Blockbuster Saturation

Lemmings At The Cliff

I've been saying for a while that the movie business has got some fundamental problems that is making it unsustainable, and that we may see the end of Hollywood as we know it. Apparently I'm not alone in this diagnosis:

The idea of spending $300 million to make a two-hour fantasy is kind of weird if you think about it. That kind of spending only makes sense if you can convince millions of people to spend between $10 and $20 each to see the result. This is one case where the format is the content — there's no other format in which you could spend such an obscene amount of money on just two hours' entertainment. It's not going to happen on television, it's not going to happen with direct-to-DVD movies. There's really no other format I can think of that would justify that kind of opulence.

Back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, people put on masques. These were lavish plays, put on at royal courts, or in wealthy aristocrats' houses, and they involved architecturally ambitious sets and fancy costumes. Often the whole point of these entertainments was how cool they looked — if you read their scripts nowadays, they're kind of dull, because you're not seeing the amazing costumes, scenery — and yes, special effects. The masque was a huge spectacular that dominated culture for roughly a century — and then it was extinct.

Nobody expects movie theaters to implode this year. The Hollywood blockbuster, as a format, will probably keep existing for years. But eventually, the unsustainable business model that drives these things will fall apart, and the movie as we know it will transform into something more suited to home viewing, and maybe more integrated with web content. So it's a good thing they're making tons of huge Hollywood movies right now, so we'll have plenty of examples of them to look at once they're gone.

That's the concluding 3 paragraphs so I've cut to the chase, but the figures cited in the article leading to it exactly what I've been saying here, so I feel like I'm not some lone nut Cassandra.

The real argument is that the revenue that the studios can collect from the films is shrinking for various technological reason as well as demographic reasons, while unit cost of the films have soared to ridiculous heights. And now they're all doing this as we pick and choose which ones we want to see based on hearsay reviews moving faster than advertising, the studios can't keep their product out in the market place to find its audience. Something's got to break and it won't be audience indifference.

I think it was back in 2003 I was asked which movies I was looking forward to seeing and I replied the depressing thing was that they all had numerals behind them as they were all sequels. Yes, they were some good movies there, but it ode really ill for the creativity of the industry. Ever since the GFC, the business is even more risk averse to the point that they will only put big money into these 'proven properties' which are adaptations of comic books and graphic novels. If they still made good smaller films otherwise, it would be gratifying, but no; they're making these films at the expense of the good smaller films. The industry really is cannibalising itself. Lucas and Spielberg and James Cameron will always be able to make a movie, but just as it happened here at a smaller scale, it's at the expense of the future. The future is now, except it's also already the past.