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JohnBarnes
1/15/2017 11:46:23 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Blazing an old trail
Dmendyk,
Just as jarring but also possibly just as liberating. The current narrow beam of CGI-and-action driven blockbusters is mostly driven by the "subtitle market", i.e. the ability to make most of the money in places where they don't speak English. This means essentially recreating the silent movie -- stories that can be followed with minimum dialogue in a room where the audience makes a lot of noise and is there more for the spectacle than for the story. A dollar invested in those projects, because the overseas market is so large, has a really good chance of making a satisfactory return.
But the movies have also had long eras in which local, people-oriented stories were the high profit area, because intrinsically they cost less to make, and they do draw a higher-income crowd domestically. A movie has to make Diller's figure of $500 million because it cost $100-300 in production costs and salaries plus probably another $100 million in marketing, advertising, and distribution fees to reach the whole planet. (And much of that $500 million will be made in the recorded-for-home-viewing aftermarket). But a movie that costs $1 million to make and $1 million to market, and makes $10 million -- which is quite achievable in, for example, the French domestic market -- is actually more profitable (in terms of higher ROI), and very possibly more reliably so.
If the big studios lose control of the market, many smaller theaters and chains can decide, as they used to, that a big movie is to expensive and too big a risk (especially since big movies tend to come with multiple week lock-ins). At that point booking 10 weeks of STAR GUYS VERSUS MONSTERS becomes more of a gamble (if it bombs, it bombs bigger, and if it succeeds, you have many other competing screens to worry about) compared to committing to two weeks each, with option to renew/cancel, to LONELY COUPLE FIND EACH OTHER, INTREPID LAWYER WINS CASE, BITTERSWEET SUMMER ROMANCE, PARENT AND CHILD RECONCILE, and TWO OLD GUYS WANDER AROUND ENACTING DIRTY JOKES.
Hollywood has had 3 blockbuster eras: silents in the 20s, spectacle-color 1939-55 or so, and the present post Jaws&Star Wars era. In between they had swarms of little movies that made very good money.
The coming revolution looks to me like the swarm of little movies swarming back. This may just be wishful thinking -- I like those periods and movies better overall -- but it looks to me like the side I favor is about to win again, for a while.
JohnBarnes
1/15/2017 11:54:20 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Blazing an old trail
Dcawrey,
"Massive audiences" pretty much implies a Price's Law situation -- as Roger Price explained it (and he thought it was a joke), when the number and variety of outlets is low and the audience is massive (think pop music in the 1950s or 1970s, TV 1955-80, fast food during the Hamburger Wars, Broadway musicals 1990-2010, etc.) it costs more to lose a customer than you can gain by picking one up, so the goal becomes "Don't touch that dial!", i.e. you avoid anything that might excite the customers because anything that might excite them might also offend them. In a Price's Law situation the product just keeps getting more alike, the costs keep going up (because you can pass them on to the consumers since no one is trying to steal them), and the whole thing subsides into expensive sludge.
But anything that breaks the Price's Law situation -- FM radio, niche radio, cable TV, Subway, Hamilton -- tends to release a huge burst of innovation and creativity, and to create a vast new range of genres and materials. So I'm betting as we come to the end of the superhero blockbuster, we're probably entering a great burst of creativity (or rather of getting access to all that stuff the creators really wanted to make all along!)
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