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Topic: Study Shows That BitTorrent Piracy Doesn’t Affect U.S. Box Office Profits
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Mike Blakesley
Film God
Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 02-16-2012 06:55 PM
quote: Joe Redifer
Of course, as a movie theater owner you will fight to the death to defend seeing movies in an actual movie theater is somehow better when it clearly only offers one advantage.
Not necessarily. I sell (a few) CDs at work, yet I am fully convinced that buying songs online these days is way better than buying a 70-minute album with only four good minutes of songs on it. (Cue: Bobby Henderson with a rant about lossy compressed formats.)
We have a 55" screen at home and I love it; but it's still not as cool as seeing a movie in a theater, to me. But that's me, you are you and there's no way either of us is going to change the other's mind.
You also have to keep in mind that that majority of people DON'T have "home theater" setups. Most of them have a crappy setup. So the home experience may be cheaper, but "better" really depends on a lot of factors.
Even the equipment isn't always the deciding factor: My brother might have a really cool TV set but I would never watch a movie at his house because his kids would be running around all the time making noise and his wife would be asking us to "turn that down, willya?"
quote: Joe Redifer
you are seeing "the boss" (of what profession, I'm not sure) in real life
Shit, these days they bring gigantic video screens to concerts, so the bulk of the people spend most of the time watching it on TV anyway. You want to talk about a shitty experience... concerts are way worse than the worst movie theater and they cost ten times as much. Yet that's where the money is in music these days. Further proof that people love to get out of the house.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 02-17-2012 10:37 PM
With so many entertainment alternatives, Hollywood is clearly on a self-destructive path if their parent Wall Street oriented companies only want to keep selling the same shit over and over and over and over and over again.
Eventually the public is going to grow fickle and stop buying. None of those bean counters know exactly when the public will become fed up and bail out of movie-going. But I guarantee it will happen at some point. Hollywood has fallen into financial crisis mode before in past decades and they're setting themselves up for the same thing again. Consumer tastes in entertainment can change very suddenly, far faster than a movie production line has time to adapt. And probably much faster still with the aid of digital technology and an Internet that is growing ever faster. By adopting this stupid "let's make the same vanilla shit over and over again" attitude the studios are ultimately dooming themselves to a really bad crisis.
The really funny thing is how the fundamental nature of showing movies is being changed (from 35mm film to video projection and various modes of real or faked digital 3D) yet the actual stories being presented are extremely re-hashed and conventional.
What the movie studios are presenting is akin to me walking into the grocery store and paying a high premium price for some generic, plain, vanilla ice cream that's wrapped in a glossy, 3D lenticular wrapper. It's bullshit.
Some years ago acclaimed screenwriter Paul Schrader wrote an article about the decline of Hollywood's movie output by measuring in terms of Oscar Best Picture nominees year over year. He brought up a year in the 1970's, 1975 I think in which The Godfather Part II won, but was up against classics like Chinatown, The Conversation and The Towering Inferno. In 1976, films like Network and Taxi Driver were up against Rocky, which ultimately won. In 1977 it was a showdown between Annie Hall and Star Wars. Then he compared those nominee lists to more contemporary lists and it seemed so lopsided on how much better the 1970's choices were. Hollywood was really having to try back then, in part because the industry was in some real trouble. They were forced to survive and forced to take chances on lots of not so conventional filmmaking ideas. Even Star Wars was an extremely risky, unproven idea. If George Lucas were trying to break the same kind of ground today I guarantee those Wall Street bean counters would never have allowed it to happen. Further, they would have pulled Francis Coppola off the set of The Godfather before he could film the riveting assassination scene inside the restaurant.
These days the Best Picture Oscar thing is pretty anti-climatic. To me, the last real contest in the Best Picture Oscar category was between Titanic and L.A. Confidential for the 1997 prize.
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Edward Havens
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 614
From: Los Angeles, CA
Registered: Mar 2008
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posted 02-18-2012 01:28 AM
Steve, that's really not a great metaphor. The store isn't only selling root beer.
Paramount released 15 movies in 2011, plus added grosses for six additional movies from 2010. Of those 15 new movies, the top five grossers for them was a sequel (Transformers 3), two comic book adaptations (Thor and Captain America), another sequel (Kung Fu Panda 2) and a sidequel (Puss in Boots). Those five combined for 52% of their domestic gross. It's not until you get to #6 and #7 that you get to original properties (Super 8 and Rango), and the only reasons those got made was because the studio wanted to keep J.J. Abrams and Johnny Depp happy. After that, two more sequels (MI4 and Paranormal 3) and a quickie Justin Bieber documentary.
Go back a year and what do you have? Another 15 new movies released, and the top ten consisting of four sequels, two remakes, a book adaptation, a live-action adaptation of a sister company cartoon and two original works.
Keep going back, whether it's Paramount or Warners or Disney or Sony or Fox or Universal, and seventy-five plus percent of the time, their top releases of films in terms of gross ticket sales are from a remake, a sequel or an adaptation, or some combination of the three. In fact, of the six majors, their combined top ten grossers have 16 originals and 44 are remakes/sequels/adaptations. So that's only 73.33%. Sorry to overestimate.
This is our modern history. Audiences want the safe and familiar, and the studios know how to market that. The Vow is a perfect example. It's not based on a Nicholas Sparks novel, but damn it if I didn't know that until I looked it up. It was perfectly sold as something safe and familiar. Hey, you loved Rachel McAdams in The Notebook, and you loved Channing Tatum in Dear John! Now here they are, together, in a movie that's just like those moves! Come give us an over-performing opening weekend! But if you're not into that, Fox is releasing a Star Wars movie! And in 3-D! Star Wars! You loved Star Wars! But if you aren't into that and you aren't in to romantic drama, Universal got you some Denzel movie. You love Denzel! We all love Denzel! Who the hell doesn't love Denzel? King Kong ain't got s**t on him! And if you got a family, there's Big Miracle. Everybody loves whales!
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