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Bad Movies to Blame for Box Office Slump
macklin01 writes "The LA Times is reporting that box office executives are finally fessing up and taking the blame. Poor box office receipts over the summer weren't caused by surging fuel costs, changes in audience preferences, or anything else. As Slashdot readers might have put it (and as it comes out in the article), 'It's the movies, stupid.'"
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/25/143921 4&tid=97
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
no it wasn't! It was those damn hurricanes, how much clearer can it get?? silly...
Insinct is stronger than Upbringing - Irish Proverb
It's almost amazing the movie industry gets away with this. They scream and throw tantrums over any overtures, any market that dares step foot in their domain. How? By threatening to sue almost anyone! How? By demanding the electronics industry put "safeguards" in dvd players (more on that in a second). How? By spending millions in D.C. demanding laws be passed to protect their eroding stranglehold on an evolving market place. How? By doing everything in their power to prevent evolution (read: progress).
In the meantime, they approve pap for movie plots and ideas, pander to the idiotic mainstream thinking that's their meal ticket (it mostly is). But their offerings have become so predictable, so terrible, and so terribly produced and directed people are starting to feel ripped off for the small fortune they must spend for a night out of movies and popcorn. They've sown these seeds, they're reaping their own rewards.
What I think funny in the article is their collective sigh of relief some recent movies are getting viewers. I suspect when movies like "Transporter 2 are raking in blockbuster revenues it's more about their concerted ramped-up advertising and less about the quality of their movies.
It does appear there may be some good movies this fall ("History of Violence" is high on my list), I'm guessing we'll see more of the same crap. I don't know how many times they can go to the well with their overproduced special effects stories with no plot or believable ideas and keep the public coming back (but don't underestimate the masses to continue to believe, ever heard of Charlie Brown and Lucy?), but they're creating their own misery.
As for their heavy handed fingers-in-the-distribution-and-technology pie, give me a break. I set up a dvd recorder for my dad. I LOVED how simple it was to operate, and it did an excellent job of recording shows for him. He was a happy camper too. He loves to watch PBS, and was excited to record a recent Civil War special on his new dvd recorder and wanted to send the dvd to me to watch. He was concerned because his dvd would not play on other dvd players, something about a region code violation (we know what that is).
Anyway, the disk arrived today, and it's NOT playable on my player. Fuck the movie and entertainment industry. They've made my dad unhappy, they've prevented me from watching a show which, had I watched, could only have helped their cause (exposure, exposure, exposure).
This isn't the first time I've had this technology dance with my dad, and I'm sure it won't be the last. But, I hate it, and the sooner the entertainment industry cleans up their act, the better. Sigh.
...Fire is hot!
It's not the movies. Well, maybe it is, but it's not JUST the movies. It's the fact that there's more competition right now for the entertainment dollar then ever before, and it's going to get worse for them. Put on top of that the negative cultural ideal of the movie theatre right now (talking+cell phones..not my experience but I'm sure this thread will be full of the stories.) So what's the solution? I suspect cut the theatres loose. 0-day DVD/PVP-Online AND theatre releases. Allow the theatres to show more movies more often. So if you rally like The Empire Strikes Back, for example, then maybe next Tuesday evening there's going to be a screening. Digital distribution makes this possible
It's not because of Steve Job's $.99 price model?
Tim
At least they're no longer in denial, and they're now willing to produce movies their customers will want to see.
Hopefully that means "Naked and Petrified" starring Natalie Portman will finally hit the big screen in 2006.
One can only dream...
At least Serenity came out yesterday. The wife and I are seeing it on Sunday! Stupid goram MPAA.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
I have wondered if this seasons lack of good action movies is partialy Lucas's fault. With the long awaited and less disapointing SW epIII this summer, I wonder how many studios decided that they didn't want to be the movies that came in a distant second to what many felt was going to be an out of control blockbuster (right or wrong).
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
I think it is changes in audience preferences. Audiences don't want bad movies anymore. The Hollywood formula is starting to wear off on people.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
"Overabundance of Commercials and Tons of Bad Reality Shows - Not TiVo - To Blame For Decline in Television Audience."
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff you Already Knew.
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
the RIAA would finally fess up to the fact that people aren't buying CDs because the music just plain sucks...
There is a lot more competition out there for our entertainment dollars that there used to be. Think of all the computer/console based activities which have sprung up in the last 2 decades, to name just one example. Like any industry forced from a near monoply position into one with competition, the movie industry complains and blames dubious straw men for their difficulties. Good movies can still compete.
Using plain ol' text since 1968
If only the record companies could come to such an enlightened conclusion...
How about more inspiration and less specualtion? More perspiration and less litigation... what else rhymes with this...?
Waiting for you by the bridge
And it has nothing to do with the $8-$10 ticket prices that have sprung up across the country. It's not like I can get 3 used DVDs for $20. Oh wait a minute . . . yes I can.
It's all George Lucas' fault, Seriously! That guy redefined movie-making in the 70s and 80s, and then single-handedly destroyed it in the 90s and 00s!
Episode I) Fool us once, shame on you.
Episode II) Fool us twice, shame on us...
Episode III) Fool us three times, screw this shit.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Cinema Fault:
Poor movies
Expensive Popcorn / Sweets / Drinks
Expensive Tickets
Can't use Gift Vouchers (Fully Paid) with new movies
Bad seating - I've seen some *shockers* in some cinemas
20 minutes of ads before the show
Those silly piracy ads on stealing music - yep thats right, we all have to put up with that
Customer Fault:
Noisy movie goers / pranksters
Mobile phone calls and constant rings
Children screaming in tense moments
Seat fighting
Its all just not worth it - wait a month or so, buy for it less than the cinema price, grab some take away and watch it on your nice big digital entertainment unit @ home - and keep the damn movie!
No wonder we don't bother going !
Duh.
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
It's all George Bush's fault.
He doesn't care about movies.
I know he's too busy with his bicycling career and all to go to movies. I just want to know that he cares.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Well at least they're beginning to see the light. Scripts are sucking. I don't understand what the point of a going to theatres is anymore. You can go to Fry's buy a bigscreen, reciever, dvd player, and 5.1+ polk audio speakers, and/or Windows Media Center stay at home and enjoy the movies in your own confortable space. No obnoxious kids talking on cell phones with the theater attendants calling them out in the middle of the movie. Hollywood should just start releasing movies on DVD, HD-DVD, Blueray (You know they're gonna haft to support both formats as nobodys backing down) and the Internet. I would rather pay $10 for 1 or 2 viewings of a movie, then $8.50 plus $10.00 worth of concessions. Movielink is owned by the major studios and CinemaNow is owned by Lions Gate, Blockbuster and Microsoft. Technologies and systems are already in place. All thats left is the dotted lines. I don't mind DRM, and I know companies are not going to abuse it as it is a guarantee they would lose business in 2 seconds flat. I have faith they will be fair, be it nieve of me or not to state. HELIX, MS-DRM, Open MagicGate and FairPlay are fine by me, as long as rights are fair.
The problem was all those altruistic producers, with their Lord of the GNU/Rings, KAlien and OpenMatrix trilogies!
Moviegoers should support our plotless, $2.00-worth--I mean, Oscar® worthy movies! All the people that we entice and underpay^W^W^W^Wwork on our movies deserve nothing less.
--Dr. Random RIAA Spokes-Person
P.S. Encourage your local movie studio to use CSS (and I don't mean standard Web technology--besides, what's better than protecting official-movie-site IP with Flash?)
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
The critics rated all researched 2005 movies (those that were still in theaters by the end of August - slightly over 100) with 69%. For 2004 movies, it was 64.25%. The audience also posted better ratings for 2005 movies: 68.4% versus 67.9% (source: IMDB). In the case of blockbusters (defined as movies opening on more than 1000 screens), 2005 movies come up on top as well: 62% versus 59.5% by the critics and 63.1% versus 61.7% by the audience. Independent movies were an exception: while critics rated them higher in 2005 (76.25% vs. 71.5%), the audience rated them lower: 70.9% vs. 71.5%.
Despite these numbers, the opening weekend has seen a drop of 12.87%. For blockbusters this drop has been even more significant, despite the fact that they were rated higher and that they opened on 5.14% more screens. The drop in box office was 15.79%, compared to last year. Yet, the top 8 movies had an above-average per-screen revenue on the opening weekend, and the top 6 movies retained this statistic into the fourth week. In addition, the reviews have a positive correlation to the movie revenues (42.9%).
As a result, I don't believe that bad movies are to blame for the box office to slump. I can speculate (haven't run any statistical analysis for those), that the declining revenues are to blame on a set of other factors, such as rising ticket prices, rising gas prices, shorter time to DVD, commercials before movies, and others.
The MPAA has set in motion litigation against makers of big screen televisions. According to one industry insider, these home entertainment people have to be stopped, their evil must be undone. If G*d wanted us to watch movies in our homes, he would have made television... oh wait
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
I keep hearing that movies suck now, but personally I don't see it. Obviously some will disagree with my taste, but I've enjoyed a lot of movies recently like 40 Year Old Virgin, Batman Begins, War of the Worlds, March of the Penguins, Constant Gardener.
And I'm just listing mainstream-ish stuff. I'm also a big fan of indie/experimental stuff.
This is just more people spouting theories. Let's see some research about people's movie satisfaction. Sales don't mean anything.
Personally, I think it's more likely that cheaper home theatre, the economy, and videogames especially contribute to lower box office turnout. The videogame industry has become huge, and IIRC it's outgrown the movie industry. People have a limited amount of time and money for entertainment...
...at one time it WAS because the movies were lame.
But now, despite their unending denial it's:
- ridiculous prices for tickets
- ridiculous prices for snacks
- picture quality that hasn't improved much since about the mid 70's (sound quality *has* improved)
- filthy theaters
If the movie makers want to claim they made bad movies this year, I'm not going to disagree - they did. But that's only part of it. Do the analyis:
One trip to the non-matinee movies for my family, plus a large pop, large popcorn and some candy for each, plus parking: ($8.50 ticket + $3 pop + $2.50 popcorn + $2 candy + $1 share of parking) x 6 = $102.
36" widescreen Toshiba hi def tube = $1600
Toshiba progressive scan DVD player = $200
(hooking it to the stereo I own)
= $1800.
So for the price of 18 trips to the movies, PLUS Deducting the intangibles:
- the convenience of watching in my own home
- the ability to pause/rewind/stop and chat about whatever I want whenever I want
- the ability to have whatever snack I want, in any quantity
- the ability to have as many friends over as I can stuff into the room
- to watch in my underwear and bathrobe if I want
- to watch at whatever TIME I want, and interrupt to go do something if I want
- to sit in my comfy chair, and exercise whatever odious personal habits I choose
- the ability to (via Netflix) see pretty much whatever movie I want, not juse what the studio suits think I should be watching.
I don't think there's any doubt - film industry pricing DROVE the development of home theater, now they have to live in the world they created. Nice job guys, you eat your young, too?
-Styopa
I have to say it, I agree with that.
This summer had the worst movies that I've ever seen. Other summers had interesting Pixar movies. This summer had, chickflicks, lame action movies and uninteresting comedy.
Better luck next summer...
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Besides, the lack of good movies is hardly a new thing. Maybe the Internet has made people more aware of the problem, but do we really think that after a century people have just caught on, most movies suck? And if that was the case, wouldn't we expect Britney Spears and friends to take a hit as well?
No, I think they are barking up the wrong tree. Making better movies would probably help, but more likely they are facing an inevitable decline as newer technologies provide better entertainment. Now movie theatres have to compete with DVD, game consoles, online games, downloaded movies, web browsing, and probably other things that either weren't around or occupied far smaller niches ten (or even two) years ago.
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
Trailers give away the whole plot, especially when you watch more than one trailer for some movie.
They show all the good scenes, so no good surprises. Why bother going to the movie when you know what the heck will happen?
...the other patrons are my biggest problem.
There are many movies that I would be very willing to watch in the theatre if I only had the ability to do so with some guarantee of peace and quiet from those around me.
Since that is not going to happen, I prefer to hold off and wait for the DVD. Simple as that.
!= profit
To prove that today's movies are so bad, bootleggers on the street are bootlegging old classics such as "Gone with the Wind" and "North by Northwest".
When P2P networks don't even bother distributing new movie titles, you know it's true...
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
Part of the reason they're 'fessing up is because movies like March of the Penguins were actually doing better than "blockbuster" titles like Fantastic Four. (Per screen, on release, March of the Penguins actually did make more money than Fantastic Four. It has now made more money than Fifth Element, in total, according to some articles.) It is hard to keep claiming that it's someone else's fault when even a French wildlife documentary can outsell multi-million dollar projects from Hollywood.
I think the other part of the reason is that the RIAA is starting to take a turn for the worse in the courts, and the MPAA wants a backup plan in case this spreads to their own lawsuits. In other words, if a movie does crap and fileswappers cases get kicked out, then they can now say "well, we TOLD you the script for that specific movie was no good!" It also didn't help the MPAA when eDonkey started talking about quitting. If there are no fileswapper companies to blame, it's going to get harder for them to push responsibility onto others.
(After all, they've known for HOW LONG that other people's movies were selling just fine? They were having a downturn for how many YEARS before fuel costs shot up? But it was only very recently that fileswapper cases stopped doing well, and only in the last week that eDonkey talked out quitting.)
Will this get Hollywood to make something worth watching? Uh, no. What it'll mean is that they'll spend even MORE on public relations to persuade people that the next movie is worth seeing. That's the usual corporate reaction - why change things, when you only have to convince people they're changed?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Earlier this week in L.A., there was an event by the LA SIGGRAPH chapter talking about digital cinema and 3d cinema and what it can do for the movie business.
One of the speakers (can't remember his name) was discussing some of the current issues with the current box office, and number one on his list was bad movies. That was followed up by high ticket prices, high concession prices, poor theater experience (bad theaters ?), short time between theater release and DVD release, and people changing their spending habits. (Oddly enough, no mention of piracy from them)
They seemed to be really big on getting digital and 3d technology into theaters as they felt it would get people back into theaters. The equipment can be expensive and ticket prices might have to be increased to help offset the costs, but these people seem to really think that it'd bring back people to the theater. I thought maybe in the short term...but maybe it's just another fade ?
The demos they showed can be pretty impressive (especially ones originally intended for 3D instead of being converted from standard 35mm to 3D) but I don't know if it'll help in the long term to bring people back. It is pretty compeling to see this stuff, but I don't know if I'd wear 3D glasses for 2 hours...
There is NOTHING that I can't wait for. I will pay cheap, drink beer, sit in my recliner in underwear and when I want some chow, I will stop the movie and go make a pizza and get another beer.
Movie theatres suck and I think more and more people are thinking like me.
...and a potential "new paradigm" business model if the theaters handed you a DVD of the movie as you exited the theater. Or at least offered it *cheap*, as in two bux cheap, something like that, not 20$. A lot of bands do that now at live concerts, sell the disks and other swag, so why not? Would it bump up interest, and help justify a "profit" level ticket price without having to make it on the popcorn and cokes? I don't know, but I would probably go to more movies (I very rarely go now anyway, for various reasons) if that was offered as a sweetener, and in bulk pressings, the actual cost of the disk would be pretty low for the producers.
They really only have two effective ways to "reduce piracy", the way they are doing it now-still steep prices and ridiculous laws and DRM schemes, or something different like "let's get real" prices and making the experience more pleasant all around. Get rid of the adversial mindset they have with their potential customers would be a good start methinks. Well, that and content as in the article, but that's really a huge variable anyway,along with being a market red herring, there's no easy way to classify taste or what people want, when you get down to it, every movie is a certain genre or niche market product, so it will have that x-number of potential customers only and that's it.
I think you identified the reason for the bad movies. The MPAA is trying to put the bootleggers out of business, by making movies that are so bad, nobody wants to watch them.
Oh well, what the hell...
Serenity, though? Ass kickery. So many flavors of goodness: "T'weren't been nothin between my nethers but was run on batteries..."
Intelligent Design: because MATH is HARD.
I worked in a Carmike during high school. You know that bag of small popcorn for $2.95? You know how much it cost to make it? 1/7 of a cent. It takes less than a penny to make a bag of popcorn. Because of the high profit ratio, they make more money off popcorn than they do candy and soda...
"That's awful," you say, but what about this: theaters typically make about 5 cents per movie ticket. On an independent film they might make 10 cents. Oh and by the way, they're exempt from overtime laws so their workers never get paid over $5.15 (much of the entertainment industry is exempt from overtime)
I think what it boils down to is people are turning from the theater experience. At home I have a 1024x768 Viewsonic projector, Onkyo 5.1 surround system and a Linux box where I keep tons of downloaded Xvid files. The fact is my home theater experience, even with a decent quality cam, is still better than the actual theater with the screaming kids and people throwing popcorn and $7 rape you in the ass entry fee; that is for an average film.
With electronics getting cheaper, it seems like my friends only make it a point to go see movies in the theater for films that really stand out. We make it a point and an ocasion to watch the midnight premier. But I agree with the arcile, there really haven't been a lot of good movies worth that effort lately, and with better home theater systems emerging, I think the movie industry will need to work harder to produce films worth the entertainment value of the theater.
Though unpopular, I agree with the parent on this one, the whole piracy debate is a battle between the asshats and the asshats, the people that lose are people who are willing to support entertainment they enjoy(at a reasonable price) but also want to be able to use it on their terms.
The movie industry is a bunch of asshats because they demand all this really annoying restrictions and extend copyright way beyond where it should be(Citizen Kane should be public domain...geez, you studios abused the poor guy, make tons of money off of him, and yet still want more!) They also constantly try to re-sell us the same stuff on a gazillion different formats
The pirates are asshats because they seem to think that they somehow have an innate "right" to entertainment, that the rest of us subsidize, and then of course complain about the quality of the stuff they pirate...
Monstar L
Copyright infringement is only a "problem" because a few industry dinosaurs have become dependent on charging for copies. The skill of making music, movies, and TV shows isn't in being able to press the button on a CD duplicator, folks - a trained monkey can do that. They need to get off their asses and move to a business model where they get rewarded for creating content, not duplicating it.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
"These fucking movies aren't even worth pirating."
Movies being illegally copied online have nothing at all to do with things like region encoding. Macrovision and CSS I'd support, but things like region coding are simply pocket-liners for distributors who can't stand that their product might have a resale market that's... *gasp!*... outside of their control! To paraphrase the old saying-- "With victims like these, who needs criminals?"
On that note, does anyone know if cracking region encoding has ever been brought up as a DMCA violation, and did it pass? I'm wondering if the defense that "Regions aren't copy protection, so no copy protection was circumvented" has ever been brought up.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
moviegoing experience, read Kevin Murphy's hilarious and insightful book, "A Year at the Movies"
He is a self-professed cinephile, but he seems to really hate the whole corporate moviegoing experience, but loves some of the interesting independent places he has found. Ones that actually offer a REASON(a good environment) for going to the cinema
Plus he smuggles a whole Thanksgiving dinner into a theatre!
Monstar L
So I want to go to the movie. Setting aside the cost of popcorn and sodas for two, which will cost more than the tickets, we enter the auditorium and find a seat. Can we sit and talk? No. There's a damn video playing on the screen pimping for a wretched TV series and commercials. This goes on until a few minutes before the curtain when the ads for the concessions come on, a terrible soft drink ad, and the an endless series of trailers for films that should have gone straight to DVD. Often I find myself thinking: "If these trailers are matched in any way to the expected audience for this film, then we've come to the wrong film." Finally the lights dim. The movie begins and it's okay but probably the trailers were right - the film is crappy.
The entire experience of going to the movies is just awful, one brutal and unsophisticated marketing blugeon after another.
Screw it - it'll take a hell of a movie to get me back into the theater again and it won't have penguins: it'll have decent writing, a plot, an understanding of cinematography and editing and it won't substitute CGI for any of these things. Most of all it will understand Fowler's Law: "When anything is possible, nothing is interesting."
Sorry you couldn't understand it. Let me try a simple analogy.
If you need your car fixed, you take it to a mechanic. You discuss what needs to be done and what it'll cost, and once the job is done, so is your business relationship. He doesn't do the work for free and then charge you a few bucks every time you use the car; what you need from him is his skill at diagnosing and repairing car trouble, so you pay him directly for that. If he wants to get paid again, he finds another car to fix instead of trying to squeeze more money out of the work he already did.
What I need from the movie industry in general is their skill at crafting movies. I'll happily chip in to fund the production of something I think I'll like, but I don't want to pay anyone else to give me a copy of it once it's finished; I can copy bits and burn DVDs myself. Paying directly for the production, rather than paying after the fact for a copy, makes intuitive sense and as a business model it's completely immune to piracy.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
"The only conclusive thing I found was that bad movies are not to blame for lower box office tickets. Why? Because the movies were better than last year."
Bold claim, lets see if you can back it up.
There are so many things wrong with your analyses of data here. Lets go statement by statement.
You state that you ran a "statistical analysis," when the only statistic that you've given us are measurements of central tendency (means, in this case).
You reference a group known as "the critics," however you do not specify who you consider to be members of this group. Did you count only critics that are published in major newspapers, or did you include internet only critics? If you chose to include internet critics, how did you choose which to count? Anyone who can write a review and post it to the internet can be considered a critic (if sources such as rottentomatoes.com are to be relied upon). In addition, some critics approach and rate movies from a certain orientation (for example, some internet critics write their reviews solely from the perspective of a parent). Your statements would be a lot more believable if there was some sort of qualifications required to be counted as part of this group.
Which brings me to question how you managed to assign a quantitative number to such a subjective activity as analyzing a movie. On his tv show, famous critic Roger Ebert rates movies with a thumbs up or thumbs down, then occasionally augments that. What number would you assign a movie that got a "thumbs up" when compared to a movie that got a "thumbs way up"? What number would you assign a movie that received a C+ rating (some critics like to grade movies on the classic academic scale)? Or do you forgo that and follow rottentomatoes' style, by deciding that a movie got a positive review or a negative review, and assign it 1 point or 0 points, respectively. If you used that style, how did you deal with critics that gave a movie a mixed review (e.g. a review that says "If you liked X, then you'll like this movie. If not, then don't see it.")
Almost all of the differences between 2004 and 2005 mvoies are small, and while you did not include size of your rater pools, I suspect that most of them are not statistically significant. ("The audience also posted better ratings for 2005 movies: 68.4% versus 67.9%" I can assure you that this is NOT a statisticallly significant difference, thus your statement is not supported by the data.) If you actually did run a "statistical analysis," you'd have given stats rating the reliability of your results.
Certainly, while the precentages are maybe a bit higher for 2005 vs. 2004 (which a very astute poster suggested might have to do with the phenomenon of grade inflation), you don't account for the fact that this year is not over. What you might have done was only included 2004 movies released in January to September.
All in all, while your numbers are interesting, they don't support your broad generalization that "The only conclusive thing I found was that bad movies are not to blame for lower box office tickets. Why? Because the movies were better than last year." Instead, they show that there is actually no powerful difference one way or the other between the quality of movies from last year compared to this year.
Jon
Psychology is really Biology, Biology is really Chemistry, Chemistry is really Physics, and Physics is really Math.
Not to contradict your largely correct argument too much, but VHS tapes did have a form of copyprotection. VHS intentionally had unsynchronized play and record. If you recorded a 1st generation copy from an original tape, it came out looking just about the same. The 2nd generation had some bigger artifacting. The 3rd generation came out looking really bad. By the time you got to a 6th generation, all you would get is snow.
This was intentional. It was actually a feature of the platform that was touted to the studios, and one of the reasons why studios chose to put our more movies on VHS than on BETA. You'll notice, if you do the same experiment in BETA you get basically the same image generation after generation. This is one of the reasons why TV was (and largely still is) on a BETA-derived standard. But the rest of us were pushed away from that standard, largely because VHS included this inherent copyprotection.
If the DVD standard hadn't included encryption, I wouldn't be surprised if we were on a WMP standard for video, just because that's what all of the movies would be released on.
The ______ Agenda
I think this is the beginning of market saturation and a fall in the value of so-called Intellectual Property.
We have so many outlets for entertainment right now that the sheer volume means I can never get to a significantly fraction of movies, books, records, video games or web sites.
And when there is too much of something, prices will fall. Not quickly, as copyright laws work to keep prices high. But fall they will.
Yes, there is a lot of sucky bands, movies, books, but the amount of material out there means there are a lot of genuinely good entertainers out there, yes, even with RIAA affiliated labels. But because there is so much material, I think the amount of material means the market is segmented and its harder to differentiate from the pack.
But again, in that kind of environment where there is a lot of decent entertainment readily available, prices will fall. Its inevitable, even in the face of lawsuits, new laws, technical hurdles. It's as inevitable as gravity.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
We saw Serenity at 9 on Saturday night...the theater was only about a third full. Maybe the movie wasn't hyped as much as some of the summer blockbusters, or people didn't want to go to a film where they didn't know exactly what was going to happen (Anikin turns evil, Samuel Jackson kicks ass, animated critters crack wise). Either way, sometimes it seems like you can put good movies on the screen, and people just won't go!
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Hollywood movies have been bad for a long, long time. So ask yourself this. Why do you keep watching them? Or, more importantly, do you watch anything other than Hollywood movies? The reason Hollywood studios continue to make such bad movies is that they know people are hooked on formula. Why don't you try foreign or independent movies (i.e. non-Hollywood) for a change? You don't because: They're too weird. They don't seem to have a story. Nothing happens in them. There's no action, special effects, etc. Subtitles suck. etc. These are all valid reasons, if that's how you feel. Like all things, there is plenty of crap out there. But if you never try, ask yourself why. You really are missing out on some good movies. Like it or not, what you are really saying is that you want *some* formula. Hollywood is willing to bet on it. Hollywood is supremely confident that most people will continue to exclusively watch their movies. Are you one of them?
...or lack of. Seriously, every "horror" movie coming out (or even action movies and sci-fi) are coming out PG-13. Look at Alien Vs Predator. Yeah, the script was horribly flawed, and none of the characters left an impression like previous characters in their respective movies (people can list off quotes from characters in Predator and Aliens, for instance), but I am willing to bet that if they had at least shown some gore, it'd help. Hell, watch carefully, and you'll notice they never really show even one chest bursting scene. Hollywood needs to realize that some movies just have to be rated R, rather than PG-13 so some kids can come see it. Cuz the kids certainly aren't the ones with the money to see movies on a frequent enough basis, especially during summer.
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
I absolutely HATE advertising. We are living in a world much like Lucas' THX-1138 - "Buy! Consume! Buy more! Consume more!" And with the cost of movies increasing to over $10 where I live, I just wait for the DVDs to come out. They usually have extended/deleted scenes, Director's Cut, making-of, etc. Couple that with a home theater system or even a home theater PC and the reason to go to the movies is almost nil. The last movie I saw - twice - was Star Wars III. I skipped work and saw it on opening day with a lot of adults (i.e. well-behaved audience). It rocked! I then saw it again on Friday night with a bunch of high school kids. They kept talking through the entire movie and it sucked - got my money back though. But now, DVDs are coming out 3 months after the movie stops playing in the theaters so I can wait. High on my list is Batman Begins, Sin City, Hitchhiker's Guide, and Kingdom of Heaven - Director's Cut.
As for TV shows, there's way too much advertising, especially on the Sci-Fi channel. So I just stopped watching TV. A 1-hour episode is only about 41 minutes of the actual episode and 19 minutes of advertising. Amazon.com sells boxed sets of the popular TV shows and I get those at the end of the season. High on my list for this fall/winter is Smallville Season 4, 24 Season 4, Battlestar Galactica Season 1, and Tru Calling Seasons 1 & 2.
I'm glad someone brought up the topic of commercials. When I was younger, they only showed movie previews. Now they're showing car commercials, as well as many other types of commercials. They also go on for about 20 minutes. They used to last about 5 minutes. So, the tickets cost more, the snacks cost more, and we have to sit through 20 minutes of commercials. At least at home 4 or more people can all see the movie for $2, and we don't have to watch commercials, or pay high prices for snacks.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.