GoldenJCJ

I think it’s more along the lines of “The market has become so diluted with countless movies available at the click of a button that they’re no longer special”.

I don’t necessarily disagree. Streamers, while convenient, have certainly watered down the industry with a ton of garbage. It’s a quantity over quality world now.

Sure, there’s still quality stuff out there but it just gets swallowed up as quickly as it’s released.

Count Dooku

Or since people have been able to watch movies at home and pause them when they want for 40 years, his problem is that the personal home theater experience has much greater primacy over the theater-going experience than ever. So if you are a serious filmmaker who makes movies with the intention that they be viewed in a theater (like Tom Cruise demanded with Maverick), the appeal of making something just so it can be added to a content catalog on a streamer is lacking.

feenst

How much watering down has there really been?

I did some brief searching for year-by-year movie production numbers, but couldn't find any obvious authoritative answer.

This Quora post indicates a huge increase in movie production in the past 10-15 years. But that also shows that there were thousands of movies made per year since at least the 1970s.

Does the recent increase really represent a tipping point?

I remember strolling through a lot of bad movies at video stores in the 1990s.

GoldenJCJ

Without doing a ton of research myself. I wonder if it’s less a quantity thing as it is an access to quantity thing. Maybe it’s more intangible.

When I was a teenager in the 90s, I could hop on my bike, ride to the nearest mom and pop video store, rent the latest Jeff Speakman piece of crap on VHS for $2, ride home and play it on my VCR. Typically, I would rent one or two movies at a time and that would get me through the weekend. Now, I have thousands of movies at my fingertips without having to get off the couch.

Id be willing to bet the number of movies started and never finished has skyrocketed over the last 10 years or so compared to the days before streaming. Even the average Cynthia Rothrock movie at least felt like somewhat noteworthy viewing. And I was damn sure to watch the whole thing before I returned it.

Movies feel like they’ve just gotten so disposable over the last decade or so.

Coral

Quote:

He opens up the streamers and there’s seven thousand choices, none of them are good.

None? Really? There are a lot of "good" films - you just have to weed through the bad stuff. Maybe there are a lot of bad movies and the whole thing is diluted - so what? If you are part of the filmmaking industry - then go and make something good. Who cares if others are making crap? And, once again, not all the films are bad. He was making films when streaming was popular - so are his films bad?

Quote:

Film has been moved out of the public domain into a private domain – you have a remote, you can stop it. It’s not the same experience.

He's right - it's not the same experience. It's better. 65" or larger playing movies in HD 10 feet in front of you with 5.1 or better audio - all in the comfort of your own home while having the ability to pause the film to go to the bathroom or get a drink without missing anything. The movie viewing experience has never been better.
If they're really against this way of viewing movies then their films should only be released to the theatres and never see a streaming service or physical media. I'm sure they had no problem taking their cut of the revenue generated from "private domain" viewing.

Fist of Doom Jr

I've never seen a Daniel Day-Lewis film in the theater - always at home. Guess I drove him away from acting.

RocShemp

I think most older directors are secretly like that. Heck, David Lynch was notorious for having chapter stops excluded from the DVDs of some of his movies because he felt movies should be viewed uninterrupted from start to finish.

rocket1312

The inability of people to recognize why the streaming culture we live in might not appeal to those in the film industry never ceases to amaze me. You don't have to agree with them, but you also don't have to get so defensive. Jim Sheridan isn't going to break into your house and steal your Roku.

JeffTheAlpaca

Scorsese released his last 2 films for streaming though they had limited theatrical runs but he did not mind you could stream them at home.

Count Dooku

He does not mind that they were produced by streamers because otherwise they never would have gotten financing.

3+ hour "prestige" historical dramas with $200 million budgets? No studio is putting up the money for that kind of movie to be theatrically released (I know, I know . . . Oppenheimer, but that had half the production budget of a Scorsese film, and Nolan has a track record of big $$ success.) So Marty either goes along with streaming or doesn't get to make the movie.

For others, like Nolan, they would rather not make the movie at all, than see it go direct to streaming. Tom Cruise demanded that Maverick not go to streaming and waited for a post-Covid theatrical release, and he was hailed as saving the big screen Hollywood movie.

For 30 years, I easily averaged seeing more than 50 movies a year in theaters. Now, I rarely go. I have 3 streaming services to pick movies from. Times and habits have changed, and some people don't like it. They're allowed to not like it without being attacked as snobs and assholes.

JeffTheAlpaca

It seemed people from the prior generations were a lot smarter and they liked all kinds of movies and not just the comic book genre and people would watch Scorsese and other movies from great directors in the theater and they made money.

Coral

It works both ways - their inability to recognize that going to the movie theatres is a turn-off for a lot of people. They've got the "get off my lawn" attitude.
Their hypocrisy is also annoying.

Decker

Killers of the Flower Moon was made by Apple TV but it had a wide release and didn't come to streaming for months. It's as much a streaming movie as The Color Purple and Wonka were.

Count Dooku

As a member of a "prior generation," thanks.

But one thing to remember is the entertainment options. You could stay home and watch TV, but the screens were small and the content was not aiming high. A movie was where the great dramatic stories were being told. So people went to see these kinds of dramas on the big screen. Now there is plenty of smart and adult stories being produced as TV shows for that audience to enjoy on a pretty big screen at home.

IDK what the hypocrisy is? People watching movies at home has been around for decades. It is baked into the industry. But if you are a serious filmmaker, you want your films to be released in theaters. You want there to be a good period of time where if people want to see your work, they have to go to a theater. It has been and will always be possible for people to say "I'll wait to watch it at home." But these filmmakers want there to be the idea that waiting to watch it at home means you are missing out on the real movie watching experience.

You know having a "get of my lawn!" attitude is good if people are ruining your lawn.

Attitudes and habits are changing, but not necessarily for the better.

Count Dooku

The investment in the production budget by the streaming company meant that Scorsese could make whatever he wanted without regard for the film's commercial appeal in theaters.

He never would have been able to make the movie, if some studio was looking for a return on its investment at the BO.

So did Hollywood stop investing in well-budgeted dramas because people stopped going to see them? Or did people get out of the habit of seeing such movies in theaters because Hollywood stopped investing in them?

Decker

I just think there's a world of difference between The Irishman, which was a Netflix movie that played for a week in NY and LA so it was Oscar-eligible, and KotFM which was a theatrical movie, funded by a steaming service, that had a full wide release and theatrical run.

Runaway

There is a difference, but I think Count Dooku isn't wrong either. Apple wasn't looking for a return on investment during the theatrical run of Killers of the Flower Moon. The movie's budget is twice of The Wolf of Wall Street, but has no mainstream appeal at all. The topic isn't very appealing in the first place and it's pretty slow-moving storytelling. I think $150.000.000 is a pretty good overall gross for a movie like that.

Count Dooku

I don't disagree.

But how much was the prestige of Scorsese involved in him being able to have a streamer invest in a movie that would be released theatrically?

If Jim Sheridan wanted to spend a lot of money to make an intense drama with D D-Lewis today, would a studio finance it? If Netflix put up the money, would Sheridan have the clout to demand a long theatrical release window?

As noted, Nolan lost the original financing for Oppenheimer because he demanded it be a theatrical release, and the studio money he eventually got came with the restriction that he keep the budget at $100 million. So what kind of financing can someone like Sheridan get when he is insisting on a theatrical release window?

Spielberg made The Fabelmans for $40 mil, and he's Spielberg!

mickey65

While I've seen a few good streamed movies in the last couple of years, my complaint is that unlike movies shown in the theaters, they aren't put out on DVD. I like to have that physical media. Netflix doesn't put out anything on DVD of their movies. ,

stvn1974

Daniel Day-Lewis is so method that maybe he is really preparing to play an actor who retires?

B5Erik

As silly and absurd (and quite hilarious) as that sounds he's the one actor I could see doing that. 🤣

JackoOnHisBacko

Too inversely-Meta. Being about to create something, where its own existence disproves that something like it could could ever be created. I also might be very tired/drunk/high right now.