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Why Media Mogul Barry Diller Thinks the Movie Business Is Dead (npr.org) 95

Posted by BeauHD from the times-they-are-a-changin' dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Barry Diller made his name in the film industry as the chairman and CEO of two Hollywood studios, Paramount Pictures and what was then 20th Century Fox. Now, he is declaring the industry dead. "The movie business is over," Diller said in an exclusive interview with NPR on the sidelines of the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference, a media and technology conference in Idaho. "The movie business as before is finished and will never come back." Yes, that has to do with a substantial decline in ticket sales and the closure of movie theaters during the coronavirus pandemic. But Diller, the chairman and senior executive of IAC, a company that owns Internet properties, said, "It is much more than that."

According to Diller, who ran Paramount and Fox several decades ago, streaming has altered the film industry in substantial ways, including the quality of movies now being made. Last year, several media conglomerates, including Disney and WarnerMedia, decided to debut new releases in movie theaters and on streaming services simultaneously. That was a radical change, and theater chains protested it. "There used to be a whole run-up," Diller said, remembering how much time, energy and money studios invested in distribution and publicity campaigns. The goal, he said, was to generate sustained excitement and enthusiasm for new movies. "That's finished," he said.

The way companies measure success is also different, according to Diller. "I used to be in the movie business where you made something really because you cared about it," he said, noting that popular reception mattered more than anything else. When asked about Quibi, the now-defunct streaming platform founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former chairman of Walt Disney Studios, Diller said: "Quibi was just a bad idea. I mean, it's that simple."

"It was a bad idea that had no testing ground other than a big-scale investment," Diller said. "Otherwise, it would have slithered around for a while. But it was such a big-scale thing that it lived and died in a millisecond." Diller added: "It has no relevance on anything. The idea of professional, A-quality 10-minutes-or-less stuff just made no sense."
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Why Media Mogul Barry Diller Thinks the Movie Business Is Dead More

Why Media Mogul Barry Diller Thinks the Movie Business Is Dead

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  • including the quality of movies now being made (Score:3)

    by dmay34 ( 6770232 ) on Saturday July 10, 2021 @08:02AM (#61569275)

    including the quality of movies now being made

    Yeah. They are much much better now.

    • No surprise someone who fires off a quick first-post on slashdot thinks modern movies are great. They're sort of geared at that mentality, after all.

    • You can't really use Comcast since they're not a pure media company like Disney, Viacom, and Time Warner Inc (before AT&T bought them), etc. Of the total $103.564 billion in revenue Comcast did in 2020 [businesswire.com], their Cable Communications division (High-Speed Internet, Video, Voice, Wireless, Advertising) brought in $60.051 billion; That's 58 percent of total revenue.

      Their Filmed Entertainment (i.e. movie studio) segment bought in $5.276 billion; That's 5 percent of total revenue.

      As for Viacom, did you really

  • Netflix implemented true infinite scrolling, meaning they produce new movies faster than you can scroll through all of them.

    So now, since the basic (in)competencies and abilities to adapt to market have been established, maybe Mr Diller can stop customer antagonisation, step aside, and let others who know how to do it make the movies?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The line is getting blurred e.g. with Disney producing Marvel TV shows featuring characters from the movies. The quality is as good as a lot of movies in terms of the writing, the special effects and the like.

      Now that TV shows can get bigger budgets there are a lot of things that can be made which were previously impractical. Things that previously would have been movies but work better as TV shows.

      Hollywood won't die but I think a lot of the cash will move over to TV.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by trparky ( 846769 )
        > Things that previously would have been movies but work better as TV shows.

        I will give you that. Plots can be drawn out and allowed to grow which of course will lead to better and more developed characters whereas with movies, unless we know there's going to be a sequel, things are all wrapped up with a neat little bow at the end and that's that.

      • What scares me more than anything is the fact that Disney owns Fox. I suppose its a good fit in a perverse way. They should have a theme park with rides for conservatives at disneyland. Where the White Oaks have to fight off liberals, euros, blacks, gays, etc etc all while watching a gigantic stock ticker to score points. And the souvenir stores all have penis pills and retirement plans.

        Sarcasm.

        Actually I think a large part of the decline in Hollywood is simply that they don't really do plots lines or chara

    • Ya, but they release tons of crap, and just when you find one thats getting good, they cancel it to make way for more crap, Netflix is itâ(TM)s own worst enemy.

    • Netflix implemented true infinite scrolling, meaning they produce new movies faster than you can scroll through all of them.

      Notice how streaming has already taken over in the TV realm?The only reason that movie streaming is limited to each streaming network's 'original content' is the goofy Hollywood licensing rules that restrict theater movies to DVD distribution. Set all the Hollywood, Bollywood and Nollywood content free to be streamed, and both the streaming services and the movie towns would increase their audience.

  • Make movies people want to see and you're fine (Score:3)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Saturday July 10, 2021 @08:16AM (#61569303)

    Quite frankly, what you're doing right now is to push relaunches, reboots and re-whatever of classics, hoping to cash in on the memories people have of the old movies by that name, only to fail spectacularly with your rebullshit because you fail to grasp what made those movies good: Great writing, great acting, great effects and most of all, trying to tell an entertaining story rather than pandering to some focus group and trying to tick off checkboxes.

    I'm not a focus group and I'm not a checkbox. I'm just some guy who is willing to drop the ridiculous price that your tickets cost, but you have to put something on the screen that I want to see for me to drop that money.

    • Strongly disagree

      I'm not watching movies because I don't want to see them, that's a thing and it's real. But I'm not watching movies in the theater because theaters suck since the invention of the cellphone. People were always self-absorbed fuckfaces but the cellphone gives them new ways to express it that are very irritating in that context.

    • I'm not a focus group and I'm not a checkbox. I'm just some guy who is willing to drop the ridiculous price that your tickets cost, but you have to put something on the screen that I want to see for me to drop that money.

      Not disagreeing about the pointlessness of reboots but every time I hear someone bring up this point, I'm reminded of the Yogi Berra quote: "No one goes to that restaurant, it's too crowded." Someone is buying the tickets so clearly they like what's being offered.

      Now, whether more people would go if we stopped with the remakes already, that's the billion dollar question. There would be some hits but a lot of swings and misses. Would you bet $15 for a ticket to something which could be an unwatchable mess?

      • Well, I guess then I interpreted the article wrong. There is nothing wrong with movies and theaters are packed with movie goers and movies are dead because ... umm... why are movies dead, then?

  • The King is Dead -- Long Live The King (Score:5, Interesting)

    by StormReaver ( 59959 ) on Saturday July 10, 2021 @08:28AM (#61569319)

    Perhaps the movie business in its prior incarnation is dead, but is reincarnating in a different body. Frankly, I can't help but think that what's bad for movie executives is good for the rest of us. They have fought us at every turn: VHS, DVD, streaming, and others I can't think of off the top of my head. In general, though, they have tried every dirty trick in the book to hold back the march of entertainment evolution.

    I hope he's right, and the movie industry as we knew it is dead.

    • Frankly, I can't help but think that what's bad for movie executives is good for the rest of us.

      If they had to pay their taxes, that would be helpful. But if the age of big-budget films comes to a close, then that will be the end of movies built out of high-end CGI for the foreseeable future. To some that's no great loss, to others it will be greatly disappointing.

      Studios had already shifted to making a lot of direct-to-video content because it was cheap, particularly rom-coms, where the biggest cost is Owen Wilson.

  • advertising (Score:3)

    by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Saturday July 10, 2021 @09:15AM (#61569393)

    >"There used to be a whole run-up," Diller said, remembering how much time, energy and money studios invested in distribution and publicity campaigns. The goal, he said, was to generate sustained excitement and enthusiasm for new movies. "That's finished," he said.

    I think advertising is a big part of it. The only place I've seen a movie advertised outside of the theater or streaming is on a Happy Meal. I'm sure I used to see more movie ads back in the 80s.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jonwil ( 467024 )

      Black Widow has just opened in cinemas here in Australia and I dont think I have seen ANY marketing for it (haven't seen a single TV ad for example). Various states are in restrictions of some kind but cinemas are still open in most states right now AFAIK so there is no reason for Disney not to be marketing this film and promoting the fact that its out there and going.

      • Does anyone who wants to see Black Widow (I just saw it, itâ(TM)s fun), not know itâ(TM)s on? Itâ(TM)s impossibly not to know itâ(TM)s on, even without any ad spend. Every Marvel fan knows itâ(TM)s on, and fifteen seconds with the IMDB app will show them where itâ(TM)s on, and help them pay the $39 for a premium lounge ticket.

        Maybe Disney just realised that they actually have no need at all to advertise a film thatâ(TM)s been so long-awaited.

      • Maybe specific to Blackwidow. I'm seeing it tonight and I've only seen a trailer at the cinema. However "Nobody", I couldn't get away from that movie. Saw posters at bus stops, trailers on Youtube, and ads on TV during the Australian Open no less.

    • The only place I've seen a movie advertised outside of the theater or streaming is on a Happy Meal.

      Maybe that's a local thing for you. I see them on TV, on Youtube, on posters at bus stops, on billboards.

    • I think advertising is a big part of it. The only place I've seen a movie advertised outside of the theater or streaming is on a Happy Meal. I'm sure I used to see more movie ads back in the 80s.

      You see advertisements? How quaint.

      I saw a few ads here on Slashdot recently but my ad blocker seems to have updated since they are gone now.

  • His simple mind can't move beyond what was. He can't see the changes as anything other than the destruction of the industry. I bet those silent film people said the same thing when sound and then color came along.

  • What does he think teens are going to do instead, get jobs? Loiter at the local burger joint like in the good old days "when America was great"? They need a place to go and an activity to do that lets them physically get away from their parents.

  • Quibi (Score:2)

    by crow ( 16139 )

    I've never watched anything from Quibi, but I can see one situation where 10-minute professionally produced content could be profitable, and that's where it ties in with existing content. They have done a number of these with Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who in the past (five to fifteen minute webisodes). I'm sure that could work for other genres, too.

    The problem is getting people to watch truly original content. That's a hard problem even for full-length content, and the answer is always advertising.

  • As someone who ever went to theaters unwillingly, bringing my own snacks, etc, I've found the new release options much preferable. COVID has probably shown that we don't have to cram into a big room to enjoy a film. Typical home systems are quite a bit different than even 10yrs ago, with most people watching very large screens, and fairly decent sounding audio systems. (And not a huge investment to get good quality.)

    Also worth noting is the boom in TV production, and many studios and actors no longer view t

  • If it goes like music does (Score:3)

    by transporter_ii ( 986545 ) on Saturday July 10, 2021 @09:57AM (#61569463) Homepage

    If it goes like music does, movies won't be dead at all. They will just devolve into being made by a guy with a laptop and a camcorder.

    There will still be good movies made, but everyone will gripe that movies aren't like they used to be. You know, because a guy with a laptop should be able to turn out the same quality work as a movie studio. Sort of like how a guy with a laptop should be able to consistently turn out songs better than Led Zeppelin.

    Same thing in the programming world. I really hate it when I hear, "well, Facebook does it." Yes. And I would imagine I would get paid A LOT more if I could consistently duplicate the work of a multi-billion dollar company, while working by myself.

    • 'They will just devolve into being made by a guy with a laptop and a camcorder.' - The Blair Witch Project is very old already.

  • Depends on what you mean by the "movie business" (Score:5, Informative)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Saturday July 10, 2021 @10:39AM (#61569559) Homepage Journal

    Movies as we know them from the past fifty years are just one possible kind of drama form for filmmakers to tell a story with. They happen to be ideally suited to the needs of a business model where you rent material to an exhibition venue which makes money by filling seats, then emptying and refilling them.

    That familiar model is different from how people consumed movies in the golden age of cinema. From the 1920s to the 1950s, cinema screens would show a slate of films: an "A" film, one or two "B" films, and a number of short features like cartoons and newsreels, and an episode of a serial like "Buck Rogers". There were no fixed exhibition times, people just came any time, sat down in the middle of whatever was showing and stayed until they'd seen the entire program. That was a business model served an audience that mainly lived in tiny apartments or even tenements and needed to get out. Movie houses were also the first places that had air conditioning, which is the origin of the summer blockbuster.

    By 1960 movies had to lure people out of their comfortable, air conditioned, TV-equipped suburban homes. Venues switched to a model where they showed a single movie at fixed exhibition times, and that movie had to be long enough to tell a compelling story, *but seldom any longer*. The demands of getting enough story into a roughly 75 minute runtime caused movie scripts to assume an almost uniform story beat structure [studiobinder.com]. By 1980, two highly time-constrained narrative forms completely dominated recorded drama: movies which told a self-contained story in about an hour and a quarter, and one hour TV series which told a sequence of self-contained 45 minute stories using the same characters and settings. If you deduct the time needed to establish characters and settings, that's roughly the same amount of story in a TV episode and theatrical movie.

    What we're seeing now is a return to the earlier diversity of the golden age of cinema. Wandavision isn't a series, like the original Star Trek; it's a serial, like Buck Rogers, albeit with A movie production and artistic values. With streaming, people recreate for themselves those golden age program mixes of short, medium, and installments of super-long form stories. It's not the death of movies, it's the death of the the monopoly of three act/two plotline story structures. People are still going to make money telling stories, they just won't be limited to a single format.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dfm3 ( 830843 )

      What we're seeing now is a return to the earlier diversity of the golden age of cinema. Wandavision isn't a series, like the original Star Trek; it's a serial, like Buck Rogers, albeit with A movie production and artistic values. With streaming, people recreate for themselves those golden age program mixes of short, medium, and installments of super-long form stories. It's not the death of movies, it's the death of the the monopoly of three act/two plotline story structures. People are still going to make money telling stories, they just won't be limited to a single format.

      If the movie industry is truly going to die, I think this is what will do it. Up until a few years ago the TV serial was less common (barring soap operas), in favor of self-contained episodes where it didn't matter if you missed a week, a month, or a couple seasons... you could tune in at any point and follow familiar characters through short story arcs that are wrapped up within the hour. If any plotlines carry between episodes, they are usually inconsequential or easy enough for audiences to get up to spe

    • The movie business, the professional sports business, (and of course the MSM) have all become political propaganda and are not worth watching.

  • IMHO, Diller (and the article) conflate a number of disparate things. To him, to the "industry", they've lumped these things together because that's how it always had been...however for anyone sufficiently "outside" that industry, what has occurred was inevitable: the movie industry used to be content creation -AND- presentation, but presentation got eaten by technology. And we're well on the path that creation shall be too.
    When I was kid, almost a half century ago, going to a theater (even a drive-in), was

  • I think it ended when... (Score:3)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Saturday July 10, 2021 @11:23AM (#61569657)
    ...they discovered that movie format versions of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) repackaged as 'SciFi' made $billions. They have pretty much the same outfits, the same fight routines & the same dramatic character/plot devices. If anything, the SciFi they throw in is a distraction for those with shorter attention spans that WWE audiences. The smarter script writing & story telling has moved on to TV series.
  • We're now in the golden age of TV, and we just like TV so much better than we like movies that we've basically turned movies into TV. That's why even damn movie is a sequel to something else: it's just because the episode format of television is what we want, and movies have to adjust to those tastes. Our era will probably go down in history as the time that movie makers thought their value-add over TV would be expensive special effects, and I guess that does fill some seats. But all this focus on effects m
  • Because people still need a place to take a date. The point of a movie is to have something to talk about when you take your date to a restaurant later. Also studios aren't going to let the movie theaters die because they make money when you see it in the theaters and they make money when you see it at home. If you think they're going to give up that double dipping your nuts.

    To be fair there is one thing that could kill movie theaters. If we keep letting pandemics run wild and it vaccination rights stay

    • Re:Movie industry isn't going anywhere (Score:5, Funny)

      by hawk ( 1151 ) <hawk@eyry.org> on Saturday July 10, 2021 @12:38PM (#61569853) Journal

      Wait, you're supposed to go to the movie *first*???

      I did it backwards the whole time. Do I have to return my wife?

    • Movie theaters are being killed by home theater.

      Most people as it turns out don't really care if the sound is loud and surround-y enough to blow their heads apart, and prefer to be able to pause and piss, or raid the fridge, et cetera.

      If you want people around you, then you invite friends over to watch your massive television that cost practically nothing. And the surround sound is cheap now and you can get wireless rears.

      There's just literally nothing theaters can do to get certain people back into them. K

  • Quibi was a bad idea, but we knew it 20 years ago (Score:3)

    by NuttyBee ( 90438 ) on Saturday July 10, 2021 @02:24PM (#61570151)

    Those who don't bother to google their history are bound to repeat it.

    Someone else tried to deliver short form "webisodes" that nobody wanted to watch, and it failed spectacularly too.

    ---

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    DEN's goal was to deliver original episodic video content over the Internet aimed at niche audiences.[4] DEN was one of a crop of dot-com startups that focused on the creation and delivery of original video content online in the late 1990s[5] prior to wide adoption of broadband internet access.

    In May 1999, DEN announced that their business model had earned them $26 million USD in investments from Microsoft, Dell, Chase Capital Partners, and others.[6] In September 1999, Microsoft announced that DEN was one of their partners in the Windows Media Broadband Jumpstart initiative, focusing on the creation of video and audio entertainment for the Windows Media format for high-speed connections.[7] By 1999, the company was reportedly valued at $58,500,000 USD and included former Walt Disney Television President David Neuman, Garth Ancier, David Geffen, Gary Goddard, and Bryan Singer as investors.[8][9][10]

    DEN was slated for a $75 million USD IPO in October 1999 but the IPO was withdrawn[11] in the wake of allegations of sexual assault against Collins-Rector, Shackley, and fellow executive Brock Pierce. All three executives subsequently resigned.[2] Layoffs followed in February 2000.[12] While a new executive team led by former Capitol Records President Gary Gersh[11] and former Microsoft executive Greg Carpenter[13] tried to salvage the company and relaunch in May 2000,[14] DEN filed for bankruptcy and shut down in June 2000.[15][16]

  • Weasel word (Score:3)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Saturday July 10, 2021 @05:28PM (#61570495)

    Who spotted the weasel words "as before" in there? In other words, he left himself an out. Movies will continue to be made, and people will make money off that. So basically, he has no idea. If the movie business continues in any form, he left himself an out. No business ever stays the same anyway. Even if theaters continue to exist, as long as streaming proliferates to a decent market share, he still has an out. And failing that, he can point to mergers or independent studios rising as "changed movie business."

    • Even if theaters continue to exist

      Locally in the USA theaters are struggling. Globally they are setting records for box office returns. Even the pandemic and forced closure didn't cause my local chain to abandon plans to open another new cinema on the south side of the city.

  • no one has been to a movie in a year and a half and small screen on demand series are simply a better art form.

  • Hollywood was always pretty much a con job. Constantly cooking the books to show losses on hugely profitable blockbuster releases and strong-arming the theaters so they couldn't show anything without paying a huge chunk of change for the projection rights.

    I think the music industry has already had their "day of reckoning" about what the true value is for what they produce. We're past the era of the "rock icons" running around, living decadent lifestyles and making ridiculous demands everywhere they go on to

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