is that most people only go to the cinema a few times a year, and the pressure to make them go to see THEIR pic on those trips pushes the ante.

Hollywood would much prefer a world in which everyone went at least once a week, but not even Hollywood marketing has managed to do that.

So stop whinging about Hollywood, and start whinging about the audience, which, frankly my dear, simply doesn't want to pay to see the films that some people think they should :-)

Merry Xmas

10 years, 7 months ago - Marlom Tander

Cinemas will show what people will pay money to see. Ticket, parking, it's a tenner+ for one, 30+ for a family.

So people only want to put down that kind of money for something that needs a big screen to work well. A screen that subtends a significantly bigger arc than the screen at home, and that's increasingly difficult as the home screens get bigger/closer).

And that means spectacle. (It can also mean landscapes where the actors are writ small, but while those films need a big screen, they are a hard sell).

If the movie is "small" - all about the people, the dialogue, the rooms, then it works almost as well on TV, so people don't spend the money for a ticket.

TV used to be 30 min sitcoms and 45-60min self contained episodes. A 6-10 hour complex story was EVENT TV - Smiley's People anyone...

But now they have realised that instead of doing short stories, people will pay attention to the novel - so now the story focussed writer has 8-10, maybe 50+ hours to develop his characters in what is only loosely an episodic format.

Given this, "Hollywood" has no choice but to focus on BIG films, and so long as enough people put enough bums on seats, on average, they'll keep doing so.

But if they don't, "Hollywood" will vanish faster than you can say Tin Pan Alley, or Vaudeville Theatre. Those companies are in no way wedded to making movies and can just as easily change focus if the risks become too great.

Me - I enjoy a well put together movie, but I spend a lot more of my time watching long form TV, because I like story and character. In fact, right now, there is more good TV and Box Sets for me to watch than I have time for, and that's the first time in history that I think this is the case.

Where does this leave the new people? Failing to get in 99% of the time, but then the world is a tough and unforgiving place. It doesn't care that "the best" don't get noticed, only that enough "good enough" do :-)

Merry Xmas (didn't want to end too down).

10 years, 7 months ago - John Lubran

Not so much a digression as an expansion of the issue within the proper context in which it ought to be put. It might be easier to ignore such a bigger picture but doing so would be like being a flat earther who believes that Francis Chichister did not go around the globe but simply in a circle around a two dimensional plain. The bankers and moguls are very happy for that metaphorical illusion to be maintained.

The sooner we pull our heads out of their arses the better all of us and our aspirations.

10 years, 7 months ago - Karel Bata

We seem to have digressed..?

Here's another excellent article on the changes we're going through.

http://grantland.com/features/2014-hollywood-blockbusters-franchises-box-office/

Depressing stuff.

10 years, 7 months ago - George Brian Glennon

There's a reason why filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, and to a lesser extent Milos Foreman stayed out of Hollywood for decades. Hollywood has been trying to find a magic formula to create blockbusters for 100 years. What you're seeing now is the attempt to remove every variable to risk, as if an actuary was giving a report to the studios, and that blueprint is getting ever narrower. I went to see "Catching Fire" last year, and the editing and the cue placement literally gave me a headache. Then I saw Harvey Weinstein saying it's a great movie. Well, it's not a great movie. It's a constructed widget to gain massive box office, and it does that because the ever narrowing blueprint is followed.

I come from the music industry, whose six billion dollar decline over the last decade is well documented.
Arguably the biggest music act worldwide in 2014 is an amateurish marketing widget that literally can't sing a note. But she has massive marketing dollars behind her and professional viral social media teams (with social media at its apex) driving it.

The good news is that someone like Adele Adkins comes along with stunning real talent and the ability to write songs that aren't nursery rhymes. Adele could only have seen the light of day because of the cast iron balls of an independent label. Do you know what? First, the world takes notice that she is indeed great. Second, she's just about surpassed the massive revenue of the marketing widget, with probably 1/20th the marketing spend.

I don't know what is going to happen in the movie business in the next decade. But you can bet that anything great is not going to come from big studios that are following ever narrowing blueprints, marketed to a general public that believes that a movie like "Catching Fire" was great, because $75M in traditional and viral marketing and promotion was thrown at it to tell them it is.

10 years, 7 months ago - Karel Bata

Marlom: "So stop whinging about Hollywood"

Oh really? Try reading the article first, which you clearly haven't, before coming out with comments like that.

10 years, 7 months ago - John Lubran

It's not a downer Marlom. It's exciting and encouraging, even though there's bound to be blood spilt, both metaphorically and actually, before this wheel in the spiral of evolution has completed. The whole world is going through some seminal changes. There's been a pervasively wicked but entirely artificially constructed socio economic system going on that has obliged most of us to acquiesce to it since the first humans began to deprive and dominate other humans thousands of years ago. There's been a stubbornly conditioned acquiescence manifested by those who have had, or believed themselves to have had, a beneficial stake in that system and others who are knee jerk cap doffers to any perceived superiority beyond their own feeble perception. The sort of challenging scenarios that this conversation has thrown up are a mere reflected symptom of a much bigger shift brought about by an increasingly exponential mass of evolutionary enlightenment, particularly within the sophisticated liberal democracies only relatively recently freed from both religious and socio-political dogmas.

To put it another way. There is little of the laws of empirical physics to support the current structural arrangements of our socio-economic system other than the greed for wealth and power of those who run it and or benefit from it. Money, as we know it, does not empirically reflect the actual physical and intellectual resources we have, even closely. The recent results of 'Quantitative Easing' demonstrate the fact. The Emperor is not actually wearing any clothes and more and more of us now know it.

This has nothing to do with socialism, communism, capitalism or any other form of ism. It's about evolution and enlightenment in the face of plain truth.

10 years, 7 months ago - Vasco de Sousa

Historically, 1994 was much more open to independents. 20 years ago a lot of original movies came out, and a lot of new directors were emerging. As the years passed, a few others emerged, but indies seem to have forgotten marketing.

I still consider myself part of the audience, so I'll say some of the reasons why we see "franchise" films.

1) Due to 3D vs 2D choices over the past few years, a lot of independent films have been crowded out of the cinema.

2) Arts cinemas have become more budget conscious, and seem to duplicate a lot of the mainstream fair of the multiplexes. It's harder to actually even see independent films.

3) "Original" films like "Lucy" or "Birdman" just frankly look boring. Movies about filmmakers and artists never really excited me (except for the flop "Ed Wood" and the odd classic like "Singing In the Rain.") And Lucy, well, she seemed to have no weaknesses in the trailer, so it looked like a boring movie (maybe it was a bad trailer.)

4) Many art films are being replaced by formulaic horror. "Original" is more than just not being based on a franchise, it should be interesting too.

Franchise films can be interesting to watch. As much as others here hate Transformers, the acting of Shia LaBeouff wasn't bad and it was well made. The new Transformers transform in silly ways, but the technical expertise behind it sound awesome.

I'd love to see more great independent films like "Frozen River", but those just don't seem to have the marketing budget so we only see them by accident.

Hollywood itself is not imploding, after a couple of years of bad movies audiences are just going to the cinema less. In some markets like Spain, the lowering population rate is having something to do with it. In the UK, the demographics are changing as young Brits move to places like Australia and immigrants move in.

Change doesn't have to be a bad thing, it does mean that the current audience may have different tastes and concerns to what is being shown on screen by the current crop of British filmmakers. (How many British movies show the Polish immigrant experience? Or the emerging concerns of the UKIP lot, even in a metaphorical way?)

But, also the trailers just aren't very enticing to anyone.

Films need to be relevant to the emerging population, not just to other filmmakers and critics. This doesn't mean abandoning art, rather making sure it truly is creative in a way people can relate to.

10 years, 7 months ago - Marlom Tander

I did, and the other one where they guy was bemoaning franchises.

But, the thread has digressed, as they do :-)

But this is SP so at least we can be confident that no one will call anyone a Nazi :-)

10 years, 7 months ago - Vasco de Sousa

I think Hollywood will adapt quickly anyway.