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George Lucas Predicts Death of Big Budget Movies
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Mar 06, 2006 10:10 AM
from the the-death-kneel-is-coming dept.
from the the-death-kneel-is-coming dept.
H_Fisher writes "Before the red carpet had cooled at last night's Academy Awards, George Lucas told the New York Daily News that big-budget movies will soon be history. From the article: "'The market forces that exist today make it unrealistic to spend $200 million on a movie,' said Lucas, a near-billionaire from his feverishly franchised outer-space epics. 'Those movies can't make their money back anymore. Look at what happened with King Kong.'" Lucas' prediction: "In the future, almost everything that gets shown in theaters will be indie movies ... I predict that by 2025 the average movie will cost only $15 million.""
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George Lucas Predicts Death of Big Budget Movies
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George Lucas is wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.unanimocracy.com/about.html | Last Journal: Tuesday April 04 2006, @12:04PM)
The problems I have with today's movies are:
1. More effects than plot/storyline
2. Hollywood unions controlling costs
3. Acting unions keeping the status quo too long
4. Economic pressures keeping people in their homes
5. New distribution mechanisms breaking down the cartels
In terms of plot, the average Hollywood movie is regurgitated from previous stories -- they even keep the title nowadays! I've seen great low budget movies with new twists and turns, but with lower production quality. My recent trip to Asia and Europe for the past 3 weeks showed me 3 foreign flick that were surprisingly good -- I even suspended disbelief for 2 of them.
The unions in Hollywood are notorious for continuing their blacklist and favoritism controls -- keeping costs high and quality low. In order to distribute a movie in the States, you have to be part of the union's preferred cartels. If you attempt to make a movie outside of their control, you'll generally not see wide distribution. Copyright at its finest, here.
For those who are familiar with my typical rants and raves on Slashdot, this post isn't much different. I'm the sole anti-copyright activist in most threads, and it doesn't hurt me to see copyright failing Hollywood after decades of them abusing their power. The Internet will slowly (or quickly) bring the distribution cartels down, and I can't wait to see what powers come to the artists willing to give up control of their work once it leaves their hands. Money is still there to be made, we just need to find new ways to sell our art without using the force of government to back our profits up.
On the economic pressure side, the usual enemy to movie theatres is gas pricing. I disagree -- gas prices in my home are not up much once you factor in inflation over the past 15 years. Greenspan did this country a huge disservice with his inflationary system -- making the cost of living go up much faster than our wages did. I believe the average home is poorer today than it was 10 and 20 years ago -- when you look at the cost of entertainment versus the available disposable income, you can see why entertainment is failing. Pile on huge consumer debt levels, and most families can't just Charge It! any longer.
In the long run, I see great benefit in the Internet is bringing the average consumer a new level of selection. The victor in this is the consumer -- and those who find new ways to bring art from the artist to the purveyor. I'm looking at all the options myself, as I don't really see much reason to support those (ie, Hollywood) who stole from me over the decades I've lived. I'd rather go see a local theatre production (where the actors and support staff get paid through real ongoing work) than make a millionaire out of someone who acted once and believes they have the right to continue to make an income without making actual repeated work.
George Lucas might be right that Big Budget Movies are dying -- but I think he needs to check his premises. It isn't the consumer that doesn't want to spend money, it is those who have controlled and manipulated the market that have lost the ability to continue their deceit and their monopoly. Information doesn't want to be free, the law of supply and demand just dictates that it will eventually be free in a digital world. There are still billions of people on this planet who will pay for good content, and I'd love to be one of the guys who finds a way to connect the supply with the demand in a profitable way.
Haven't bought a movie in years. (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday December 20 2006, @03:29PM)
Hollywood just doesn't make content for me anymore, so I will gleefully watch its demise.
Being a major book geek, movies tend to be weak sauce compared to a good novel anyway.
But it's more fun to watch a movie drunk than to read a book.
No even need to buy, just borrow (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No even need to buy, just borrow (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Haven't bought a movie in years. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:George Lucas is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
in 20 years, if almost everyone has a decent home theatre and a lot of internet bandwidth, these guys will have become irrelevant.
Re:George Lucas is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.unanimocracy.com/about.html | Last Journal: Tuesday April 04 2006, @12:04PM)
While a succinct and true response, your reply is more important than many might realize.
Copyright has given monopoly cartel power to a group of people who are now ready to fight to keep it. In 20 years there is a bigger chance of the Internet being controlled by DRM and the cartels than the chance of true freedom. I can only hope that the geeks and hackers find new ways to work around any regulations that we will likely see in the coming years.
My big fear in the BBS days was copy controls, but they were always worked around. Now I still have those fears, and when the hardware supports the controls, we have to work extra hard to make sure we have work arounds. It's funny how many pro-government geeks are on slashdot who support the work arounds that give us power over the cartel monopolies who get their power from the government.
But copyright only lets you horde (Score:4, Interesting)
The thing is that over-restrictive copyright simply lets holders horde media and ideas. But it does not stop new ideas, which simply cannot use existing popular media as a base as they were able to in the past (like Disney using classic fairy tales).
So what it does is punish those companies who lack creativity (like, ironically, Disney - though with Pixar they bought creativity once more) but those companies that actually are creative and able to come up with new ideas are actually rewarded more than they would have been in the past, because there is less competition in the space of the truly original work. Pixar is an example of this, where they were successful because of how creative they were but that success was increased by the mediocrity all around them, as other companies worked for years to cross-licence something that was popular last decade.
I don't really mind longer copyright because I know it will correct itself at some point and kind of become irrelevant in the face of smaller groups able to deliver high-quality media content with far less money. I just feel sorry for kids today that will have a whole media heritage from their childhood locked in a vault guarded by dying compnaies that cannot undserstand how they are killing themselves.
Re:George Lucas is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.kibbee.ca/)
I believe that people just want to have much more stuff than they did before. 20 years ago, very few people had Computers, nobody had cell phones, thed had 1 phone for the entire house. They didn't have cable tv, and they had small 13 inch tv's. Now people have cable, and giant 60 inch TVs. You can't expect that to cost the same amount. Cars have also come a long way. A car 20 years ago is much less than what most cars are now. Entertainment is the same. Movies now are much more than what they were 20 years ago. You aren't getting the same product. You're really comparing apples to oranges in this case. Would the average american want to watch a black and white movie, where you can see the strings, and there's only 6 actors, and the director/producer/editor/cameraman/lighting tech/lead actor is all the same person?
Re:George Lucas is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.unanimocracy.com/about.html | Last Journal: Tuesday April 04 2006, @12:04PM)
This is one of the 3 important rules of the Austrian economist "time preference" theories -- we all want more rather than less.
The great thing about what we have is that the free market has provided growth every step of the way. The bad thing about what we have is that it is mostly owned by foreigners that have loaned us the dollars we needed over the past 10 years.
Americans have much less real money now than any time in US history. Our ability to keep buying and overspending will likely be greatly reduced in coming years, much to the surprise of the average citizen who never realized they really own nothing but debt.
Re:George Lucas is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Think back to around 1991- dialup access was absurdly slow and ridiculously expensive, a decent computer would cost ya more than 3 grand. Cars were about the same price, but had fewer gizmos and creature comforts. If you wanted a cd of music, you had to fork over the $10 or $15 (No cd burners or emusic or piracy). If people have less real money now then then, it isn't for stuff getting more expensive, it is for their own stupidity, unwillingness to live within their means, and appetite for massive amounts of debt.
Re:George Lucas is wrong (Score:4, Funny)
Sounds like porn flicks, except you have too many actors and they're color because color doesn't cost extra anymore.
Re:George Lucas is wrong (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.elflord.net/ | Last Journal: Monday March 19 2007, @10:35AM)
Fact: since 1980, the average salary of a US citizen has risen from 15,757 to 41,400 (162% increase over 100%)
Conclusion: in the last 26 years, the average buying power of an American citizen has increased by roughly 3.1%
Doing good, folks. Lets see if we can't make it 6% in another quarter-century.
Re:George Lucas is wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://members.shaw.ca/tsmit/index.html | Last Journal: Friday September 21, @08:24AM)
Sounds like Clerks... It was the best thing to hit the big screen in a long time, for a lot of reasons. With the advances in CG animation and home production software, there is no reason a small studio or group of individuals couldn't put together a movie that challenges the big guys on either the storyline or effects fronts - unless you assume that quantity will always outweigh quality.
Re:George Lucas is wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Wait - what? I'd say 75% of slashdot is anti-copyright, 50% of it anti-patent, and 90% anti-software-patent. Your threads must be small.
Re:George Lucas is wrong (Score:4, Funny)
(http://papasian.org/)
What's more troubling is that 4 out of 3 people don't understand statistics.
one long post deserves another (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.fishdan.com/ | Last Journal: Monday April 16 2007, @02:26PM)
And the theater environment is rapidly losing it's appeal for me -- I'd MUCH rather watch a movie at home on my projector than in a theater with people who can't keep quiet during a movie, can't keep their cellphones off inspite of all the warnings and can't control their bladders for 90 mins. So, for me, the incentive to find a version of a movie that I can watch at home has little to do with $$$ and much to do with convenience. And (imho) that's going to be true for everyone as home entertainment centers become cheaper and better. It used to be that there was something to going to the theater for the big screen experience. With that going away, I can't see people really interested in the cinema much at all. Someone let me know if they think people will still be "going" to the movies in 25 years in Japan or the US.
So with the Cinema viewers prefering to watch at home, home distribution is the wave of the future -- and I agree with you again, that will lead to inevitable copyright infringement. So, there's really a window of opportunity for the creators of a film to make money. In the first weeks of a movie's life -- they'll have the best version of it, and that's their chance to make money on it -- as you said, supply and demand. It will eventually be cracked though, and then they'll have to compete against the crack -- agani supply and demand. Certainly the studios will find ways to monetize their product -- that's what they do best -- but if the end sum figure is going to be what a movie can make in a competetive market -- people will not be willing to invest big $$$. These movies have these huge budgets because they have a hope of return on nivestment. Without that hope, the investments will go away, and with them the big budgets.
Fortunately for Hollywood, there are easy places to trim costs. Salaries are crazy, as you mentioned. The entertainment unions are going to be broken because the studios will have to break them. And there will be no more $30M paydays for an actor for one movie. Which is fine by me -- once again, it's supply and demand.
Re:one long post deserves another (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://rowell.info/ | Last Journal: Friday April 25 2003, @02:17PM)
On the flip side I work from home, and my home theater is in my basement. I've only seen two movies at the cinema in the last six months, but I've probably watched fifty movies in the time (thanks to Netflix
I'd say your stereotype of home theatre owners being anti-social is way off base. In fact of the five or six people I know that have a home theater, I wouldn't categorize any of them that way.
Re:George Lucas is wrong (Score:5, Funny)
I'm hoping for invisibility and x-ray vision.
Re:George Lucas is wrong (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Friday March 31 2006, @10:51PM)
Lucas: Well, I think what we need to do here is blah blah blah excrement blah
Lucas' Aide: That's a great idea, sir
Lucas' Aide, internal monologue: JAR JAR FUCKING BINKS!
Lucas: Yes, I know. Furthur, blah blah Howard Duck blah blah
Lucas' Aide: Great, I'll take this to the ILM team
--
ILM Team: Yes?
Lucas' Aide: Here's the latest from George: blah blah Howard Duck blah
ILM Team: JAR JAR FUCKING BINKS!
Lucas' Aide:
ILM Team: Er, nothing.
See also: Howard Dean
Re:George Lucas is wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
Art is about emotion.
No one really gave a damn about any other character.
There wasn't any character conflict with any other character.
The dinner scene where jar jar irritated leem nielson was about the only character conflict in the entire movie (and revealed more about the jedi master's character than any other scene in the movie).
No one really cares about the other characters in the movie but they all have an opinion on Jarjar. So I say most annoying AND the best character after palpatine in all three movies.
Re:George Lucas is wrong (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Friday March 31 2006, @10:51PM)
See? There it is! Right there! That's the point where I stopped caring what you think; Reductio ad Jar Jar.
Hollywood wants to give you what you want, not lie (Score:5, Insightful)
It saddens us when this is something we personally like (Firefly, Arrested Development, Furturama, etc), but the average consumer is showing Hollywood that the current crap story, ton of CG, big-budget approach isn't profitable. Thus it will not be funded unless it is profitable.
No one can predict with perfect certainty whether or not something will be well-done and a success. Lucas's recent works were shit, but the original SW trilogy were very successful and critically acclaimed; Hollywood funded Lucas's new efforts because they want to give people what they want and what sells! Not because they want to force crap on you.
Movies in theaters are indeed gouging in a way, but the costs of showing a movie in a theater have also increased dramatically. Carmike Cinemas has struggled financially for a very long time, believe it or not but owning large buildings in an urban area, licensing the content, and upgrading to the newest AV technologies over and over again is quite expensive. Movie theaters are expensive but it is not a high-profit ripoff scam business, the costs are expensive as well. I hope this will diminish in favor of the home theater and other distrubution methods. The economics here are failing.
In the future Hollywood will continue to try to give you what you want. Pay money for movies you think are excellent and you want to see more of, and support them. Don't support crap. Hollywood is very responsive to economics.
There will always be crap, because not even the people funding the movies can predict how they're going to turn out; they can only read the proposals and evaluate the past performance of the people making them. But they have a larger stake than you or I do in wanting to make sure they succeed. Sometimes this is underhanded, such as not showing a screening for critics with the recent "Ultraviolet" as they realized how much the end product sucked. But the movie industry never wanted it to get to that point, they want to make things that are epic and successful-- after all, that's the most profitable.
Big budget movies will never die, because of this. The investors and production companies will put their resources into maximizing their profits, and most of them really do love film and want to do make great movies. They gamble with the knowledge and dreams they have, they will always lose and win. Avoid the losers and support the winners, and this helps things evolve in the future.
And hey, I don't think Hollywood is abusing their power either. DVDs are great; a high quality version of a movie that even has a great viewing experience on a $20 player. Most of them cost less than music CDs and have a lot of bonus content. Sure, DVDs use CSS, but there's nothing wrong with wanting to protect your content and livelihood either.
Entertainment costs are down, down, down. Electronics are cheaper than ever, and getting the content legally-- via DVD, or new services like NetFlix make movie watching a better experience than in the VHS days, and a more economical one. TVs have dropped in price by almost half since the 80s due to improvements in cost production, and a DVD player costs maybe 20% of what a VCR once did. DVDs cost barely more than VHS tapes used to-- they go up less than inflation. And you can buy older DVDs for less than $5!
Hollywood has stolen nothing. They lose more than you do when a movie sucks. I don't ask you support bad content, but I ask that you do consider supporting things you want to see more of. I recently paid ~$80 for Seasons 1 and 2.0 of Battlestar Galactica, not because I hadn't already downloaded the bittorrents, but because I want to support good content and share it with others.
2025 is a long way off... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:2025 is a long way off... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.nps.gov/c...reation/ohioerie.htm)
Re:2025 is a long way off... (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Saturday January 06 2007, @01:13AM)
If you're are one of the owners of the companies that take huge chunks from the 90 million dollars, it's obviously which is better. Doh.
You get USD90 million from someone else/investors. Pump that into your companies or companies owned by your cronies (marketing, distribution, merchandising, effects, consultants, legal, etc). Who cares if the movie loses money, or makes very little?
Naturally you try to adjust stuff so that the investors grumble but still make enough money on _average_ to keep coming back.
From time to time if stuff don't go quite as planned, you can just blame piracy, P2P etc.
Re:2025 is a long way off... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://timgray.blogspot.com/)
Hollywood uses a very strange accounting system. No movie in history ever made a profit. No matter how much a movie will Gross it will never exceed the expenses for that film. I know. Several friends had been promised "Net points" on a hollywood film they worked on. They never made a dime (Look at Stan Lee they tried that crap on him as well!) while the few like the director were given "Gross Points" and made their millions. After everyone is paid the rest of the money goes into paying the Gross points and other incidentals so that no movie ever makes a net profit.
This has been this way forever in Hollywood.
Secondly most hit movies lately have been indie films bought and then re-made These are the ones that people actually talk about, buy the DVD, and reccomend others to see. Most of the big budget films do not get the re-viewings or reccomendations from people to their friends.
Hollywood accounting tricks (Score:4, Interesting)
Is it just me, or do you get the impression that the mob has easier to follow bookkeeping than a lot of corporate America today?
Re:2025 is a long way off... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://paul-mclaughlin.com/)
Re:Yeah, but CGI is hear and now... (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://mp3bat.com/)
But could you even do Spider Man or X-Men in 1985 with 10 times their budget? The only reason those films worked under their current budgets was CGI.
CGI still costs an arm and a leg, but its not as costly as it was with Terminator 2.
Frankly, CGI will continue to improve until we can't tell a difference between it and real life (I think we have reached that point in some aspects) but will simply drop in price over time.
Eventually, machina-esque movie making will come out of a the box much like Sims Movie Maker program. The price in CGI will go down since all props will have already been rendered and with faster and more powerful cpus the rendering time will be pretty nihl to what you need to do a full length movie now.
Heck, an indie film maker might be able to pull off a movie without a 3d effects or 3d modeler artist if he can buy a "pre-canned" package. After all... Once the human mind can't tell the difference between a live actor and a computer generated one, you don't have to re-create that model over and over again from scratch. Just sell the model and let the indie director style it with a gui interface out of box.
I predict... (Score:3, Funny)
Mod parent up (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's what a great deal of movies have been lately. Barely tolerable, stupid plots, that are not good stories and certainly would not stand on their own merit independant of medium, where infusions of cash, breasts, and CG try to make up for this. But in the end, all you get is a really expensive, bad movie, with a few tit shots. Putting the female lead on a trampoline, or just saying fuck it and turning it into a porno would probably be better at that point.
Indie movies don't necessarily have good plots, either. I've seen some pretty bad indie movies lately. Open Water, and the stupid one about the "death" tunnel or whatever were both distinctly worse than porn. In the end, it's all about the story, moreso than anything else. Film techniques and dynamics such as acting, direction etc are important as well, but second to the story.
Want my money? Tell me a good story. Then we'll worry about the CG and breasts. If I just want the latter without a story, I'll get a video game or porn.
$15 Million (Score:3, Interesting)
Star Wars rules... but Lucas is a moron (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.slashdot.org/~ExE122 | Last Journal: Friday September 22 2006, @09:47AM)
Look at what happened with 'King Kong.'
The problem isn't the budget, its the lack of creativity. 'King Kong' is not a new movie, it is a remake of the 1933 RKO classic. Other big budget films: The Fog, The Nutty Professor, The Exorcist, Charlie's Angels, The Incredible Hulk, X-Men, Spiderman, Day of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead, The Shaggy Dog, The Pink Panther, etc, etc, etc... And lets not even get started on sequels that should've never been made! (Anything that makes over 200m these days is just about guaranteed a sequel, whether is should have one or not)I took a History of Film class in college, and I remember learning about how "lulls" are often preceded by an abundance of recycled plot lines. The mainstream has run out of creative writers. Just about everything is a remake of something that's already been made. That's why independent, low budget films have become more popular. They are more likely to substitute a lack of special effects and big-name, no-talent casts with well developed plot-lines, creative stories, and some damn good acting.
This isn't even that big of an issue in all honesty. The big budget industries are complaining because they're only making an average of $250 million instead of $350 per crappy-remake-of-an-old-tv-show movies. They will go on spoon-feeding shit to the masses and having them eat it with a big grin on their face.
Re:Star Wars rules... but Lucas is a moron (Score:5, Funny)
As opposed to being a remake of something that hasn't been made before?