Posted on 10/14/2009 8:02:11 AM PDT by AreaMan
Maybe DVD Sales Collapsed Because Movies Suck
Posted By John Nolte On October 13, 2009 @ 2:31 pm In Entertainment, News | 163 Comments
Everyone seems to have an opinion as to why DVD sales have cratered since hitting their peak in 2006, but no one’s looking at the obvious answer. Plunging sales have been blamed on piracy [1], competing technologies such as video games [2]and low-priced rental outlets like Redbox [3]… everything but the quality of the actual films.
First and foremost, I’m a movie lover. Nothing competes for my attention in this regard, including dollar rentals and the like. But I’m just not buying anywhere near the number of new releases I did just ten years ago. Obviously, this is anecdotal evidence, so make your own comparisons:
1998 [4] – I purchased 15 of the top 20 money makers…
1999 [5] — 18 of the top 20.
2000 [6] — 16 of the top 20.
2001 [7] — 14 of the top 20.
And nothing’s changed. My tastes are the same. I still enjoy and don’t regret a single purchase (well, maybe “Planet of the Apes” — but I keep watching thinking it will get better). Now flash-forward to the last few years and the numbers collapse:
2006 [8] – 5 of the top 20.
Excerpt...
(Excerpt) Read more at bighollywood.breitbart.com ...
Get netfix. For $17 a month you get all you can watch (max three at a time). Your account lets you have three lists at once. I have one for me, one for my wife, and one for my daughter. When I send a movie back, the send me one from my list, ditto with my wife and daughter. And you NEVER have to spend money or time going to the video store trying to beat a late fee.
If the movie is scratched or broken when it arrives, you go online and report it and they send you another that same day if it is early enough.
Let’s be totally honest for a moment with ourselves....
When was the last time you had an “first screening raiders of the lost ark moment” in a movie? Pretty freaking rare. Movies are too predictable, too slow and are one way communication. They don’t hold our attention. So yes they suck.
And... Chris Pine is supposedly going to be the next "Jack Ryan". I wonder which Clancy novel is about to be mangled?
*sigh*
3 of us were watching “No Country for Old Men”. I fell asleep. The next day I asked the other 2 how it had ended. No one knew. They fell asleep, too. I definitely didn’t care enough to actually watch the piece of crap again.
The basic problem is “corporate Hollywood”, non-entertainment corporations buying entertainment corporations as investments, ignoring the purpose of why they are entertainment corporations in the first place.
A bad economic model: make a few huge blockbuster movies a year.
A movie with a $200m budget that makes $220m at the box office is worth less than a movie that costs $2m and makes $30 million at the box office. Simple fact. However, if just a few blockbusters fail, it risks the entire studio.
A good economic model: Golan-Globus, Cannon films. They produced dozens of low budget movies, and if just a few of them were popular, they paid for the production of all of them, and made a healthy profit as well. Better yet, a lot of them were popular, and are still remembered today. Golan-Globus made a fortune.
The difference being that Golan-Globus made movies that their audiences wanted to see, but corporate Hollywood makes movies *they* wanted their audiences to see. This is not a subtle difference.
But corporate Hollywood is utterly blind to this simple equation. How many anti-Iraq war movies did they crank out, even though they all went stinker at the box office? Pattern recognition failure.
It has been known for decades that the most profitable movies are family friendly, with good writing and acting.
But corporate Hollywood doesn’t want to do that. Instead, it wants a lot of action, a lot of cgi, nothing controversial or innovative, formula plot and the same tiny group of homogeneous actors.
Those 50 copies are bought at a reduced (negotiated) price and then sold off “used” after a set period of time.
And yet Hollywood passed on distributing Mel Gibson's The Passion Of The Christ.
They were free to do so but the shareholders should have divested since the studios work against the profit motive in favor of politics.
yup, and got to meet U-dog (and Trix rabbit) creator Joe Harris at a cartoon fan convention
With the internal politics of Hollywood, the losses of that $220million movie would be written against that debut hit (or fledgling hit) to protect the clout of A-list directors/actors. Hollywood engages in creative accounting and that "food cart" could be padded with all sorts of expenses. Same with "promotion" costs.
Another thing is when the corporation owns a tv-cable channel. Ever wonder why the Batman movie with "Arnold" aired so much? Time-Warner owns HBO. Pad the calendar until it breaks even.
And yet, when a film DOES hit (like the first Burton Batman) Hollywood engages in creative accounting to declare that it never turned a profit (writer Sam Hamm was to get a percent of the profits).
And the people who play these games and rape 13 year olds with alcohol and pill cocktails dare to lecture us about a “culture of corruption”.
Yeah...as an old jet mechanic, I loved the scenes with the Tomcats.
One of the most beautiful jet fighters ever to take to the sky.
Got all the old classics on VHS; the new flicks - made for imbeciles and teenyboppers - pretty much suck. End of story.
I will, however, rent the new Star Trek and Transformers flicks when they come out.
I buy only selected DVDs.
Things like “Casablanca”, “The Best Years of Our Lives” (my favorite!), “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, “Animal House”, “Das Boot”, “Band of Brothers” and so on.
And, of course, I admit that I love all the Pixar stuff, although I didn’t like “Wall-e” as much as the others...
I have never and will never pay close to $20 for a just-released DVD. (I’ll order it on Netflix)
I enjoy the old TV series also, right now I am working my way through the original Dark Shadows, poor quality filming because it was a daytime soap, but very entertaining nonetheless.
How Green Was My Valley - a masterpiece. Incredibly moving.
I have to admit that Das Boot was a surprisingly good movie, I too buy mostly older stuff and the very few newer ones that are good(not many of those).
Since the entertainment unions are a fixture in California, I have long thought that they could set up their own studio, with a very different character from the typical.
To start with, the production, writers, actors, musicians, etc., unions all agree that everybody is just paid scale, across the board. The emphasis is on production volume, that is “a little work for everyone”, instead of “all the work for just a few”.
Productions would be very low budget, and ordered towards vignette and variety shows with different casts and production teams, like the original Twilight Zone, American Bandstand, and variety shows.
Profits from series sales and syndication get plowed back into more productions. Eventually create a cable syndicate with two or three channels. If, and only if, one of the shows becomes a hit, it and its cast can be contracted off to a network, entering the major leagues, as motivation to do quality work.
Thus the public gets good acting and writing and a bunch of programs to watch, even if they are on a budget; and the union’s rank and file actually get some profit and exposure for a change, instead of starving while a few on the ‘A’ list get all the work.
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