| ▲ | darth_avocado 3 hours ago |
| Matt Damon talked about this somewhere. The risk aversion stems from the move away from DVD sales. Historically a lot of low and mid budget movies relied on DVD sales to recoup costs even if theater releases didn’t get you as much money as you expected. With the safety net gone, studios don’t want to take the risk. They make big budget movies with massive marketing budgets that rely on known IP and established fan bases to guarantee income. This also ensures that the story itself is average because you want an average fan to like it. I think calculus somewhere has changed that is allowing these small/mid sized movies to be made again. |
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| ▲ | hangsi an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| This is from the interview on Hot Ones (released August 5, 2021):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaXma6K9mzo&t=816s > Sean Evans: > I think a scenario lots of viewers can relate to is sitting on the couch on a Friday night, going through the streaming services, cycling through the movies and thinking to themselves "they're not making movies for me anymore". As somebody who's been intimately involved in movie making for 30 years, what are the macro Hollywood conditions behind that sentiment? > Matt Damon: > Well, so what happened was the DVD was a huge part of our business - of our revenue stream - and technology has just made that obsolete. And so, the movies that that we used to make: you could afford to not make all of your money when it played in the theater because you knew you had the DVD coming behind the release and 6 months later you'd get a whole other chunk - it would be like reopening the movie almost. > And when that went away, that changed the type of movies that we could make. I did this movie "Behind the Candelabra" and I talked to a studio executive who explained: it was a $25 million movie. I would have to put that much into print and advertising to market it - what we call P&A - so now I'm in $50 million. I have to split everything I get with the exhibitor, the people who own the movie theaters, so I would have to make $100 million before I got into profit. The idea of making $100 million on a story about this love affair between these two people... Yeah, love everyone in the movie, but that's suddenly a massive gamble in a way that it wasn't in the 1990s when they were making all those kind of movies - the kind of movies that I loved and the kind of movies that were my bread and butter. |
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| ▲ | lazypenguin 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It’s because nobody has made Steam for Movies. Let me have a movie collection that I can buy movies $1-$5 per movie and never lose it and I promise you I will buy a lot more movies. Just like people buy hundreds of steam games |
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| ▲ | mrkpdl 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The iTunes movie store launched 20 years ago. It’s far from perfect but it is essentially steam for movies. Sadly it’s been de-emphasised over time. But it is still there and was pretty good for a while. | | |
| ▲ | righthand 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The iTunes movie store is not friendly outside of the Apple ecosystem. Making the entire idea not really affordable since you need a expensive electronic device to utilize it sanely. Might as well find another way to get to it at that point. | | |
| ▲ | extra88 an hour ago | parent [-] | | MSRP of an Apple TV device is $129. The iPhone's market share in the U.S. is already over 60%.
But neither matters because the Apple TV app is available on basically everything and can be used to buy movies. https://support.apple.com/en-us/119890 | | |
| ▲ | righthand an hour ago | parent [-] | | But if you use the app you’re only streaming from Apple servers. That Apple server copy can be revoked at any time. And 60% is not 100%, my point stands you need an expensive device just to purchase and watch it. Probably multiple expensive devices if you want to actually watch it on your TV. When can I download my movie onto my Linux laptop and play it through an HDMI cable? | | |
| ▲ | radley 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > When can I download my movie onto my Linux laptop and play it through an HDMI cable? Probably because the Linux market is too small to support an iTunes for Linux. By my understanding, the Linux market prefers free, open source, community effort. So essentially the real question is: why aren't you making movies yourself and sharing them free with your Linux peers? | |
| ▲ | arusahni an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A "Steam for Movies" service (as expressed in an ancestor comment) is basically that, though. One doesn't own their Steam games. | | |
| ▲ | lmm 10 minutes ago | parent [-] | | But you can run Steam on Linux. You don't have to worry about whether they're going to discontinue the cheap Steam Box you were relying on. And they have built up credibility from decades of not pulling the rug, in a way that Apple hasn't and probably can't. |
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| ▲ | extra88 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | You're moving goalposts and ignoring what I wrote. An Apple TV box is not expensive and you can use even cheaper streaming devices to buy and watch instead. |
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| ▲ | 1123581321 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You can buy at several places that interop with each other—iTunes and Amazon are the two biggest. They don’t have literally every movie, but they have most that most people want to watch. https://moviesanywhere.com/participants Cost ranges from $5-30. Fewer dirt cheap sales than Steam, but the standard price point at launch is lower, in exchange. (Having to explain “buying movies” makes me feel old!) | | |
| ▲ | im3w1l an hour ago | parent [-] | | Unlike with steam, things can appear disappear from your iTunes library if you move countries. At least music can. | | |
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| ▲ | whyenot 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | As someone already mentioned. Steam for movies already exists (iTunes, also Amazon’s offering). The problem seems to be that hardly anyone wants to actually own a movie anymore. There are places where the ownership model seems to still be thriving (books), but for video and audio, ownership (vs. streaming or renting) is largely dead. | |
| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | HeWhoLurksLate an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Steam had John Wick on it at one point | |
| ▲ | simonbw an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | People are saying that you can buy movies online, but I think they're missing the key point of putting lots of movies on massive discounts and promoting the movies that are currently discounted. Like sure you can buy basically any movie on Amazon or Apple's store or wherever, but I know that wherever I go, it's going to cost $4 to rent a movie, except every once in a while when it's on sale and I get it for $3, and buying it is going to be some higher amount that is almost certainly not worth it. When steam has sales, I might browse and buy quite a few games that I'm not gonna play right away. Or I buy things in bundles because it just seems like such a good deal. If movies were usually $10 to buy, but the Amazon store had a very visible section of movies that were $5 or less, but for a limited time, I'd be way more likely to buy multiple movies that I'm not intending to watch right now. | | |
| ▲ | slg an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I just opened the Apple TV app on my phone and "$4.99 Essential Movies" is listed prominently just under the top charts and new releases. I'm not trying to be rude, but this whole thread has people just speculating on stuff with limited self-awareness. The reason you aren't building a big film library is probably because you aren't that passionate about films, it isn't because no one is providing you a list of cheap movies. It's all there already, you just had to open the app. | | |
| ▲ | simonbw 27 minutes ago | parent [-] | | You might be right. I think the other thing is that there are a ton of free things for me to watch on various streaming platforms. |
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| ▲ | 1123581321 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Games industry has an oversupply problem that is the root cause of flash sales. I thought about mentioning that in my answer. |
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| ▲ | anamax an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Matt Damon talked about this somewhere. The risk aversion stems from the move away from DVD sales. DVDs and even video tape are relatively recent. Hollywood was a lot less risk averse before DVDs and video tape. Heck, Hollywood was less risk averse before TV became mainstream. |
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| ▲ | protocolture 44 minutes ago | parent [-] | | When Hollywood didnt have to compete so much for spectacle with television and could afford to have a cheaper B movie on every roll as a value add. |
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| ▲ | delfinom 37 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] |
| The calculus has changed because people don't give a flying fuck about celebrities on golden thrones these days, especially since your average YouTuber is more popular. The cost of celebrities in movie spins is fucking massive. Hollywood has also completely failed to cultivate a new generation of celebrities. God, we had a few years of nothing but Pedro Pascal to the point we have memes inside memes. And the cost of production has gone way down, you don't need a specialized studio to put in CGI these days when some guys Blender can do better. So Hollywood is busy being in a downward spiral eating itself while so much room has opened for "indie" to eat their lunch and dinner. |
