Joss Whedon Releases New Film On Demand
Rambo Tribble (1273454) writes "Popular director Joss Whedon has taken the film world by surprise by releasing his latest offering, 'In Your Eyes', available for download on the same day it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. The new release comes from Whedon's own "micro studio", Bellwether Pictures, and is featured on Vimeo as a $5 rental, (free trailer). Whedon mused, 'It's exciting for us because we get to explore yet another new form of distribution — and we get $5.' Mr. Whedon has a history of pushing the delivery envelope, as with Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, in 2008."
Joss Whedon is just such a fun filmmaker, even if he wasn't the director for this particular movie. Look at Buffy, The Avengers, even Cabin in the Woods, which was a thoroughly enjoyable re-imagining of the tired horror flick. And this one just so happens to be partially filmed in my town; I haven't seen the movie yet, but if you see a gas station with tanks right out of the 50's, that ain't no prop, it's for-real. (Though they stopped pumping gas five or six years ago due to the storage tank needing to be fixed up.) Really excited for this one.
Can anyone comment about the quality of this film? Is this Cinema quality? Direct-to-Video? SciFi channel? YouTube?
While watching SHIELD the other week, they transitioned seamlessly to a Captain America commercial -- and I wondered if I was still watching SHIELD until 5 seconds later, a actual car crash stunt happened, and I knew the budget for the 30-second commercial was higher than the entire episode of SHIELD that I had been watching.
I'll gladly pay $5 to watch a new movie in this "new model" of distribution.
But will *everybody* have an quick wit and annoying snappy comebacks?
Louis CK did pretty good with his pay what you want experiment and his own production. If could get a download that plays on any video player tha say day or even month after it came out of the movies I'd be all over it. The last time I went to the movies was to see The Road after spending nearly $50 between me and my son on tickets and popcorn I said fuck it this is enough and haven't been back. At $5 per movie Id' be buying prrtty much any good movies that comes out. Hell even for the price of the ticket $10+ tax each person I'd could buy 4 movies and enjoy them at home.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
There is no difference between a micro studio and a Giganto Studio. I have the exact same tools in my spare bedroom "micro studio" that they have at MGM. and if I really wanted to shoot with a $190,000 arriflex I can rent it, just like they do.
This is the wonderful thing. a single person with a spare bedroom is equal footing competition to a $100,000,000,000 studio.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Yeah, Firefly was pretty good. But his other work is mediocre at best. And he also has this weird fetish for 100-lb. waifs beating up hordes of 250-lb. guys that drives me crazy. I always suspected that Firefly was more Tim Minear's series than Whedon's (100-lb. ass-kicking waif aside).
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I hate it. Not in a hipster "I hate it because everyone else likes it" kind of way. I just hate it. It's awful.
If his film is released at Tribeca you can assume its only good in the eyes of people in the industry that love to slobber all over each other about how awesome they are even though its complete crap.
Its been released the same day because all 6 people that are going to watch it already have so he's praying his name will get some sales outside of that because of his history.
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Is he related to Wil Wheaton?
The movie was worth the five bucks to watch it on Vimeo, but their Flash-based player (no quick way to switch to an HTML5 version) resulted in such a choppy playback that the constant pauses and buffer attempts added another half hour to the whole thing.
Since it's a 95 minute movie we're talking about a quarter of the time being spent on just waiting for the fucking site to do its job again.
Before anyone asks: The 100MBit connection has never been a problem before and the necessary software was up to date as well.
Hope you'll have more luck. Except for the predictable end it's quite a nice movie.
Subject pretty much sums it up.
The *EQUIPMENT* has come huge lengths. You do, however, lack the writers, acting talent, stage hands, etc., etc., etc. If you give me eggs and cheese, I give you cheesy eggs. A French chef gives you a souffle. Having the ingredients is only the first step.
....dr. horrible's sing-along was fucking terrible mind-numbing garbage. I do not want more work like that.
I do not like renting, I prefer to own.
Just put it up on AppleTV so it conveniently becomes part of my iTunes lib.
Also I don't have patience for sloppy flash based players.
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
way to watch my favorite character die.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This. Louis CK did this the right way. Pay $5 and get sent a link to a clean video file that you can download up to five times and watch on any device that supports it (or transcode to any other format you want). I'd like to watch this movie, but the old xbmc box connected to my TV probably won't do a good job playing back an HD Vimeo stream (as some others have already reported).
sanc7ions, and
Coulson's wife.
The summary mentions a download, but only fleetingly, and then it just talks about vimeo (a proprietary streaming service, last time I visited them). And if I follow the link to vimeo, indeed: all I see is vimeo offering some kind of rental streaming thing.
Do you realize this is the difference between night and day, between steak and shit? Between something that maybe works but you won't know for sure until after you've paid your money, and something that is normal like our other experiences, that people can be pretty confident about?
Louie C.K. has led the way, but you have to understand that a pro-revenue approach is still really rare, and while I trust him now, I don't have any faint idea about whether or not Whedon is actually trying to run a serious business yet. Most Hollywooders are still (indirectly, through DRM) advocating piracy, last I saw. (And I sure as hell, haven't heard of Firefly or Buffy files being for sale yet.)
Announcements like this need to be very explicit about the type of file they're selling. I wanna see words like "Matroska" or "MP4" and probably the codec mentioned too (not that the codec matters a whole lot to me, but if the seller doesn't know the codec, then I know they aren't for real). Not luddite bullshit like "stream" or "flash" or ".Net and we haven't tested it with Mono yet" or other nonsense like that. That vimeo was mentioned, they ought to know is a big red flag telling people to keep their money in their wallets, and if they're actually selling then they need to make sure people know it.
How hard is it, for someone on staff to just think for 30 seconds about what things look like, from a prospective customer's point of view?
As far as I can tell, and I even took some time to click around a little bit (though maybe I missed something) this download announcement is somewhere in that dark gray spectrum of "someone doesn't know what they're talking about" to "joke" to "fraud." I'll try to attribute this to stupidity, but whenever we're talking about Hollywood, historical "post-judice" urges everyone to assume the worst: that they are attempting theft through dishonesty, and $5 gets you nearly nothing.
Whedon, fire someone over this, at a minimum. Your NAME is one this. Do you think Louie C. K. wouldn't fire someone over a disaster like this? Names are important, especially right now.
Dear Mr. Whedon,
Please justify the $5 cost to rent your film. I can rent your latest superhero blockbuster over the weekend for $2 from Redbox. I can own Louis CK's latest show forever for $5. Why is your content so much more expensive?
Thanks,
a fan
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
As of right now (12:23pm PST, 4/21/2014) the parent post is showing +2.... Flamebait.
I've been here a while but never seen a negative word attached to a positive score (it's always been +3 Informative, or +4 Insightful, or +2 Funny, or whatever). I don't think that my personal 'score adjusters' would give anything enough points to boost a -1 or 0 up to a +2.
I'm assuming it got mod'd up with a couple different modifiers (one insightful, one interesting, etc), then mod'd down with only Flamebait (and so Flamebait is the most common modifier), but I'm curious (1) if anyone else is seeing this and (2) does anyone have a better explanation about the score/modifier?
The entire "freemium" video game revenue model is predicated on the fact that so-called "whales" would pay $5 to download a car.
This is false advertisement. You cannot purchase this as there is no place to download this ...
Like, say, what kind of movie it is. I had to google to find out anything about the movie itself, rather than just its distribution strategy - apparently it's a "supernatural romance" about two people, not currently in a relationship with each other, who realize that they can communicate psychically with each other over any distance.
That, coupled with the Whedon name, does seem interesting enough to give it a shot. It is pretty lame of him to only release it via a streaming-only site, but you know what? I'm sure there'll be a way around that. I have no problem tossing him 5 bucks anyway, and then immediately turning around and figuring out a way to get the results onto my hard drive one way or another. I can't imagine Whedon would mind, either; he's a pretty cool guy. :p
Wheddon is an over-rated, talentless hack. Nothing he does really succeeds because of this simple fact. With the single exception of Cabin in the Woods, the bulk of his output is unwatchable, unenjoyable dreck. I suspect, for this reason, that Cabin in the Woods was an idea stolen from someone else.
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Also, the thinking is probably along the line of theaters which charge at least $5 to see something immediately instead of waiting for rental. This is competing with theaters not with rentals -- and he must go up against the stigma of direct to rental movies (which are usually crap.)
Movies make their money back BEFORE getting to rental. They spend about 1/3 marketing the things so that they make it back with the theaters or if it's a failure, they can make it back during rentals. Not all, but it seems like most do.
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torrented it, loved it.
tempted to pay $5USD (im from new zealand) after the fast.
BUT BECAUSE ITS MY ONLY OPTION, he gets nothing.
i might have given more. id probably just flick him a few dollars and it wasnt even his bandwidth.
pay what you want torrents are the future. LIVE THE DREAM.