Like I said elsewhere, I think people still want to watch 1+ hour fiction stories that are compelling. This is a broad category that I think people still want that's differentiated from 30sec vertical video, and that should exist in the cultural conversation.

It doesn't feel fully democratized because if it was, you'd see more indie things in this same format competing with "big budget" movies on the same playing field.

Can't it be both? In Marvel movies the plot, story, and characters are irrelevant and it's still the current greatest American cultural export.

Ironic that pro-unionization people on HN frequently use SAG as an example of what a software industry union could look like. Ignoring that that's absurd (no other engineering union I know of works like that), just as the parent highlights, unions won't make a difference when the economics of an industry no longer make sense and that is what is happening to software right now.

This is definitely another case where a union could either understand where the bigger economic forces are headed (in this case globalization, IP licensing, residuals that no longer make sense, attention economy fracturing the marketplace etc) and adapt to how people will consume content in the future, or double down on an economic model that is one generation behind.

In theory the union is the only org capable of standing up to the streamers' buying power, but it has to make sense within a business model where consumers pay one monthly fee for content. I'm not even sure what that really looks like in the end.

Maybe it's also that the FTC allowed all this monopolization to happen, and turns out that having three media companies in the US is bad.

For some nations there is still a sort of paternal fixation with US influence but it does seem to be fading with time. Couldnt point to any one factor than maybe just an overall sort of boredom of it.

It's easy to say that because the whole idea of "movies" has been fundamentally linked to the USA for the last 60-70 years. So if nowadays there are a few other countries who also have "movies", you could say it's true, but it speaks more to the level of cultural dominance and soft power USA movies have held up to this point than anything.

Can you comment further on this? As an American it's kind of hard to see that. Is this just kind of a temporary reaction to the Trump administration or a larger trend? What is taking its place? Are there more localized media pockets (e.g. is there a significant German-language Instagram influencer world)? Geographically which areas are you talking about?

Anton Ego in Ratatouille gives this take on what democratization should mean:

Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.

For me the "blockbuster" movies use so much CGI that it's impossible to suspend disbelief. They've gone too far and ruined the experience. AI will only make it worse.

Democratization is a specious argument. The artistry in an AI assisted work is the part that the human contributes as opposed to the the part that the AI contributes. If the human contribution is negligible, the artistry is negligible and there is no meaningful democratization because there was only token artistic intent in the first place.

And what's actually happening with AI? Someone mentioned in another submission that 7500 new books _per day_ are being released on Amazon Kindle. The wave of low quality AI submissions to HN was so severe that the HN mods had to restrict them. Whatever democratization is actually happening is drowned out by those taking advantage of the low cost of AI slop for profit.

In the end people have limited number of hours to watch content, and only a few things bubble up to the popular attention.

What I meant is that I don't see truly indie-produced feature films reach the zeitgeist anymore.

I don't mean AI slop, but the next gen of creative tools that will allow people to make cool and creative and compelling stuff without the backing of 100's of millions of dollars.

It seems like movies are just another cyclical creative industry and this has already happened multiple times before- with each new technology and distribution platform there's the potential to get a wave of creative output that wasn't possible before.

Another aspect could be that the hollowing out of the top / polarization of the industry is another catalyst.

It could be enough that people who don't work on 100's of million dollar budget films get funding to do the next 1 million dollar film that looks great and is amazing.

That's more analogous to the SaaS startup boom that happened in the previous gen of tech startups. Initial costs went down and platform access went up.