The businessmen broke Hollywood

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/hollywoods-cruel-strategy/674730/

by fortran77 • 3 years ago

175 387 3 years ago

The quality of their product has ceased to matter.

If people will still pay, you would of course cut quality to increase margins. Walmart figured out that quality was a secondary concern to the customer, who is quite happy to buy a lawnmower that starts twice for $90 over one that lasts years for $180.

Spooky233• 3 years ago

Bad example. That $90 mower works as well as a $600 Honda, it just has fewer fancy features.

Walmart is the master of the commodity. It’s dumb not to buy many things there. Whole Foods will sell you a gallon of vinegar for $7, Walmart will same the same product probably made at the same place for $2.50.

jsiepkes2• 3 years ago

Can you buy a spare part for your $90 mower if it breaks?

GauntletWizard3• 3 years ago

There's a ton of both. And there's a consumer problem where it's slow and painful and most importantly - expensive in the most valuable commodity, time, to do the research on products.

America is built on the assumption that people have agency to make choices. We have been robbed of that time and agency by the deluge of things competing for our attention, but also by the amount of things that we need to think about. There should be economies of scale - it shouldn't matter which toothpaste you buy, because journalism should keep them honest, but it doesn't because there's too many options for that and they're all corrupt.

parker_mountain• 3 years ago

They're not happy about it. I think a lot of people make that decision under a form of (personal financial) duress. Or put better than I could, by the master of pithy observations:

    The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

dooraven6• 3 years ago

it's just wrong though, the reason why people are rich is that they have more income streams by producing more valuable things, not consuming less.

It's a nice idiom to have when you use labour to trade for income and your income doesn't increase by your efforts but the reason why people are rich is more based on their production than their consumption.

The analogy makes sense for middle class folk though, but a rich person will stay rich regardless of what they buy as long as their production output is stil desirable.

GauntletWizard3• 3 years ago

I don't think it's even that. Everyone has been burned by companies that charge for quality and provide less service than the cheapest option. See fast fashion. See Amazon scam reviews. My parents just had a window break- a skylight spontaneously shattered and got glass all over their kitchen. The warranty, a 20 year affair, had specific provisions for "spontaneous shattering" that covered the only way windows fail- and specially disclaimed the important selling point of safety glass, that it doesn't shatter into pieces that get everywhere - safety glass is supposed to stay in one piece, even when it spontaneously shatters. A crumply singular piece is far safer than being showered with shards of glass. Thank goodness nobody was home.

Fraud is the fastest growing sector in America, and until there are daily executions for fraud, we will not be getting better.

fragmede3• 3 years ago

But what is the cost of happiness to the corporation? If you buy the $90 mower for which Walmart takes a cut of, and are unhappy about it, vs being happy about buying a $180 mower, if Walmart is making more money on the $90 mower, your happiness is irrelevant to the corporation. We see corporations where that's what makes their whole business model work. Spirit Airlines, Comcast, AT&T.

There, I said it. If Spirit Airlines didn't take advantage of people putting up with being miserable, they would not be viable as a business.

watwut13• 3 years ago

That was meant to be funny thought process of a simple man (Vimes). That was not supposed to be everything explaining economical analyses.

In those book, Vimes is practical simple man with little time for big picture side of things. He deals with what is immediately around him and never really cares about root causes or anything like that.

achow• 3 years ago

https://archive.is/I55sb

totetsu• 3 years ago

Wow I just noticed that archive.is automatically appends selected text reigons to the link in the address bar. neat https://archive.is/I55sb#selection-887.146-887.383

vector_spaces• 3 years ago

It's such a great service. Can't really believe it's just one person maintaining it essentially as a public service given that it's quite expensive to run (based on a post I read in the last year or two).

Basically all my techie and non-techie friends use it -- hoping that he finds a way to make it sustainable so that it sticks around! It's a much nicer experience than waybackmachine imo, at least for my use cases

satvikpendem9• 3 years ago

The quality of their product has ceased to matter.

Most people don't go to the theater (or even stream) to watch "quality," they go for entertainment. Artsy films might have a lot of artistic quality (like The Green Knight, for example) but most people don't care, they'll watch the latest blockbuster, which is where studios make the most money. For the people who do watch artsy films, understand that the blockbusters make the bulk of the revenue to even greenlight artsy films; without the mass market films, there wouldn't even be any artsy films (of a sizable budget like 10 to 50 million dollars, not true indie or art house films).

Interestingly, it would be ironic if, were these strikes to go on for a longer time, studios would simply think to invest more into AI which doesn't have the sorts of problems mere humans might, hastening the demise of writers and actors. This must be why it was reported that negotiations broke down as soon as AI was thrown in there, they definitely want to bet on that as the future and I'm not sure what leverage actors and writers have, honestly. It seems like whichever way the strike goes, studios won't budge on that issue.

Edit: removed art house label as it was inaccurate.

OO000oo17• 3 years ago

Most people don't go to the theater (or even stream) to watch "quality," they go for entertainment.

A tell-tale sign of a decadent society where people are depressed and unfulfilled, more interested in escape from life than engagement with life because everything they might live for is compromised in the name of profit at the expense of everything else.

I don't know what point you think you're making, but it's not helpful and there is nothing about this that anybody should be proud of.

dooraven6• 3 years ago

A tell-tale sign of a decadent society where people are depressed and unfulfilled, more interested in escape from life than engagement with life because everything they might live for is compromised for profit at the expense of everything else.

Not really, where exactly am I going to get dragons in real life?

satvikpendem9• 3 years ago

Panem et circenses has been around a long time, it's not a new concept that you're implying. People like entertainment, which is sometimes but not always a proxy for quality. We can deny that at our peril or accept that that's what the majority of people like and cater to them. That's what studios do now, whether we artsy media watchers like it or not.

afavour3• 3 years ago

they definitely want to bet on that as the future and I'm not sure what leverage actors and writers have, honestly

The fact that AI is by definition just going to create recycled, derivative content. If the industry replaces writers and actors with AI it’ll be their demise because audiences will get very, very bored very quickly.

satvikpendem9• 3 years ago

How is it "by definition?" Just because it trains on known data doesn't mean it does not mix and match ideas in novel ways. Even AlphaGo a few years ago played a completely novel move in the game that was never seen or even considered by master Go players, so I'm not too worried about AI's "creativity."

I'm also not necessarily talking about AI creating the entire movie from scratch, it's a useful tool to help guide decisions. Personally I'm more looking forward to seeing indie filmmakers making something on par with a Marvel film in terms of CGI, without having to hire actors, rent studio space and time, etc, because the product at the end of the day is all pixels, data that can be generated line by line by a computer if only it knows what color to make each pixel. It sounds far-fetched today but in due time, everyone will have that power.

falsaberN1• 3 years ago

Have you ever seen "Unlimited Hams"? It's an AI recreation of the famous steamed hams scene from The Simpsons.

It's the most entertaining nonsense I have ever had the delight of witnessing, despite being extremely repetitive. And at times I learn about pretty exotic foods as a bonus.

The original version was banned due to a cooking mishap, but there's a successor of sorts and it's more or less the same thing.

AlbertCory2• 3 years ago

This is wrong in so many ways.

the blockbusters make the bulk of the revenue to even greenlight art house films; without the mass market films, there wouldn't even be any art house films (of a sizable budget like 10 to 50 million dollars, not indie films).

Your assumption seems to be that big studios somehow use the profits of blockbusters to subsidize arthouse films. That would be wonderful if true.

It's false, though. Art films are financed from different suppliers of funds, and they even play in different theaters.

there wouldn't even be any art house films (of a sizable budget like 10 to 50 million dollars, not indie films).

I don't know what this means. Before you were talking about arthouse films but now it's low-budget studio films??? What are you saying?

satvikpendem9• 3 years ago

My mistake, I shouldn't have said art house, you're right that I'm talking about low budget studio films that are more serious in tone or have something unique about them and aren't just another action film. I don't mean indie art house films literally.

nostromo• 3 years ago

There is plenty of blame to go around. The writing for new shows is predicable and boring. Actors are featureless blobs that all look the same. Movies and shows seem to be eye-rollingly preachy and talk down to audiences. The whole industry is due for a sharp correction.

lockhouse• 3 years ago

Don’t forget the terrible sound mixing where the dialogue is inaudible while the sound effects and music are blaring.

mcpackieh21• 3 years ago

They got it in their minds that inaudible dialogue is more realistic and therefore has more artistic integrity than actors giving proper theatrical performances. A good stage actor can 'whisper' and be clearly heard across the room, but that's not realistic and is out of style. So now they have actors actually whisper and everybody has to watch the show with subtitles on.

Actors should never be whispering or mumbling for real. Even an actor pretending to be drunk should be able to clearly enunciate their words while still making themselves sound drunk. I'm sure modern actors can still do this, but they're being given bad direction.

MattPalmer1086• 3 years ago

I keep thinking I'm starting to go deaf. I ask my wife what that character just said, and she admits she couldn't make it out either. Then we rewind, turn the volume up, and we still can't hear what a character is saying.

danjac2• 3 years ago

Also, what happened to proper lighting? Even in a night scene, we would actually like to see what's going on, otherwise I might as well listen to a podcast drama.

reportgunner2• 3 years ago

The worst is that this is gaslighting non-native english speakers to think their english listening skills are terrible.

afavour3• 3 years ago

I disagree with most of those but even if they were true, all of those would still be the fault of the studio bosses.

Actors all look the same? You bet they do, we market tested the top five male face shapes and we make sure every actor’s face is modelled on the most popular.

Writing derivative? You bet! Our customer surveys said they love that curly haired kid from Stranger Things! That’s why he’ll be the lead character in three separate Stranger Things spin-offs.

happymellon4• 3 years ago

The number of actors coming out of hollywood that don't act these days is awful.

The Chris Pratt school of not acting is strong.

bexsella• 3 years ago

The writing for new shows is predicable and boring. Actors are featureless blobs that all look the same

I would argue this is a symptom of the money men exerting too much control over entertainment. Everything has to be safe and neutered, every investment has to be as sure as possible. This isn't down to writers, there's interesting writing going on, you just won't see it come out of the big studios unless it's a smaller subsidiary.

TazeTSchnitzel• 3 years ago

Eventually the money men become so risk-averse that they give up on originality entirely. Hence the endless stream of remakes, adaptations and formulaic additions to existing series.

watwut13• 3 years ago

I don't think it is entirely. Even with safe and neutered, writing could have been much better then it is. The butchering that happened in Witcher or Game of Thrones was purely on writers. It is not just money men.

It is that contemporary screen writing is unable to engage with characters and complexity outside of, like, 5 stereotypical tropes. That they internalized set of rules about how to simplify things and just can't comprehend any slightly realistic psychology of adults or set of events.

The money men did a lot of damage and are the ones who set the rules. But the bad writing we see now is because writers insist on cproducing bad writing even having choice. Maybe all the good writers left, maybe it is something else, but they screw it up even when having freedom.

ctrlp6• 3 years ago

Can you recommend interesting "unsafe" shows that, but for the money men, you think would/could be made today? Or are being made but on smaller subsidiaries?

ryandrake3• 3 years ago

Another problem is that everyone is aiming for the broadest international market, so any dialog must be easily translate-able to Mandarin, Japanese, French, German, and so on. No more clever wordplay, double entendres, puns, regional dialects... It all has to be vanilla and the themes need to be simple and straightforward (not to mention politically uncontroversial) so it can be palatable across the entire globe.

WeylandYutani• 3 years ago

Entertainment is made for money. It wouldn't exist without it.

Nobody is giving 200 million dollars to a director just to break even.

satvikpendem9• 3 years ago

Indeed, it reminds me of the Witcher show, where Cavill left due to the writers literally having disdain for the actual source material and were just using the show's setting as a backdrop to push their own entirely disconnected stories.

elithrar• 3 years ago

due to the writers literally having disdain for the actual source material and we're just using the how's setting as a backdrop to push their own entirely disconnected stories.

Is this concretely true, or just disinformation to put blame on writers vs. producers?

I’m not saying it’s not plausible either way, but this is a common cop out.

boomboomsubban5• 3 years ago

Do you think the writers wanted to work on an adaptation of a franchise they hated? Producers care more about targeting an existing market than taking any risks, even if the result is a mediocre show.

anticodon2• 3 years ago

Also, something that is forbidden to talk about in "free societies": by forcefully showing in movies something that contradicts everyday life but is aligned with the woke ideology, you don't make movies interesting, you make them shallow and sometimes even loathsome.

But it's a zugzwang: impossible to avoid woke ideology in movies, because minorities had become such a powerful entity that they have ability to destroy the company or a life of any person if they don't like what you do or say.

arrrg• 3 years ago

Care to elaborate with an example? The point you are making seems quite abstract and incomprehensible to me.

pm24601• 3 years ago

Tell me you don't know the meaning of a word without telling me.

AlexandrB4• 3 years ago

I hear a lot of complaining about "woke content" and I think the real problem is shitty writing. There was plenty of "woke" messaging in movies and TV shows in the 90s (just look at Star Trek TNG), but the writers has the good sense to provide a layer of abstraction through allegory or metaphor.

Transposing 2023 American social problems 1:1 into a fictional universe, as many productions do today, has the effect of breaking suspension of disbelief completely. It's not interesting or insightful. To someone like myself who actually agrees with this stuff it comes off as cheap pandering. I can imagine how fucking annoying it is to see if you have a different worldview.

It also doesn't help that the veil of mystery around a writer's or director's intention is often intentionally removed by endless interviews, teasers, and press junkets. Again, the "woke" media of the 90s did not suffer from this nearly as much. What the author intended was often a mystery and up to the viewer's interpretation. Combined with the aforementioned allegory or metaphor, it made it possible to enjoy media made by someone whose views you would 100% disagree with.

gonzo41• 3 years ago

Yeah the last decade has been suffering a glut, of Marvel, Star Wars, Fast X (how is it at 10!), and not much else.

NovaDudely2• 3 years ago

This is why I find it funny when certain shows manage to get through the banal filter. Bojack Horseman and The Good Place are great examples. Both basically went in with a goofy premise but then pivoted as soon as they could into some really decent stuff.

hoseja3• 3 years ago

Occasionally there is a good show. More often than not on AppleTV or Amazon (entities with more money than God) these days and more often than not completely overlooked.

ryandrake3• 3 years ago

Actors are featureless blobs that all look the same.

I'm glad I'm not the only one to notice this one. There seems to be five or six "allowed looks" for each gender, and many mainstream Hollywood actors and actresses have become almost clones of those archetypes.

I thought maybe I'm just old and more familiar with actors from older generations. Show me a random famous Hollywood actor who's under 35 years old and I probably can't tell you who it is. But maybe it's because they all actually do look the same!

toyg4• 3 years ago

It's not the "allowed looks" as much as the fact that they must be all super-fit and super-beautiful, which inevitably makes it look all samey. The young Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffmann wouldn't get roles today, because they're not conventionally attractive. Tom Cruise is particularly guilty of overcasting beautiful people in his recent movies, but he's hardly the only one doing that.

The last leading man that I can remember with non-conventional looks, is Vin Diesel - and he got there by muscling (eh) his way in, not by acting.

hdior• 3 years ago

It’s not just a Hollywood thing; the money men ruined all creative outlets: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/bobby-kotick-wants-to-take-...

Finance is nothing more than rent seeking. The correction required is society wide movement to dethrone finance.

lotsofpulp8• 3 years ago

All we have to do is vote to drop copyright lengths to 10 years.

faeriechangling• 3 years ago

Actors look more diverse to me than ever.

arp242• 3 years ago

Depends what metric you use. When was the last time you saw an overweight character in a leading role? Or someone with a distinct accent (e.g. Boston accent, NY accent, southern accent)?

You can see this very clearly in US remakes of some UK stuff where they'll add a black guy or whatever and increase diversity by that metric, but typically diversity goes down by almost every other metric.

And I'm not against adding black folks, I'm just saying that the US idea of "diversity" is exceptionally narrow, one-dimensional, and overall quite un-diverse.

gadflyinyoureye• 3 years ago

Define diverse. Is it there are more black, gay, transgendered people with different forms or are they all pretty much with the same body as a whole?

jollofricepeas• 3 years ago

Actually.

It’s because the market dynamics have changed and we stopped buying DVDs and VHS.

Matt Damon talked about this just a few years ago on Hot Ones.

https://youtu.be/Jx8F5Imd8A8

“So what happened was the DVD was a huge part of our business, of our revenue stream,” Damon said.

“Technology has just made that obsolete, and so the movies that we used to make you could afford to not make all of your money when it played in the theatre because you knew you had the DVD coming behind the release.”

Links:

https://www.ajc.com/life/why-dont-they-make-movies-like-they...

pjc508• 3 years ago

There's no reason why having the back catalogue in streaming should be different from having it in DVD .. except that streaming has opaque accounting and seemingly pays terrible residuals.

411111111111111• 3 years ago

If that was true, then why are there movies/series created solely for streaming providers?

It can't be there sole reason, and I sincerely doubt it's even true. Sure, the price of a single DVD would've covered the price of 1-2 months of streaming on Netflix, but people didn't buy a DVD each month. And if they did, they lent it to friends after.

troupo6• 3 years ago

And yet, instead of making them available for streaming, in order to recoup at least some money, studios pull them from services and make them unavailable outside the US.

crashingintoyou• 3 years ago

Actors are featureless blobs that all look the same

I consider this to be mostly a positive. I'm interested in following stories rather than watching the N+1th Actor X movie.

gmerc• 3 years ago

Just end stage capitalism. At least these professions have balls and organization, something Silicon Valley is just barely comprehending as necessary when the good times run out

mcpackieh21• 3 years ago

end stage

This is a silly meme, none of us have a crystal ball; there's really no telling how much further there is to fall. If this is the end stage, what are you going to call it in 50 years when people are getting themselves euthanized so they can sell off the last of their organs to put their child through elementary school?

tonfreed3• 3 years ago

Marx predicted this and has been wrong for 140 years. It'll come true this time you guys.

areoform• 3 years ago

    Hollywood’s CEOs are suffering. Not primarily from labor disputes or industry disruption or public-relations issues, but from vincible ignorance, which seems to be endemic in C-suites of all industries. Under pressure to deliver to Wall Street, too many CEOs have lost the plot of their own movie. They are not running companies to profitably deliver a good product, such as a book or a cup of coffee or, in this case, a movie or TV show. They are running companies to deliver good profit. The quality of their product has ceased to matter.

I blame the general stagnation of our current age and its associated rent seeking on the MBA. MBAs have spent decades teaching and preaching that what the business does doesn't matter. All that matters is financial alchemy.

"Forget building a better mouse trap! Take on venture debt, buy out all the mouse trap makers in your area, make their products worse (or keep them the same and sell them under a different brand name - whatever doesn't matter anyway) and jack up the prices. What are they gonna do? Go to someone else?"

"Content business? What content business? Those old Hollywood studio executives were hacks! They still cared just a tiny bit (a vanishingly small bit) about making a 'great movie.' What phooey! Buy up licenses, sell them for as cheap as possible for a while and then flood the zone with generic content. They won't know the difference! It's all the same!"

The reality? People do care. They might like slop, but they like well produced slop. Not just any generic, store-brand slop.

No matter what the artistic merit of Friends and The Office is; hundreds of thousands to millions of people subscribed to Netflix to watch them over and over again. When those properties were gone, they slowly began to ebb away from the platform. Starting in 2019, when Netflix first lost the IP,

"Netflix suffers first major loss of US subscribers, blames price hikes," https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/17/20694711/netflix-friends-...

and continuing (with some ups) into 2023,

"Netflix loses almost a million subscribers," https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62226912

Their response to their decline wasn't to create better series or a better experience, but to crack down on sharing passwords. It made their subscriber numbers net positive for one or two quarters (so far), but you don't have to Fermi to predict how this will end. https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/9/23755156/netflix-subscribe...

polygamous_bat• 3 years ago

Beautifully written: my personal feeling is that the decline in the quality of everything around our lives are strongly correlated with the increased focus on value capturing rather than value creation.

It's a weird prisoner's dilemma, since value creators will always be bled dry by value capturers, but if value creators stop existing, value capturers have no value to capture anymore. Then they start flinging crap at the wall hoping something sticks, because in their intense drive to capture value they ignored to learn how to distinguish truly valuable content.

ggm2• 3 years ago

I fundamentally agree with this. When Netflix demonstrated there was value in the IPR, the IPR holders took it back to get that value themselves. Netflix had shown it could make amazingly good content, but at higher risk and cost. It's got scared of the risk side. Too many flops? cancel after 2 episodes, never mind a season. So what if "fans" are ballistically angry and unfinished story arcs, they don't pay our KPI!

But, we also have short memory for the french metric kilometres of sheer dreck put out. I mean, "b movie" exists as a term because of it. hence D list celebrities exist because b list movies exist (kinda-sorta)

"Barton Fink" tells the story well: get amazing talent, smash the joy out of their life by applying the old school hollywood machine.

Disney has got scared too. It doesn't know if it will ruin the longterm income from Star Wars, by making more star wars. Its milked its goldmine of cartoons for 5 or more decades, and has a long term view (hence the remarkably bizarre disney thing about "putting it back in the vault" for a 5-10 year window so that a whole new cohort of consumers can be made to buy it)

saghm• 3 years ago

What always confused me about such a large number of networks/IP owners deciding to open their own streaming service was that even if every single streaming service was full of amazing content, there never was any indication that most people would want to subscribe to all of them. There's a big market for people willing to pay $15/month to get a ton of stuff to stream, but there's a lot fewer people willing to pay $75/month for five different streaming services; it doesn't matter if each of them had 20% of the "good" content from before if no one wants to pay 5x what they're already paying. Some of the wave of services coming out after Netflix's boom made sense; Disney probably has the largest set of IP of any company in the world for a streaming service, HBO already was a premium service that had demonstrated they were able to produce content people were willing to pay for but...is anyone really shocked that CNN didn't have enough draw to maintain a profitable streaming service? I suspected that the proliferation of streaming service wouldn't last forever, and that eventually there would be a consolidation into a much smaller number of major players, but I didn't think it would take so long that the people in charge would end up grinding the entire industry to a halt because they'd take so long to finally figure out that it wasn't sustainable.

mlsu2• 3 years ago

I think the problem with streaming is that there is just too much of it. There is only so much content -- ahem, TV -- that people can watch in a given day. Especially because content includes stuff like TikTok.

How many minutes of TV were produced last year? How many minutes were produced in 1990?

Those legacy salaries are not possible, because if each American TV minute is worth $0.01, they're now splitting that $0.01 across 1,000 different shows, not a couple dozen.

If I'm a young person who wants to perform on screen for a living, I know where I'm going: TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. There, I can control my own creative output, make my own brand deals, and own my own face.

kennywinker• 3 years ago

This would make sense if the companies in question weren’t making billions and funneling those profits to the execs, and investors, over the people who actually did the work.

Expanding or contracting the industry is one thing. That’s not what’s happening here. This is a shift in how the money is distributed due to a tech “disruption”. Workers deserve to be paid well for the content they make happen.

OO000oo17• 3 years ago

If I'm a young person who wants to perform on screen for a living, I know where I'm going: TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube.

An extremely sad state of affairs by any historical measure of a successful society.

Hollywood marks the absolute apex of American art. As this era of unquestionable greatness and human accomplishment draws to a close, we are nothing if not pathetic if we cannot at least acknowledge what it was. We should be nothing less than ashamed for letting it slip through our fingers, but here we are just making little quips about its outdatedness.

renegade-otter• 3 years ago

"And the Oscar for the best 5-second hot girl gyrating and thinking she is dancing video goes to..."

JumpCrisscross3• 3 years ago

If I'm a young person who wants to perform on screen for a living, I know where I'm going: TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. There, I can control my own creative output, make my own brand deals, and own my own face

You also lose control of your distribution and are completely commoditised. Hence why the median full-time content creator makes $20,000/year, and I don’t think that includes production costs [1].

[1] https://www.epidemicsound.com/blog/the-future-of-the-creator...

OO000oo17• 3 years ago

And the content is garbage. Even if one would disagree, we are comparing with the American cinematic canon, by most measures the greatest body of artistic accomplishment humanity has ever produced. I cannot believe people even have the nerve to question the comparable value.

hoseja3• 3 years ago

lose control of your distribution and are completely commoditised

And... Hollywood is any better??

DropInIn• 3 years ago

And apparently the SAG average is $40000, without accounting for costs like union dues nor the bargaining advantage that comes with union membership.

When you look at non-union actors that drops to about $25000, and often has many costs to maintain due to the lack of protections that would come with union membership.

Seems like youtubers and the like have a darn good deal considering it includes a far higher volume of low activity/effort/quality "actors" coupled with the independence and higher rate of higher scale earnings.

Hollywood is way more top heavy , regardless of if secondary business ventures are excluded from both sides, as that likely makes yt even more fair in that more yt creators have secondary streams like merch and services than Hollywood actors do, where only the biggest names can earn much of anything by thier "brand" alone.

I have to ask, did you even try to do a comparison or did you just google internet creator average income and the presume it was a pittance compared to that of the average of all working (and non working?) actors?

(Ed: ugh just reread that and dont like _how_ it's written, but since the correct sentiments and points are there and rewriting would be an undertaking, I'm just gonna leave it. Sorry for any headaches the prose causes.)

gogopuppygogo• 3 years ago

Bingo. Except TikTok, Insta, and YouTube are all the intermediary still. They let you build a following but a creative still needs to find a way to own direct communication with their audience.

Let us not forget that in our current trajectory, Robots and Real Estate are going to be owned by one class of people who extract value from society while everyone else struggles to feed themselves.

Don’t rely on any of the big platforms long term.

fragmede3• 3 years ago

twitch.tv is another site I'd use.

labster4• 3 years ago

Like most simple answers, this is wrong. If content isn’t profitable, the networks don’t have to pay for it, which has always been the case. What is different are the mini-rooms and the excuse of streaming to stop paying residuals.

If they can’t make money without paying a living wage, then they shouldn’t make money. Period. Business models like Uber, postdoc/adjunct professorships, and Hollywood are exploitative by their nature, replacing business models that used to pay better wages for the same service.

mlsu2• 3 years ago

In both the cases you mentioned -- college professors and cab drivers -- supply (of labor) massively expanded, and wages fell accordingly.

Of course, the execs are greedy, and of course they win. The execs always win.

You can look to Spotify for what happens on residuals, when an individual can choose to listen to any of 100,000,000 different songs. The only winners are those who control their own image and distribution. Like Taylor Swift, who makes 10 million each show and has full control over her recorded music.

benjaminwootton• 3 years ago

As with many other industries, I assume that VC, PE and Financial Engineering have also played havoc with these markets.

Everything is fine whilst we are awash with loose speculative money, but when the tide goes out there isn’t enough real demand to keep the lights on.

chung81234• 3 years ago

How can you pay residuals on content that doesn't have recurring revenue? Before the playback was either tied to a sale or ads that played back against the content. Now there is no more money when someone streams it.

In other industries you only pay a person once and then that work is owned by whoever paid.

dave333• 3 years ago

Like startups where people will get paid with stock that may go big, acting and to some extent writing gives you a chance to become a star. But I think this is more about the median performers and whether they get paid fairly and get a share of streaming and any derived work such as AI generated likenesses/scripts.

_trampeltier2• 3 years ago

I grow up in the 80s and 90s. That time there had been a small set of really famous actors. Today there is an endless stream of new actors. In the end, it almost does not matter what person plays in movies today .. how many Spider Man did we have in the last 20 years. Also movies like the newest Indiana Jones. I think there is no true background from outdoor. I guess not in a single scene. At least it feels, like they did the whole movie with animated backgrounds.

Kye2• 3 years ago

It's more often a composite of real stuff and VFX. Almost every scene in Game of Thrones was a real location with effects and edits to make it suit the scene.

stcroixx• 3 years ago

Can’t those platforms de monetize or hide your content or even ban you according to whatever criteria suits them? It’s great until it’s not. Shaky foundation.

pjc508• 3 years ago

Well, so can Hollywood. The completed but unreleased Batgirl movie was simply deleted.

gist• 3 years ago

I don't understand the entitlement. People choose a profession. The dynamics of earning a living with that profession have changed. The fact that others are making money from that profession (or companies) doesn't matter and shouldn't change that. The fact that other venues or ways to make money that formerly didn't exist shouldn't change that. It's capitalism not socialism at work.

If actors/writers can't earn a living from the profession quite frankly 'too bad'. Am I the only one who was raised and was told that you can't earn a living doing acting or entertaining unless you are 'a star'? The problem was going down that road and becoming dependent on it and not thinking things might change.

By the way what is going to happen to all of the people that have jobs in and around the industry that makes gasoline powered cars. Nobody seems to concerned about that. I don't mean just people who build gas powered cars but the entire industry supplying parts that will not be needed by EV (or parts for gas pumps etc you get the point).

ThinkBeat• 3 years ago

I know little about the behind the scenes machinations in the US film/tv world. The one union says they have been on strike since May. That is, in my opinion, a long time. Which may indicate that the other party is not hurting too much from it?

On a sidenote: With the horrible quality of the major films and tv show these days, these guys should be on strike demanding higher quality productions.

Soom seems to be "Ok give me an explosion here" "Move 3 steps" "Give me an explosion there" "You get on the motorcycle. " "I need 3 explosions there and then you four open up with machine guns"

Some movies seem to have bypassed the script writing entirely

toyg4• 3 years ago

That is, in my opinion, a long time.

It's basically a blip in AV production times. Hollywood movies will typically take one or two years to be made; so you won't see the economic effects of a strike for some time. TV starts hurting faster but it also hurts less, because you have sports, news, and reruns, to pick up most of the slack.

If this was, say, a NBA strike, we'd currently be towards the end of pre-season.

anonymousab2• 3 years ago

these guys should be on strike demanding higher quality productions

That is one of the goals around getting some baseline requirements around writer's rooms; they want to stop a hollowing-out race to the bottom with writing in Hollywood that has been going on for a while.

ryathal2• 3 years ago

Most movies seem to be "written" as a collection of scenes that the directors and producers want to see and then they tell the writers to make those fit together in a story.

solatic4• 3 years ago

The strike will break Hollywood. There are simply too many other options available. Streaming distributors (e.g. Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV) will simply go abroad and market foreign productions to American audiences, which is little different from living in a foreign country and having mostly American productions marketed to you. Consumers will pick and choose between what's still available on streaming distributors, YouTube, and other non-video entertainment sources like video games.

The cost of an average blockbuster production, compared to the cost of independent productions on platforms like YouTube, is insane. There's a reason why the cost of seeing a movie in a theater is so much higher today. But the value proposition is profoundly difficult. Spend $20/person/night at a movie theater, or $12/month for ad-free YouTube, where the production values of the top content producers have increased as per-episode views have reached into the millions? YouTube democratized content production, and gave anybody with sufficient talent access to the video entertainment market without needing to deal with the Hollywood gatekeepers. Think that the talent behind YouTube productions are going to unionize? That genie is out of the lamp.

Once the consumers leave Hollywood, good luck to Hollywood trying to get them back. And because the union's agreement doesn't extend to foreign productions, good luck trying to prevent actors and screenwriters from going abroad, whether to be part of a foreign production or an American production for YouTube, the longer the strike goes on.

ishanmahapatra• 3 years ago

The foreign unions are all looking to see how this plays out. The shape of the deal for SAG and WGA lays the groundwork for what they will be able to negotiate for.

pjc508• 3 years ago

Streaming distributors (e.g. Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV) will simply go abroad and market foreign productions to American audiences

Very skeptical about this. You'll see a bit of it while the strike is on, but the quality difference is real and the average US audience hates both sub and dub content.

You might get a bit of e.g. Scandinavian murder mystery or Korean drama, especially following the breakthrough of Squid Game.

solatic4• 3 years ago

the average US audience hates both sub and dub content.

The Anglosphere is larger than the US. Britain, Canada, South Africa, Australia each have domestic production companies that pump out English-language content that would not require dubbing or subbing.

solatic4• 3 years ago

the quality difference is real

The production difference is not large enough to justify the difference in cost. Ultimately, the streaming platforms control distribution. If you're Netflix, and the cost to acquire a foreign production is a fraction of the cost of an American production, even if the foreign production has a more limited audience, which are you going to decide to purchase and promote?

Maybe streaming distributors could introduce premium subscription tiers to unlock access to more expensive American productions, but I doubt it. Netflix's business model is predicated on purchasing large amounts of niche content that, due to a global audience, are sufficiently large to justify the purchase of the niche content. Ultimately, the American subscriber market is just another niche, when you're building out a global subscriber base. American audiences can be uninterested in most foreign productions, as long as individual subscribers are interested in some foreign productions.

ch_sm2• 3 years ago

I‘m also sceptical that non-US productions can simply take over. Hollywood as a global industry doesn‘t really have any competitors.

but the quality difference is real

It’s surely a matter of taste, but IMO there are lots and lots of European and Asian films that are extremely high quality and stand head and shoulders above most Hollywood productions.

chriskanan• 3 years ago

AI dubbing is getting very good. I hate dubs that don't sync up well or with actors who are terrible, but I'm optimistic about AI dubs taking over:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQ1OPpj8gPA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hMulGYj8wo

mcpackieh21• 3 years ago

the average US audience hates both sub and dub content.

Probably still true at present, but it's a mutable attribute. All you need to change this is to consistently present Americans with foreign content they personally find compelling. This has already been demonstrated with anime; Americans who like anime become acclimatized to subtitles, and of course dubs. And it's happening again with Americans who like romantic dramas; they're increasingly turning to Korean content. It could easily happen with blockbuster action movies too, particularly since those are light on dialogue anyway.

If Hollywood is counting on native English content being their moat, I think they're in trouble. That's a moat Americans are willing to cross if enticed with enough good content.

takinola• 3 years ago

I am skeptical about this take. I have lived abroad before and experienced the phenomenon of having the majority of pop culture come from the US. I don't think the United States will support this model (ie majority of pop culture coming from other countries). My feeling is that, at best, the strike will give more exposure to the entertainment industry of more countries but this will in no way supplant Hollywood.

As for Youtube, TikTok, etc, I believe these address a completely different need of the consumers. It takes Hollywood to create a Mission Impossible (or even Everything Everywhere All At Once). No one is going to create something like that and release it on social media (the economics don't work). Also, I (and I presume most other people) don't want to watch a 2 hour epic on my phone or laptop. The movie product includes the experience of going out, having a communal experience, etc. It is not just a solitary experience of seeing people act stuff on a screen.

solatic4• 3 years ago

The movie product includes the experience of going out, having a communal experience, etc. It is not just a solitary experience of seeing people act stuff on a screen.

I actually agree with you, but as the price of movie tickets keeps going up, so does the cost of that communal experience. The price is starting to creep up against live concerts and live sports (for bleacher seats, OK, but still).

It takes Hollywood to create a Mission Impossible (or even Everything Everywhere All At Once). No one is going to create something like that and release it on social media (the economics don't work).

The economics aren't working for movie theaters. The number of big-budget flicks that Hollywood can finance is decreasing over time as theater attendance declines and the films keep getting more expensive (at least due to inflation). The risks (costs) are increasing while the rewards (ticket sales) are decreasing. Something has to give.

toyg4• 3 years ago

I've heard these critiques since the '90s at least. I'm sure there were plenty even during times that are now regarded as a golden age of artsy moviemaking, like the '70s.

The reality is simply that the sector rides waves, and at some point the wave ends. VHS was a wave. DVD was a wave. Mega-CGI (from The Matrix to Lord of the Rings to Marvel) was a wave. Streaming was a wave (Netflix threw money at productions almost senselessly, for a few years). Now that those waves are over, bosses' largesse is in scarce supply. Unions will do what unions are supposed to do.

The only novel bit, in this dispute, is the role of AI and computer-generated characters; but tbh we could see this development coming for a long time. A simple example: the brother of Spider-Man 2099, in the comic, is a film director who makes movies completely on his own, via digital means. This was published 25 years ago.

Simulacra• 3 years ago

I can see that the system is messed up, but it also just seems like a lot of rich people yelling at other rich people. I can't seem to find any sympathy for the strikers.

asdjy• 3 years ago

The modern songwriting process goes like this: gather multiple teams of 20-year-olds with laptops into a conference room. Give them 2 hours to write a song. Pick the best song. When I heard about this process on an NPR podcast I said yup that explains everything.

In contrast, a member of the Allman Brothers was holed up in a motel or cabin trying to write a song. In frustration with writer’s block he went out to the local store. Inside a woman was chasing her young daughter down the aisle calling her name. He liked the name and went back and wrote the song “Melissa.”

conradfr• 3 years ago

Not saying that the current Top 40 isn't terrible but even legendary artists and songs were produced in a variation of this way back in the days.

https://medium.com/@shelrochaleal/motown-the-star-making-pro...

HDThoreaun• 3 years ago

Pop music was overproduced in the late 60s too. There are still plenty of bands writing songs about mundane experiences they've had after holing out in a motel or cabin for a while.

Kye2• 3 years ago

Writing a song has always been the easy part. It's all the other stuff that takes time and money. At that level, everything is a whole production. Everything. I don't see how this is any different from a writer's room for a TV show or movie. Those scripts go pretty quick, too. Maybe not 2 hours, but they have to deliver scripts in time for production to get it ready for narrow release windows.

You're always going to get a factory process when a lot of people are involved because there are deadlines and checkpoints written into contracts. That doesn't make the output bad.

costanzaDynasty• 3 years ago

You've spent the last 5 years making clickbait assembly line garbage and anytime anyone has any valid criticism they are labeled ism. It's not surprising that most people have moved on. The customer isn't always right, but at the very least the customer deserves respect.

You need our money more than we need to give it to you.

draw_down• 3 years ago

I saw an interesting thought, that the recent popularity of anime among Americans is because our entertainment now is not only constantly moralizing, but also poorly made. Anime doesn’t appeal to me but I thought that was a funny idea.

Ylpertnodi• 3 years ago

because our entertainment now is not only constantly moralizing

...been that way for several decades, not just 'now'.

dreamcompiler• 3 years ago

...but also poorly made.

This.

Linked video [0] is entirely CGI generated in real time, and it looks better than the CGI in most modern Hollywood blockbuster movies, which can spend 10 minutes rendering each frame if they need to.

I'm not a gamer but people familiar with modern video games probably already know this.

There's no excuse for the lack of quality in modern movie CGI other than "we refuse to pay what good CGI artists are worth."

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU0gvPcc3jQ

baryphonic• 3 years ago

Hollywood’s CEOs are suffering. Not primarily from labor disputes or industry disruption or public-relations issues, but from vincible ignorance, which seems to be endemic in C-suites of all industries. Under pressure to deliver to Wall Street, too many CEOs have lost the plot of their own movie. They are not running companies to profitably deliver a good product, such as a book or a cup of coffee or, in this case, a movie or TV show. They are running companies to deliver good profit. The quality of their product has ceased to matter.

Has there ever been a time when the suits weren't ignoramuses? And if they're optimizing everything to deliver a profit, why aren't they profitable?

The suits are to blame in terms of accountability, because the buck stops with them. But the product as far as I can tell has never been more expensive. The new Indiana Jones movie had a production budget of approximately $300M, plus marketing costs (between $50M & $150M). If we assume Disney will pocket 50% of the gross box office, they'd need to make $700M-900M just to break even. So far, more than two weeks after release, the film has made just over $300M worldwide.[0] That movie alone is very likely to lose hundreds of millions. Movies losing money is the norm, but not to the tune of hundreds of millions.

What's gone wrong? 1) The writing has deteriorated. Stories have become boring & tendentious, filled with unlikeable characters, hackneyed plots and preachy dialogue. 2) The studios have become completely risk-averse. I can kind of understand why they'd want to be risk averse with budgets of $300M, but audiences tire of remakes, reboots and distant sequels. (I think the creative types have gotten wise, which is why "explorable" IP with large worlds like Star Wars or Middle-Earth have been cannibalized to tell stories that are tonally and thematically quite different than the source material, because the suits have zero clue. Sometimes it even works, like with Andor. Though even Andor has struggled to find its audience amongst all of the noise.) 3) The costs have gotten too high. I'm not sure if the streaming wars or golden age of TV or even just low interest rates are responsible, but the costs of production are staggering. This is in a day and age where technology should have made it cheaper to produce films & TV. When I look at Oppenheimer's budget of $100M, I can almost understand why it is so expensive. I can't explain the Indy 5 budget.

When I was younger, I could almost always find a movie I wanted to watch on a Friday night. Those days are long gone. At some point, Hollywood stopped producing anything worth seeing, and now they're paying the price.

[0]https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl2776598017/?ref_=bo_...

anonymousab2• 3 years ago

Has there ever been a time when the suits weren't ignoramuses?

The Sony leaks from years ago showed that the executive level lived up to every stereotype of an out of touch and ignorant executive that you could imagine.

It's possible that things have somehow changed since then, but I doubt it.

rmk• 3 years ago

I don’t see many non superhero or non franchise movies coming out of Hollywood. It sure sounds like the moneymen’s influence: why not milk a sure thing?

TrackerFF• 3 years ago

Yes, there's a reason why, excuse the expression, capeshit movies have dominated the cinemas for the past 10-12 years. MCU movies probably pay for a lot of other high-quality movies - but they rely on those franchise movies to bring in the bucks.

The good thing is that most serious movie goes can easily ignore these movies, if they want to. The negative thing is that, well, those movies really do dominate they cinemas, and will get first priority on pretty much everything.

I'm from a small rural place, and back home they would screen nothing but the latest superhero movies for 3-4 weeks straight, when they got released. Other movies would either get passed on, or get screening time much later in the season. More often than not it was the former.

nebula88043• 3 years ago

What that shows is your market is so small and costs have grown enough over the years that if it weren't for the addressable market of the superhero movies, they wouldn't be showing anything in your region at all.

Maybe the big chains might exit your market regardless. AMC almost went bankrupt(they were saved by meme investors). Regal did go bankrupt. Hell even Alamo went bankrupt (but emerged successfully to live another day). How much time do you think is left? As AMC continues to decline they will chop the rural areas first. You'll be maybe left with mom n pop outlets that may not be worth dealing with from the point of view of the distributors(we'll see).

Ive said it before but i'll say it again(and get downvoted again). Living in a rural region confers many benefits one of which being likely low taxes...but another way to look at it is you are still paying a tax, just in other ways.

pnt12• 3 years ago

This month, there were Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan and Asteroid City by Wes Anderson.

It does show that HN is a website for techies and not for cinema enthusiasts; there's good stuff out there, but you won't get to it if you only scratch the surface.

rednerrus2• 3 years ago

At some point we have to talk about how much of the money investors should expect. The real issue is that investors expect more and more of the pie.

nebula88043• 3 years ago

There is no real mechanism to force a complete market wide wide behavior change other than maybe a great reset(how that could happen is beyond me).

KBme• 3 years ago

I would guess it's ESG and activism more than that. People aren't buying the racist, classist and overtly indoctrinating sludge that has been coming out of there for the last decade+. It's boring drivel nobody is interested in.

The businessmen broke Hollywood

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