Why Are Modern Blockbusters So... Not Very Good? - SOME MORE NEWS

Hey there, News Beetles. It's me, the largest News Beetle, the firmest News Beetle, here to give you some more of the news. And here's some more of the news. You ever notice that like, movies are pretty bad now? I don't mean that in the way where I'm old and scared, not in this video at least, but rather that with few exceptions, this past summer saw an amazing amount of box office failures. And while I know this is subjective, it wasn't just bad movies flopping. Even movies with built-in fan bases that are of at least the same quality of their previous films did poorly. Movies that I would argue weren't pretty bad, but rather pretty good. But also, the movies that were bad also did poorly. One would assume that the Indiana Jones would move the needle no matter how old and slow and scared of bugs for some reason he was. And yet, it did not. Superhero movies fell right on their dicks. Disney supposedly lost a butt ton on their Marvel and Star Wars properties, as well as that Little Mermaid remake. And what's interesting there is that those are all things that used to be free money for them. No matter how good or how bad, and they were often bad, a live action Disney remake was a guaranteed hit just a few years ago. Heck, we watched endless Jurassic World sequels despite, and this is objectively true, every one of those movies being terrible. Generally speaking, the state of blockbuster films, not like films in general, but like big blockbuster movies, has been quantifiably homogenous compared to previous generations. For example, the highest grossing films of 1991 were an action sequel, adventure adaptation, original comedy, thriller horror, comedy Western, drama Western, thriller, dark family comedy, slapstick comedy, and comic book movie. In 2001, it was a fantasy adaptation, family comedy, kids movie, action comedy sequel, adventure sequel, historical epic, terrible sci-fi sequel, sci-fi remake, horror sequel, and epic fantasy. Not a bad spread. So let's look at 2021. Okay, so it's a Marvel superhero sequel, a Marvel superhero fantasy, Marvel superhero sequel, Marvel superhero prequel, action sequel part nine, Marvel superhero fantasy, James Bond sequel number 25, horror sequel, Ghostbusters reboot number two, and the Truman Show but with video games. But hey, you know, Free Guy is technically an original film, so it's cool we got one in there. But now, in this year of 2023, for the first time in 20 damn years, the top three movies at the global box office, at least when this video came out, weren't sequels. They were, big quotes, original stories, as original as blockbusters have always been. I mean, even Jaws was based on a book, right? And in fact, from this dismal year, a double feature rose from the ashes, the likes of which we hadn't seen since Alien vs. Predator Requiem and The Bucket List came out on the same day, spawning the famous pop culture event, Bucket Predator. You remember that? Oh God, that was so fun. Remember when throngs of excited fans poured out for that infamous same day double feature? It was like the 9-11 of Kennedy assassinations of movies about two aliens trying to live life to the fullest and two old guys trying to kill each other, I think. Bucket Predator was a long time ago. I don't remember everything. But anyway, this episode is mostly about Bucket Predator. Obviously. An entire episode of Bucket Predator. Hell yes! I've been pushing for this for a long time. There were a lot of doubters, a lot of people tried to stop me, but here we are. Okay, so to start, let's talk about the lore of Predator. Wait, what's that? No, no, no! ♪ Let's all go to the lobby, let's all go to the- ♪ What's going on with blockbusters these days? Okay, well, I've been told that everything I recall about the success of Bucket Predator was a fabrication and this actually has to be a video about a larger look at studio films, but I will have my day. Just you wait. So Bucket Predator was not unlike the real cultural phenomenon of Barbenheimer, which saw audiences across the country flocking to double features of Barbie and Oppenheimer. Those were, along with the Super Mario movie, but not the good one, the top three films I was referring to and it really seems like such an event would be a clear message to studios that audiences likely want well-made genre films more than they are looking for endless sequels or tired superhero spectacles. Oppenheimer mostly took place in very serious rooms with very serious people, but adult audiences were ready to watch an actual adult film and not a four quadrant behemoth. Barbie, though basically an advertisement for a brand, was still, much like Oppenheimer, made with a great deal of thought and care and craftsmanship and wokeness. So, you know that old saying, go woke, become the biggest film of the year? Both of these movies were shot on real sets without much CGI at all, which shouldn't be something to have to brag about. They were also, by today's standards, shot on a much lower budget than a lot of films today. For context, if you took Oppenheimer's budget and combined it with Barbie's, the total is less than the budget for The Flash. Then there's, of course, the fact that Barbie and Oppenheimer were very well marketed and even embraced the fact that they were coming out on the same weekend. I think actually start your day with Barbie, then go straight into Oppenheimer and then Barbie Chaser. I suggest we do Barbie first, Oppenheimer for lunch, and then a Barbie Chaser. I saw a poster for Barbenheimer the other day where they combined our worlds and I think that's just the best kind of friendly competition. How often do you get red carpet stars plugging a different film? So what, if you were a studio executive, should you learn from this? Well, at the very least, you shouldn't shy away from double features. If a meme starts around your film, you should let that happen organically. So you would think that if, for example, another double feature came along, then studios would be extremely happy about that. Like if, I don't know, if Taylor Swift revealed she would be releasing her Eras Tour concert film in theaters the same day as the new Exorcist movie, hashtag ExorSwift, that's perfect. That's even on Friday the 13th of October, and obviously it's less effective if it's not organic and seems incredibly forced, but like Barbie and Oppenheimer, in that case, there's no real threat of those two things having to compete. They are totally different genres, and so you can get scared watching the demon in the first movie and then go see that Exorcist film to cool off afterward. And so the studio heads at Universal, Morgan Creek, and Blumhouse, seeing the writing on the wall for another Barbenheimer-level success, moved the release date of their Exorcist film ahead one week, effectively deflating the burgeoning meme like ripping a balloon from the lips of a thirsty clown. Freaking why? Are they allergic to money? Meanwhile, after the runaway success of Barbie, the executive response was to greenlight a bunch of projects based on Mattel toys, because clearly, what thrilled audiences the most about the Barbie movie was the Mattel logo in the credits. And this goes back to that first thing I said about how movies are bad, because the second recent trend we've been noticing is that the movie and TV executives appear to be completely incapable of learning the correct lesson from any success and failure. They're like aliens with bad taste, like the aliens in Bad Taste. Every story we hear about their decision seems to be purposefully intended to hurt their bottom line. Warner Brothers CEO David Zaslav seems particularly good at this. Is everyone talking about Brendan Fraser? Better cancel his Batgirl movie and push forward with the totally beloved Ezra Miller superhero movie instead. HBO is the premier television destination? Quick, let's pull that name from our branding and call it something wildly similar to another brand that's also associated with television. You liked Westworld and Raised by Wolves? Well, go watch them on another streaming channel. It is genuinely impressive how often he's able to piss on his own shoes. Don't get me wrong, studio executives generally have been clueless for a while. Depending on who you ask, Disney changed the title of John Carter of Mars to just John Carter, either because they didn't think girls would see a movie with Mars in the title, or, no joke, because the film Mars Needs Moms bombed and they didn't think people liked the word Mars? And we fucking love that word, it's a good word. Mars, Mars, Mars, it's a fine word. I'm also not going to sit here and pretend like blockbuster films in the 90s and 2000s were untouchable works of art, except, you know, the one. Or that blockbusters in general aren't designed specifically to make as much money as possible. But there's no denying that homogeneity I mentioned before, or that the worst qualities that have always existed in the big budget studio system have now ramped up way more, because it is different now in ways that it never was before, specifically when it comes to technology and the general state of capitalism. And we are going to explore all of that. But it's important to recognize that we have and will always make terrible movies. They made four Planet of the Apes sequels in the 70s, and I'm guessing most of those weren't very good. Out of the Forbidden City, they roared, to settle once and for all who had the right to rule the planet. Ape or man. Ooh, nevermind, that actually looks pretty great. I wanna see Severin Darden as Culp, just a totally famous actor playing a really iconic role that we all remember. So quality ebbs and flows. And I would argue that in terms of blockbusters specifically, we are in an especially deep slump, specifically because these stories of clueless and terrible executives have now become the norm and not the exception. Stories coming from studio bigwigs who seem to completely misunderstand why we like movies. And in fact, some of them appear to actively hate them. Entire TV shows and movies are being pulled from streaming platforms before anyone has a chance to watch them. That includes the Willow revival show and an original Adventure Space movie that had been out for only seven weeks. In short, being a fan of blockbusters is exhausting and punishing now. Not just because your favorite film might be randomly vanished from streaming, but the entire modern system we've crafted has made it absolutely grueling. And it's not just because you're getting older, although that doesn't help the situation. Death is so, so close. So for example, movies have objectively gotten longer. Genres that have no business being long are now inexplicably over two hours. Kids movies were specifically designed for short attention spans. And now that new Little Mermaid is nearly an hour longer than the original. It's over two hours long. The new Cruella shouldn't be longer than Serpico, but it is. Movies have gotten so long that even their trailers are getting too long. But to be fair, if you're not watching trailers online where you can now see teasers for teasers of trailers and pre-trailers to the trailer you're watching, the time spent on movie trailers in the theater hasn't actually gotten that much longer. But there is an added fatigue of having to watch an ad for the literal movie theater you are in. Sometimes they run like two of those ads back to back. Did you see that Regal one? It feels like dying. And if you get there early, you get a bunch of other ads before the ads, pre-ad ads. And these are usually for movies we've already been marketed to for sometimes years before they come out. That's thanks to a few things. There was the pandemic, remember that? Yeah, it happened. And now the labor strikes creating delays. That movie Free Guy, for example, was being marketed two years before it came out because of COVID. We had to watch Free Guy trailers for two grueling years. And pandemic aside, thanks to the internet, we now know every step of every film production. We knew about Avatar sequels over a decade before one came out. Superhero movies took that tactic to the next level by having Steve Jobs presentations mapping out the next decade of their series. Nothing ever got to be a surprise. It's hard to feel tension while watching a film when you know the studio already announced several sequels. Is Spider-Man gonna survive the snap? Don't worry, they literally debuted a trailer for his next film before Endgame came out. And with the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, we got a whole new level of exhaustion. Every blockbuster wanted you to watch 10 versions of it. Side note, if you wanted to do a movie monster cinematic universe, obviously you take Brennan Fraser and Rachel Weisz's characters from The Mummy and have them investigate Dracula and The Wolfman, you fucking morons. But the cinematic universes that did prevail have gotten so convoluted that it's actually work to keep up with it. You wanna see that new Marvel's movie? You gotta watch two TV shows first. No, wait, three TV shows first. Are you a Mandalorian fan? Perhaps you stupidly thought that you could go from season two to season three. You rube, you fucking rube. Don't you know that you have to watch this entirely different show first in order to see the resolution to what you thought was an emotional and dramatic narrative choice? Obviously, there's the superhero fatigue, but I genuinely don't think that's the problem so much as the total carelessness and hubris of the storytelling itself. The multiverse continued to lower any stakes or tension in these films, but that isn't to say you can't make a good multiverse story. There's actually a good Twitter thread explaining the difference. The actual problem is when you combine the multiverse with these huge, expansive cinematic universes without any plan beyond finding ways to make the audience point and cheer. Pretty fucking weird pause without any audience clapping, isn't it? If you've purposefully injected pauses into your film so a theater audience can react, then you've purposefully traded a lasting quality for box office hype, right? There's no other way to interpret that tactic. 50 years from now, people won't understand why every Marvel movie has these long pauses in it. It's like watching an old 3D movie where shit keeps flying directly at the camera for no good reason, and this is what's actually hurting the superhero genre, putting the importance of meta hype moments over crafting a quality film, and the multiverse has given them a really convenient way of mashing action figures together instead of exploring the characters that fans love. The Marvel and DC model has, in my opinion, made fandom so very tiring because they promise an unending barrage of stories. The only natural conclusion is for these series to sputter out like an asthmatic racehorse. This is literally what happened to the Snyderverse, which just kinda stopped unceremoniously. You wanna see the last moment of the Snyderverse? Here it is. What? The puttering out of these narrative universes in turn angers fans who feel like they've been cheated out of a conclusive story. Toxic fandom gets ramped up, perhaps on some terrible hypothetical social media site, and that pushes away casual viewers. This model has also put brands forward. Star Wars, Marvel, DC, these are all listed as genres on their streaming services. People root for their favorite brands now, which I would argue has hurt at least some people's understanding and appreciation of art. On the flip side, movies and stories themselves are turned into brands. Both Star Wars and Star Trek are now logos that play before a film or TV show the way a studio logo might. And that's a little weird because stories shouldn't be treated like companies, right? Stories end while companies try to achieve endless growth. And I think this has completely blurred the way people are looking at the art of storytelling. Not that Twitter represents anything, but there's now an unsettling trend of people praising the absolute hogwater that AI is barely able to write. I don't know if you know this, but there was, and maybe still is, a strike going on in Hollywood, which we will talk about. And that strike has centered on the idea that artificial intelligence would be able to digitally replace writers and actors. Heck, we even saw our first AI-generated credits. And without recreating and repeating the video we made about this, AI is generally no more advanced than it was in the past. It's faster, but in terms of writing and creativity, it's simply taking from preexisting art and mashing together a copy. And it's possibly telling and very disheartening that some people don't seem to see the difference between that and genuine creativity. And those people especially include film executives. And so it's time to ask how it all got this way. Why did most blockbusters fail this year? Why does it seem like studio executives are waging war with good movies? Why are movies, big movies, so generally exhausting? There are answers, but also there are ads. So let's watch those ads and then give some answers in that order. Let's all go to the lobby. Let's all movie the advertise, it's ad time. Hello, news lovers, friends, family, and of course my many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many pet snails. You know, fall can be stressful. Summer's over, it's getting dark earlier. Gotta buy thousands of dollars worth of cuddle bone and tropical terrarium mix. 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That's 25% off at N-E-X-T-E-V-O.com. Promo code MORENEWS. Cha-cha-cha-cha. Boy, those sure were some tasty ads. Almost as tasty as the movie theater popcorn we all scarfed down this summer while watching some of the shittiest movies Hollywood has ever made. We used the first part of this video to lay out all the various ways it seems like movies have sucked lately. And again, I know it's a little subjective as to which movies sucked, unless it's the Jurassic World films, which are objectively bad films. I also can't stress enough that I'm aware that saying blank sucks now is a clear indicator that one is getting a bit old. Yelling at clouds, et cetera. But what can't be denied is that the cloud has it coming. And this year saw a massive shift in the box office. Something is changing. And when you combine this with all the strike news and streaming sites seemingly collapsing, deleting their own shows and projects and raising prices and studios claiming that they can't pay anyone a fair shake well, you gotta wonder what happened to these studios? Hey, here's an unrelated clip. From Dimension Home Video, screen two, rated R. That was real nice, Don. Is John Cho about to get blown by the trailer voice guy? So it's not exactly news that video rental stores died out in the late 2000s, along with physical media in general. But I'm not sure people fully appreciate what that did to movie studios. Here's a New York Times article from 1987 that details exactly how a movie made its money back then. What it explains is that the profits for any given film, in their example, David Cronenberg's The Fly, gets shared by a million different people. Along with the people who worked on the film, they have to share revenue with the theaters themselves, which have to pay their employees. And for this reason, most of the actual theatrical revenue from the film was spent on paying people for the work, making back their budget plus paying the theaters. For this reason, only one out of 20 films would actually make a profit from theatrical releases. Those would be the blockbusters like E.T. and Back to the Future. Every other film would have to make their money from the later video rentals and purchases, as well as cable TV broadcasting. By the futuristic year of 2000, DVD and VHS rentals and purchases would equal $20 billion in sales. Meanwhile, movie theater tickets were only a third of that. Home video and cable TV were the primary way that studios made money. And you might notice that neither of those things really exist anymore. Now, to be clear, movie studios aren't hurting right now, and we will talk about why. What that is demonstrating is that generally speaking, movies used to make a lot more money in the long run, and that loss of money had to come out of somewhere. And I'll give you a hint, it wasn't the executive salaries. And we're getting ahead of ourselves. During the 2000s, we saw a shift, one that I would call a natural progression of society. This would be called the World Wide Web. And while I can't get into it right now, give it a bing, it's very interesting. The early World Wide Web, or TripDub as we all called it, was a great tool for over big companies. Film and music piracy was a fun thing we all totally didn't do. And you could argue that was in response to video rental becoming a monster that stopped caring about their customers. For a while, it was good. But piracy was eventually countered with streaming services and capitalism took back that control. But not before the murder of Blockbuster, a company a lot of people with bad memories have nostalgia for now. The point here is that studios had to pivot. And that mainly meant that they had to rely more and more on theatrical profits instead of rentals or DVD sales. This meant that every movie they made had to be a Blockbuster. It had to make that money in theaters because that was the only option. So a movie like The Fly, for example, couldn't be made under this budding business model. It's too risky. And here's where you have to wonder how many movies like The Fly have been snuffed out thanks to this new situation. And since studios needed to make all their money theatrically, they naturally tried to make that money globally. And as we creeped towards the 2010s, studios began to notice that their films were just as, if not more successful in countries like China. Suddenly it became very important to make movies as broad as possible to appeal to the most people. Often movies were adjusted for different countries. So there became a need for them to be modular. This of course meant that marketing was a bigger consideration. The marketing budget for Barbie was as much, if not more than the film's entire production budget. Granted that turned out to be a good investment because Barbie has made almost a billion and a half dollars, but it usually doesn't work out that way. Most movies don't make a billion and a half dollars, but because of the lack of a home video market, they kind of have to now. And so this new model meant that a movie either has to be really cheap or really big to make money. In short, you're either Avengers Endgame or Paranormal Activity, or MyScript, Paranormal Avengetivity. Look for it now on Slooby. Five extra bucks a month for Slooby Bulbous. This era also gave studios, specifically Warner Brothers, a revelation. While sequels were traditionally seen as lower quality and the success of one was treated as a surprise, we began to see the opposite happening. The highest grossing Harry Potter movie was in fact the eighth and final one. It used to be that part eight of any film series was likely schlock, often involving the taking of Manhattan. But now that was a bankable tactic. Nevermind the fact that Harry Potter was based on a successful book series. In the studio's eyes, you could now bleed a series dry, and no better blood cow than the superhero genre, which was a naturally serialized source material. Not to mention that they are generally broad action-adventure comedy films with a lot of CGI, which in turn meant that they were global and modular. Another extremely important detail that gets missed about this era is that these films also weren't centered around actors or directors or writers. And what I mean is that when audiences went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, they weren't seeing a David Yates movie, despite that being the director. They were seeing a Harry Potter movie that was going to be made with or without that director or the writers. Unlike the 90s, blockbusters more and more felt like they belonged to the studios and not the actors or directors or writers. People used to see Arnold Schwarzenegger or Roland Emmerich films as a genre. And if a sequel didn't have that person involved, it wasn't worth seeing. For better or very often for worse. Your rules are in the beginning. Ah! Wait, wait, wait, I said for worse. Why would you show a skate from LA for that? Classic film. Anyway, this would be sealed with Marvel, which besides a few key actors, is generally seen as an ensemble. No one actor or one director held sway over the studios. Producers were in power now, to the point that they would specifically seek directors who didn't have a strong creative vision and boot the ones that did. Now a note about producers. They can be good and they can be bad. Sometimes famously bad. But their job is to generally oversee the production of a movie from a managerial and business perspective. Don't get me wrong, there are a dozen types of producers and some of them are absolutely making creative decisions. Sometimes they're good creative decisions. But for the sake of this video, we're not talking about them. We're talking about the executives and the money people. Rarely do those people think about the artistic intent behind a specific shot or line of dialogue. It's not their job to do that. They are trying to make money. And that's fine until they're given more creative power than the directors and writers. When that happens, they start making decisions solely based on cost cutting and profit motives. And that spirals more and more until you get scenes like this. It's a bird. There's no artistic reason to make a rubber face digital avatar of an actor who committed suicide due to pressures around acting, specifically as Superman. It's actually the opposite of art to do that. I don't know for sure, but DC probably just wanted to include as many references as they could so the audience would clap. Because that's what Spider-Man did and Spider-Man made money. The Flash is a fascinating end result of what would happen to studios in the 2010s. It's everything right and wrong with modern blockbusters. For example, you might be curious to learn how they made the nightmare that is two Ezra Millers. In the past, movies used to do that with motion capture rigs or by locking down the shot and having the actor do the scene twice, splicing it together. With The Flash, they actually did something completely different. They used a technique called volumetric capture, which is basically a way to 3D scan a person as they are performing. Basically, they would shoot the scene with a double and without having to lock down the camera or plan the shots. Then later, they would have Miller perform the scene again in this 3D scan. And since they had every angle captured, they could just plug them in at the right angle. That's incredible. So hey, there's a question. Why does that movie look like shit? The reason and the reason why CGI seems worse recently is the same reason that the technology is so cool. It's a paradox. Like going back in time to move a soup can and now George Clooney or something. You see, it used to be that CGI was expensive and primitive. And for that reason, movies would be very selective about which shots to use it for. Jurassic Park famously has less than 60 CGI shots in it. Meanwhile, the Jurassic World films have roughly 1,000 CGI shots, which is considered low. For reference, Avengers Endgame had 2,500 VFX shots. Now to be clear, more CGI doesn't equal a worse film. David Fincher, for example, uses tons of CGI. What I'm actually getting at here is the concept of preparation. When films used CGI less, they would have to do a heavy amount of pre-production in order to get things right. This is commonly seen as the normal way to make a movie. You write the script, then you plan all your shots, then you figure out how to do the shots, and then you film it. I'll let the good people behind Terminator 3, Rise of the Machines explain it. It's not just improvising. You have to really, when you have visual effects, you have to do things exactly the way it's planned out, or otherwise it won't work late on when you put the visual effects in. You have makeup effects, visual effects, special effects. All of these departments have to get together and agree that this is how we're gonna do a particular shot. Cool music, but as CGI got better, producers discovered that you don't have to plan nearly as much if you just make everything digital. You can just shoot it all on a green screen and make adjustments in post. Film your actor in 3D, and then plug them into any shot you want. No longer do you have to think about your movie before you film it. Literally, the bad movie cliche, ah, we'll fix it in post, is an actual tactic now, except now I guess it's, ah, we'll write it in post. Even things that shouldn't be in effect are now, as evidenced by this shot from a reshoot for Spider-Man Far From Home. It's a producer's wet dream. If you shoot movies all on green screen, you can add and remove everything you want to make the film more marketable. Remove blood for the TV version, cut a surprise character from the trailer, or adjust for overseas audiences. A producer could potentially decide to change anything about a scene after it was shot. But that power, when wielded by people only thinking about money, can make very bad art, and or very bad visual effects, which isn't art, if only for the singular reason that if you don't know what a scene is going to look like, you can't light or shoot that scene in any specific way. It has to be lit evenly in boring wide shots so it can match whatever changes are made afterward. Taking away the pre-production of these films means that the directors don't get to think about artistic intent. They don't get to craft a scene, to carefully plan every shot and sequence. Suddenly it's like shooting a documentary where you're just getting as much coverage as you can, and then throwing it together in post. The original cut of The Flash was four hours long. That should not be the case, but this is only one reason CGI has become troublesome. This could be its own episode, but visual effects artists desperately need to unionize. Marvel is particularly bad when it comes to treating their artists fairly. CGI has become a buyer's market. The visual effects companies actually have to bid on movie projects, competing with other companies to see who can do the work for the lowest price. The producers naturally pick the companies that offer to charge the least amount of money. Those companies in turn underpay their artists and press them to churn out the effects in time. Meanwhile, the producers might randomly change shots along the way, taking advantage of the CGI company's willingness to play ball. So for example, a visual effects company like The Mill will underbid for a project, then push their artists to complete it in time. The end result is the film cats. So now, instead of being the expensive option you have to use sparingly, CGI is seen as the norm. And despite picking the cheapest effects, it has still bloated movie budgets. The average visual effects budget for a blockbuster movie is currently $65 million, which you might recognize as the entire budget for the original Jurassic Park. Even with inflation, that film would have cost far less than most movies today. Modern movies that even win good will still end up looking like this. Big, shiny oof. This is why movies are way too expensive to make. And in fact, you could argue that they aren't bombing at all but rather have no way to make back their money. The new Indiana Jones cost nearly $300 million to make, as did the new Mission Impossible. It is wild that Dead Reckoning can make over $500 million and still be a flop solely because they made it for way too much money. That's like spending $50 million to open a $1 hot dog stand and then wondering why it failed. So now, to recap, you have big blockbuster films that cost more to make but often look worse, that are often spearheaded by producers and executives instead of directors and writers, and are seeking to make the most broadly appealing story that can work on a global market, all while receiving zero pushback from fans along the way who, for a while, would make these projects the biggest movies in existence. Gee, I'm sure that will last forever. So here's an idea. We're gonna take our final and best ad break and then talk about where this is all headed. Enjoy ads, or else Wormbo will find you and he will, he will do stuff. Hey, now, who put this ad here? Was it a ghost? 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Before the break, we took you on a harrowing journey through the history of modern blockbuster movies, a 20-year adventure that slowly put the creative power in the hands of producers, making broad, easily digestible, fan-pandering products for as cheap as possible while simultaneously spending way too much money to do that. Meanwhile, the home video market became the streaming market, a business model where people could pay between $5 and $20 a month to have access to an endless library of films. That model, as you can probably tell, isn't sustainable for many reasons. For one, no single film can prove to excel in that market. If, for example, a film becomes a sleeper hit, as in a film that underperforms in theaters but does well on a streaming platform, that doesn't really equate to the studios making more money. Sure, a few new people might sign up for the service, but you can't calculate the success of a film like you could with video rental profits. For that reason, studios have decided to calculate residuals, as in the money artists make from streaming, based on the overall number of subscribers they have, and not how many times that specific film or show was watched. This is currently changing due to the strike, because what that means is that your movie or show could be really popular on streaming, and you couldn't make a cent more for that, and that's assuming your contract even included streaming. This is why we started seeing shows and films get randomly pulled from streaming networks. For the studio, it's just a numbers game. They have a set amount of money coming in from subscribers, and a set amount of residuals paid based on the amount of, big quotes, content they have. Those two numbers aren't necessarily linked to each other. So if they wanna save money, they just have to delete whatever they deem to be unimportant enough to lose, even if that's a movie that's only been out for a few weeks and didn't even have a chance to be seen. And now, thanks to the oversaturation of the markets, the low quality of the product and the high subscription prices, that model is starting to tank. Meanwhile, countries like China boost their own film industries, undercutting ticket prices as well. It's almost like some kind of, it's like an inflated thing that's bursting. Yes, perfect metaphor. And now, the question you might be wondering is, how? If the film industry has lost an entire revenue stream with home video, how is it that their executives are still getting paid a ton, you ask, having never looked into capitalism as a system? So this part isn't new. There's a whole Wikipedia page about the term Hollywood accounting. The most common explanation of it is that individual movie productions are legally treated like an independent corporation. This is how movies will be produced and distributed by multiple production companies, all working with this separate entity. So for an actor, you're working for that dummy corporation. You get a share of that company's profits. Meanwhile, the studio charges that company for their sound stages and equipment and so on. And while they still have to maintain the studio, it's not like they're buying new equipment. This is just stuff they have that they're renting to themselves. This inflates the expenses of that dummy company so much that when the dust settles, there's virtually no amount of money that movie can make to offset that fake cost. And this is how the actor who played Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi hasn't gotten any residuals for that extremely successful movie that technically failed. In short, Hollywood has been and always will be a battle between a large group of creative people who want to make art and a bunch of executives who want to take advantage of that desire. And this is where we get to the strike. You may have heard about the strike going on in Hollywood right now. Specifically, the Writers Guild of America, which has since ended, and the Screen Actors Guild. They were and are striking to demand more equitable treatment from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. The Amptv are the people we've been ranting about for many monetizable minutes because they're the ones making all the decisions and pulling all the strings. And basically, the writers and actors in Hollywood are just asking to be paid a living wage because currently they absolutely aren't. Believe it or not, most of Hollywood isn't Tom Cruise. Almost 80% of actors make below 10K a year and Lord knows they haven't adjusted for inflation. And while most of the industry's creative workers are struggling to survive, Bob Iger and David Zaslav, the current CEOs of Disney and Warner Brothers respectively, were paid a combined total of well over $100 million in the single year of 2021. In fact, counting all of his many perks and bonuses, Zaslav alone earned a salary of $246 million in 2021, which is almost enough to produce a single John Carter. Hundreds of millions for the guys that have been deleting titles from their streaming apps like they're about to be named in a Taylor Swift song. You also may have heard that during these strikes, the studios were dabbling with the idea of replacing writers and actors with AI. And in fact, AI is already beginning to replace background actors. And while it may seem like AI isn't good enough to replace these jobs, well, did you hear everything I've said about these studios so far? AI would be perfect for them. It's the natural progression of these executive-driven corporate projects. Cut out the artists completely, or at the very least, limit their power even more. It's also cheaper than artists and completely modular. You can make 10 different versions of the same piece of movie that sucks. Who cares if it's derivative? Executives don't see how that's any different than what they've been making for the last 20 years. Derivative sells because when their business model is completely dependent on getting people into theaters over anything else, all that matters is the marketing of the film, right? If home video sales don't exist, that means a movie doesn't have to stand the test of time. It just has to be successful for a few weekends. That's it. And what better way to get people into seats than a sequel or remake or spinoff of a previous hit? It's worked for so long now. Marvel, Terminator, Ghostbusters, Jurassic World, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Batman, Fast and Furious. They've all been paraded out like gussied up elephants in some kind of fanciful elephant parade. And who isn't going to go see the elephant parade? But the thing is, that was only going to work for so long. I have no like science to back this up, but people ultimately tend to like things they haven't seen before. Like, I guess, an elephant parade. This is actually why it seems like studio executives learn the wrong lessons from successes. Not because they don't see the right lessons, but because those better lessons aren't marketable or safe under their business model. It's easier to simply make more Mattel films than to gamble hundreds of millions on the vision of artists. And in their heads, the math adds up. Because in their heads, they aren't making art. They're making a product that will make them money now, in the short term. And so every film should be a series. Endless growth means endless sequels. There is no creativity needed to do that. Nor do they care about the human cost of an industry about the humanities, which would be ironic if they understood what that word meant. But they don't, because they don't care about art, despite earning their living in an industry of the arts. If anything, artists get in the way, and you can see their contempt for the artists during this strike. Back in June, Bob Iger said the WGA wasn't being realistic with their demands, despite the fact that, according to the WGA, the total cost of meeting their demands would have set Disney back $75 million. That's less than one Little Mermaid, and Disney generated $82 billion in revenue last year. Iger himself earns a million clams a year, and he just signed a two-year contract that is all but guaranteeing him $50 million extra if he can manage not to quit before the end of next December. See, for these people, the last 20 years have actually been great. Distilling movies into brands and not art completely simplifies the process for an executive, as does changing the balance of power to the producers and not the artists. Sure, there's a Tarantino and a Nolan still making their movies, but that's within a system where, for most films, it doesn't matter who stars in or makes that film anymore. People were going to see Ant-Man no matter if Edgar Wright made it or not. Nor does it matter if a movie is good or bad so long as it's based on a popular IP. The last Star Wars movie can be total gibberish, and was that, and it doesn't matter because everyone is going to see it. And now, thanks to AI and digital magic, you can keep using these characters long after the actors have died, or heck, before they die. I mean, we just saw it in The Flash, and it's been happening in some capacity for a while now. Indiana Jones isn't Harrison Ford, he's Mickey Mouse, to the point where they can just de-age him and stick him in a movie, no matter how weird that looks. No more simply recasting characters, a thing that audiences generally accept and aren't confused by. If they get what they want and digitally scan these actors, they can just use them for decades until that particular IP is sucked dry. As Michael Shannon recently said, more and more are these movies just people playing with action figures. In fact, the upcoming Avengers Secret Wars, which will probably star every Marvel actor ever, from Hugh Jackman to Lou Ferrigno, and make the most money of any movie ever, is based on a comic series that was literally written to sell action figures for Mattel. And in fact, the title Secret Wars was conceived based on the fact that those two words had a favorable reaction by young boys in focus groups. That's what all the adults in the world are going to see for so much money. The end result of stripping films down to their IP and digitizing the pieces is, of course, that those pieces get sold off to everyone. AI is now promising a future where anyone can just make their own Indiana Jones or Star Wars movie using digitally scanned actors and AI writing. What is essentially the plot of Ready Player One, a film specifically about a pop culture dystopia where you can inject yourself into the shining or use the Iron Giant as a big gun, which he was specifically not. A gun. Yeah, bro, I told him. So you might be wondering why this all matters. I mean, besides the fact that it slowly degrades our culture and understanding of art, which plays a huge part in how our society progresses. Actually, that's enough for it to matter now that I say it out loud. Also, I just think blockbusters should be better and that's enough. And art matters a lot. That's why we do it and pay money for it. And for a while, the deal was that artists could be paid to make this thing that we all need. But now the people handing out the checks have no interest in art. And that's for a few reasons. One being that we kind of let it happen, not on purpose, but the last 20 years have given studio executives no incentive to actually make good films that stand the test of time. Fandom got so out of control that the brand became more important than the artists. But as this episode mentioned at the beginning, things might start getting better. Everything I just said about sequels and remakes and reboots being successful, at least this year, wasn't true. And in the last few years, we've seen that model begin to break as audiences looked for other stories that weren't Star Wars or Marvel. Since the strike, studios have largely been seen as the villain of this story. And I think they are now hopefully realizing that this tactic isn't going to work anymore. Again, I hope. But of course, that doesn't solve streaming. And I don't know, maybe we need to think about a resurgence of physical media. Just an idea that is kind of impossible. Or maybe film will fundamentally change. Maybe people will get more of their satisfaction from other places and blockbusters will just turn into big rides and every theater will be converted into those 40 pieces of shit that throw you around so hard you don't notice that the movie's bad. Oh yeah, I love being jostled violently while I'm trying to watch a movie. Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but if an action or horror movie has to physically shove you to make you feel excited, then it's probably a bad sign. It's probably a bad movie. But again, it's all about making the movie feel good in the theater, not stay good for years to come. But my point is that art has always ebbed and flowed and I'm optimistic that things will change or evolve in the future. And I can't stress enough, this whole time, I've been talking about blockbusters and not film as a whole. While the quality of blockbusters, which still can be works of art, has degraded, independent film has been fucking weird and awesome. Did you get skinamarinked yet? Ah, like it or hate it, it's objectively good that a film like that can still exist. The winner of the 2023 Best Picture Oscar had a scene where people put awards up their asses. But the more things get bad for blockbusters and studios, the more that will eventually trickle down. As I mentioned, it's nearly impossible to make a mid-budget film anymore. And that's a problem. If films like No Country for Old Men can't be made, that's bleak. It's as bleak as, well, No Country for Old Men. And if none of that is good enough, well, another reason this all matters is that, in a way, Hollywood is a perfect microcosm of late stage capitalism. And that's, you know, it's interesting to observe and perhaps something we should take note of and be concerned about. It's an entire industry being driven into the ground by unprecedentedly overpaid executives exploiting an underpaid workforce to overproduce an inferior product that everybody hates. It's like a Dr. Seuss book they gave you in hell. A very good comparison is the airlines, another industry that has existed so long that we've seen the worst version of it under capitalism. You may recall that the federal government handed US airlines $54 billion in bailouts after air travel fell over 90% during the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. But from 2014 to 2019, those same airlines paid their executives and shareholders over $45 billion in the form of stock buybacks and dividends plus an additional $750 million in executive salaries. This is the reason why airlines nickel and dime you with baggage fees and upgrades and service charges. They obviously aren't saving any money because they couldn't make it through a single week of the pandemic before they started asking for a $50 billion bailout. And they definitely aren't investing in their workforce because during that same five-year period of 2014 to 2019, they cut over 10,000 jobs. We did a whole episode, you should watch. And like Alien Ant Farm said, it's just like the movies. We pay studio executives money to deliver some of the worst movies we've ever seen to fund their big old sloppy shareholder orgies. And when they run out of money because they paid it all to themselves, they'll take even more money from the hands of their workforce by slashing jobs and deleting entire movies and TV shows from existence until they eventually have to get it back from us by starting streaming networks and raising subscription prices and probably getting a taxpayer-funded federal bailout. And that's essentially capitalism in a nutshell. I think that's partly why some people get really irked by what's happening with studio films. Besides just wanting movies to be good, I think it also very perfectly represents the problems of seeking endless growth under late-stage capitalism. It's currently one of the worst industries based around wealthy assholes exploiting labor, and in many cases, showing open contempt towards it. The internet created this potential utopia where art can be free to enjoy, except it's not free to make. And instead of finding a way to balance that equation, corporations just swooped in and turned it into Netflix and Spotify and all the other services that exploit artists in exchange for making a handful of people a lot of money. And everything from music to painting to film has suffered greatly from that. And we should be way more angry about that. And that's saying something because we're already very angry about movies. And much like airlines, I think, or hope, we finally realized that it can't go on like this. And the weird little money androids pushing these movies through production have violently sucked all the goodwill from us, and now we just can't get excited anymore. It's like getting blown by a vampire. Oh, they should remake Monster Squad. You remember Monster Squad? You know what? Forget everything I just said in this video. Let's just get a Monster Squad movie going. Yeah, okay. Great meeting, everybody. Adjourned. The Monster Squad Cinematic Universe. The Monster Squad 5. The Secret Monster Squad Wars. Those are words, right? Just jam them together. Perfect. Can't wait for the one movie. They're gonna, in like 10 years, they're gonna make a movie, and it's gonna be everybody. You're gonna get your Harry Potter, you're gonna get Indiana Jones, you're gonna have Luke Skywalker there. Every character that's been in any movie ever, they're all gonna be hanging out, fighting each other for stuff, and it's just gonna be called all movies, and then we can just stop making movies. No more movies, everybody. We did it. In a world where you just watched the video, you liked, and subscribed, and commented, and check out our patreon.com slash some more news. We've got merch at a merch store with Warmbo on it. He's obnoxious. We've got a podcast called Even More News, and you can listen to this show, Some More News as a podcast. It's where all the podcasts go. Get ready for that.