The Business of Hollywood & Streaming

[royiv 9247]

31 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

I don’t blame them for striking but it’s a bit disingenuous to ask for fair wages when the top 1% of the acting labor force must take home 80% of the compensation for all actors. (I don’t know the numbers but the top must make a high %.) 

Yeah, I cringed a little bit when she called out CEO pay when their own union has a huge pay disparity issue. Those in glass houses...

[Nice Guy Eddie 13508]

1 minute ago, royiv said:

Yeah, I cringed a little bit when she called out CEO pay when their own union has a huge pay disparity issue. Those in glass houses...

I believe that the top actors deserve their pay, after all Tom Cruise brings in audience just with his name and his promotions of a film. But a union should be arguing for the rank and file even if that means less money for the top.

but we will see the PR videos of top actors walking the picket lines or buying food and drinks for their fellow actors.

finally it’s interesting to me that the president of the actors union always appears to be a well known actor who has made plenty of bank. Wouldn’t a better rep be someone that none of us have heard of?

[Queen Bitch 1692]

3 hours ago, immamac said:

All this would be solved if streaming went away and the actual consumers of entertainment had a way to you know, pay for that entertainment at a market value established by them instead of some idiots in a studio somewhere who charge 24.99 for a fucking Blu-ray. Why not just charge 6-9 dollars for a downloadable movie that you can opt to have streamed from some centralized place cuz you don't wanna manage the storage/files etc. 

That would fix everything. Pay comes in, pay goes to studios, pay goes to actors, everyone knows how much everyone is consuming or buying. 

Streaming has fucked everything up and it's really weird because it doesn't really actually save anyone any money including the studios. 

*This* is what kills me the most. The execs love to say "The business has changed, the business has changed..."

Well yeah, because you broke it. You stopped properly monetizing your studios' output and library and went all in on vertical integration chasing the solitary Netflix model. It's not our fault y'all forgot how to diversify. That's your literal job as a suit. Leave the world-building, character arcs, and third act story problems to us. Sure, we'll take your notes if they're good. Hell, sometimes they are. In the meantime, remember what made film and television wildly profitable for its first century and maybe keep your focus on that -- cuz if *you* can't wildly profit off it too, that should reflect YOUR compensation, not ours.

And regarding AI -- it's fool's gold. It won't be able to tell good stories. It's regressive and draws from what it already knows. A Barbie AI movie wouldn't appeal to a single fucking adult, but the wildly inventive take (for a Mattel toy) by A FUCKING HUMAN CREATIVE is on the verge of a $100 million opening. So yeah, if we don't stand up and fight *now*, the suits will go all in on AI trying to make it work. Once they inevitably realize they can't rely on AI to tell stories, it'll be years too late. And by then, the business will be permanently, irreparably broken. 

 

 

 

Edited July 13, 2023 by Queen Bitch

[royiv 9247]

1 minute ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

I believe that the top actors deserve their pay, after all Tom Cruise brings in audience just with his name and his promotions of a film. But a union should be arguing for the rank and file even if that means less money for the top.

but we will see the PR videos of top actors walking the picket lines or buying food and drinks for their fellow actors.

finally it’s interesting to me that the president of the actors union always appears to be a well known actor who has made plenty of bank. Wouldn’t a better rep be someone that none of us have heard of?

Don't disagree. The big names are a huge part of what gets people to the theater/stream/whatever and will always be deserving of higher compensation as a result. Having the union president bitch about CEO pay is a distraction from the real issues in play here.

[Neonmoon 38129]

I don’t think AI will replace writer/actors, but I do believe it will become a tool that is used. Like any technology, will it cut down on some jobs, sure, but it won’t replace talent. 

[Queen Bitch 1692]

7 minutes ago, Neonmoon said:

I don’t think AI will replace writer/actors, but I do believe it will become a tool that is used. Like any technology, will it cut down on some jobs, sure, but it won’t replace talent. 

I don't entirely disagree with you, but we as a guild absolutely cannot trust that the studios will act in good faith and do the right thing by us. Hell, they literally ran to the media thirty-six hours ago and said they'd rather us lose our homes than return to the negotiating table before October. We also cannot in any way afford to wait until the next contract expires in three years to address the AI problem. Our position is that, by then, it'll be far too late to start retroactively putting protections in place. 

Edited July 13, 2023 by Queen Bitch

[mdmost 42999]

If it can be replaced by a machine, companies that strictly operate on the desire to increase shareholder value will take full advantage of anything that cuts out salaries and increases the revenue of the company will do exactly that. If a machine can give them a decent idea that can be polished by one person, the studios will go straight to that option and remove human salaries that are a drain. 

Edited July 14, 2023 by mdmost

[Queen Bitch 1692]

18 minutes ago, mdmost said:

If it can be replaced by a machine, companies that strictly operate on the desire to increase shareholder value will take full advantage of anything that cuts out salaries and increases the revenue of the company. If a machine can give them a decent idea that can be polished by one person, the studios will go straight to that option and remove human salaries that are a drain. 

100%

If they had it their way, the studios would go to the computer and say "Computer, whip up ten scripts for the new season of The Night Agent. Here are a couple of loglines we can use in marketing." Then Shawn Ryan, the series' creator would probably receive a weeks' worth of pay (maybe two if his agents really pushed) to polish the scripts and make the characters sound like humans. All while keeping a close eye on how to eventually eliminate him from the process altogether... on the show HE created...

Side note, when David Simon asked if he'd be willing to work under similar conditions in an interview, he said "I'd rather blow my brains out" lol

Edited July 14, 2023 by Queen Bitch

[Longhornsnus 200]

4 hours ago, naija said:

Anyone negotiating for a new deal in any industry would be stupid not to be worried about A.I. Seems to me, we are all going to have to deal with this one way or the other and you are best served setting some ground rules now, no matter how painful it gets to do so.

I typically think Scott Galloway is a chose but thought this was interesting:

Today, entertainment is no less relevant than energy was in the 1980s. But we’re increasingly getting it from somewhere other than a Hollywood writer’s room. The rise of reality TV (birthed by a writers’ strike in 1988) created an entire genre that relies less on writers. Cops, one of the first big reality shows, was conceived as content that could be produced during the strike.

Live sports are more popular than ever — 94 of the top 100 telecasts in 2022 were sporting events. Apple paid $2.5 billion to stream Major League Soccer and is rumored to be readying a bid for the Premier League. There’s more of it to come: MLS, XFL, WNBA, PLL, hockey in Las Vegas. Even within the narrowing genre of scripted TV, there’s the accumulated competition of history: Friends wrapped in 2004, but in 2015 Netflix paid $118 million to infinitely stream all 236 episodes.

The big threat isn’t other TV … it’s other than TV. Social media is, at its core, unscripted entertainment. YouTube has 122 million U.S. users every day, and YouTuber MrBeast has three times more subscribers than Hulu. But the biggest hands around the windpipe of scripted TV belong to TikTok. Short-form video, written and produced by amateurs, floods our lives by the gigabyte, endless in volume and variety — commanding 95 minutes a day of our attention.

The younger the viewer, the more they prefer TikTok to television. Stranded on a desert island with Wi-Fi and only one screen, two-thirds of Gen Z say they’d choose TikTok over the entirety of television and streaming. Put another way, writers shouldn’t be picketing outside studios in Los Angeles, but Bytedance HQ in Beijing. Also, the culprit isn’t some cartoon-villain studio exec, but your nephew who’s never had cable and prefers to spend 45 minutes scrolling TikTok to paying $6.99 a month to watch The Witcher. He’s never heard of Stephen Colbert.

It’s tone-deaf to ask Dad for an increase in your allowance the week after he’s lost his job. Comcast’s gross margin has melted from 27% to 4% in the past five years. Disney’s, from 16% to 4%. Warner Bros. Discovery, once a cash-generating titan, posted $7 billion in losses last year. Paramount lost $511 million last quarter on streaming and is cutting its workforce by 25%. Netflix is the only streamer that’s been able to increase its margin, but subscriber growth has hit a wall — so it’s cutting $300 million in costs. Of its existing viewership, 100 million are using passwords borrowed from friends/siblings/kids.

For Sale: Writer’s Room, Barely Used

Similar to the miners watching the mines close, writers have felt winter coming for years. Adjusted for inflation, the median writer-producer salary has declined 23% in the past decade. Much of this is due to streaming. While a traditional 22-episode broadcast program guarantees writers 30 to 40 weeks of work, the average 10-episode streaming series only guarantees 20. And streamers pay writers little or nothing in “residuals” — payments received when a show goes into reruns and syndication, once a huge source of security in an insecure sector. Studios are also getting craftier about relying on junior writers, reducing the number of writers on a show, and barring writers from working on other shows for longer periods. Ten years ago a third of writers worked at what’s called the “Minimum Basic Agreement,” the minimum amount studios have to pay. Today half do.

In anticipation of the 1984 miner’s strike, Thatcher built up massive coal reserves, key to breaking the strike. The staggering overinvestment in content that streamers engaged in over the past decade hammered profit margins, but also built a reservoir of shows consumers can’t see beyond. I watch a lot of TV, but my Netflix queue will outlast the writer’s strike fund by a decade.

Q: What do late-night TV and downtown office space have in common?

A:  Neither will recover.

Few kids grow up dreaming of being a miner. One sign of how fucked up our nation is? The most cited career American youth aspire to: “influencer,” a creator who runs ads during their content. Entertainment professionals have always had to contend with bus and planeloads of hopeful young people arriving in LA and NYC. Now those millions arrive each day on people’s phones.

The One Where a Robot Takes Your Job

On our Markets podcast this week, Prof G Media analyst Mia Silverio interviewed some of the picketing writers in New York. And they assured her that what they did, the magic of their creativity, was a distinctly human trait, not something AI could replicate. Their union isn’t as confident as they are, though. One of the sticking points in the negotiations has been the use of AI. Specifically, the union wants to bar the studios from using it. While the writers have a valid point asking for a form of residuals from content that informs large language models/generative AI, asking studios to not use AI has the same probability of succeeding as demanding they give up texting and air-conditioning.

As with near-every technological innovation, AI will inspire job losses in the short run and then, over the long term, net job creation. Automation destroyed jobs on the factory floor, but at first we didn’t see the jobs that heated seats and car stereos would create. There will be a plethora of new service providers in the streaming business that leverage AI. In addition, there is usually a “winner takes most” effect. A decent writer gets culled, a great writer earns more. In sum, AI won’t take your job, but someone who understands AI will.

Pro tip: While you’re on strike, let your Netflix queue grow and play with Notion AI.

The writers strike and its outcome will boil down to incentives and leverage. The studios need a pause that cauterizes their unsustainable spending. However, the break would need to be multilateral so no one company grabs share by maintaining those higher levels of investment. Enter the gift to end all gifts, providing the studios a recalibration of the economics of streaming without the risk of losing share. “I just don’t feel a sense of urgency to end this strike,” said every studio head

[Longhornsnus 200]

Here is link: https://www.profgalloway.com/struck/

[HornOnTheBayou 8905]

1 minute ago, Longhornsnus said:

Here is link: https://www.profgalloway.com/struck/

Thanks, Animal-Tobacco. You've finally learned how to post links to the articles you copy.

[YChang 3443]

41 minutes ago, HornOnTheBayou said:

Thanks, Animal-Tobacco. You've finally learned how to post links to the articles you copy.

Oh man… really?! Another user name?

[Queen Bitch 1692]

1 hour ago, Longhornsnus said:

It’s tone-deaf to ask Dad for an increase in your allowance the week after he’s lost his job.

Except our labor made dad his money. We created his assets. This is a terrible analogy.

Edited July 14, 2023 by Queen Bitch

[henrygandorf 29189]

1 hour ago, Longhornsnus said:

“I just don’t feel a sense of urgency to end this strike,” said every studio head

uh huh.  as we've been saying for months, streamers with other sources of income (disney, apple, amazon) will be just fine.  any other studio head is rolling the dice.

[Neonmoon 38129]

11 hours ago, mdmost said:

If it can be replaced by a machine, companies that strictly operate on the desire to increase shareholder value will take full advantage of anything that cuts out salaries and increases the revenue of the company will do exactly that. If a machine can give them a decent idea that can be polished by one person, the studios will go straight to that option and remove human salaries that are a drain. 

I fear this is exactly what will happen eventually 

AI will pump out tons of material. They will have one talented writer to rewrite it and make it unique

It will be the same for many industries to be honest. There will be less jobs. Same with all technological advances.

[Buzzrock 14902]

I fear this is exactly what will happen eventually 
AI will pump out tons of material. They will have one talented writer to rewrite it and make it unique
It will be the same for many industries to be honest. There will be less jobs. Same with all technological advances.

Counterpoint: if this were universally true everyone would be unemployed now with the explosion in technology over the last several decades. US population is up 85% since 1960 and unemployment is lower now. Technology often paves the way for more and better jobs, not fewer.

If AI can be used to create the dreck that we see in network prime time shows and reality TV, that frees up good writers to create better content for myriad distribution outlets that exist today. AI can probably easily crank out a few seasons of Chicago Fire (or Marvel movies for that matter) while good writers continue to create the Successions of the world.

It’s interesting to see the actors get on board. My initial thought watching the writers strike was “Well that’s stupid, now all the tech companies can take over with AI.” But if the writers refuse to work on AI-generated projects that could make it interesting. But there are a lot of starving actors out there. Just this idiot’s opinion of course.

But hey!

[Don Johnson 4752]

16 hours ago, Captain Ron said:

 

65 years old but would.

[Buzzrock 14902]

I don’t blame them for striking but it’s a bit disingenuous to ask for fair wages when the top 1% of the acting labor force must take home 80% of the compensation for all actors. (I don’t know the numbers but the top must make a high %.) 

According to this study only 2% make a living.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10213-0

[Celery Man 20931]

42 minutes ago, Buzzrock said:

According to this study only 2% make a living.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10213-0

I'm a member of ASCAP and get checks in the mail once a quarter or so, they amount to about $20 a year. Knowing basically nothing, I would guess that SAG is different (people who acted a little bit and have moved on with their lives wouldn't still be members unless they kept up with dues, I would think) but also similar in that if you want to understand what part of their union are working but not rich, it's more complicated than "everyone but the top earners". Looks like $3k to join and then ~$250 in annual fees, probably a lot of aspirational members, lots of people who joined for a gig and then continue to keep up with the annual fees but aren't truly still chasing the career?

got curious so I read that article a bit - the 2% figure seems to be a fuzzy figure based on a few surveys of actors - I don't doubt that it is in the ballpark of correct but I also don't think that an "actor" in that figure means a SAG member. I just texted my buddy (not a real actor) who joined SAG for a part in a movie 15 years ago and he's apparently an "inactive member", which means they process residuals but he doesn't pay dues.

I'm not drawing any conclusions about any arguments anybody is making here, just an interesting union dynamic.

Edited July 14, 2023 by Celery Man

[Texas St. Armadillos 1381]

14 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

I believe that the top actors deserve their pay, after all Tom Cruise brings in audience just with his name and his promotions of a film. But a union should be arguing for the rank and file even if that means less money for the top.

but we will see the PR videos of top actors walking the picket lines or buying food and drinks for their fellow actors.

finally it’s interesting to me that the president of the actors union always appears to be a well known actor who has made plenty of bank. Wouldn’t a better rep be someone that none of us have heard of?

There have only been 3 SAG presidents.  They are far from being headliners.  Fran is by far the most well known.

[Gene Parmesan 4002]

5 minutes ago, Texas St. Armadillos said:

There have only been 3 SAG presidents.  They are far from being headliners.  Fran is by far the most well known.

Ronald Reagan...Charlton Heston

[YChang 3443]

2 minutes ago, Gene Parmesan said:

Ronald Reagan...Charlton Heston

2 bums and a nanny!

[Texas St. Armadillos 1381]

3 minutes ago, Gene Parmesan said:

Ronald Reagan...Charlton Heston

My bad.  I should have said SAG-AFTRA.  Ed Truck from The Office was the first one!

[Captain Ron 12866]

1 hour ago, Texas St. Armadillos said:

My bad.  I should have said SAG-AFTRA.  Ed Truck from The Office was the first one!

DUDE. How dare you insult the White Shadow.

 

[henrygandorf 29189]

4 hours ago, Neonmoon said:

It will be the same for many industries to be honest. There will be less jobs. Same with all technological advances.

[UT_OB1 2217]

4 hours ago, Neonmoon said:

It will be the same for many industries to be honest. There will be less jobs. Same with all technological advances.

Nah. Just like other industries, it will create new, different jobs. You’ll need people trained to work on the code. People who are “experts” inputting prompts to get good content. People to ride bikes to power the new AI overlords. People to fight and die in the pits for the amusement of the overlords. 
 

There will be plenty of work. 

[Texas St. Armadillos 1381]

7 minutes ago, UT_OB1 said:

Nah. Just like other industries, it will create new, different jobs. You’ll need people trained to work on the code. People who are “experts” inputting prompts to get good content. People to ride bikes to power the new AI overlords. People to fight and die in the pits for the amusement of the overlords. 
 

There will be plenty of work. 

Excellent Black Mirror reference.

[Neonmoon 38129]

15 minutes ago, UT_OB1 said:

Nah. Just like other industries, it will create new, different jobs. You’ll need people trained to work on the code. People who are “experts” inputting prompts to get good content. People to ride bikes to power the new AI overlords. People to fight and die in the pits for the amusement of the overlords. 
 

There will be plenty of work. 

True. I meant fewer jobs for writers/actors as they are employed now. They will more more jobs, just the responsibilities and skills will be completely different. 

The internet changed the news industry forever. There are still writing jobs, just the role is different. You are contracted through an agency where you write 200 words per week for different online platforms and shit like that. You’re no longer a staff writer for the Globe 

 

[NotActuallyALonghorn 4975]

I think we are entering an unprecedented era in which technological progress is so much faster than anything we've adapted to in the past. It's going to be painful in the short term, but we will eventually figure out how to deal with it.

[Longhornsnus 200]

13 minutes ago, Neonmoon said:

True. I meant fewer jobs for writers/actors as they are employed now. They will more more jobs, just the responsibilities and skills will be completely different. 

The internet changed the news industry forever. There are still writing jobs, just the role is different. You are contracted through an agency where you write 200 words per week for different online platforms and shit like that. You’re no longer a staff writer for the Globe 

 

I think this is what the writers/creatives are decrying about the advent of advanced technology and all industries being scathed. But the sooner you can predict and foresee the new way and what is coming, the better you can pivot and position yourself to suceed.

The old ways are dead (or dying) and I do think it is wise to fight tooth and nail because I do agree that this next contract sets the tone and will set the benchmarks for how to succeed as a Hollywood Creative 2.0 (or 3.0?)

All the writers/creatives who resist and just live in the past and bemoan how there used to be 30 episode seasons to work on and full writer rooms at full pay or whatever the past was, I think they will just be jaded and bitter as everyone else who is flexible adapts to the new way. Then they will say, I'm still a big writer, it was the AI-led industry that got small!

[Longhornsnus 200]

Just read this in NYT today and it seems to mirror exactly what @henrygandorfbeen saying. Are you a genius?

Quote

 

In some ways, the strike could actually benefit studios and streaming platforms. The lack of new shows and movies may allow them to back out of expensive production deals they signed during the content boom.

But the longer the strikes go on, the more audiences may grow restless with a lack of fresh scripted content. (Fall TV schedules are packed with reality and game shows.) Streaming giants with vast libraries might be OK, but lesser-stocked services may face a deluge of cancellations, and studios that sell to other platforms could be in increasingly dire straits.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/14/business/dealbook/hollywood-actors-strike-costs.html

[henrygandorf 29189]

20 minutes ago, Longhornsnus said:

Are you a genius?

[henrygandorf 29189]

😳

[Underdog 28546]

Gym dodged a bullet not having to fight that guy.  /nocr

John Cusack had a good Twitter thread on some bookkeeping shenanigans of studio finances. 

[billfromlaketravis 11447]

Finally not a shitty movie year and… WGA and SAG go on strike. I fully expect at least 2 years of mediocrity after this. 

[henrygandorf 29189]

1 hour ago, Underdog said:

John Cusack had a good Twitter thread on some bookkeeping shenanigans of studio finances. 

yeah, turns out you can ditch produced material, never release it, fuck over the people who worked on it, and then claim hundreds of millions in impairment charges to avoid paying taxes, before you cry poverty to the media.

(cusack covered a lot of ground on twitter today, this was just part of it)

[CooterBrown 18003]

All this would be solved if streaming went away and the actual consumers of entertainment had a way to you know, pay for that entertainment at a market value established by them instead of some idiots in a studio somewhere who charge 24.99 for a fucking Blu-ray. Why not just charge 6-9 dollars for a downloadable movie that you can opt to have streamed from some centralized place cuz you don't wanna manage the storage/files etc. 
That would fix everything. Pay comes in, pay goes to studios, pay goes to actors, everyone knows how much everyone is consuming or buying. 
Streaming has fucked everything up and it's really weird because it doesn't really actually save anyone any money including the studios. 

Prior to D+, we bought Disney movies on Amazon VOD for the kids to watch and download for plane rides. I totally forgot about that until now.

[Smax 3800]

25 minutes ago, billfromlaketravis said:

Finally not a shitty movie year and… WGA and SAG go on strike. I fully expect at least 2 years of mediocrity after this. 

what good movies have come out this year because the ones I have seen have been pretty mehhh.

I've tried to shy away from commenting on this thread as I haven't followed too closely all the details, I get the gist I guess. I feel for the ones who are really hurting financially but then I start thinking that most of the products that Hollywood has put over the past 10-15 years has been shit IMO. Reboots in film and the small screen screams lack of creativity to me, the super hero genre has run its course but Hollywood will milk the ever living shit out of it. We've read on this forum every year that it seems like Hollywood is out of ideas, just look at the 99 thread nothing mentioned since '08 that's 15 years.  I'm sure the viewing public has a lot to do with it but maybe we've just accepted mediocrity from hollywood.

[CooterBrown 18003]

Does the strike affect British production? Obviously many actors would be SAG members but is the strike only against US studios?

[henrygandorf 29189]

4 minutes ago, Smax said:

what good movies have come out this year because the ones I have seen have been pretty mehhh.

I've tried to shy away from commenting on this thread as I haven't followed too closely all the details, I get the gist I guess. I feel for the ones who are really hurting financially but then I start thinking that most of the products that Hollywood has put over the past 10-15 years has been shit IMO. Reboots in film and the small screen screams lack of creativity to me, the super hero genre has run its course but Hollywood will milk the ever living shit out of it. We've read on this forum every year that it seems like Hollywood is out of ideas, just look at the 99 thread nothing mentioned since '08 that's 15 years.  I'm sure the viewing public has a lot to do with it but maybe we've just accepted mediocrity from hollywood.

this strike is way more about television production than film production, and the bolded is a shitty take.

[billfromlaketravis 11447]

10 minutes ago, Smax said:

what good movies have come out this year because the ones I have seen have been pretty mehhh.

I've tried to shy away from commenting on this thread as I haven't followed too closely all the details, I get the gist I guess. I feel for the ones who are really hurting financially but then I start thinking that most of the products that Hollywood has put over the past 10-15 years has been shit IMO. Reboots in film and the small screen screams lack of creativity to me, the super hero genre has run its course but Hollywood will milk the ever living shit out of it. We've read on this forum every year that it seems like Hollywood is out of ideas, just look at the 99 thread nothing mentioned since '08 that's 15 years.  I'm sure the viewing public has a lot to do with it but maybe we've just accepted mediocrity from hollywood.

Asteroid City, No Hard Feelings, and MI7.
 

Promising reviews: 

Barbie

Oppenheimer 

Flowers of the Summer Moon

Dune 2 

 

[Neonmoon 38129]

23 minutes ago, CooterBrown said:

Does the strike affect British production? Obviously many actors would be SAG members but is the strike only against US studios?

Different union (Equity) in UK. They are still working and cannot strike in solidarity. 

Edited July 15, 2023 by Neonmoon

[mdmost 42999]

43 minutes ago, Smax said:

what good movies have come out this year because the ones I have seen have been pretty mehhh.

I've tried to shy away from commenting on this thread as I haven't followed too closely all the details, I get the gist I guess. I feel for the ones who are really hurting financially but then I start thinking that most of the products that Hollywood has put over the past 10-15 years has been shit IMO. Reboots in film and the small screen screams lack of creativity to me, the super hero genre has run its course but Hollywood will milk the ever living shit out of it. We've read on this forum every year that it seems like Hollywood is out of ideas, just look at the 99 thread nothing mentioned since '08 that's 15 years.  I'm sure the viewing public has a lot to do with it but maybe we've just accepted mediocrity from hollywood.

Hollywood makes what we support. I think a lot of the creative elements are now more focused on television and streaming because you can actually get it made through those outlets. Go back and look at the top 10 highest grossing movies of the last 10 years, you will not find anything original outside of animated movies. The rest are all reboots, superhero movies, and sequels. I think as far as live action, it was American Sniper and The Martian, both based on books/real life stories, so not wholly original. I'm glad there's options like Apple+ now that will make and support quality programming. 

Edited July 15, 2023 by mdmost

[Michael Knight 12976]

7 hours ago, NotActuallyALonghorn said:

I think we are entering an unprecedented era in which technological progress is so much faster than anything we've adapted to in the past. It's going to be painful in the short term, but we will eventually figure out how to deal with it.

We're entering an era where capitalism is in it's death throes. But it's gonna be painful. When 90% of all work can be done by robots why do people need to work what's the point of money, or like 30 people will have all the wealth and everyone else can eat shit

Edited July 15, 2023 by Michael Knight

[MrBig 5375]

The studios have caught up to the streamers in their ability to distribute the content they create. They were unable to do this for over 70 years while streamers were exempt from this rule. 

Now that the studios and streamers are on the same playing field, it seems like they all want to own and control production in-house instead of licensing out content from smaller independent producers. 

The studios and streamers can get by on their existing library of content because they still have revenue from subscribers. They will starve out the unions to get what they want. They’ll keep adding docuseries about athletes and fat people and pimple popping and housewives and all that shit to hold people over in the meantime. 

[Underdog 28546]

1 hour ago, henrygandorf said:

yeah, turns out you can ditch produced material, never release it, fuck over the people who worked on it, and then claim hundreds of millions in impairment charges to avoid paying taxes, before you cry poverty to the media.

(cusack covered a lot of ground on twitter today, this was just part of it)

More like cooked books from my understanding, from one of his threads... 

He had another regarding his sister Joan and her part in Shameless, which I never watched, and some of the bs she dealt with. 

[Queen Bitch 1692]

Sorry for these very long screeds, but walking in slow picket-line circles in the sweltering sun these past few months -- and everything changing for the better with SAG jumping in -- and well, I've got a lot on my mind about the state of things and nowhere to really put it. 

I keep hoping we're nearing the end of this era of Hollywood, similar to when 1960s Hollywood collapsed under the weight of a bunch of big-budget musicals and old-fashioned spectacles, all of which bombed at the box office one after the other. Tastes had changed, the younger audiences didn't give a single fuck about Paint Your Wagon, and Hollywood couldn't quite figure out what they wanted. (In today's equation, I'm thinking the zillionth superhero retread and tired franchises with very little gas left in their respective tanks. This summer's dismal box office under-performance supports how dire this problem is today.)

So... what happened next? The dawn of New Hollywood. The Godfather, Chinatown, The Conversation, Cabaret, The Exorcist, Robert Altman. The 1970s remain the undisputed artistic era for cinema. 

How exactly could another New Hollywood happen today? Well, it probably involves these bratty corporate titans dismantling the studios and selling them for parts. That sounds dramatic, but Zas is kind of already doing that with WB and it's an open secret that Paramount doesn't have that many years left as a studio. Or maybe it involves Wall Street massively downgrading media stocks for terrible box office receipts and a lack of streaming profits. Or maybe, just maybe, it involves the writers and actors demanding radical change (it's sad that 'radical change' here means "don't replace us with machines and also let us be able to afford to live in the city where we work", but hey, that's just late stage capitalism.)

We write cool shit in Hollywood, I promise -- but we're not the ones with greenlight power. This era of Hollywood is so deeply risk averse and IP obsessed, and I for one would love to see it collapse. Another New Hollywood -- let's fuckin go.

(We don't have nice things anymore, so this won't happen, but hey, it's fun to dream.)

[NotActuallyALonghorn 4975]

2 hours ago, Queen Bitch said:

So... what happened next? The dawn of New Hollywood. The Godfather, Chinatown, The Conversation, Cabaret, The Exorcist, Robert Altman. The 1970s remain the undisputed artistic era for cinema. 

Um, excuse me, but Roadhouse and Red Dawn were both made in the 80's. Point Break came shortly after. And let's not forget about Predator, Rambo, Die Hard, or even those forgotten treasures like The Outsiders. 

[Underdog 28546]

The fuck was wrong with Paint Your Wagon? 

[Gene Parmesan 4002]

1 hour ago, Underdog said:

The fuck was wrong with Paint Your Wagon? 

It insists upon itself