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George Lucas Predicts Death of Big Budget Movies
H_Fisher writes "Before the red carpet had cooled at last night's Academy Awards, George Lucas told the New York Daily News that big-budget movies will soon be history. From the article: "'The market forces that exist today make it unrealistic to spend $200 million on a movie,' said Lucas, a near-billionaire from his feverishly franchised outer-space epics. 'Those movies can't make their money back anymore. Look at what happened with King Kong.'" Lucas' prediction: "In the future, almost everything that gets shown in theaters will be indie movies ... I predict that by 2025 the average movie will cost only $15 million.""
The problems I have with today's movies are:
1. More effects than plot/storyline
2. Hollywood unions controlling costs
3. Acting unions keeping the status quo too long
4. Economic pressures keeping people in their homes
5. New distribution mechanisms breaking down the cartels
In terms of plot, the average Hollywood movie is regurgitated from previous stories -- they even keep the title nowadays! I've seen great low budget movies with new twists and turns, but with lower production quality. My recent trip to Asia and Europe for the past 3 weeks showed me 3 foreign flick that were surprisingly good -- I even suspended disbelief for 2 of them.
The unions in Hollywood are notorious for continuing their blacklist and favoritism controls -- keeping costs high and quality low. In order to distribute a movie in the States, you have to be part of the union's preferred cartels. If you attempt to make a movie outside of their control, you'll generally not see wide distribution. Copyright at its finest, here.
For those who are familiar with my typical rants and raves on Slashdot, this post isn't much different. I'm the sole anti-copyright activist in most threads, and it doesn't hurt me to see copyright failing Hollywood after decades of them abusing their power. The Internet will slowly (or quickly) bring the distribution cartels down, and I can't wait to see what powers come to the artists willing to give up control of their work once it leaves their hands. Money is still there to be made, we just need to find new ways to sell our art without using the force of government to back our profits up.
On the economic pressure side, the usual enemy to movie theatres is gas pricing. I disagree -- gas prices in my home are not up much once you factor in inflation over the past 15 years. Greenspan did this country a huge disservice with his inflationary system -- making the cost of living go up much faster than our wages did. I believe the average home is poorer today than it was 10 and 20 years ago -- when you look at the cost of entertainment versus the available disposable income, you can see why entertainment is failing. Pile on huge consumer debt levels, and most families can't just Charge It! any longer.
In the long run, I see great benefit in the Internet is bringing the average consumer a new level of selection. The victor in this is the consumer -- and those who find new ways to bring art from the artist to the purveyor. I'm looking at all the options myself, as I don't really see much reason to support those (ie, Hollywood) who stole from me over the decades I've lived. I'd rather go see a local theatre production (where the actors and support staff get paid through real ongoing work) than make a millionaire out of someone who acted once and believes they have the right to continue to make an income without making actual repeated work.
George Lucas might be right that Big Budget Movies are dying -- but I think he needs to check his premises. It isn't the consumer that doesn't want to spend money, it is those who have controlled and manipulated the market that have lost the ability to continue their deceit and their monopoly. Information doesn't want to be free, the law of supply and demand just dictates that it will eventually be free in a digital world. There are still billions of people on this planet who will pay for good content, and I'd love to be one of the guys who finds a way to connect the supply with the demand in a profitable way.
Lucas fails to mention what has changed in the viewer or economic system. A relatively short period of time ago, big budget films were often hits. There was a placebo effect, whereby people would have high expectations of a big budget film (despite this often not panning out.... i.e. WaterWorld).. Both the Spiderman and X-Men movies have proved that big-budget films, of late, can score big. It's not just about ticket sales, but merchandising as well. Except for t-shirts and posters, "indie" films cannot compete with the merchandising opportunities of the types of movies that mandate big budgets.
...the death of big George Lucas movies. Aw, shoot. Already happened.
Does this count for inflation?
He may end up being right. Gambling with so much money on movies may no longer be worth it. On the other hand, with less money needed, they may end up making better movies.
Look at what happened with 'King Kong.'
The problem isn't the budget, its the lack of creativity. 'King Kong' is not a new movie, it is a remake of the 1933 RKO classic. Other big budget films: The Fog, The Nutty Professor, The Exorcist, Charlie's Angels, The Incredible Hulk, X-Men, Spiderman, Day of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead, The Shaggy Dog, The Pink Panther, etc, etc, etc... And lets not even get started on sequels that should've never been made! (Anything that makes over 200m these days is just about guaranteed a sequel, whether is should have one or not)I took a History of Film class in college, and I remember learning about how "lulls" are often preceded by an abundance of recycled plot lines. The mainstream has run out of creative writers. Just about everything is a remake of something that's already been made. That's why independent, low budget films have become more popular. They are more likely to substitute a lack of special effects and big-name, no-talent casts with well developed plot-lines, creative stories, and some damn good acting.
This isn't even that big of an issue in all honesty. The big budget industries are complaining because they're only making an average of $250 million instead of $350 per crappy-remake-of-an-old-tv-show movies. They will go on spoon-feeding shit to the masses and having them eat it with a big grin on their face.
Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
Last one I saw in a theater was Lord of the Rings trilogy. I find myself buying older films, classics.
Hollywood just doesn't make content for me anymore, so I will gleefully watch its demise.
Being a major book geek, movies tend to be weak sauce compared to a good novel anyway.
But it's more fun to watch a movie drunk than to read a book.
Blar.
"Though big-budget hollywood earned me millions - screw the next generation... they ain't gettin' any my investment money"
This is lucas we are talking about. The same man who made Revenge of the Sith.
He has no business making movies any more, and less making predictions.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Lucas points to one large budget disaster (Kong) as proof that big budget movies are doomed. King King was a disaster becasue the studio couldn't rein in the director and force him to put out a movie that would actually sell.
Movie budgets aren't going to come down any time soon. These independent films Lucas thinks will be the wave of the future will merely be blueprints to be copied by the major studios. Small movie sells and big movie copies. It's that simple.
Besides, I though we got the doom and gloom about the plight of big production movies after the Blair With Project didn't destroy Hollywood after all.
I think the difference between the indie movie he mentions and the typical Hollywood mega-bux picture is story line. If you have a good story line, you don't necessarily have to pump mega-millions into the pic.
Bring back good writing and yes the cost per film will drop.
Keep throwing flash and glam into pics like many of the recent Hollywood money-black-holes and the price will only keep going up.
Flash and glam do not (always) a good movie make.
Yeah, no one went to see the remake of a remake, I wonder why...
"I'm out of Star Wars ideas."
Amen. $15 million is not a small budget by any means though.
Improve at backgammon rapidly through addictive quickfire position quizzes: www.bgtrain.com
No One will be as good as me, I am the MASTER of Everything Space Related (Shut Up Gene!) No one should DARE to spend 200 million!!
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
The next instalment of Star Wars will not depend on big budget special effects; it will draw crowds and rave reviews with a powerful story brought to life by excellent direction and acting.
That by 2025 the goiter on George Lucas' neck will grow to such size that he will look more like Jabba the Hutta.
Don't forget the insane fees paid (not salary or pay either, so they pay no income taxes).
What amazes me about that is that actors are imminently REPLACEABLE. There is a new crop every few years such that no actor is indespensible. Pay them a normal fee and cut huge costs and development time from films.
Ok...according to Box Office Mojo: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=kingkong05 .htm/
King Kong cost $217 million to make. And it's made, worldwide, $544 million. Now, only about half of that goes back to the studio, and there were certainly huge marketing costs, but we've still got DVD and Pay Cable and Basic Cable and Broadcast rights and Video Game Licenses and Merchandised Crappola.
Maybe they're not Titanic-happy, but it's hard to see them crying.
It's getting cheaper to do largely realistic special effects, and the benefits of spending truckloads of cash on cutting edge CGI just aren't visible to the average viewer. Take "Munich"...that story could have been told with no custom-built sets, no CGI effects...basically, a bunch of cameras, some permits in European cities, and a handful of blood packs. But Spielberg managed to spend $75 million on it, according to IMDB. Basically, anything involving Industrial Light & Magic is probably going to be too expensive to justify. On the other hand, LOTR proves that there's definitely space for a super-production every now and then.
"Lucas told me, adding that it's no accident that the "small movies" outclassed the spectaculars in this year's Academy Awards. "Is that good for the business? No -- it's bad for the business. But moviemaking isn't about business. It's about art!"
One wonders what George Lucas is smoking these days? Moviemaking is about art and not about business? Are the heads of the studios, distribution companies and theater operators aware of this ? do the all the stockholders know?
Speaking of "out of touch", I think it's time for George to cop a ride from Han Solo back to Earth, if it's not about business then why is the MPAA scared to death of piracy and declining theater revenues? Seems to me if small budget indie films are going to be the wave of the future then the movie industry would be embracing new distribution channels (Internet) like gangbusters and I don't see that happening right now.
With the computers of 2025, maybe you only need $15M to make King Kong?
Mr. Lucas in part may be correct. However I feel he left out a vital factor. The growing emergance of the internet. I believe with technology progressing how it is today soon the quality of home movies will surpass a reasonable standard to where homemade movies can be shown as feature films. Maybe not on the big screen but with the internet as a new distrobution medium I think we will see a time where there is a entire movie industry decicated to online distrubution of homemade movies. Maybe for 2 or 5 dollars a download you see the lastest installment of your faviorite movie series. I firmly believe it's possible. And if the industry keeps going the same way it has been we may see something similar in the music industry. Besides I find real thought provoking content in music and movies to be almost always better when it's homegrown. Meh, just my thoughts.
Color me confused: according to IMDB, King Kong had an estimated budget of $207 million, but had already brought in $520 million worldwide by the 26th of January. How is that a failure?
Is my point of confusion that the amount brought in was the Gross profit figure, and the taxes and other overhead eat up more than $300 million of that?
Hopefully this signals the beginning of a new era with old-fashioned values.
Movies will (again) have to rely on a decent plot and actors ability rather than some formulaic storyline with tons of expensive eye-candy.
Unfortunately, the obverse is probably true; they'll replace all expensive human actors with CG characters.
Indie films will start taking over once they start making more money than big budget films. Then, everyone will jump on the bandwagon and at some point moviegoers will get as tired of them as much as we are tired of epic flops now. Then, someone will take a chance on a big budget blockbuster that has an excellent story, good acting, and generally does everything right and it will make an exorbitant amount of money. Then, things will trend back to blockbusters. It's no different than any other copycat industry, like sports where general managers will try to remake their teams in the image of this year's champion every year.
If everybody keeps bunging their output full of really shoddy-looking CGI, like you've been doing, nobody'll ever have to spend huge amounts on production again. Bring back models and motion-control and stuff, say I, it looks loads better.
Thing is, even if his predicted apocalypse came and suddenly everybody was knocking out low-budget stuff, they'd all immediately start trying to outdo each other again, and soon enough we'd be back where we started.
The local library and the university library where I live has some good classics and they are free.
I have no idea what Lucas is talking about.
http://imdb.com/title/tt0360717/business
Kong cost $207m and made (US Box alone) $216m so it made money, toss in worldwide revenue and while it didn't blow the roof off anything it still made money. Now toss in the video game licence, other merchandising and future DVD and TV rights sales and you've got a film that will still make a good truck of money depsite being nothing more than a warmed over remake. What that film teaches us, i think, is that no matter how lame the concept, if it is hyped well enough and sold big enough anything can make a buck no matter how grotesque its budget is.
I have two problems with his statement.
First, economies of scale and evolving technology will make the big budget movie of today a cheapo film of the future. Lucas spent more money on Star Wars A New Hope than he did on Revenge O' The Sith (adjusted for inflation, of course). Still, I think both paid off for him.
Next, this year's crop of movies that the Academy considered sucked IMHO. If I want to see social issues, I'll move the San Francisco or Berkeley. I go to the movies to escape all the PC BS I see every day. I want to enter a world where right is still right and wrong is still wrong. I don't care to understand why the bad guy is a bad guy except in the case of an Austin Powers movie. I really don't want to spend my hard earned money so someone can tell me that terrorists are simply misunderstood, McCarthy is bad, and gays and minorities are still being persecuted. I can get that from NPR for free. I don't think I'm alone in that opinion.
If Hollywood can no longer afford big budget movies, it's not because they cost too much, it's because they are made for and by Hollywood types (or they are sequels or remakes). You're simply not going to make your big budget back while concentrating on such a limited audience.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Personally I'm really sick of big budget, over hyped movies. (Specifically the last two Matrix movies) Don't get me wrong; big budget movies have a place... That place is not to make you feel like you've been watching someone play a video game with really good graphics for two hours. I've been going to a local independent theater that shows a lot of inde films from around the world. Its been a much more enjoyable experience then Regal. Just last weekend I went to see "Worlds Fastest Indian" which was one of the best movies that I have seen in a while and I'm sure its production cost wasn't way off from 15 million.
I certainly hope that this outlook on Lucas' part is correct. Without a doubt, I'm preaching to the choir here when I say that there hasn't been much in the mainstream movies that has proven interesting at all. Let's face it, no matter how much money you throw at some of these awful movies, you still won't manage to hire a writer who can come up with plots beyond a fifth-grader's capacity to understand them.
With any luck, the lower budgets for production will open up the way for relative no-namers to at least get their break and put thier first movie on the big screen.
I'm not holding my breath though... Not after hearing that Jurassic Park 4 is going to hit the theatres in the foreseeable future. They shouldn't have even made the first sequel, let alone the next...
And that's what a great deal of movies have been lately. Barely tolerable, stupid plots, that are not good stories and certainly would not stand on their own merit independant of medium, where infusions of cash, breasts, and CG try to make up for this. But in the end, all you get is a really expensive, bad movie, with a few tit shots. Putting the female lead on a trampoline, or just saying fuck it and turning it into a porno would probably be better at that point.
Indie movies don't necessarily have good plots, either. I've seen some pretty bad indie movies lately. Open Water, and the stupid one about the "death" tunnel or whatever were both distinctly worse than porn. In the end, it's all about the story, moreso than anything else. Film techniques and dynamics such as acting, direction etc are important as well, but second to the story.
Want my money? Tell me a good story. Then we'll worry about the CG and breasts. If I just want the latter without a story, I'll get a video game or porn.
The problem with a lot of the movies out of Hollywood is that most of them just plain suck. For example, I am not going to pay $15 to see a movie about gay cowboys. You want movies to make money...make them with an original story line that most people actually WANT to see, and stop being so fucking greedy at theatres. $12-15 to see a movie is rediculous when I can buy a DVD for $10 from Blockbuster's previously-viewed. And even at that, I'm not going to buy it if it just plain sucks (per movie example given above).
I just checked on the imdb and King Kong grossed $216M in the USA for a budget of $200M. Adding foreign sales (2M entries in Germany, probably the same in each large European and Asian country), DVD, TV rights, merchandising and so on the movie actually made money, maybe not as much as the original Star Wars, but it is not a disaster of Waterworld dimensions. And that was done leaving artistic freedom to Peter Jackson ! It's true anyway that movies in the $5M-$30M range, even on the commercial and "fun" side (Pulp fiction, Austin Powers...) and not on the arty-intellectual side are often much more enjoyable and less predictable than blockbusters. On the IMDB top 250 list, there are not that many blockbusters excepted for LOTR; Terminator 2, and Star Wars.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
Was this sour grapes for having been dissed last night?
Movies wouldn't be so damn expensive if they didn't have so much CGI. Have you seen the thousands of $$$ that it costs for 1 second of CGI? How many movies would be better with real stunts and real make-up effects rather than CGI?
I happened to like King Kong and Lord of the Rings, for that matter, but both of them were more cartoons than anything else.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
Indie films are the only ones that matter anymore from an artistic standpoint.
Lucas is just pissed that he hasn't made as much off of the prequels as he thought he would.
And the theater environment is rapidly losing it's appeal for me -- I'd MUCH rather watch a movie at home on my projector than in a theater with people who can't keep quiet during a movie, can't keep their cellphones off inspite of all the warnings and can't control their bladders for 90 mins. So, for me, the incentive to find a version of a movie that I can watch at home has little to do with $$$ and much to do with convenience. And (imho) that's going to be true for everyone as home entertainment centers become cheaper and better. It used to be that there was something to going to the theater for the big screen experience. With that going away, I can't see people really interested in the cinema much at all. Someone let me know if they think people will still be "going" to the movies in 25 years in Japan or the US.
So with the Cinema viewers prefering to watch at home, home distribution is the wave of the future -- and I agree with you again, that will lead to inevitable copyright infringement. So, there's really a window of opportunity for the creators of a film to make money. In the first weeks of a movie's life -- they'll have the best version of it, and that's their chance to make money on it -- as you said, supply and demand. It will eventually be cracked though, and then they'll have to compete against the crack -- agani supply and demand. Certainly the studios will find ways to monetize their product -- that's what they do best -- but if the end sum figure is going to be what a movie can make in a competetive market -- people will not be willing to invest big $$$. These movies have these huge budgets because they have a hope of return on nivestment. Without that hope, the investments will go away, and with them the big budgets.
Fortunately for Hollywood, there are easy places to trim costs. Salaries are crazy, as you mentioned. The entertainment unions are going to be broken because the studios will have to break them. And there will be no more $30M paydays for an actor for one movie. Which is fine by me -- once again, it's supply and demand.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
Your head will explode - what a load of trash. I mean it is an interesting conjecture from good ol' George, but surely they could have found a better article to discuss it.
Hollywood has, for many reasons, certain archetypes that prevent it from being creative. You have the ass-kicking woman who can take on men who are significantly more muscular and in better shape as though they were middle school bullies, the stupid white man (doubly so if religious, which makes him barely 1 dimensional), the thug or post-thug black man, the child who knows it all. There are others, but those are the ones that always strike me as incredibly lame and tired, but they're a standard because they produce reliable results, or seem to anyway.
In the real world, even women with fifth degree black belts in real Tae Kwon Do can often be physically overpowered by muggers who have a biological advantage over them. Religious people have been some of the most intelligent and educated in society (not all, but definitely not fitting the dumbass, wild-eyed zealot archetype), blacks are often these days successful members of the middle class with no connection to "the ghetto", there are many stupid asians who amount to "nothing" in life, kids (especially teens) are often total morons compared to those older than them, etc.
There was some animated comedy a little while ago that featured fairy tale characters like the Big Bad Wolf, but I couldn't couldn't bring myself to watch it because of how horribly archetypal the characters were and how cliche the story was. The sassy, badass little red riding hood (1 point down), the ass-kicking granny (1 point down), the idiotic big bad wolf (1 point down). Then there's the trailer. So typical of hollywood that I couldn't give it the benefit of the doubt. I swear to God they must be pulling these out of a vault where they keep a base story line and let it mutate into several possible storylines like some fast evolving bacteria or fungus.
And when Hollywood does in fact do stories that break a mold, they do it with movies like Brokeback Mountain that they know are going to alienate fans of the genre. Who seriously thinks that that movie won them approval from those who like Westerns? Of all the possible stories, they chose the one break from the norm that in the eyes of most Western fans (I'm generally not one) that shits all over the cultural norm for the genre (gay cowboys). And they wonder why they're alienating their fans and making indie movies more popular. This is, IMO, the tip of the iceberg of what is fundamentally screwed up with Hollywood in a business sense. They take risks where they know they'll be bad for business.
"King Kong" box office record
So a 200% return on investment in the first year alone, not counting merchanidising, not counting DVD sales, DVD rentals, TV licensing and Hollywood accounting practices, isn't enough?
There's another thing as well - lower budget doesn't mean lower quality. I don't mean that you can get by with spending less on equipment, hiring unknown actors, etc, I mean that if tomorrow's average budget for films is a tenth of what it is now, you wouldn't notice from watching the films.
Drop the salaries across the board, and you won't get lesser performances. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie aren't going to stop trying so hard because they get paid $1 million per film instead of $20 million per film. Hell, you might get big name actors to work a bit longer before retiring.
Drop the advertising budget across the board, and you won't get less demand. You won't get any more competition from the low budget films because whatever Hollywood spends on advertising would still far outstrip people with limited budgets, even after massive reductions.
The only reason so much money gets spent on advertising and actors is because there's always somebody in Hollywood willing to spend more. It's a tragedy of the commons. If people weren't so eager to get the #1 name or the most airtime, the same films could be produced for a fraction of what they are at the moment.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
This would be great if it's true. Billions of dollars in the movie industry show where our priorities are. Hopefully ticket prices would drop somewhat also. I'd prefer if we spend our cash elsewhere. It would also show our country's priorities have changed.
But I know I'm only dreaming.
Developers: We can use your help.
I'm sure the whole world is ready for films containing 20 minutes of people coughing.
I've paid to see films like that. The major in film studies only has a negative effect...
Task Mangler
While I haven't seen any of their output yet, I have browsed by some Star Trek fan flick sites. These seem to be people who care about what they are doing, making decent productions, and not mortgaging the house to do so.
If this is the wave of the future, I say, "Bring it on!"
Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught. -- Sir Winston Churchill
Excellent, I hope they realise money does not equal a great movie. There are way too many effects used, look what was achieved with the original star wars? how much do you think that would cost to make now?
Other thing what will $15 million dollars buy you? computer technology graphics effects etc etc is going to be so more advanced by then, even the easily affordable cheapest options are going to be far better than what we have now...
King Kong was the best movie I've seen in years.
I don't need you raping my adulthood, too!
The latest Slashdot meme.
and it's valid.
Even Lucas' own movies have taken a turn for the worse.
I'm a HUGE fan of B movies because (usually) I go into watching them with no pre-conceived notions of the budget or the actors themselves. The only big screen movies I ever really liked were made back in the day: Star Wars (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), E.T. (1982), and Highlander (1986). Nothing after the early 80's is appealing with the odd exception. Even the Matrix series was over-budget tripe that was predictable and boring. Movies have no pizazz anymore. It's all been done and re-done and now burned.
In the future, almost everything that gets shown in theaters will be indie movies ...
Shit Lucas is planning on releasing innumerable CG redos of Indiana Jones too! Next thing you know that dude with the twirling swords will throw a knife at Indy before Indy shoots him.
Oh ya, well I predict the death of George Lucas before 2025 too, with only $15 mil in his bank account. That would put him at age 81. Statistically, as an American man, he should expire.
On the day after Crash deservedly took the oscar for best film, hollywood needs to consider how many movies like Crash, Sideways, Munich, Serenity, Sin City, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Open Water, and Sean of the Dead are out there waiting to be made, and which could be made for much less money and make a much better return on their investment than utter piss like Mr and Mrs Smith or the latest Pink Panther.
Not all of the above are cheap films, but none of them had a couple of hundred million thrown at them, and every single one of them made a decent return. Hollywood is run by suits who dole out money to what they belive to be the safest option- a small selection of dead horses which the shamelessly flog (market) into turning a profit.
Someone please, please hand Michel Gondry, Charlie Kaufman, Darren Aronofsky, Guy Richie, and Christopher Nolan ( could go on, but am pressed for time) 100 million dollars each (that's $500m - less than the cost of cost two summer blockbusters) and sit back and watch about 15 great movies happen.
What a summer movie that'd be.
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
They should have special awards for movies that get the least bang for the buck. Lucas' last three films had a bare minimum of plot, dialogue, and story. Special effects are cool but they shouldn't carry the film. I can think of a number of films I enjoyed a lot more that cost 10X less than Lucas' -- Serenity comes to mind. The movie industry blames the internet and pirated DVDs for the decrease in people actually going to the movie theater (theme of Oscar speech by Prez of the motion picture association). Certainly these have an effect. Still, take some responsibility, put out better movies.
n/t
--- What?
Low budget films such as Anakin Dynamite were pretty good.
Prove it.
How many movies came out last year with King Kong's budget? Just one.
The "average" cost of a movie is already far, far below $200 million... I would say that the "average" cost of movies is already in the $15-20 million range.
One of the biggest expenses of the movies is actors' salaries. Do anybody here actually believe that the studio execs LIKE paying $20 million to an actor for one film? Of course not, but they are paying the market rate for that actor. Actors draw audiences, so how does Lucas propose that the studios force the big name stars to take a lower salary?
All industries like hollywood, Music Industry and soon the games industry need to fall. They are artificial and not really representative of consumers desires. Marketing and hype can carry things pretty far, and make people *believe* it is what they want, but eventually people see through things.
Artificial "cycles" summer/winter movies, re-damn-diculous budgets and salaries, and formulaic "blockbusters." I tend to find the greatest joy out of many lesser known, small budget, and actually talented actors, not the hunk/ho of the week.
Rappers are not actors, hell they aren't even musicians, and if one more bullshit rapper starring movie comes out I'll scream. Sure, the fun popcorn flick every now and then is fine... and we don't need a million indie artsy fartsy movies where you walk away scratching your head... we just need real films.
Small Time, High Fidelity, Big Man on Campus, Pi, Niagra Niagra, Sideways, Memento, etc. Those are all part of my top movies list and they are all fairly low budget or at least devoid of million dollar effects.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
... can pretty much cut out the studios. If a moviemaker has a good idea (or a lousy idea) for a short film, they don't need one of the big distribution systems anymore. One such site is youtube and no doubt there can be many others. Eventually they will be able to host full-length fims which are rated by the audience, not the critics .... sort of like /. itself!
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
Does this mean George will be out of a job? Has he ever made a movie that did not have an obscenly high budget?
My local theaters charge prices I used to see only in Manhattan.
Supply and demand. I'll pay that for Spider-Man, the new Superman, or some other summer event film. But I'm not going to blow a bunch of cash on a film that I know ahead of time isn't worth that much money.
If they moved to a pricing scheme that actually reflected supply and demand (more money for event films on opening weekend and less for others) they would generate more box office overall.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
But moviemaking isn't about business. It's about art!
So... what part of the art scene is Jar Jar from? Retarded anthropomorphic jamaican frog art?
Should read "causes", not "predicts."
Last night I rented "Transporter 2". I saw "Transporter" in the theater an eventually rented the DVD a time or two. I enjoyed the first movie.
"Transporter 2" looked interesting in the previews, but I never made it to the theater to see it as I had better ways to spend my money.
I rented it last night as a lessor of what was bad at the local movie rental place. There was nothing good that stood out.
I popped in the DVD and sat down to watch. The first 10 minutes of the movie are mostly "Special Effects". Terrible "Special Effects". Effects that ruin the movie and make it totally unbelievable as a story.
After 30 minutes of the movie, I thought it was a disaster from the "Special effects" and turned it off. I only watched about 35 minutes of the entire movie before deciding there was somthing else better I could do.
So I went outside and changed the oil in my car.
If I had seen the movie in the theater, I would have been real upset.
It makes me even less willing to shell out $12 at the local theater and even more less likely to even rent at $4 for the next crap movie that comes out.
When will they ever learn?
Next big movie will have no "Special Effects" at all.
Nathan
The same goes for Disney movies. If you want my money for your movie, the trailer's main plot points can't be two animals wetting themselves and another animal getting racked on a bar.
The reason why big budget films will fall (not "could" but "will") is that this budget gets pumped into FX, actors (actors with big names, not actors that can actually act), copycrippling and lobbying.
And all that junk to hope people will rush into the theaters before the reviews are out that tell you that acting stinks, dialogues are meaningless and the whole script is full of logic errors.
Should you happen to get a movie done that has a more or less logical script with ok acting, your chance for an Oscar are already pretty high. Not in the FX area, but who cares about that anyway.
Should you get your facts right, too, you might even get the one for best documentary.
So yes, movies will get cheaper. Simply because FX don't count anymore. We've seen it all, who cares that the cars fly even more realistic than realistic around? If the rest of the movie stinks, well animated flying pigs won't save it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is what plagues the RIAA and MPAA. This is what plagues movie screens and radio. Piracy is a problem, yes, but it's not the reason these big corporate types are losing money is because of the big corporate types. Putting out new colors of the same thing will drag sales out only so much.
I think one of the bigger reasons that Mr. Lucas is right is the ability for novice movie makers to do their own CGI. While it may not be as flashy as the big-budget movies, it's enough to get across the idea, as long as a good story compliments it. For instance, while using StumbleUpon, I found a video for a fan-made parody of Power Rangers called "Emo Rangers". The initial episode (which was all I could find) ran about 18 minutes or so, and had some pretty good effects (certainly better than we saw in the original Power Rangers). Considering that all the group that made it had was a YouTube entry and a domain that forwarded to their MySpace account, I highly doubt they had a large budget.
People are waking up and realizing that they've already seen this plot thrice, and oh now we can predict the plot twist. Shiny objects will entrance people for only so long. Good stories are taking precedence, and this will allow more indie directors to get their turn in the spotlight.
And they wonder why they're alienating their fans and making indie movies more popular.
What you're saying is that...indie movies are the last bastions of heterosexuality?
I think my head just exploded.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
That's what most movies should be anyways. Telling a story. If a story can't hold up on its own without eye candy, crazy action and big name actors, then it shouldn't be told.
"King Kong had an estimated budget of $207 million, but had already brought in $520 million worldwide by the 26th of January."
Well, for starters, only half of the box office take will go to the studio, the rest being kept by theatres and distributors. Less than half, maybe, when you consider the overseas portion. And then there's at least $50 million or so spent on marketing and advertising that's not included in the production budget.
In the end, with DVD sales and what-not, they might scrape over the line into the black; and a percentage of that might belong to Jackson and some of the actors. But when you spend more money than the gross national product of Portugal, managing to get your money back is hardly a resounding success. They could have made more buying bonds or something. The only reason you risk $200 million is because you expect to make a huge percentage of that in profit. That risk isn't paying off so often lately.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
You hit the nail on the head here. Lucas is the current Hollywood Ideal. Big special effects combined with a lukewarm, recycled plot. I think what's happening is people are becoming disappointed with this model.
Audiences want actual storylines. The problem is Hollywood is going for the "safe" or "Sure" bet of remaking something that's already been done.
The example of "King Kong" was an incredibly absurd one. Jackson got to make "King Kong" because of the tremendous success of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, which demonstrated nicely that long, epic, big budget movies still draw a substantial audience.
The age of big budget movies is not coming to an end. What we are hopefully seeing is an end to banal, poorly written big budget movies. I suspect one of two things will happen. Either Big Budget movies will start being produced with innovative, interesting and well written scripts, or the bad writing will continue at a lower cost per movie.
Big Budget Hollywood movies are only going away if Hollywood fails to hire decent writers and take some chances on new plots.
Actually, from the viewpoint of Lucas, he's right. The kind of Big Budget movie of which he's capable is dying. You need actual writers to make one that will thrive.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
This has to be correct because Lucas has been spot-on lately when it comes to understanding what the public wants...
http://www.tomandemily.com
Source: http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=kingkong05.htm
Maybe a few more comments like George's will help to stimulate the market for cheaper quality camera equipment.
Although equipment is no substitute for a good story, cheaper quality equipment does at least lower the barrier to entry.
A camera that can shoot HD straight to disk or memory while maintaining good dynamic range would make a big impact for those who have to produce on a budget.
I keep trying to think how feasible this is. It can't be that far off:
You would probably need:
Minimum 15 megabytes per frame (Raw)
Recording at between 30fps and 60fps
So that would be 450 - 900 magabytes per second sustained (uncompressed)
So uncompressed data transfer seems to be a limitation. Unless you are multiplexing the frames over interfaces in parallel.
Storage:
You would probably want to be able to shoot for half an hour before changing cartridges
So you would need between 810Gig and 1.62 TB
Sensor cost will be the factor but hey that must be dropping pretty heavily now.
Anyone want to help home brew one
It saddens us when this is something we personally like (Firefly, Arrested Development, Furturama, etc), but the average consumer is showing Hollywood that the current crap story, ton of CG, big-budget approach isn't profitable. Thus it will not be funded unless it is profitable.
No one can predict with perfect certainty whether or not something will be well-done and a success. Lucas's recent works were shit, but the original SW trilogy were very successful and critically acclaimed; Hollywood funded Lucas's new efforts because they want to give people what they want and what sells! Not because they want to force crap on you.
Movies in theaters are indeed gouging in a way, but the costs of showing a movie in a theater have also increased dramatically. Carmike Cinemas has struggled financially for a very long time, believe it or not but owning large buildings in an urban area, licensing the content, and upgrading to the newest AV technologies over and over again is quite expensive. Movie theaters are expensive but it is not a high-profit ripoff scam business, the costs are expensive as well. I hope this will diminish in favor of the home theater and other distrubution methods. The economics here are failing.
In the future Hollywood will continue to try to give you what you want. Pay money for movies you think are excellent and you want to see more of, and support them. Don't support crap. Hollywood is very responsive to economics.
There will always be crap, because not even the people funding the movies can predict how they're going to turn out; they can only read the proposals and evaluate the past performance of the people making them. But they have a larger stake than you or I do in wanting to make sure they succeed. Sometimes this is underhanded, such as not showing a screening for critics with the recent "Ultraviolet" as they realized how much the end product sucked. But the movie industry never wanted it to get to that point, they want to make things that are epic and successful-- after all, that's the most profitable.
Big budget movies will never die, because of this. The investors and production companies will put their resources into maximizing their profits, and most of them really do love film and want to do make great movies. They gamble with the knowledge and dreams they have, they will always lose and win. Avoid the losers and support the winners, and this helps things evolve in the future.
And hey, I don't think Hollywood is abusing their power either. DVDs are great; a high quality version of a movie that even has a great viewing experience on a $20 player. Most of them cost less than music CDs and have a lot of bonus content. Sure, DVDs use CSS, but there's nothing wrong with wanting to protect your content and livelihood either.
Entertainment costs are down, down, down. Electronics are cheaper than ever, and getting the content legally-- via DVD, or new services like NetFlix make movie watching a better experience than in the VHS days, and a more economical one. TVs have dropped in price by almost half since the 80s due to improvements in cost production, and a DVD player costs maybe 20% of what a VCR once did. DVDs cost barely more than VHS tapes used to-- they go up less than inflation. And you can buy older DVDs for less than $5!
Hollywood has stolen nothing. They lose more than you do when a movie sucks. I don't ask you support bad content, but I ask that you do consider supporting things you want to see more of. I recently paid ~$80 for Seasons 1 and 2.0 of Battlestar Galactica, not because I hadn't already downloaded the bittorrents, but because I want to support good content and share it with others.
Finally remember that film is one medium for content alone. There are many ways to tell a story, and if film is not meeting your needs, you can always indulge another.
I can only say "HOORAY!!!!!!!!!!"
He was a big part of the start of the expensive movie model. I hope he's right that we're goin back to things before Star Wars.
The effect would be story-driven movies, with more actors and writing, and less special effects and production value costs. That means more movies, and more ideas.
(And a lot more crap, but the massive information flow of the Internet helps filter out stinkers.)
I'd be a happy camper.
....That War of the Worlds and LWW beat Episode III for an Oscar nomination. I'm pissed Kong won. They had a couple great renders but their comps looked like shit and overall. The CG characters didn't even look like they belonged in the shot 1/2 the time.
All true, but I think the theater experience is a big issue as well. "Back in the day" (before may Slashdetters where old enough to go to movies) theaters actually had screens that where significantly bigger than a big screen TV, hence the phrase "Big Screen Blockbuster" was often associated with a movie such as Lawrence of Arabia or something. But this isn't the case anymore with mega-plexes squeezing more and more smaller screens into the same space. Snacks have always been premium priced (a "rip-off") at theaters, so I don't think that comes into the equation that much, but over the years the theater experience has gone from a special night out to a lot less fun than just waiting and renting the DVD. A lot of people blame poor quality films, but they have always been around, just turn on the TV and surf the cable channels late at night. For me at least, the quality of the theater experience keeps me out of the theater, not the movies themselves.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Ironically, the concept of gay cowboys (http://www.southparkstudios.com/show/display_epis ode.php?season=2&id1=209&id2=22 ) was originally conceived as an independent film. However, I was disappointed when they dropped the penchant for pudding. A critical failure, in my opinion.
Lucas fails to mention what has changed in the viewer or economic system. A relatively short period of time ago, big budget films were often hits. There was a placebo effect, whereby people would have high expectations of a big budget film (despite this often not panning out.... i.e. WaterWorld).. Both the Spiderman and X-Men movies have proved that big-budget films, of late, can score big.
But could you even do Spider Man or X-Men in 1985 with 10 times their budget? The only reason those films worked under their current budgets was CGI.
CGI still costs an arm and a leg, but its not as costly as it was with Terminator 2.
Frankly, CGI will continue to improve until we can't tell a difference between it and real life (I think we have reached that point in some aspects) but will simply drop in price over time.
Eventually, machina-esque movie making will come out of a the box much like Sims Movie Maker program. The price in CGI will go down since all props will have already been rendered and with faster and more powerful cpus the rendering time will be pretty nihl to what you need to do a full length movie now.
Heck, an indie film maker might be able to pull off a movie without a 3d effects or 3d modeler artist if he can buy a "pre-canned" package. After all... Once the human mind can't tell the difference between a live actor and a computer generated one, you don't have to re-create that model over and over again from scratch. Just sell the model and let the indie director style it with a gui interface out of box.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
They're shrinking the market among the more moderate and conservative segments of society. They're sharing a smaller pie with the indie movies these days, and the indie movies are either staying the same or growing in popularity.
gas prices in my home are not up much once you factor in inflation over the past 15 years.
Inflation is meaningless. I'm paying less for a TV than in 1989, but I might buy one every 15 years. Food is more expensive, though, as well as heating fuel.
Note that gasoline is a large part of the inflation itself. A far better metric than "inflation" is the Federal minimum wage.
In January 1989, Gasoline was $1.00 per gallon (source). The Federal minimum wage was $3.35 per hour (source). In 1989, someone making the federally mandated minimum wage worked one hour for three and a third gallons of gasoline.
Today's prices need no source; look at the sign on your way home. It's $2.47 this morning here. The federal minimum wage is $5.15; the worker making minimum wage today can afford about two gallons of gas for an hour's slavery, as opposed to the 3 1/3 in 1989.
Please stop believing everything the liars in government tell you and do a little basic research yourself. Thirty seconds googling found the true increase in the price of gasoline.
How would you want all lead women action roles to be portrayed? The women gets her ass kicked in the first scene and then goes back to cooking in the kitchen? Also having women in lead roles in action films is somewhat new and broke the old archetype. Compare versus the damsel in distress type role.
Additionally there are films for religious people and always have been. Recently there has been Narnia and The Passion of the Christ. Traditionally how about, The Ten Commandments or Ben Hur?
Really Hollywood is trying to make money and they will make movies about whatever as long as people go and see them. Now maybe they will give awards to different kinds of movies but thats not always the case. For example Gladiator won best picture in 2000, and LOTR in 2003.
Also do you think there were never gay cowboys? I don't know even Westerns could be a little gay at times, checking out each other's pistols and what not.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
And Starbucks will only require you to put in 5 hours growing/harvesting beans, 2 hours grinding, and 1 hour cleaning the store, along with the $15M, for the privilege! At least it will be "organic", whatever that will mean by then.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
At some point movies that cost $200 million will only cost $15 million due to the wonders of technology. This is great for people like Lucas who may make as much or more money on franchise merchandise ($500 for a prop replica stormtrooper blaster anyone?) than the movie sales themselves... oh and don't forget the booming DVD secondary market.
Firstly, since my post ended up a bit long, I wanted to plug the movie Primer. Best sci-fi film made in a long time, doesn't pander to the audience at all. I think most on Slashdot will love it, despite the measly $7K it cost.... And now with the rest of the story: Perhaps people would go to theaters more regularly if: a) It wasn't so expensive. b) The movie-going experience was more rewarding. The cost of going out to a movie makes it difficult for the industry to compete with cheaper alternatives. The reward of seeing the movie needs to justify the cost; with todays movies it's rarely the case. Because people see so few movies in theaters, they usually choose to see the biggest movie out. Many of the quality movies get overlooked. There are also fewer "easy yet rewarding" movies. Those that are accessible and enjoyable by all, yet aren't cheap comedies, dramas, horrors, or remakes. Directors used to make a few movies every year. Quality isn't about the movies needing to be films, they don't need to raise questions or be difficult to understand. Quality is just about them being entertaining and capturing the human imagination (The difference between episods 4-6 vs. 1-3). Lucas is right, but I think for the wrong reasons. The poster that said King Kong failed because the studio couldn't pull in the reigns on Jackson is right on. It could have been a beautifully re-imagined version of the original, but instead has much directorial masturbation that dilutes the story. It's not that quality movies aren't being made, it's that they are overlooked. That will change as the big studios get behind more of the small quality films. I think it's a similar trend that's happening in music and radio as well, as the large corporations realize the value in trying to sell quality products rather than market crappy products to death. Primer
"Too lazy to fail." - Heinlein
I think what George is trying to say is that with modern technology being so inexpensive, there's no need for spending $200M per film. Just renter it on his (or anyone else's) computers. Okay, this does make some sense.
I've seen zero-budget high-FX films come from people's home computers. Some of these are damn good.
I can see what Georges is trying to say, but I honestly believe him wrong. Big budget movies are here to stay. Sometimes I want to be wowed at the theatre too. LOTR was well worth the $300M budget.
Will theatres be runover with indie flicks? No. But I'd like to see a better balance in the theatres. I'm tired of going to the megaplex and seeing 4 screen showing Gigli.
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
Matt Damon as Archie!
Ben Affleck as Jughead!
Gwen Steffani as Betty!
Liv Tyler as Veronica!
Now there's a surefire moneymaker!
What?
I predict an open source film somewhere in the galaxy FAR FAR FAR AWAY!!! Cost, 15 million.
...I don't know what Lucas's basis of judgement was on that comment (but then again, who really knows why Lucas makes the decisions that he does...). However, after the move Crash won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and considering that the movie had a huge list of big-name actors, yet only had a budget of $6.5 million dollars, I can see where he's coming from.
Yet, what nobody seems to understand in Hollywood is that what movie go-ers crave is a good storyline. Sure, it's fun to see how much of a world you can create with the marvels of modern technology, and there are plenty of times and plenty of people who are attracted to a movie for the action, adventure, and eye-candy, but what so many producers are forgetting is replay value.
The perfect example that flies in the face of Lucas's comment is the movie Titanic. The budget for that movie in '98 was a whopping $200 million, when nobody ever imagined spending that much on a film before. It stayed #1 at the box office for FOUR MONTHS!!! Why? Because it had replay value.
On the completely opposite end of the spectrum is the movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Here's a movie that never had a wide distribution and never played in more than 200 theaters at a time during its release, yet holds the record for the most box office revenue ever taken in by a movie with such a limited release, $135 million. Again, the movie has replay value.
Star Wars Ep. 4-6 has a ton of replay value. Star Wars Ep. 1-3, on the other hand, has very little replay value. Huge explosions, big-name actors, and expensive CGI effects make for a strong initial showing, but without a good story, aren't worth watching again.
* Facts and figures taken from Wikipedia.
I don't know how serious Lucas is with this prediction. Look at the hundred's of millions of dollars invested in his new digs near the Presidio. Sure games and TV producttion, but a lot of movie making capacity. Doubt he has buyer's remorse on all that.
Yep, that was exactly my reaction. The most expensive special effect in the original Star Wars was that vector demo of how to blow up the Death Star they showed to the pilots! There were more complicated screen savers for Windows 3.1.
Whatever software is standard for movie editors in 2025 will have better special effects built-in than the most complicated stuff in the Matrix movies. Fifteen-year-olds will be outdoing Revenge of the Sith (on a special effects level, I mean--any high school play already beats the acting).
Twenty years ago I watched cable on a 27 inch TV. Today my TV is 47 inches, but most people I know are watching TVs (not "TV's" you silly illiterate person) closer to the 27 inches I had back then.
Most people didn't have computers, true - but I did. Others I knew did as well. Many folks I know now still don't have computers, and not all of them are geezers.
Cars were't that much cheaper back then either; maybe 15k for a low end model. And today's cars last longer and need less maintenance.
Nobody had cell phones, true, but today I have no land line. My landline cost about fifty bucks back then, and didn't include long distance. Most folks had at least two phones, many a phone in every room. After all, the only cost was the phone itself. My cell phone is about $47, with "free" long distance.
Movies now are much more than what they were 20 years ago. You aren't getting the same product.
With few exceptions (Lord of the Rings) movies today aren't anywhere near as good as they were twenty years ago (The Terminator vs I, Robot.)
Perhaps your math is wrong, as the world as you describe it is more like 1960 than 1985. And in 1960, our black and white TV was 19 inches, the neighbors had a 25 inch color set.
What's a death kneel? Is it some kind of kung-fu move?
There are a lot of standard complaints that are thrown around that don't bear out. In behavior finance this is the demonstration of revealed preferences over stated preferences.
Everyone likes to turn to the classic bit on the lack of imagination in Hollywood when there is little evidence that the movie-going masses would have preference for "more imaginative" movies.
First, everyone likes to point at how Hollywood likes remakes. Well this isn't a recent phenomenon. King Kong wasn't just remade in 2005 but in 1976. You could've rented the DVDs for both previous versions and watched them before seeing PJ's version. You can go all the way back to Cecile B DeMille remaking the Ten Commandments and continue on as Hollywood repeated the standard film plots, from sword and sandal standards to Dragnet to... Lord of the Rings. And that brings up the real point:
People don't mind remakes, they just don't want "bad" remakes.
The funny thing is what constitutes "bad". Consider the original King Kong. Everyone will call it a classic. Heck probably more people would call it a classic than have actually seen it. And I bet most of them have no real drive to do so even though its just a Netflix order away. It's because what most people consider "bad" are opinions on effects and film production: less believable special effects, stage-derived pre-Method acting, pre-New Wave static cinematography, etc.
Basically they want special effects. And not just any special effects, modern special effects.
And that isn't even due to the plausability of the effects, just expectation. Compare the movies Cache and Saw: the second is clearly gorier and more violent. It is wall to wall violence and bodycount. The former has only one on-screen death (two, if you count a decapitated rooster). Now what are the reactions to the two? I've been in theaters for both and the little Hitchcockian thriller Cache shocked the audiences more than Saw did. Why? Because it's violence didn't fit into the expecations of the audience. People seeing Saw know what they're going to see; they can put on the mask of fake bravery and laugh at the misfortune of shallow unsympathetic characters. Cache engages the viewer in a completely different way: by that nefarious "character-driven plot".
Of course Saw made hundreds of millions of dollars while Cache showed to small art houses. Saw also spawned a sequel.
And that leads to the emergent behavior of movie goers: they expect repetition. Repetition in effects, in plot, in characters. This is why sequels have been and are so popular. People tire of watching the same movie over again. But they wanted repeated experience. So you take a movie, conceive of a similar plot, rehire the same actors, set designers and let them go. Most sequels are really more serials with the idea of an over-arching plot pretty tenuous. Franchises like Bad Boys, Big Momma's House, American Pie. Disney has made a cottage industry of this, crapping out straight to video releases and cartoons based upon their best received product. Its a fine line of just different enough to make it stand on its own while not so different as to fall outside of expectation.
That last one is the killer, something like only 5% of non-franchise movies recoup the costs of the other 95%. And these are rarely anything special. These are the My Big Fat Greek Weddings of the world. And you can bet the masterminds have sat down and tried to figure out how to franchise those too.
Folks aren't looking for plot-driven, nonstandard movies. Look at the Best Picture nominees this year: Capote, Brokeback Mountain, Crash, Good Night and Good Luck, Munich. Their nominations were out over a month ago and only Brokeback has gone over 75 million. Crash has made 55 after a full year in theaters. Spielberg's Munich has only recouped 45 of the 75 m
What is music when you despise all sound?
Hollywood will continue to blame their problems on everything except the cause of their problems: A significant percentage of today's movie suck simply because Hollywood has greatly underestimated the intelligence of its audience.
Every time you see a production of Shakespeare it's a 'remake' yet nobody complains about that. The problem is not remakes but (1) remaking stuff that was awful first time around and (2) making it even more awful the next time around.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
the average production costs will be equal to a big budget film in India (Hindi, Telugu or Tamil). I see outsourcing in the horizon already.
Look at what happened with King Kong.
Indeed.
Look at what happened with King Kong:
In 2005 Hollywood remade (for the second time!) for $hundreds of million$ a movie originally made in 1933, and nobody went to see it so the movie tanked.
What Hollywood sees: we made an expensive movie that tanked. Ergo: Expensive movies bad!
What the rest of us see: the 2nd remake of a 70-year old idea. Creativity nonexistent.
Is it any wonder Hollywood is struggling with such obviously stupid people running the show? There are brilliant people in the movie business, they just aren't in charge.
-Styopa
But by "anti-copyright activist" do you mean don't believe in copyrights at all? If so, please explain (or direct me to your better rants). -- I'm not baiting, I just don't believe I've ever heard anyone express a *no* copyrights position. I'm personally a fan of the constitional 14 year copyright -> public domain theory {and believe a 5 - 10 year term would be more appropriate in today's age).
The conversation seems to be neglecting two things we can take for granted in 2025: 1. Dirt cheap CGI 2. Decentralized distribution A movie today is expensive because of actors, effects, unions, and studios; the above two things obviate all those reasons.
So what happened with King Kong?
What movie studio has been among the worst for releasing virtually nothing but poor sequels for the last few years? Disney animation. But now, with Pixar in the driver's seat for all of Disney animation (not just 3D CG), and with the cancellation of Toy Story 3, that is sure to change. Will other studios follow suit? Or would it take other crews like Pixar's to break them out of their collective rut?
As for Lucas, it makes sense that he's railing against the establishment. He's been fighting against the system since he started making movies. The big studios didn't want to finance American Grafitti, so he secured funding for himself, and it was a modest success. When he sought funding for Star Wars, once again the big studios wouldn't touch it. He secured funding for that enormous success himself, and created one of the best technical services organizations in the movie business. He's not even a member of the director's guild, having quit after the guild pressured him to put more opening credits into Star Wars.
Whatever you say about Star Wars, it's one of the few big-budget movie series that was created entirely according to the wishes of its creator, without a big studio saying "You can't do that. Do this to make is more commercially viable." The success or failure of the series was always in the hands of one person.
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
It gets weirder than that. Hollywood exploits tax loopholes around the word to bring down the upfront investment in a movie to a fraction of its total costs. The linked article claims that even though Tomb Raider had a budget of $94 million that the studios only had to put up $7 million for it. Fortunately, the German government recently closed this same tax loophole that has fueled Uwe Boll's abysmal career.
Is it just me, or do you get the impression that the mob has easier to follow bookkeeping than a lot of corporate America today?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The fact is that the moviegoing experience is not what it once was. Mostly gone are theaters with high-vaulted ceilings, art-deco lobbies, and theater screens which could wallpaper the front of most middle-class homes and still have enough material left over to paper the half the sides and the roof. Gone also are the comfortable reclining seats, replaced instead with stadium seating rigs which are so uncomfortable I believe they were taken straight out of the coach classes of retired 737's.
The theater experience used to be something that you couldn't get at home. Going to the movies was a sense of occasion. It was a gathering place.
Take away the comfort and the sensory deprivation and the immersion to the point where a person can, for a few thousand dollars investment in a low-end theater rig, get a better general experience at home watching a DVD, and you start to see theatrical release itself become a thing of the past.
I, for one, won't mourn the death of the BBM, since most of the movies I've seen over the past decade and a half having such crazy budgets didn't impress me nearly as much as the indie films I've seen, anyway.
Who cares?
d zilla giving you a sense of regurgitated plot ?
This is the M-O-V-I-E-S. Hulk/Superman/Spiderman/Batman/X-Men/King-Kong/Go
Yeah, OK, umm, don't go to see them.
Move along netizen, nothing to see here...
All is well, consume !
Star Wars IV: A New hope - Budget: 11 million.
Raiders of the Lost Ark - Budget: 20 million.
Hmmm....
He puts out digital 1080i as the new super def,
Clones looks like crap compared to "Lawrence of Arabia".
You can get 1080 on a home screen, and it is supposed to stretch to 30ft.
I went to IMAX for Harry Potter.
George, if you want to do a big budget film, go for better media.
Rather than his digital DRM scheme, that saves money on distribution and
controls the time and number of screenings, future theaters have to
have a superior viewing experience.
His reasoning:
"If it does not look better than my home system, why go." is correct.
Can he make movies that will always look better on the big screen?
The other part is Californication is putting out movies that no
sane father is going take his family to.
The Oscars shows this in Bold letters (WE HATE NORMAL FAMILIES!)
and (WE HATE AMERICA!)
When was the last time you saw a live action movie
with a whole famliy where the father was not the butt of the jokes?
"In the real world, even women with fifth degree black belts in real Tae Kwon Do "
Tae Kwon Do is a sport not a means of self-defense. Oh sure, if you can kick ass, Tae Kwon Do can help you, but if you can kick ass, you don't need no tae kwon do to help you.
Only $15 million. Yeah..the average indie film writer has that much.
I could predict the death of big-budget Lucas.
In the real world, even women with fifth degree black belts in real Tae Kwon Do can often be physically overpowered by muggers [...], kids (especially teens) are often total morons compared to those older than them, etc.
Oh, so movies make people semm cooler than in real life?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Like Indiana Jones 4?
What exactly is Lucas referring to? Kong grossed 500 Million dollars and IMO it was a bad movie. Of course it still heaps better than anything Lucas did in about 20 years, so I guess we can't expect Lucas to judge quality.
I went to Kong with 4 friends and we were all dissapointed. And we are all Fans of Jackson/LOTR sci fi etc... Jackson went overboard to the point of it being extremely tedious to watch at times, and plain silly at other times. I would never want to sit through it again.
What I can't reconcile is the critical success this movie enjoyed. That plus other hype translated to box office, but in truth this was not a well executed movie. It would be better if it went on a diet and lost 45 minutes. Remove some of the sillyness and tedium.
Any chance he meant to say $25 BILLION? That seems more likely to me. Fewer films with bigger budgets...rich get richer, poor get poorer.
Is that $25M in today's currency or in the currency of 2025? Perhaps we will have a great bout of deflation?
...if he had predicted back in 1989 that no more good Star Wars films would ever be made, and that cute dancing bears and blond moppets would replace good characterizations and stories. Aside from two very good films (one of which he didn't even direct) what has Lucas done that deserves so much praise? The last 4 Star Wars films that were made were all varying degrees of dreadful (for 'Revenge of the Sith,' I am taking a friend's work, no need to lose another 90 minutes of time to more wooden acting and CGI FX).
Once the human mind can't tell the difference between a live actor and a computer generated one
I believe this will never happen though; there will always be some clue (even if its subconscience) that will tip people off.
I am no movie analyst (So I may be completely wrong), but I've always been under the assumption that the reason movies produced in the US were so much "better" (In graphics at least) was because unlike other countries, we didn't find it overkill to put $100+ million or often even more into production of a movie. So he is predicting the fall of modern Hollywood it would seem? I guess that could be somewhat possible, since computers have been making it cheaper to "build sets". The biggest problem would probably be adjusting Hollywood pay scales down to that of normal people, where they should be (I'm just jelous they probably love what they do and get millions for it, and acting does look fun as hell).
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
With 20 years of inflation, a hot dog is going to cost $15 million. Want real beef that will be an extra 2 million.
A $200 million budget will be considered a home movie.
They said the same thing after Blair Witch Came out...in fact Lucas has been saying this for years. He thinks that it would be great if every shmuck with a camcorder could create a movie and release it in theater's and maybe it would be great. But maybe it would be terrible too. In the end I think this is just a way to stir up the pan and see what comes to the surface.
I have long been annoyed with hollywood and the trend of remakes, so much that years ago I began enjoying HK cinema as my primary movie source (and to a lesser extent, japan, thailand, and korea).
There are plenty of fantastic movies that have come out of HK, japan, and other asian countries. These are movie industries where $40Mil (USD) is considered "big-budget", the 3d effects are sometimes laughable, but the stories are fundamentally different than what we get from hollywood. No, they are not all kung-fu movies, and they are not all great, but they do latch on to trends that you dont really see here in america. There was a big gambling movie trend years back that resulted in some great classics (God of Gamblers, All for the Winner). The Triad genre is relatively packed, but with more good than bad. Infernal Affairs is being remade (surprise, surprise!) by hollywood.
Give the asian film market a chance if youre tired of hollywood's tired formula.
This was a casual comment from the guy while at a party. Big deal. Maybe he was just drunk.
'The market forces that exist today make it unrealistic to spend $200 million on a movie,' said Lucas, a near-billionaire from his feverishly franchised outer-space epics. 'Those movies can't make their money back anymore.'
Who cares how large the budget is?? Is that a deciding factor for any moviegoer?
Even if it was, LOTR had half of that budget, and I don't think many thought it looked amateurish... It had made $314,000,000 as of the end of 2003.
Look at what happened with King Kong.
Yeah, to many it kinda sucked especially for being too long. The point...? That a high budget movie has a risk of failing if it's a remake with some pacing problems? Of course! But maybe Lucas has been blinded by his Star Wars brand, and automatic interest in anything about it, so much that he believes it's more about the effects and the title than the movie, and after that the revenue is received on a silver platter. Unfortunately for most, that's a luxury he's among few of having.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Yeah, the live actors will be more wooden ;).
But the computer generated ones might be "too consistent".
I can't believe a man with so little vision in his skull has actually even created something succesful in his life. Then again I shouldn't be surprised, this is the man that included Jar Jar from a purely business standpoint and wondered why people didn't love him ...
... that's unheard of, money = quality surely..
Maybe King Kong tanked because it was an utterly awful movie. Ohno, an expensive movie that turned out to be crap
That's why Clerks was a hit right.
Nothing more than scare tactics. This is just part of the anti-piracy fear mongering by Hollywood. "Start going to the movies again or we'll stop making good ones!" is essentially what GL is saying.
I say, start making good movies and charging reasonable prices at the cinemas and people will start going again. Offer me something in a theatre I can't get in my living room.
Maybe Hollywood should pressure the theater's to lower prices.. Paying $20 for 2 tickets + another 20 for overprice popcorn/soda/candy. A $40 night at the movies for two people? I will wait for the movie to hit DVD: 1. Cant beat being in the comfort of your own home/sofa. 2. Food is pennies compared to theater costs 3. no babies/cell phones and people acting like 10yrs olds. 4. Saves gas!
I predict that by 2025 the average movie will cost only $15 million.
In other news, the ticket price will also be $15 million.
"Religious people have been some of the most intelligent and educated in society"
why isnt this modded funny? its obviously satirical.
Computer graphics are becoming cost-competitive and taking away a lot of the need for big sets, complicated stunts, exotic locales and even extras for big battle/crowd scenes. And (not by 2015 but maybe by 2050) there may not be much need for real actors! If you don't believe me look at the computer graphics in the first clip on Animatrix movie.
The real damage of over-zealous and lengthy copyrights are in loss over time of historical media.
The thing is that over-restrictive copyright simply lets holders horde media and ideas. But it does not stop new ideas, which simply cannot use existing popular media as a base as they were able to in the past (like Disney using classic fairy tales).
So what it does is punish those companies who lack creativity (like, ironically, Disney - though with Pixar they bought creativity once more) but those companies that actually are creative and able to come up with new ideas are actually rewarded more than they would have been in the past, because there is less competition in the space of the truly original work. Pixar is an example of this, where they were successful because of how creative they were but that success was increased by the mediocrity all around them, as other companies worked for years to cross-licence something that was popular last decade.
I don't really mind longer copyright because I know it will correct itself at some point and kind of become irrelevant in the face of smaller groups able to deliver high-quality media content with far less money. I just feel sorry for kids today that will have a whole media heritage from their childhood locked in a vault guarded by dying compnaies that cannot undserstand how they are killing themselves.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0360717/business
:)
Simply put, what kind of meaningless comment was that about King Kong? Besides, what kind of mega-dollar monsters hasn't George Lucas himself spewed out, and with considerably less good results (Episode I anyone?).
What they all need is 1. to pay the stars less 2. pay MPAA nothing 3. pay the people who actually have no part in the making of the movie, well, less 4. get better stories.
Voila, more movies will make a profit then
I mean, how much does the average pr0n video cost to make? $15K?
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Hollywood funded Lucas's new efforts because they want to give people what they want and what sells!
*BZZZZZZT!!!!*
Lucas funds his own films. The cash for the prequels came directly from LucasFilm, Ltd. 20th Century Fox was the distributor, nothing more.
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
Actually, in 2025, the average movie budget may be nowhere near $15 million -- it may be more like $15,000. We've had garage bands around for a good long time now, but we're in the early stages of the era of the garage movie. Why should an "indie" movie cost $15 million to make?
With internet distribution, these movies have a way to find an audience for the first time. Everything from traditional "indie-style" character-driven dramas to creature features to animation are now accessible to anyone with a prosumer DV camera, a decent PC, and an idea.
Sure, there will be more expensive movies made in Hollywood, but there are only a trickle of those every year compared with the potential flood of no-budget indie flicks.
This is the same man who created Jar Jar binks and tool three movies to make one that was as good as it should have been. I've LONG believed his team was the real reason for the original trilogy. The man is brilliant with story ideas. Do we really believe that translates into industry foresight?
Archicad Guru
I predict that by 2025 the average movie will cost only $15 million.
Coincidentally, so will a bucket of popcorn.
His big question was whether we could get the costs of CG down. He thought things looked promising. "Reboot", the first all-CG TV show, was produced at one episode per week by a team of thirty people. That showed how cost-effective CG for TV was possible. Then there was "Roughnecks", the Starship Troopers spinoff, also produced with a comparable budget. "Roughnecks" had live action and CG, and most of the complexity of a movie, yet it was affordable. So things were looking good.
For a few years after that, though, CG budgets seemed to climb and climb. You'd see films with five to ten effects houses credited. (Someone at ILM once told me that where they make their real money is in bailing out failed productions, where someone else botched the effects and the producers now desperately need a quick fix to get the film out the door.) Audiences were expecting all big scenes, all the time, all the way through the movie. CG costs were becoming a studio nightmare.
But now, the tools are starting to mature. A film project rarely needs a technical R&D operation today. The computer hardware is off the shelf. The software comes as a boxed product. Many artists now know how to drive a 3D animation system. Cramming the detail of a big scene into the computers is no longer a problem. Need an alien city? No big. Seamless integration of live action and CG backgrounds? No problem. Unless your principal character is CGI, as in "Shrek", CG is as routine as background painting once was. There's more CG in a typical TV show today than in a movie of a decade ago.
So costs are starting to come back down to reasonable levels. And they'll fall further.
Managing all this is tough. One wrenching change in the industry has come from CGI. Preproduction planning now dominates, and this has been a shock to directors who came from a theatrical background. Theatrical directors build scenes by putting actors on a bare stage and having them walk through the scene, seeing how it works, and adjusting the dialog and staging until it looks right. Some film directors work that way, and while it's slow, some great films took many takes before the scenes settled down and worked. For CGI-heavy films, this runs costs through the roof.
Animation directors, though, make movies by starting with a storyboard and filling in the blanks. Once the storyboard is locked in, the scenes and shots change little. CGI-heavy films require that discipline to keep costs under control. One result of this overcontrol is rather wooden acting, even by good actors.
It's been hard on some directors.
...the closing of that loophole may not affect Uwe Boll much, as he was one of the few people actually using that tax shelter as intended - he _is_ German and actually does finance his films from German investors, with said investors having beneficial ownership of the result.
At least so thinks Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uwe_Boll
Gone also are the comfortable reclining seats, replaced instead with stadium seating rigs which are so uncomfortable I believe they were taken straight out of the coach classes of retired 737's.
Never have been to a theatre with "comfortable reclining seats", and I've been going to movies for over 45 years. The stadium seating is great especially if you are short or have kids since the chance of someone blocking the view is substantially reduced.
Wow! Just 15 million bucks to make a movie? That truly *is* independent...
Seriously, what seems to be happening, as evidenced by Lucas' statement, is not the demise of the movie industry; rather, the movie industry realises that people start shying away from "Hollywood" movies, and that "independent" films are the current trend. So what's happening, naturally, is that they're trying to commercialise those - it's the same thing as with "alternative" music. What started out as a true alternative is merely a marketing label today, but it takes people quite a while to realise that, so until the "independent" or "alternative" label will be worn out in a couple of years or decades, the industry will still make good money.
And when it wears out... the same thing will happen again. New trend crops up; industry seizes new trend and starts to market their own stuff under the new label; most consumers [1] are too stupid to realise that it's the same old shit being fed to them by the same old industry; industry continues to make money; label wears out; lather, rinse, repeat, ad infinitum or - maybe more appropriate - ad nauseam.
Lucas really is just playing the game here. Does anyone really think that when he talks about "independent" films, he wants some young people with new ideas to make movies with hardly any budget, simply by investing a lot of work and love? Of course not; he wants to continue selling his own crap, so the "independent" label is just a way for him to justify that - a way to avoid being labelled one of the old dinosaurs who're dying out. It's quite shameless, but that isn't really surprising, either, of course.
1. Except for those who actually cared and started the whole new thing, of course; those will turn away in disgust and look for something else, but they're a small minority.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
I believe this will never happen though; there will always be some clue (even if its subconscience) that will tip people off.
We give the human mind more credit than it deserves mostly because we assume that what we see is actually 100% actual light reflected of the objects. The truth is that we simply do not have enough visual cortex synapses (neurons) to see all of the photons/ rays of light being relected into the retina to process 100% accurately.
Or other words... The human mind has to make big assumptions about what it is seeing. This is why optical illusions work on us. But as a benefit it is also why we can look at an abstract peice of art or cartoon and recognize that its a person or an animal even though it is minimal information being reflected into our eyes.
However, we are faced with what they call an Uncanny Valley type of a problem when things seem real, but creepy at the same time. One of the problems I found when doing 3d animation is that it was easy to make a realistic model, but it was almost impossible to get it to sit still right. Humans don't actually sit perfectly still and have ambient moving all the time (breathing, fidgeting, and other things) and the Final Fantasy animation movie sort of rubbed my nerves wrong because they were pretty bad with it.
But I think CGI artists will overcome this one way or another... They are being paid millions to do so.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Not to mention, all the reviews said that King Kong doubled the length of the original without really adding any story. I was looking forward to seeing it, then read the reviews and decided I wanted to see a DVD of the original before seeing the new one. But the original hasn't been available at my local stores, so I haven't seen either yet.
Summing up: so-so movie with poor marketing tie-in.
Steven Soderbergh predicted in a Wired magazine interview that the typical film launch will coincide with the dvd release and cable/satellite broadcast, all in the same day. Why? Because of piracy and dwindling box office returns. In fact, Soderbergh is putting his money where his mouth is with his upcoming film Bubbles.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
Bad example, George. Movies about big monkeys and fish are precisely what drove me to the foreign art houses in the 70s. It helps if a big movie actually _says_ something, you know?
Is it written in Hegel's eternal cycles that every generation must have a King Kong?
"But from 1997 on, the trend reverses and shows a distribution pattern, a sell-off of mindshare in popular movies. The speculation is that the current movie sales malaise may have been predictable."
r y=final_movie_meme_graph
http://www.realmeme.com/roller/page/realmeme/?ent
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
So what? That's what I say about this...
If I feel entertained by a film I don't worry if it costs 200 million or 2 million. I don't feel gratified by knowing that I'm seeing a big budget film if it leaves me wishing I hadn't seen it at all.
Am I wrong here? I can not help it that "saw" was entertaining without the use of big money and mostly mid to low profile stars. Could it have been better with a larger budget and bigger names? Perhaps, but it doesn't bother me. I was entertained, I told others it was a good film, I bought it on DVD and went to see the sequal. This is what Hollywood should want; my possitive review.
On the other hand I didn't feel good about a 45 minute car chase in a film that costs more to make than the GNP of Brazil because it bores me. No amount of CGI or whatever effects are going to impress me if I don't get involved in a story. I think that's what the public is saying...
I'm sure it's a redundent post but everytime Lucas opens his trap it pisses me off, frankly. The man sabotaged his own brainchild and is now blaiming the public for not loving it. WTF?
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Once the human mind can't tell the difference between a live actor and a computer generated one, you don't have to re-create that model over and over again from scratch. Just sell the model and let the indie director style it with a gui interface out of box.
I hate to have the Luddite opinion on this one, since I'm a CG animator and fear the "out-of-the-box" CG actor software, but I don't think this is going to happen. Do you realize how much work it is to make a CG character believable? It isn't just a technical issue, it's an artistic issue. Sure, once you have the model you don't have to create it again, but you'll ALWAYS have to create new animation if you want a decent performance other than the stock "look left then look right" that you see in video games. Creating a realistic performance for a human character is a herculean task, and one that hasn't even been achieved yet, because the more realistic a CG character gets, the more nuance that humans can pick up and automatically tell that "it doesn't look right."
You discount the importance of an original, good performance; something that will always require a good actor, either in front of the camera, at a computer.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
You mean watching a stampede of 30+ dinosaurs through a 50' chasm, missing all our heroes underfoot is not compelling to you?
"The unions in Hollywood are notorious for continuing their blacklist and favoritism controls -- keeping costs high and quality low. In order to distribute a movie in the States, you have to be part of the union's preferred cartels. If you attempt to make a movie outside of their control, you'll generally not see wide distribution. Copyright at its finest, here."
Um...
Sorry, but this paragraph has absolutely nothing to do with copyright. When a copyright holder asks a distributer to distribute a film, and the distributer says "no," it's not copyright law being evil and standing in the creator's way. In fact, the copyright holder is the one being turned down.
Does this show unfair control over distribution channels that favour certain kinds of movies? Yes. Does this show copyright flaws? No.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
George, why couldn't you have forseen this before Episodes I, II, III? So much pain and suffering could have been avoided...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Lucas alludes that King Kong did not do well. In fact it cost $207M and made $543M world wide. Even if his guess is right about the demise of big budget films, he made a poor choice in using KK as an example.
A little history to enlighten those of you who haven't lived my life.
...it's actually possible to make full feature high-quality movies with these.
For many years ago a revolution in video-graphics took place. It started with the PaintBox (Huge video painter) to make special effects, and then it continued into the private sector with Amiga and PAR (personal Animation Recorder). Many extra cool units came to the indie moviemaker such as PVD and the famous Video-Toaster. All this wonderful gear made it possible for individuals to persuade a dream of moviemaking in a garage on a household budget.
That made a LOT of moviemakers bloom (just look at Quentin Tarantino and his "one-man-movie-farm") and many more
Today its getting even closer. Did you know that I might be the next Pixar? (yes - you read it right, you just might be reading a sentence from the next "Pixar" like indie animation moviemaker). I have a long background in both traditional Animation and Computer Animation, and have been waiting forever for the computers to evolve to what they're at today.
It's finally happening, computers are at blazing mad speeds and rock-bottom prices, it's possible to have a HUGE renderfarm on a budget and even OpenSource software like Blender 3d are getting so powerfull
What I mean to say is - no longer is both the software and the required hardware for the privileged few, now they're for YOU and ME. Good ol'George knows this, he's no fool.
And it will happen - This I promise you!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
How about a woman who fights using her intellect to compensate for her physical disadvantage. You know, a woman who uses strategy instead of going toe-to-toe with men who are as well-armed, well-trained and much strong. I hate to break it to you, but even most atheletic women would get their asses kicked in a straight on one-on-one fight with a young man in decent shape. We can do significantly more damaged because of our naturally stronger upper bodies.
This isn't a sexism thing. I like Selene in Underworld precisely because she's an ass-kicking woman, but she's also not human. Regular women simply cannot go head to head with military-trained men and their equivalents in real life and not get hopelessly beaten down. Even women with fighting experience would stand a bad chance because at the end of the day, strength and speed matter. The former more so than the latter. 20 weak female punchs versus 5 strong, weight lifting-enhanced male punchs are not going to do the female fighter any good. It's a matter of biology. Women were not made for battle/hunting big game.
I wasn't crediting the ability to detect real from fake to the human brain; I don't think that CG people will ever be able to capture all those little movements (some that are barely preceivable consciencely) needed to fool people.
There are alot of clues that people see in other people's movements that they aren't even aware that they are processing. If we aren't even aware of all the clues, how can you program CG to pick them up (and leave out other movements that may not mean anything at all)?
And when Hollywood does in fact do stories that break a mold, they do it with movies like Brokeback Mountain that they know are going to alienate fans of the genre. Who seriously thinks that that movie won them approval from those who like Westerns? Of all the possible stories, they chose the one break from the norm that in the eyes of most Western fans (I'm generally not one) that shits all over the cultural norm for the genre (gay cowboys). And they wonder why they're alienating their fans and making indie movies more popular.
Brokeback Mountain did pretty well for a movie that you think alienated fans. How do you know that people who like westerns were alienated? What is wrong with shitting "all over the cultural norm for the genre", as long as the movie is good? If Brokeback Mountain alienated it's fans, why did it do well at the box office (with realatively little advertising)?
Some stats from boxofficemojo.com for Brokeback Mountain:
Worldwide gross: $129,906,000
Production Budget: $14 million
Box Office rank since 1980 for Western genre: 5
2005 Domestic Gross Rank: 26 (and it was only about 1/2 way through it's run on Dec 31st)
Not bad for a low budget western.
Jack the Ripper predicts more women will be raped and murdered...
Osama bin Laden predicts more terror attacks....
FedEx predicts more packages will be delivered tomorrow....
Warren Buffet predicts the insurance business will have a good year...
Edith Keeler Must Die
People aren't aware of them because they aren't paying attention to them. CG animators sit in front of a screen or a mirror for hours on end paying specific attention to all the little things people do without realizing they do it. If a cue is visible (which it must be to be used subconciously) then someone staring at it can figure out what it is sooner or later. Do you think CGI will just hit a wall where no matter how hard anybody tries they can't make it any better? That's one of three possibilities I can think of, the others being that everyone will stop trying to make it better, or that it will keep improving until you are unable to tell whether an actor is real. Given the benefits (including money) involved with perfecting CGI to this extent, I can't imagine everyone would either give up or fail, especially with continually-increasing processor and storage capability. It will happen, it's just a matter of time. Personally, I give it 7-10 years.
His movies are childish.
His interviews are "not smart".
Why do we pay attention to him?
Too late. Jackson is already turning Halo into a movie, and we can't have two movies about ring-shaped artificial planets out at the same time. :-)
Yes, but does Netcraft confirm it?
All this means that Hollywood has to both be better at doing good movies and cut unnecessary costs. Just having good actors won't do a good movie - even if some actors are able to lift a movie by prescense. Patrick Stewart, Kevin Spacey, Sean Connery, Samuel L. Jackson, Halle Berry and Cate Blanchett are a few that has the ability.
You may not agree on the list, and there are others too. Some directors are also better than others to make a good movie out of what may seem nothing. In my opinion Stanley Kubrick was one of the best. Not that George Lucas is that bad either. The important thing is not how you are as a person when you are a director, but the ability to use what you have and compose the result to something that ends up as a whole that is more than it's parts. Another director that also is able to get good results is Luc Besson, who is very productive, and where Nikita and Léon are two films that are worth checking.
So in my opinion - cut down on all those kerosene effects and figure out something more bone-rattling thrilling experiences. You don't have to get to all special effects just to shock the audience - use as little as possible and with a good mix. Alfred Hitchcock was good at this. Just because a film has been cheap to make doesn't mean that it has to be bad.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Applied to (e.g.) SF (books and movies) that means for me: if I'm well informed (by reading reviews etc.) I'll probably be able to avoid about 70-80% of the worst stuff. Which leaves a proportion of something like 2:1 or 3:1 ("crud" vs. "good stuff").
I can live with that, especially because within those 10% will be that insanely great, fantastic, mind-blowing fraction of a % that made reading/watching all the other stuff (crud, near-crud, near-great etc.) worthtwile.
Just my 2, of course.
sig? Oh, that sig...
I have my own theory about "what happened" with King Kong (which has made a lot of money, by the way, and will continue to do so when released in DVD).
King Kong is an enormously creative remake which transcends the original. The production quality is very high, and the effects are superb. The storytelling, as well, is very good. The one problem with it, from a box office standpoint, is that an animal -- namely, the title character, who is portrayed very sympathetically -- is killed. I'm sure I'll be criticized as a male chauvinist, but women hate that sort of thing.
Titanic, by contrast, was also a remake and was also "very sad." But, no animals die, and the star of the movie -- the heroine (a woman) -- lives.
The moral of the story is, don't kill women, children, or animals on screen, or you'll tend to alienate the tenderhearted half of heterosexual couples and jeopardize your ticket sales.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
They're not cowboys! They're shepherds. ;-)
sig? Oh, that sig...
The comfortable or the reclining?
when an "indie film" can mean one that had $15M spent on it?
...Of course, Clerks 2's budget is $5M. Still, that's a bit short of $15M, and Kevin Smith is hardly indie anymore. Not that he or his hardcore fans (or the movie industry) have noticed...
Clerks' budget was $230K. Yes, _K_.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Your inability to suspend your disbelief when you watch women beat up men indicates that you hate women. Most likely you are closet homosexual who dates women but tends to beat them because of his own insecurities. The whole bit about how Brokeback Mountain ruined the Western genre only supports my hypothesis.
The fact is that as long as Hollywood has money expressed in scientific notation, they will keep producing big "blockbusters" to keep the illusion that the big-name directors, producers, and studios are still in charge.
In fact that's the only reason they're still around. All of those advertisements at the theaters? Guess what advertising does... it protects monopolies and oligopolies. That's its only purpose. It's a barrier to entry into the industry, and the "indy" directors only have difficulty getting into theatres because of it.
Movies have already been completely and totally destroyed by the computer and video game industry. Every single movie you can see is outdone by a mediocre game. Granted, there are old classic movies which are still amazing - must-see movies like "It's a Wonderful Life" can't be replaced with a game, but that's because they're stories. Movies don't add anything to printed stories. Interaction does.
Hollywood is dying, and the only reason we'll mourn its absence is because the lack of vice on the news will make for some boring TV dinners.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Was it Steve-O? He takes on a woman boxer from Japan and gets his ass handed to him in about a minute. And he fits your definition of an average, in-shape male -- and certainly able to withstand punishment as shown by the rest of the movie. It wasn't even close -- she pummeled him despite his best efforts.
My question would be, which do you claim never existed? The comfortable part or the reclining part. I'll believe the first because that's just a matter of taste, however they were infinitely more comfortable than today's stadium seating (which often completely lack any adjustment ability whatsoever). However, prior to the advent of stadium seating in recent times, even multiplexes sacrificed screen quantity for larger theater sizes and seats that slid forward into a reclining position. The point is that a 12-plex fits into the space once occupied by a 6-plex, sacrificing comfort and amenities and delivering a less "majestic" experience in the process.
The problem is that so few new movies are good. I am not interested in seeing King Kong yet again. The Fantastic 4 made a good plot, but its one I've already seen in comics and cartoons since I was a young child. When they start coming up with something original and good, I will be willing to spend the money to see it in theaters, but the last truly good movie I've seen was Saw II, and even as good as it is, it was still a sequel. It also, if I am correct, had a comparatively low budge...
Sometimes, if you register at local state university for some summer basket weaving class you might get access to the state-wide library book borrowing system, tons and tons of PDFs of otherwise expensive professional journals, tons of media and other stuff, sometimes you can get free access to athletic facilities (swimming pool, weights, treadmills etc.) -- just an outside gym membership for 3 months might cost you more than the 2 credit our class!
If you are in the Washington, DC area, the Arlington Cinema and Drafthouse (Flash warning) seems somewhat similar to the place you describe, except they usually show more recent films. They do have the "midnight madness" thing though, which can be quite fun.
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
I hope what you mean is "CGI studios get paid millions". I'm a CGI artist at a major studio and I can tell you we (the artists) don't get paid close to "millions". In fact, we barely make a middle class wage for the areas we live. (LA, London, Nor.Cal, etc.) I'm so sick of people misrepresenting our wages. We really don't make all that much money.
Pointless idealism. The 'reponsible capitalist' is an image put forward as an ideal here every day. "Support things you like", posters demand. Waste of time. The entertainment economy is 100% controlled by the masses following the path of least resistance.
the amorality of copyright - you make a product and can make money of it forever after. On and most Hollywood films are crap ;)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I would speculate there is another factor at work here that drives Studios to strive for huge opening numbers, they get a larger percentage of the take, sometimes as much as 100% the first week or two. I think The X-Files movie was the first to introduce the 100% opening take strategy. I remember the theater owners being none too happy about it, some refusing to exhibit The X-Files. When you have to sit through 30 minutes of commercials at the Cinema you can thank the makers of The X-Files movie to some degree, as Theaters are really struggling to make up for the lost ticket revenue on premiers.
Letter To Iran
not to be rude, but i hate this sentiment. american classics have always been trashy and they continue to be to this day...
The key to me is that while 90% of the content made 20 years ago is crap, just as the ratio is today, a large amount of that 90% has faded away into obscurity, leaving me with a better selection. It's been said (by Heinlein I think) that the biggest advantage to classical music is you've had a few hundred years to week out the crap.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
"Last one I saw in a theater was Lord of the Rings trilogy. I find myself buying older films, classics.
Hollywood just doesn't make content for me anymore, so I will gleefully watch its demise."
Hollywood made LOTR, but they don't make good movies anymore?
Vote for Pedro
I used to wonder about where do they take the same old stories over and over until i learned how they actually write scripts. It's a bit like assembly line: you have the first scriptwriter, who sometimes is even outside hollywood (like a writer making his own scrips after his books), and then you have teams rewriting and rewriting the script. They a definitely hollywood profesionals, and never less then two teams/script, each rewriting at least once. So no matter how original the ideea was, the end product is written by the same hundred-odd people every time.
The (Hollywood) movies I tend to like are some of the ones with larger public, and yet, I can say that you are wrong. The problem is not thar Hollywood doesn't want to give public what the public want. The problem is that Hollywood CAN'T give the public what it wants.
That happens because of 2 factors, firts, there is yours "not even the people funding the movies can predict how they're going to turn out". And, second, and most important, the investors really doesn't know what the public want. You just need to look a few years back to see that most huge sucess had little credit before they were launched.
Rethinking email
$25 to watch by 2025. Think of the net profit returns on this concept.
15 million in today's dollars is 200 million in 2025 dollars. So movies will still cost 200 million.
They will probably feel more "indie" though because they will be made by smaller teams and there will be more of them (both teams and movies).
This is sort of funny coming from Lucas, isn't it? He is a major innovator in making a movie's money back. Every little spaceship they designed for the Star Wars movies flies over and over again in games and toys. Theoretically, you could put the spaceship designers in your games and toys company and then you could make a movie with those spaceships for 15 million dollar and it would have a tremendous advantage over another 15 million dollar movie.
The last time I actually went to the movies I wondered if I might not be better off just producing my own...
Say what you want, Mr. Lucas, but when I only have to wait six weeks (or less, very frequently) to catch it on PPV or DVD, the only reason I can think of to spend 2X to 3X to sit (in gum) with my feet glued to the floor behind some guy with a big head (talking on his cell phone) while some kid kicks the back of my seat for 2 hours is for the leathery hotdogs, watered-down Cokes, and too-salty popcorn.
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Part of the problem is that the law of supply and demand also comes into effect in a different way when you have piracy.
With lots of piracy, demand goes way down, that is, demand to buy the product from the owner.
So what happens if at the same time, you see a drop in demand due to the crappiness of the product, and also due to a change in viewing habits? It is empirically nearly impossible to determine what the real cause of the drop in demand is.
This is basically the combination of factors we see now. In order to determine the real effect of piracy, we'd have to keep the other factors constant, and that's impossible.
Another less obvious problem is that the easy availability of the option to pirate alters the consumer's cost-benefit analysis. Before it was easy to pirate movies, people would look at the price, think about the value of having the movie versus not having it, and often decide to get the movie because they'd rather have it than not have it, even if they thought it wasn't quite worth the price.
Now, they often consider the value of having the legitimate movie versus the value of having a pirated version, versus having none and maintaining their sense of personal integrity. The last costs the most. The second costs the least, and the first is probably in the middle somewhere. In this calculus, piracy often wins out, but as I noted at the beginning, the reasons are going to be unclear....
I don't believe ideas are quite as infinite as some would have you believe. At some point, we'll be up against a wall, and the excessive burden of today's copyright terms just might extinguish entertainment as we know it.
Damn right. "Melancholy Elephants", a short story by Spider Robinson, expresses this sentiment. Unfortunately, the wall of accidental similarity may have already appeared in songwriting: see "Three Chords and the Truth" by Peter C. Lemire and someone's probability analysis.
I'm not sure if I understand George correctly, but does he really say that the stupid, pointless, over-hyped bulls**t "King Kong" was a flop because of the movie-pirates?
well if so, that would be another proof that hollywood lives on a different planet...
everyone knows that media-piracy has hit the music and movie industry hard, but how do they react? rise the prices, resulting in? less and less people are willing to pay the prices and start getting the media illegally... where is this supposed to lead? one single consumer paying 200 000 000$ for his cinema ticket?
George Lucas is right, Hollywood will die, but not because of piracy, but because of their consumer-hostile politics
- they almost only produce special-effect-shows without a story (especially george lucas himself)
- prices for cinema tickets have doubled in the last few years
- prices for snacks and drinks at cinemas are ridiculous
- DVDs even without features are much more expensive than VHS cassettes although they are MUCH cheaper in production than VHS cassettes
they should start producing movies with a good story again and sell cinema tickets and DVDs at reasonable prices, this would attract people again, instead of chasing them away more and more...
if they keep their politics, they deserve to die!
just my two cents
King Kong? Who told them it would be a good idea to make King Kong again? Duh, it isn't about the money that is spent on a movie. If all the cheap movies that came out were as good as Star Wreck: In the Pirkining, then I welcome and applaud the demise of the big studios that want to control how we watch everything. Those horrible executives.
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Movies in theaters are indeed gouging in a way, but the costs of showing a movie in a theater have also increased dramatically. Carmike Cinemas has struggled financially for a very long time, believe it or not but owning large buildings in an urban area, licensing the content, and upgrading to the newest AV technologies over and over again is quite expensive. Movie theaters are expensive but it is not a high-profit ripoff scam business, the costs are expensive as well. I hope this will diminish in favor of the home theater and other distrubution methods. The economics here are failing.
So if it's not profitable for them, why do they continue to do it? Even worse, why do they tell people publicly that they should continue to patronize theaters instead of installing home theaters? Seems like they should be happy that home theaters and other distro methods are taking away their business, because then they can do something else more productive.
After all, that's what we're told about outsourcing; if someone else wants to do it cheaper, you should welcome that, because it frees you to do something else.
yes George, maybe when Hollywood runs out of franchises to ruin...
"Her idea of wit is nothing more than an incisive observation humorously phrased and delivered with impeccable timing."
The Prequel Trilogy basically killed the Sci-Fi Blockbuster. He's griping about something he had a hand in bringing to pass. I weep not.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The reason movies like King Kong did not do very well is that they tried yet again to re-use the same story line in yet ANOTHER FREAKIN REMAKE! How many times do they need to make the same movies? People are not going to pay to see the same thing made over and over again. So its not surprising that such remakes have trouble recouping their costs. If they want people to spend money on their movies then make GOOD MOVIES! It's really that simple. And don't be surprised if some movies don't make money. There are no GUARANTEES that every movie will make money. It's that old risk and reward thing, making a movie has risks. The more money that is expected to be made from an endvour the more risk involved. So some big budget movies will flop. Just the way it is.
Indie movies aren't cheap. And don't make much money.
Look at Lion's Gate Saw 2 franchise. Around 4 million to make, another $30 million to market, it's domestic and world wide revenue box office is around 131 million. Net is something south of $65 million. So before DVD sales it made around $35 million or so.
Shrek 2 by the numbers: worldwide revenue of $920 million; or around $460 max net revenue. Compared to $70 million production budget and marketing budget of $50 million. Netting $320 million in box office revenues alone.
Which would you rather have as an exec for your bottom line: Shrek 2 or Saw 2? Which would you rather have as an investor?
SOME indie movies can make money in the horror or exploitation genre. Even something like Brokeback is probably a money-loser (those three months of expensive commercials to campaign for Oscars cost money) once you count the marketing in.
Lucas is wrong because ironically he doesn't get the economics behind the movies. To get a LOT of people to see your movie on screen or buy it on DVD at Best Buy or Wal-Mart requires a mass-market film with expensive stars and special effects and big-time marketing with usually, fast food partners. Hollywood makes most of it's money off of Harry Potter, Star Wars, Spider-Man (look at Sony's revenues when Peter Parker isn't on the screens) and so on.
Yes it's a gamble with big budget films. Bad ones with no clearly defined heroes and villains (Stealth had a MACHINE as the bad guy) or incoherent plots (the Island) will suffer. But one big hit (Potter, Shrek, Incredibles) makes up for that strike-out.
What we will probably see more of is G-rated animated films. Shrek 2 sold 17 million copies; made the studio about $170 million gross revenue.
I'll predict the reverse. Once media companies crack down on studio execs, we will see fewer independent films, not more. Because independent films don't make money except for cheap exploitation stuff (Devils Rejects) and even then it's a pittance to broad, mass market films.
Remember you've to get your film known (hey! It's out! I should see it!) and that costs a floor of $30 million or so.
We don't get to see a 300mil episode 7?! Oh well. I'll do my best to contain my disappointment, but it won't be easy.
I usually wait until the movie goes to the budget theatre....I'm not going to pay 8 bucks for a movie, + 5 bucks for drinks, + 5-6 bucks for popcorn just to see a remake of a stupid tv show or "part 2,3,4" of some other lame movie. HollyWIERD/MPAA/RIAA wants to know why people aren't buying ticktet or CD's...It's REAL simple. People want to be E-N-T-E-R-T-A-I-N-E-D! And the crap that is out there isn't entertaining. You want entertainment, you have to watch TVland reruns of shows that were FUNNY without leud sex/humor and listen to the oldies channel on the radio.
All you need is a good idea
Which the major motion picture studios will likely sue you for allegedly copying.
several computers, a camera, a blue screen
Doesn't the blue screen come free with the several computers? ;-)
Libraries? You guys are all just nerds. Of course, normal people watch movies in theaters. Elsewise is there so much money being spent on movies? Maybe not made, but spent. And you guys talk about libraries as if they were a norm. Not every neighborhood has a nice, well funded library. But I'll tell you this, every neighborhood has a movie theater with at least 10 screens.
My page.
Remains a Hong Kong affair. I prefer films/movies with subtitles, and when I used to buy or rent DVDs like crazy when I had more "discretionary" income, I bought or rented imports. They may not be 100% original, and may have even borrowed (even heavily) right from hollywood, but, you know what? There is a certain *something* felt when watching a decent foreign action or love story. And, when I watch them, I do so in subtitles. I never, almost never ever, watch any portion in the English audio track. The hokey, laughable English is unbearable, more often than not, and besides, I cannot bring myself to watch a foreign FILM of a non-English country in ENGLISH. It's not as if it is a documentary or news clip being translated for educational or news purposes.
I watched all 3 "Infernal Affairs", with Anthony Wong, Andy Lau, and a ton of other Asian stars. Each one had twists and turns that sometimes shocked the hell out of me. I have yet or in QUITE a long time been impressed or wowed by anything from LA. I am sick of the hero always winning, the bad guy dying, the male protagonist winning the girl after red herrings, and tired of anything that kow-tows to the audience expectation. Audiences MUST be SHOCKED in order for anything to feel new and refreshing.
I strongly suspect that if ANY "merkuns" who intend to see IA LA-style first see it Hong Kong original and pay attention to the subtitles and watch them 2 or 3 times will feel cheated if they watch ANY remakes. It's the nature of the beast. Just as bad movies often emerge from decent books, movie remakes of decent or great foreign films tend to emerge. As for Infernal Affairs, there's a whole range of history: mob, cultural, family, national, regional... so much going on that you have to see it at least 3 times to get the true tapestry. If IA is remade LA-style, the theaters won't want to lose the screening time to the running time, but if IA is chopped and butchered just to appeal to click-monkeys and time-pressed members of the potential audience, then why bother remaking it? IA remade needs to be made for home consumption where the audience can pause, discuss, and resume-- something you cannot nor are expected to do in a theater unless the days of the INTERMISSION return as a feature of "moviegoing".
Producing remakes, in my eyes, just signals of flagging ability to *CREATE* new, fresh, or seems-original product.
I feel that in order for films like Infernal Affairs, IA2 and IA3 to be well-received here as a remake, the remake might end up being either 100% remade and passed off as "based on a true story" so it gains credibility, and good reviews, or it would have to be re-dubbed into 100% English and presented in the light or praise that Shaolin Soccer and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon were. I like Replacement Killers, with Chow Yun Fat and Mira Sorvino partly because of the actors and partly because of the cultural exposure on foreigners' associations *back home*, not just "my other in New York, or my cousin in Tempe" references.
What is interesting about some Hong Kong action (and other, non-action) flicks from the past decade and earlier, and in a number of cases even today, is that it is possible to put to screen in about 6 weeks (AND at a mere fraction of what hollywood investors throw at a production) what might take hollywood a YEAR or TWO. I find it grating to see trailers-- outtakes of the BEST of a hollywood movie-- that end with "In theaters Summer 2007" when it is January 2006. To see that many outtakes means it has probably wrapped principal photography, gotten a lot of the botched scenes cut or reshot if the actors have the availability to reshoot, and that the screening might even have been done, but some MORE retakes are being negotiated to wrangle out that last, teentsy-weentsiest bit of recoupable dollar based on critics commentary.
I've seen dozens of imports from Hong Kong, Tokyo, Taiwan, Korea... Some being Tube, JSA: Joint Security Area, Shaolin Soccer, Beast Cops, Zero Woman, Silmido, Shiri, Seoul, Ichi the
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
but the ticket to see it will be $20...
"Just Smile and Nod." --Huck
George Lucas Predicts Death of Big Budget Movies
He single-handedly murdered them himself. It took an ingenious director/animator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gendy_Tartakovsky) to actually bring some life to the post 1980s Star Wars saga, and save it from the horrible mess that Lucas created.
Havoc Video
And when Hollywood does in fact do stories that break a mold, they do it with movies like Brokeback Mountain that they know are going to alienate fans of the genre.
That's why it's called Ground Breaking
Imagine if Schindler's List http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108052/ came out in the 1930's. Or God forbid, The Color Purple http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088939/ came out in the 1950s. Jews! Colored folk? Not in my country! God hates them! The bible says so..... some where... (thumbing through King James)... oh yeah. Leviticus. Where it also says Eating birds of prey, eating shellfish, cross breeding livestock, picking up sticks on a Saturday, planting a mixture of seeds in a field, and wearing clothing that is a blend of two textiles are examples of acts of ritual impurity which made a Child of Isreal unclean. These were not necessarily minor sins, some called for the death penalty. BorkeBack Mountain, and Copote were exceptional movies. Not even for what some would call controversial topics, but the fact that the directors sculpted moving stories and incredible cinemetography. You van try to doubt me, but the Oscars pretty much speak for themselves. God bless Ang Lee
Havoc Video
I attended a premiere screening of "House of the Dead" in San Francisco before it had even gotten a distribution deal in the U.S. There was a guy at the door with a German accent padding everybody down. Unfortunately my friend and I hadn't foreseen this and had arrived at the theater with our pockets fully loaded.
"Vat iss zat, zere? Vat iss zat in your pocket?"
My friend produced a pint bottle of Jim Beam from his back pocket.
"Ah," the German guy said. "No cameras!" he announced. "Booze iss fine." And he waved us past.
In the Q&A session after the screening, we learned that this German guy who had been padding everybody down was the director, Uwe Boll.
(Incidentally, before the Q&A Uwe pointed out a representative from Sega who was in attendance. A Japanese guy stood up and waved to everybody. I noticed that the Japanese guy was sitting next to my friend Keith. Later Keith told me that the Japanese guy had helped him polish off an entire fifth of Seagram's 7 during the screening. All in good fun at Uwe Boll movies.)
Breakfast served all day!
Does the cumulative evidence support Lucas's assertion?
Oh whaa, they didn't make as much on King Kong as they'd like. It's just tragic.
But, King Kong was just one example. Take all the big budget movies and that have been made in the last 10 years, and see how the economics work out. Add up all the Harry Potter, Spiderman, Starwars, Lord of the Rings, Narnia, etc. and give me an average.
Frankly, I don't know how the economics of it would figure. But common sense tells me you can't make a case based on *one* example. Especially since there is tons of data out there.
BTW: the death of the cinema has been wrongly predicted for about 50 years. First with television, then with VCRs, then with HBO, now with home theaters.
Frankly, I feel the only movies worth seeing at the theaters are the big budget types. Capote may be a good movie, but unlike King Kong, it's not the sort of movie I have to see on the big screen. I can wait for Capote on HBO.
My only major problem with cinemas is the advertising.
Here in Germany most people (at least in the cinemas I frequent) stay silent, stay seated, and have their cell phones turned off.
While prices have gone up by quite a bit, I do like to sit in a cinema with a nice girl and watch a good movie (happens even today, every now and then).
But cinemas have begun showing advertising on a major scale. The well-known "[m]" Cinema in Munich shows 45 minutes (yes, fourty-five!) of advertising before the film begins.
Meaning you show up at 20:00, curtain goes up, place goes dark, and you are pumped full of moronc advertising until 20:45 - when the film begins.
Bah. Like heck I'll pay money for that.
So now I sit at home and watch DVDs on my 21" Screen. Not quite as good (no, I'm not buying a TV, ever, and not a beamer while the bulbs still die soon and expensively), but the films starts the instant I want it.
Oh, and yes, I've got a few DVDs with non-interruptible adverts in it (thanks, Disney!). No worries for me, since I rip my DVDs anyway and leave them on the shelf.
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
As Eric Cartman would say, nothing but hippie movies about gay cowboys eating pudding.
You just got troll'd!
I predict the death of George Lucas.