Why Have Movies Been So Bad Lately?

mikesd81 asks: "Why have movies and shows been so bad lately? I find myself looking on my Video on Demand service from my cable company or flipping channels and just nothing seems to have any depth any more. But on the other hand, I happened to watch Stargate Atlantis and there was an incredible scene that just caught the emotion and emergency. So is it the directing? The writing? The acting? It seems more and more movies just aren't worth anything. Let alone paying $20 to go to a movie." Let's not forget the recent number of Hollywood remakes and the amount of "reality TV" being pumped out by the networks.

Comments

Here's my take on it...

[wtansill]

Passion does not scale well. The greatest restaurants are all one-offs where the staff is passionate about serving good food and giving the customer a quality experience. Programs that we love to use (Linux, say) are put together by people who are passionate about what they do to the point of evangelism. Art house movies are made by people who are passionate about using cinematic techniques to tell stories that are compelling both visually and in terms of their plotlines. But passion takes time, is monetarilly intensive, and, let's face it, is a crapshoot; there are many folks who are passionate about their beer can collections or what have you (I knew a woman who was fascinated by bricks or all things), but they aren't ever going to make money from it.

Enter the financial folks. They are absolutely necessary any time a business moves beyond being an expensive hobby, but they will strive for efficieny. Efficiency is best gained by homogenizing operations, but that also weeds out the things that tended to make the enterprise truly great in the first place. On top of that, some things (movies in this case) are enormously expensive to make (someone has to pay Industrial Light and Magic for all those special effects), and once the expense goes up, the natural tendency is to minimize risk. But again, minimizing risk keeps you from taking that fresh view and going out on a limb.

Sometimes this isn't really all that bad. If I swing by the supermarket to pick up a gallon of milk I want commodity pricing, and the bean counters excell at building the sort of enterprise that can deliver those commodity prices. You want really good creative stuff? Stay far away from the big guys and shell out extra for the starving artists who live for this sort of thing.