Posted on 09/17/2023 9:03:57 AM PDT by spirited irish
Unlike you, I don't care at all about Hollywood in this day and age.
I came upon an internet ad this AM for some film involving DiNiro that is apparently about Big Oil and the people behind Big Oil. Hollywood on Big Oil? No sale. Canceled the ad as a matter of course.
Streaming Killed The Video Star.
“They were always liberal, often communist, but generally managed at least to be subtle enough about it to make a buck.”
Your comment reminds me of one of my favorite old movies—”Seconds”, an old black and white movie which starred Rock Hudson.
The movie was designed to be Commie propaganda—but it was subtle and clever—even brilliant.
The average viewer would not be see anything political in the movie—it was all done with stunning photography and writing and directing—no preaching at all.
It was a true work of art—preview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqJZE-AY9uQ
(spoiler alerts)
The Commie propaganda concept was that the “corporate machine” viewed humans as “meat” to be consumed—the film used images of meat trucks and the evil man greedily consuming chicken while recruiting Rock Hudson to deliver the message.
My 13 yr old son watches no TV, of his own volition. Same with the rest of his friends. No interest whatsoever.
They're doomed by their own hand. They decided to mimic the television strategy of Least Offensive Programming (LOP) that had been around since the 1940s and make bland, mass-produced garbage. As the medium declined they then decided to fill it with Leftist propaganda.
Hollywood is just returning to their roots where actors and actresses were looked at as just slightly above prostitutes.
All of the steaming services with the exception of Netflix and possible Amazon are bleeding money. Disney + alone has lost $13 Billion since it started in 2019 and cannot get any traction to grow and add subscribers, in fact they are losing them in droves.
One of the sticking point in the WGA-SAG strike is residual payments, well without Ad revenue there is no extra money for those payments. So expect all of the Steaming Services to go to AD based platforms to some degree, which there will be a subscription fee or you can get a premium level for no Ads.
There is very little public sympathy for this strike and no one seems to really care. WGA has a terrible negotiating team right now and have no idea what they are doing and they have no Strike Fund to speak of. The Studios are now in the position of being able to cancel a number of projects as well as a lot of expensive production contracts and Deals with actors to save money.
The Rock just lost a lucrative production deal at one studio and Disney is cutting back right and left to save itself.
Hollywood is probably going to fundamentally change and maybe for the better. The DEI and Woke thinking is destroying them. Even the Comic books film are now failing on a massive scale. All of the studios are losing money especially Disney and Warner Brothers.
Actually it’s a large pool of untalented writers and only a small number of really talented ones. One of the sticking points in the WGA strike is they want a minimum number of writers fora show at a set price of around $15,000 a week, which means out of 8 people in the room only 2 are worth a damn and producing all the content while the other 6 collect a paycheck for goofing off. This was really illustrated well in the TV show 30 Rock.
One movie, and the one movie everyone acknowledges was a turd. Now that overwrought overwriting turdship of "No Time To Die" is a prime example of Hollyweird's internal failures in this century.
That picture was doomed from the start: Craig genuinely did not want to make it because the original script did not have him dying. Then when Barbara greenlighted his death, writer-director Danny Boyle (who would have been brilliant), said, F it.
Then it was in the can for release at what turned out to be prime pandemic time, and postponed twice from there, with much talk about reshooting the designer genetic virus plot. In the end they took it in the teeth.
Also in the original script, Bond was going to bed both the Cuban Paloma and 700 lbs of "Nomi"s big booty.
Even though Bond did not screw around during NTTD, during the story arc of Bond's initial liason with Madeline Swann in Spectre and their canon off-on relationship with what turned out to be the mother of his child in NTTD, he cheated on her at least 3 times.
Finally, Lazenby only had one extremely brief dalliance in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and instead the focus was on his courtship and marrying Diana Rigg.
“Actually it’s a large pool of untalented writers and only a small number of really talented ones”
Yeah—the raw stupidity of the Reddit posters supports what you are saying.
They just want a pay check—will spew out whatever leftist talking points are required to make that happen.
At this point most of them should be replaced by AI—garbage in, garbage out—garbage all the way down....
It was a piece of crap. The movie didn't make sense. Bond became woke. And then he died.
Maybe the best part of the movie was that he died at the end.
You can find free movies on tubitv.com with minimal ads (unlike You Tube with their ad overload).
“and some movies (such as Spider-Man: No Way Home and Top Gun: Maverick) had explosive success”
Side note: The entire climax of Top Gun: Maveric was exaclty the entire climax of Star Wars: A New Hope with a more diverse cast.
It's the opposite; people don't want to know what their coworkers are watching because it's too disturbing. At the same time, the workplace is full of snowflakes who get triggered by everything and run to HR about anything.
Sportsball was a "safe" watercooler subject for many but once that went woke, fewer viewers tune in.
It's been decades since the trend started to not share anything about movies or television at work. I think the television show 'Friends' was the nail in the coffin because people were so disappointed in their coworkers who watched it and treated it as a pseudo-social circle.
As for movies, once Hollywood producers had the secondary video market to fall back on, they really started generating trash. The financial package of making a movie to make the sequels, regardless of how bad they were, also led to lower quality productions. By the 1990s, Hollywood was clearly desperate.
Taking 80s action heros and making them clowns:
Kindergarten Cop 1990
Stop or My Mom Will Shoot 1992
Last Action Hero 1993
Judge Dredd 1995
Jingle All the Way 1996
Twins 1998
Getting so desperate to go with amateurs:
Clerks 1995
Mallrats 1995
Friday 1995
The Jerky Boys: The Movie 1995
Making low-budget sequels in a desperate attempt to cash in anything:
Rocky V
RoboCop II 1990
RoboCop III 1993
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III 1993
Beverly Hills Cop III 1994
Batman and Robin 1997
Blues Brothers 2000 1998
Addams Family Reunion 1998
Universal Soldier: The Return 1999
Trying to recycle cartoons and make a movie that should have been an animation and gone directly to video:
Dick Tracy 1990
Dennis The Menace 1993
The Flintstones 1994
Casper 1995
George of the Jungle 1997
Inspector Gadget 1999
After running out of cartoons, the producers switched to making movies from comic books in the 2000s and 2010s with the same level of garbage output.
Hollywood can slip into a timeless coma per my opinion. If I crave movies, I find that scrolling through all the available streaming services offers thousands of possibilities, much more than a lifetime of constant watching can realize.
I see the strike and failure in Hollywood in terms of individual faces of so many of the execrable life forms there, like perlman, messing, deniro, sarandon, reiner, etc, and take solace therein.
The problem with Hollywood is that it *is* Hollywood. You meet three kinds of people there: those who grew up in the industry (i.e., Carl Reiner) and don’t realize what a weird little bubble of alternate alien reality it is; those who have some moral principles and basic human decency (i.e., Kevin Sorbo) and are keeping their mouths shut about the madness around them because they want to keep their jobs (but they generally don’t last very long); and then enormous numbers of people who have migrated *to* Hollywood, because they hate the town they came from, they hate the schools they attended, they hate their parents for making them go to church, and they see Hollywood as the place where they can express all that hate and get back at everyone they despise.
Hollywood is full of people whose hearts are full of hate. Just listen to what they say when they’re being themselves and not reading a script.
“All of the steaming services with the exception of Netflix and possible Amazon are bleeding money.”
I was expecting to have access to thousands of movies at any time. Instead, they have a few dozen available at one time. Really a ripoff when you consider the only overhead is data storage and server capacity.
The last time I went to a movie theater was in 2007 when I took my then 12 year old son to see the first Transformers movie and back in the mid 90s I took my daughter to see The Santa Clause and The Lion King. Before that was in the late 80s when my wife and I did a “double date” with a best friend and his girlfriend.
Since 1981 I have seen nine movies in a theater and have no wish to see another at any theater. Since I lived that life and thus see no need to hurry I’ll just pick up a copy of Oppenheimer when it is on Blue Ray, used, on EBay.
There is nothing that Hollywood produces that is compelling enough for me to go see. There are no more actual movie stars other than two or three who have done pretty well. They are now the worst, most pathetic, human beings on the planet and have zero acting skills and the writing and scripts are horrible. They have resorted, until the Me Too crap, to flagrant nudity, gore, and CGI when the old movies used good writing and acting skills to convey the same.
No longer is a script and the actors good enough to insinuate a sex scene without any nudity or graphic details. Now they have to show everything to keep the viewers in their seats as the script and acting are worthless. They use CGI to create monsters when a good script would create the monster in your mind, which is scarier than anything they can come up with themselves.
They have also resorted to no more than dredging up comics (I have always hated comics) and using CGI to create a mess of a film instead of finding grown-up themes in which to deal. Since they no longer have the ability to think they just create a remake of a hit then wonder why it failed miserably.
Hollywood can go take a flying leap. Oh, it looks as if they already have.
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