Hollywood's Bad Summer Movies Are Driving a Decline in Movie Ticket Sales (fastcompany.com) 245
An anonymous reader shares a report: While some people may point at The Emoji Movie as the root of all that is wrong with Hollywood, The Wall Street Journal reports that the problem goes much deeper than a single misfire featuring Patrick Stewart as a poop emoji. WSJ reports that movie attendance has dropped by 5%, compared with the same period in 2016, and revenues are down, too, dipping just 2.9%, thanks to higher ticket prices making up for the lack of ticket sales. On Aug. 2, AMC shares dropped 27% in one day, the WSJ reports. While films like Beauty and the Beast, Wonder Woman, and Get Out fared well at the box office, they were the anomalies in a year full of box office disappointments. Instead of giving moviegoers more badass female leads and genre-bending horror films, Hollywood keeps throwing gobs of money at an unwanted fifth installment of Pirates of the Caribbean, more Transformers movies, and putting $175 million into King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, and then clutching their pearls in shock that no one wanted to see them.
Speaking just for me (Score:5, Insightful)
I simply can't divorce Hollywood from it's politics. I can't just go and enjoy a movie anymore. They insist on injecting their dogmas on to me. Before the movie I see nothing but politics from the actors, telling me how awful a person I am. During the movie it's an endless barrage of extremism masked as social justice.
Making things worse, they want me to "enjoy" this in a shitty movie theater surrounded by loud people that can't put their cellphones away. All for the low low price of 15 bucks a person not including the 25 bucks in terrible food.
Pretty rare these days too that a movie isn't a sequel or prequel or sidequel in some "franchise" that sucked from the start but brought in a lot of teenagers so the stiffs in suits thought it would make sense to throw billions of dollars at it.
I jokingly said to my wife the other night that there wasn't even anything I wanted to pirate anymore, it's just gotten that bad.
Re:Speaking just for me (Score:5, Funny)
Translation: "I can't believe Star Wars cast a woman in a leading role and didn't show off her tiddies."
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Re:Speaking just for me (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's be honest, the only reason of Carry Fisher's success was the bikini scene RofJ, not the depth of the Princess Leia.
So was Mark Hamill's success a result of his brilliant acting or did he have a shirtless scene I forgot about?
Let's be honest, Carry Fisher and Mark Hamill were both decent performers who achieved fame beyond their talent because they were well cast in a massively successful movie.
To insist that Carry Fisher's success was only because of her bikini scene is the definition of sexism.
Re: Speaking just for me (Score:2)
Star Wars was a shit movie. Devoid of any artistic merit, marketed very well.
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Which star wars movie, the crappy Jar Jar Abrams shit story fest or Rogue One which I regret not seeing at the Cinema because I was expecting another Jar Jar shitfest (the only thing wrong with rogue one was the ending, I like to see the good gals and guys live happily ever after). You know what is easy to pick what comes out of hollywood, the nepotistic shit fests and content produced by actually creative people, who earned their positions.
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There was a lot more wrong with Rogue One than the ending.
1. The intro was way too goddamned long and would have been screentime spent much better elsewhere.
2. The whole mindbreaking alien bit should have been scrapped altogether and the pilot just made either a coward or someone with massive amounts of PTSD, or it should have been properly fleshed out and the pilot been truly crazy.
3. The one Vader joke was way too goddamned forced and OOC.
4. The romance subplot was pathetic.
5. The ending scene on the plan
Re:Speaking just for me (Score:5, Insightful)
You watched Star Wars and that's what you came away with?
You might have bigger problems than the SJWs, my friend.
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You might have bigger problems than the SJWs, my friend.
Yes, like a lack of titties in movies.
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I can't even tell if there's a mention of SWM Harrison Ford risking his life and dying in that comment.
There's a lot of coded acronyms I don't know, and I probably should because I'm a SWM that didn't notice only SWM were dying. There was an entire planet that died and I'm sure not everyone in plastic was a SWM.
This is confusing.
Re:Speaking just for me (Score:4, Insightful)
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The only people politicizing content are the insufferable dummy spitters who flip out everytime they put a woman or a black guy in a film
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Slashdot is about 75% conservative whining. Are you new?
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Don't get me started on The Dark Tower. First of all, PG-13? Sorry, but Steven King movies don't work at PG-13. Secondly, Christopher Heyerdhal would have been VASTLY superior to Matthew McConaughey at his best as The Man in Black. The performance that the neophyte director got out of him was decidedly not his best and whoever did character design needs to be shot. There's a reason Hollywood has makeup artists and he should have been much more disturbing to look at. It would have needed to be over two, two
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Both Leia and Padme show copious cleavage, which is tiddy enough for incel MRAs.
Re:Speaking just for me (Score:4, Insightful)
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You do have to watch Transformers - The Movie, however.
It's the only good one and it came out 30 years ago.
It's got an incredible voice cast, from an era when no established actor would touch an animated film with a 10 foot clown pole.
Not only do you get the iconic Peter Cullen and Frank Welker, you also get the likes of Casey Kasem, Eric Idle, Judd Nelson, Leonard Nimoy, and Robert Stack. You even get Scatman Crothers and one of the final performances from Orson Welles.
Then you've got the sound track that
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It's the only good one and it came out 30 years ago.
When everyone else was watching Transformers in the 1980's, I was watching Captain Harlock, Robotech and Starblazers,
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Weird. What horrible politics and dogma are you running into?
I agree that seeing X-Men episode 27 or Star Wars prequel 12 doesn't do it for me.
Re:Speaking just for me (Score:4, Insightful)
I simply can't divorce Hollywood from it's politics. I can't just go and enjoy a movie anymore. They insist on injecting their dogmas on to me
That's your problem, I suggest seeing a therapist about these kinds of paranoid delusions. Your white privilege is as safe as it ever was. Hollywood only has one dogma, that is to make money. The problem Hollywood has is that movies are no longer the only game in town. I'm not just talking about TV and Netflix, video games are now a significant form of entertainment amongst most people. Hollywood for so many decades never had any competition, they were able to keep a stranglehold on the production and distribution of the majority of entertainment, the internet has largely ruined this for them with games and streaming services taking over the production and piracy dealing with the distribution. Hollywood has simply not changed with new technologies. They're still stuck in the 80's when we had no other choice but to buy their crap (and I remember the 80's... they made some shit movies).
I jokingly said to my wife the other night that there wasn't even anything I wanted to pirate anymore, it's just gotten that bad.
Could she hear you from the kitchen, or was this when you put her shoes back in the drawer.
Your problem isn't the imaginary "dogmas", your problem is they aren't pandering to you, ironically its because you're even further behind the times than Hollywood.
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Don't eat in theaters and go during morning hours. That is how I save money and avoid the crowds. :)
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Here's a thought - find a cinema that *doesn't* show all-hollywood stuff. There's plenty of thoughtful films coming from europe and asia - plenty of trash, too, but you can always try reading some online reviews to determine whether you're going to see something clever and funny from france or italy or S.korea, or another ear-piercing bollywood musical rom-com.
Apropos of the discussion - what's *your* idea of an entertaining film? Do you like drama, comedy, thrillers, "true stories", romance, noir, sci-fi,
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It's means it is.
It's been nice proving you wrong!
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The "leftists" in Hollywood are just the loud ones.
That's pretty much what he said.
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Technically, Logan would be considered a parent of Laura so she would have American citizenship (or Canadian if Logan never got American citizenship).
Sequels and remakes (Score:5, Insightful)
I couldn't believe they did another "Flatliners".
When we watched the previews a few weeks ago we saw this as well as 4 (yes, FOUR) remakes of previous movies.
Hollywood deserves to go broke if this is all they can come up with.
If I see another comic book movie, I'm gonna puke.
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It's a side effect of all the studios being publicly held companies. They become completely risk adverse to anything that doesn't look like what worked the last time. Restaurants, retail shops, banks, airlines are all selling the same product in the same way because "the shareholders" (mostly institutional investors, the only ones who get an audience with the CEO) don't know anything about the business, other than what company X's earnings statement looked like last quarter, and so if you want the fund mana
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Nothing new under the sun (Score:2)
We're just getting way past the saturation point with entertainment and stories of every kind. We need a break, and then afterward we can go back to telling and hearing the same old tales again, just as our ancestors have done for millennia. Maybe we could even do something useful for a while. I have even been thinking about cutting the cord on my Netflix subscription... ...and I'm not any kind of anti-TV nutter.
Re:Nothing new under the sun (Score:4, Insightful)
When did our ancestors take a "break" from telling stories?
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Sorry, I did not intend to say they did. We need the break, because of our modern luxuries and capabilities which allow us to overload ourselves with media. Our ancestors were naturally limited by lack of time and technology for such things. Though at times (e.g. Roman), they may have come close.
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I don't know. Maybe you're right.
I'm thinking about how for tens of thousands of years our ancestors would spend their evenings with nothing to do but look up at the stars. They told thousands upon thousands of stories just based on those little lights in the sky. Th
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Absolutely disagree. There are lots of great scripts out there, but Hollywood is run by accountants now. The reason they keep recycling old hits is because they think there's a baked in market. There's a baked in comic movie fanbase who'll go watch any shitstorm Marvel churns out regardless of the ratings, they'll tell us how great it was until the slow realization that it sucked sinks in right aroudn the time the next promo starts airing.
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Yes, there are tons of great scripts, and if you look at the television and streaming landscapes, plenty of them are already there. I'm not making the "lack of quality" argument, I'm saying that with the fragmentation and proliferation that's been happening, we basically want for nothing. And if you think your particular fringe taste is not being met, you only need to look closer, or wait a few months. I have heard some commentators call it another "Golden Age". But nothing out there expands my mind lik
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Except that the vast majority of recent comic book properties, especially those by Marvel, have fared very well with both critics and viewers when taking into account ratings. It turns out that on average, "tentpole" movies that have good ratings do very well. Movies like Transformers do initially well, and then plummet, for one simple reason...they suck.
Not all movies (Score:4, Informative)
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For years literal Nazis didn't round up people and slaughter them en mass. What they did first was destroy the young system of democracy and any kind of factual public discourse. And of course, they did demonize the Jews, prepping society for what was to come.
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<sarcasm> Thanks for preserving the lie. <\sarcasm>
Big, intrusive government is left wing. There is no fundamental difference between fascism and communism, they are both based on denying individual rights.
Small government, government which respects individual rights, is right wing.
when hollaring "Freedom!" rings hollow (Score:2)
As it happens, I've read an intelligent comment on this matter before, right here on Slashdot. It was not yours.
guises [slashdot.org] — December 2016
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...are you fucking stupid?
I guess you're not a fan of Japanese kaiju [wikipedia.org] movies, where suspense is built up by not revealing the monster until the very last possible moment. The most famous example, of course, was Gojira (Godzilla) [amzn.to]. For the American Godzilla (2014) [amzn.to], the bad monsters were shown early but Godzilla wasn't fully revealed until last one-third of the movie. Cloverfield [amzn.to] was an epic disappointment when they revealed the monster. The early Dunkirk trailers had the promise of being an epic monster movie.
Small wonder (Score:3)
" WSJ reports that movie attendance has dropped by 5%, "
If I want to see teenies checking their smartphone I just take a look on the sidewalk, no need to go to a movie theater.
Public Service Announcement (Score:2)
Baby Driver is good.
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But the year so far has seen a rather poor harvest of movies. Dunkirk was pretty decent. But they even manag
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You think they just now screwed up the Alien franchise?
There was one good alien movie, one OK, the rest just suck big wet acid dripping alien balls.
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Two.
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One _really_ good one. One that was OK. I might like 'Aliens', it it wasn't for 'Alien' setting such a high bar. Should have left it alone. But Hollywood...
The ones I feel for are the kids that see 'Alien' last, or any other order than first. 'Alien' after 'Alien vs Predator XXXIV'? They don't even show you the alien until 2/3 of the movie is gone, just ruint.
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Two really good ones if you include the director's cut of Aliens.
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A good cut of Alien 3? How long is it? 30 seconds?
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I don't have a problem with that, actually. But I can see how some people might.
It's like the guy who complained about the entire Mad Max franchise just being made of movies that were "one long car chase". For me, that's exactly what made them compelling. It was cinema boiled down to its essence: moving light projected on a screen with sound. Pure action. Very existential.
Dunkirk wasn't bad, but I found it a little manipulative, like a Sp
but bad movies won't get the blame (Score:3, Insightful)
Too Many White Males (Score:5, Funny)
There are still too many white males in prominent roles in movies. Movie revenue will increase once all white males are cast in unimportant or comedy relief roles then phased out entirely. Hollywood must boycott white males if they want to succeed.
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They didn't just flip the genders around. They also made their motivations entirely different, made the secondary characters utterly irrelevant, and turned it into an action/slapstick comedy instead of horror/comedy.
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They tried that with the Ghostbusters reboot and it failed. As expected.
Being a reboot where all they did was flip the genders around is the main reason why I not didn't see it but why I also wanted that travesty to fail. Had it been a sequel featuring the daughters of the original Ghostbusters I could have gotten behind it but a remake where they're all just women and where they casted a bunch of unfunny ones at that was just a disaster waiting to happen.
My problem was that I wouldn't have been particularly interested no matter which women they'd cast. They lost me pretty much immediately when they thought that the line to sell that clunker was 'Same movie, but with the team being chicks!"--if I want to see the Ghostbusters, for less than the price of a movie ticket I can get the original on DVD. Plus, I'd not be left with the nasty feeling that I'd rewarded Hollywood for treating women as cheap, lazy gimmicks.
The movie I wanted and would have paid to see
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There's nothing that'd keep you from having both going on at once--especially since once you've established that there are Ghostbusters teams elsewhere, you would lose a lot of the problems with getting the cast back together for a sequel with no need to actually write out a character. They're just busy elsewhere, doing other things.
No originality .... (Score:3, Interesting)
The heavy left-wing political slant most Hollywood stars and writers want to impart on films isn't helping sales either. But IMO, the lack of movies worth the price of admission to see is the biggest issue.
I actually enjoy going to the theater to see a movie sometimes. I'm not much of a sports person so I don't go to see games. A good movie is an excuse to get out of the house with the family and to buy bragging rights that we saw a newly released film long before it comes out on video. All the complaints about unruly crowds and teens using their phones through entire movies? I've encountered a bit of that, but it's more the exception than the rule - at least at the theaters I go to.
But the movie has to be worth seeing! With so many sequels and remakes, there's not a whole lot left! Anything in one of those categories is best rented and watched at home, IMO. Some of the remakes are mildly amusing or entertaining, but practically never rise to the level of justifying buying a group of adult movie tickets at over $11 each, plus popcorn or sodas or what-not at hugely inflated theater prices.
I think the superhero movies from Marvel and DC have done so well because there were so many good stories to tell there. We have many decades of comic books being printed that were all but ignored on the big screen until now. Even so? You've still got Hollywood trying to milk some of the best known ones (Spiderman, Batman and Superman) with regular re-releases of films about them, sometimes rehashing the same basic story different ways. It feels like the producers and directors are making these more for themselves than for the audience?
But sometimes you've just had enough of seeing yet another superhero movie, too. Then what? The Fast and the Furious movies started out as ideal summer action/fantasy films - but by this last one? It just went over the top on stretching your belief. "I'll just push this torpedo that's flying here and change its direction." Come on! A good car movie needs to have scenes that at least make some attempt at being plausible.
And some will disagree, but I feel like the "horror movie" genre was all played out by some time in the 1990's, if not earlier. 90% of them are pretty much formula material, aimed at an audience young enough to not have watched a lot of the older stuff first. Nobody else would find much of it worthwhile at all. And again, any of the true classics they came up with got rehashed with SO many sequels it became a farce. (Anyone up for another Chucky movie? Or hey, maybe we could redo the Exorcist one more time?)
Personally, I'm into sci-fi more than most genres, and Hollywood manages to do a decent job with that occasionally. But not often. And worse yet? When they promise a lot but get it all wrong, they alienate people who you managed to drag along who weren't really into sci-fi but resigned to give it a chance. How many times will they try again when future sci-fi movies come out?
I was just telling a friend of mine earlier today ..... as much as we all loved "Office Space", I think I'm glad they didn't try to do a sequel. I mean, it's another obvious cash grab for Hollywood if they did. But it would probably be awful. I think you could do it right, at least for one more movie. But you'd need to tell a whole new story about a different company, with a whole new cast of interesting characters. And for comic relief, re-insert a couple of the originals. Maybe Lumbergh finds a new job as a middle manager at the new company, since crappy middle managers always seem to manage to keep getting re-hired at places in real life. I think instead, they'd screw it all up trying to tell some stupid story about how all the characters find themselves doing the same kind of work at a new place.
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Annoying yes (especially in "Ghost in the Shell" and "Suicide Squad" where it was stuck on very awkwardly in a way that didn't fit the plots) but it's how the slant is applied. For example, every single "Godzilla" movie has the slant, it's part of the genre, but it doesn't have to be so annoying.
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They made it twice?
The message in the wet dream about doctors with nukes novel (thankfully watered down in the first film) was overbearing enough without adding to it.
The thing with the two I mentioned is the laid on thick message of "don't trust your boss" ran entirely counter to the plots. All those resources used by the bad guys for no other purpose than to foil their own plans - yeah, right. They are probably twenty minutes of cut and fill away from being
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I know some very religious artists that are open-minded and enjoy exploring new things. Meanwhile, I also know atheists and leftists who are very close minded, categorize everythingg they do not like as facism or sexism or racism, and are not easy to hang around with. Open-mindedness is not part of any ideology, and to some extent, contradicts the idea of having an ideology at all.
Movie theaters are just nuisances anymore. (Score:2)
I've had so many bad experiences at local theaters, the IMAX's are always full so you have to stand in line too long to get a good seat, parking garages are full on the weekends, the food and drink is too expensive and poor quality, people on phones and noisy eaters, the quality of the movies are mediocre. Then top it off, Hollywood is insulting people by making remakes and putting social justice in them.
I'd rather just buy or redbox the blue ray and order a pizza, cheaper, I can pause the movie, and no an
Well... (Score:5, Informative)
Hollywood keeps throwing gobs of money at an unwanted fifth installment of Pirates of the Caribbean, more Transformers movies, and putting $175 million into King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, and then clutching their pearls in shock that no one wanted to see them.
Pirates of the Caribbean 5
Production budget: $230,000000
Worldwide gross: $781,537,470
Transformers 5
Production budget: $217,000,000
Worldwide gross: $586,549,576
Somebody, somewhere wanted to see them, which is why Hollywood keeps making them.
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It's China (Score:5, Interesting)
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Exactly. Even a movie like Transformers doesn't hide it - Chinese production companies are right there front and center.
Heck, Huahua Media, according to IMDB are i
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Somebody, somewhere wanted to see them, which is why Hollywood keeps making them.
Well that's rare. Someone on Slashdot actually used thought and evidence in a discussion on the quality of movies. You sir are right on point. Everyone that is saying "movies suck, cinemas suck, Hollywood is dying, no one goes to the movies" is ignoring the fact that each of these are fundamentally businesses and exist primarily to make money, and usually they actually do make money hand over fist.
Then when someone does have an original thought, or someone does adapt something that isn't mainstream it fails
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They probably haven't made a profit though, thanks to Hollywood Accounting.
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Anybody got a rule of thumb for that? I swear I read once that things START getting profitable when domestic box office gets to 4x production costs.
Worldwide box office, I got nothing.
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The rule of thumb is that if a film has a lot of people who have been contracted to get a share of the profits, the movie never makes a profit.
Domestic box office takings for Return of the Jedi was 10x production costs. It is yet to make a profit on paper.
I saw Dunkirk last week (Score:3)
I snuck in a bottle of water and some trail mix
Great move, bad experience.
/ snuck in - they were in my pockets, pretty obvious to anyone who cared
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So go in 20 minutes later?
Hmmm. (Score:5, Insightful)
WSJ reports that movie attendance has dropped by 5%, compared with the same period in 2016, and revenues are down, too, dipping just 2.9%, thanks to higher ticket prices making up for the lack of ticket sales.
If you raise prices and revenue decreases, it means that prices are too high. There's a simple fix to their problem.
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I like the phrase the summary threw in about "badass female leads and genre bending horror"....as if lack of those was the problem. Now don't get me wrong, bad-ass female leads kicking ass makes me hard, and horror story that is well done is fun too....but a good story can have any and all kinds of characters, even an old WASP millionaire
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Yep, simple fix - no more http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/HollywoodAccounting [tvtropes.org]
"Darling! This is the Industry! The really creative people are the accountants. A big studio got over half the profit, after setting breakeven at about three times the cost, taking twenty-five percent of income as an overhead charge, and taking thirty percent of income as a distribution charge, plus rental fees, and prime interest on what they advanced."
â" John D. MacDonald, Free Fall in Crimson
TV Screen Size and Quality (Score:4, Informative)
This seems no surprise to me. Movie experience is essentially a constant. TVs keep getting better and bigger. I find little difference these days watching movies at home. In fact until we've had a 10 foot projection screen in our media room since 2008. I had a tri-beam data-grade projector back in 2000 that I powered with a myHD card. I haven't cared that much about seeing things in the theater since the introduction of Blu-Ray. With shows like Game of Thrones you essentially get a movie fix once a week minimum anyway. Here is the main thing. Learn to delay gratification. Once your watching everything 6 months delayed, your watching the same amount of content and basically the same amount of enjoyment for a lot lower cost point (which helps pay for your kick-ass media room).
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AMEN!!
In fact, what's happening now is that all the best creative work is being done for _television_, of all things. Besides the obvious success of "Game of Thrones," don't forget once AMC showed you can create great TV shows like "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad," it showed that the best creative stuff in Hollywood were high production value TV shows of 9-12 episodes per season. And once Netflix and Amazon jumped in with their shows that (mostly) drop with a whole season all at the same time (and can be stream
Welcome to the demand curve (Score:2)
WSJ reports that movie attendance has dropped by 5%, compared with the same period in 2016, and revenues are down, too, dipping just 2.9%, thanks to higher ticket prices making up for the lack of ticket sales.
Or, the movie theaters jacked the prices (again) and attendance dropped (again).
This need have nothing to do with a sudden change in the quality of the content. It sucked last year; it sucks this year. But every time they raise prices, they increase the likelihood that the population that doesn't otherwise care how much the content sucks is still going to go find something else cheaper to do.
Bullshit (Score:2)
Box office ticket sales [the-numbers.com] have hovered around 1.3 million per year for over two decades. Some years have sold a couple million more, some have sold a couple million less, but the trend is relatively flat. There has been no huge drop in people going to see movies.
Bad language (Score:2)
Does anybody go to a movie so that they can hear characters saying "fuck" and "shit"?
I avoid such movies if I can. I suspect others do also. The laziness and incompetence of writers that result in the inclusion of such words causes other aspects of the movie to degrade. Fewer people want to see inferior movies.
Valerian (Score:2, Insightful)
Here was a non-Hollywood movie that got killed in the reviews. The first half had no faults, was kick-ass, and to me was worth the price of the ticket. And you know why many people didn't like it? Because it did not fit the superhero mold that people still seem to love. Face it, Hollywood gives you what sells tickets.
misfire (Score:3)
> The Wall Street Journal reports that the problem goes much deeper than a single misfire
Please allow me to interrupt here -- Ya think??
It couldn't possibly be that Hollywood is substituting eye candy and big set pieces for an actual story that works? That they've completely underestimated how much the public, yea, even that unwashed billy-bob public that is supposed to only be interested in naked breasts and explosions, might want a compelling story that makes sense? (And maybe, since you brought it up, that nobody really thought a poop emoji voiced by Patrick Stewart was funny?)
Nah. It must be them damned downloaders.
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Cursing and excrement jokes aren't "story".
Hot take: King Arthur was pretty damn awesome (Score:2)
I really enjoyed that movie and was quite surprised to find out it was considered a flop.
i am so glad they mentioned King Arthur (Score:2)
That piece of shit "actor" Charlie Hannam must go. I want to never hear a peep about this shitface piece of shit evere again
The length of movies is becoming problematic (Score:2)
Re:Leftist Agenda or $$$ - Choose One (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think anyone is staying away from the Emoji movie because of an evil leftist agenda. They're staying away because it sucks, and because streaming services like Netflix and Amazon can provide better entertainment at a lot better price.
Re:Leftist Agenda or $$$ - Choose One (Score:5, Funny)
Who invented emojis? Millennials. Who invented millennials? Leftists. Checkmate, Martian.
I bet you aren't even from Mars.
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"TFA" is basically a fan-made trailer for real TFA (Score:5, Informative)
Real TFA [cetusnews.com] doesn't even mention emojis OR "more badass female leads and genre-bending horror films".
All that was injected into discourse by the "writer" of that blogpost masquerading as TFA.
Cause... clickbait.
Basically, it boils down to more expensive tickets...
A summer without a real mega-blockbuster cause all the slots were taken by expensive non-starters or franchises which have overextended their welcome and overpaid for the production...
And talk about earlier streaming options making distributors nervous. Very nervous.
Also... Chinese investors. But mostly it's about streaming.
No agendas.
Nor is it about genre-bending horrors and chicks who punch people.
It's about distributors riding their favorite geldings along the road - when a strange mechanical contraption suddenly roared passed them, leaving them and their animals shaken and scared in a cloud of dust and exhaust fumes.
And then a different machine FLEW over them! GASP!
Is this the end of the horse industry as we know it?
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On a more serious note, how does this year compare to other years than 2016? Seems like one year comparison is a small sample.
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Tell that to people who believe that "Since I made X money last year I should make at least as much this year".
Except it's not even years but quarters.
From TFA:
"If Walt Disney Co. had released its live-action "Beauty and the Beast" one month later than its March 17 debut, "we'd be looking at this [quarter] a whole lot differently," said Mark Zoradi, CEO at Cinemark Holdings Inc., the nation's third-largest exhibitor."
They are literally hanging the hopes of the entire industry on a single movie.
Which it's an
Re: Leftist Agenda or $$$ - Choose One (Score:3)
And at the very root the issue is that the beancounters run the whole industry these days. The process began in the 70ties but then it was the cheesemakers who just bought the studios and by mistake did a good thing - gave opportunities to young directors to experiment a bit a make movies for young people. Thus we got all those directors considered icons of the second half of 20th century.
But some of those innovative movies flopped on release while becoming all time classic (e.g. Blade runner).
Today the mar
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You can't blame someone for feeling more virtuous than a Trump voter.
Re: Leftist Agenda or $$$ - Choose One (Score:2)
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It is kinda difficult not to be.
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For the same reason Mohammed is such a popular name - conservative people have no imagination.