VanPersie
Well-Known Member
That didn't quite work out well for them in the aftermath either though. In fact in many aspects it became exceptionally worse.
Hollywood’s current state of failure and the reasons for it
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joberg
Legendary Member
We tend to forgot that they're people holding the strings, behind the scene, that have an interest at staying behind the scene; case in point:
BlackRock! That mutual fund and mostly ETF and AUM (Assets Under Management) owns 114.6 million shares of Disney!
They manage, approximately, $6.47 trillion in AUM.
Larry Fink , the CEO, champions a brand of capitalism known as "Stakeholder Capitalism", which insists that big businesses ought to engage in social activism and not be limited to earn profits for shareholders. "Today, staff and customers believe that business leaders should embody the company's values and speak out on big, touchstone issues, from race, LGBTQ+ and climate change" (Unilever CEO Paul Polman's quote).
That's why Disney is dictated by this type of strategy to come-up with these type of movies that attracts a very small minorities of people and not appealing for a majority one. I'll stop here, because this type of topic is societal and a reflection of today's zeitgeist and, by its connections, highly political.
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Cephus
Master Member
I know it's on the studios, just like it's on DC and Marvel that the entire comic book industry imploded. People have explained it to them and they have refused to listen because wokeism is a mental disorder. It is a religion. People who embrace the faith have a really hard time letting it go because it impacts their entire worldview. It just has to be true because if it isn't, their entire self-worth and view of the world falls apart.
It's why Disney, as an example, can watch their world fall down around their feet and keep doing the same thing because to them, admitting they were wrong isn't a possibility. It can't be. It just is.
Cephus
Master Member
I had a friend, years ago, who was a complete vegan... except when it came to In and Out burgers, which she ate a couple of times a week and didn't see a problem with it.
Cephus
Master Member
Only Disney has accurate records, but it's funny that they have NEVER released numbers like that for D+. Ever. It sure looks made up to me, and they have a history of just making things up so they look credible. It's why the production budgets keep rising when people catch them lying through their teeth.
Riceball
Master Member
That's not true at all, 3D modeling and animation (aka CGI) is just a tool and not magic. It does make certain aspects of FX work easier but it still skill/talent, effort, and most of all, time. You either rush or try do practical effects on the cheap you're also going to get bad results. Neither one is inherently better or worse than the other, each has its own sets of advantages and disadvantages.
Riceball
Master Member
It's because these people are a loud minority so naturally these big studios this is what audiences want, because the squeaky wheel and all that. And because these studio are so large, it's hard to course correct in a quick and timely manner, it takes a lot of time., sort of like the Titanic and the iceberg. You have to figure that they have who knows how many productions already in progress (or were before the strike) how many already in pre-production, and others that have been greenlit but haven't even started pre-production yet. So it's going to take a while for these projects to filter through before we can expect to see anything different. But I'm certain that we will, because, as I've said many times before, the big studios aren't in the business of making art or even movies, they're in the business of making money, And if what they're producing now isn't making them money, they're going to work damned hard to figure out what will. Even if the CEOs and other top execs are all about DEI, they still have to answer to their investors/board of directors who aren't going to be happy that their stocks are dropping in value and are going to direct the CEOs to start making money, DEI or not.
I'll leave this here for your further entertainment/anguish/grinding of gears: Red-Pilled Movie Reviews - If It Ain’t Woke Don’t Miss It
VonMagnum
Sr Member
Hard to tell by reviews that are mostly 3 stars, give or take. 6/10 is almost or at flunking when I went to school, but anything above a 6 on the IMDB is considered awesome seeing as only a select few make the 8 range and virtually nothing stays in the 9 range, even the best movies of all time. In other words, they're mostly meaningless.
Back in the day, you could usually tell whether a movie was worth seeing by finding a reliable movie critic. Rex Reed was quite possibly the most reliable critic of all time. In general, if he liked it, avoid it like the plague unless everyone else agreed too. If he hated it, it was sure to be awesome.
I totally agree about the inertia of turning the ship. With a big studio it's not just a matter of changing the shows in production. It's more like they have to change over a bunch of employees (including pretty high up) before the course corrects. You might be able to make an employee tone down their ideology but you'll never convince an un-talented one to start being talented. The studios (particularly Disney) got themselves in trouble because they seem to have treated diversity/wokeness/etc as a substitute for basic creative quality and management skills.
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VonMagnum
Sr Member
Not true at all?
I'll give you not always true (Jurassic Park VS Superman inflation adjusted), but movie making costs have skyrocketed in the past two decades, IMO and CGI has not reduced costs compared to prior big sci-fi films, IMO. Sure, some things are impossible without CGI, but cost and realism wise, I think we might be better off reconsidering more real effects and less green screen. Green screen acting is generally harder to do and therefore poorer as well on average.
The Maltese Falcon cost about $8 million in today's dollars. Casablanca was about $14 million.
The Ninth Gate (hardly an action film) cost $69 million to make in today's dollars.
Raiders of the Lost Ark cost $66.9 million to make in in today's dollars and it was an action film with tons of special effects.
Star Wars cost $74 million in today's dollars.
Close Encounters cost about $95 million in today's dollars.
Superman 1 & 2 are probably the closest to today's insane costs at $200 million adjusted dollars, but that's only approximately what T2 cost in today's dollars.
Oddly, Jurassic Park only cost $119 million in today's dollars. I guess CGI went up after it left Silicon Graphics machines....
Now big movies are routinely costing $200-500 million to make for big budget film. Higher costs mean more pressure, less new ideas and innovation and generally more sequels, remakes and related films that is getting old fast.
I also don't care how great Marvel movies once we're, they still look fake. Raiders pretty much looked real save maybe the face melting guy, but that was funny.
It's more amazing to me how they could make some of the best movies of all time in the Golden Era for a fraction of the cost. Maybe it's because a great story and dialog trump special effects based action flicks almost every time (see Maltese Falcon & Casablanca).
Riceball
Master Member
Green and blue screens are nothing, they were using them as early as the '70s. And before and in addition to compositing against blue and green screens, set extension work was done using matt painting, which is just a pre-digital form of filming against and blue screens and adding in a digital set or set extension in post. The computer simply became a new tool and new way of doing things but the same basic principles and ideals used with practical and analogue methods are still the same.
As for the cost of movies, I don't think that the costs are entirely due to the increased us FX. While that certainly plays a role, I think that a lot of it has to do with more people working on a given movie in general. Then on top of that, I'm sure that A-list actors today are getting paid far more now than they ever have in the past and A-list directors don't come cheap either.
ghostryder
Legendary Member
"Tom Fontana is furious. And thinks you should be, too."
"The veteran TV writer, on his fourth writers strike in 40 years, is fighting to save the profession that gave him a legacy"
"The veteran TV writer, on his fourth writers strike in 40 years, is fighting to save the profession that gave him a legacy"
VonMagnum
Sr Member
They're nothing? You seem to be missing my point by bringing up the older blue screens or perhaps you just want to argue against old school real sets and real effects? Acting against blue/green screens makes it very difficult for actors to have proper reactions when they often have no idea WTF the set is supposed to look like. A "box" or a guy holding a broom is often used to show where the "monster" is going to be, etc. It's so generic and quite possibly one of the reasons the acting is so awful in the Star Wars Prequels. They had absolutely no feel of the worlds they were going to be computer placed into. The CGI looks great, but it doesn't look quite real in a lot of places, either.
It may not entirely be due to that (e.g. Jurassic Park cost less than Superman inflation adjusted), but why do you think they need so many more people now? A whole lot of those people are for creating and generating and editing all those composite CGI effects, etc. Yes, they needed people to build sets, but have you seen the list of people working on some of these modern films? There can be hundreds and hundreds of people working on CGI effects alone. What do carpenters get paid compared to a 3D set designer and effects animators?
I don't know, but I can tell you that Atari 2600 and many arcade games used to be designed and programmed by one person (I still remember Pitfall = David Crane). Now you have teams at EA and other places with hundreds of people involved over 5-6 years to make something like the Dragon Age series. They often work 6+ days a week and massive overtime and have no lives. There's been news articles about it.
Now imagine trying to do all the CGI effects and scenes for a movie like Doctor Strange inside a year or two (movies used to shoot for 3-4 months or up to a year. Now some movies might takes years to finish because of all the CGI needed (or even more people). They needs an unbelievable amount of people working on these projects to get them done in any semblance of a reasonable amount of time. And yet they give the sound guys (which often number in the 1-2 people range that mix it) a whopping one weekend in many cases to do the Atmos track and we wonder why so many soundtracks don't live up to their full potential in Atmos (overhead + head level effects).
Personally, I think one of the great selling points to the Mission Impossible series and even Top Gun II is the minimal use of CGI and real use of not only stunts, but Tom Cruise doing most of his own stunts. You know you're seeing the real thing and not CGI most of the time. Like him or hate him, I gotta be awed by the skills he's learned just to do that from learning to fly a helicopter to climbing rock faces to base jumping into a canyon with a motorbike and parachute.
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HeartBlade
Sr Member
i dont know who makes the reviews for this website but they are pretty bad tbh.
worthitorwoke.com
So the best movie according to this website is Rob Schnider: Woke up in America? MI Dead Reckoning is also pretty “woke” for an MI movie and is definitely one of the weaker MI entries.
Highest Rating - Worth it or Woke - BASED Movie Reviews
Forget what Lefty says. Read our reviews of the latest movies to hit the big and small screen.
worthitorwoke.com
So the best movie according to this website is Rob Schnider: Woke up in America? MI Dead Reckoning is also pretty “woke” for an MI movie and is definitely one of the weaker MI entries.
I think a lot of the cost is just the overall perfection. You look at a modern movie and everything* has a level of polish that wasn't there 30-40 years ago.
Look at Star Wars ANH. Never mind the space battle shots, today they wouldn't have released it with a stormtropper hitting his head on a door. The Obi-Wan/Vader swordfight scene would have been deemed unusable and re-shot. Etc.
Hollywood has been doing car chases for decades but they are going through A LOT more cars than they used to. The 1977 'Smokey and the Bandit' was filmed with 3 Firebirds. The Steve McQueen 'Bullitt' movie was done with 2 Mustangs and 2 Chargers. Today they would build about 10 copies of those cars to get the same scenes done.
*everything, that is, except bad CGI. For some ridiculous reason that gets a pass. They would never let a scene get by with bad hair/makeup or a boom mic showing in the frame, but they have no problem with phony CGI blood spatters and cartoon physics. I don't get it.
Tom Cruise has gradually built it into a selling point for the movies. Like the way Chris Nolan is known for disliking CGI work. Cruise doesn't just come up with a wild new stunt for a M:I movie, he also makes sure the world knows he did it for real before the movie is released.
All these movies still have tons of CGI by 1990s standards. Modern claims of "We didn't use CGI" can be translated to "We didn't use CGI for everything." There was CGI all over 'Top Gun Mav' but it was used well.
And that's fine. Nobody was sorry when 'Back to the Future 2' used CGI to erase the actors' wire rigs in the hoverboard scene. But everybody would have been sorry if they had used CGI-fabricated images of flying actors. There are different ways to "use CGI."
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That's what happens when you base movies or reviews entirely on political leanings. It's very easy to bitch and moan about woke Hollywood, but it cuts both ways. That site could have have taken the concept to create a humerous take on the subject, but it just comes across like MAGA whining. Any blatant political bias or religious rhetoric where it has no place in the context of the piece ruins entertainment. Ever see a Kirk Cameron flick?i dont know who makes the reviews for this website but they are pretty bad tbh.
Highest Rating - Worth it or Woke - BASED Movie Reviews
Forget what Lefty says. Read our reviews of the latest movies to hit the big and small screen.
So the best movie according to this website is Rob Schnider: Woke up in America? MI Dead Reckoning is also pretty “woke” for an MI movie and is definitely one of the weaker MI entries.
HeartBlade
Sr Member
Agreed. While there is a tendency to blame storytelling for being bad for being “woke,” thats because its the predominant ideology in Hollywood. Its not like non-woke conservative movies arnt also terrible.
But even in the base definition of woke used as their criteria is pretty stupid. Dune is not “woke” despite being a story with a strong matriarchy? Again with MI DR with Grace (hell you can even criticize the earlier entires as “woke” for having a black female spy in Ghost and Isla being a very capable female in Fallout and RN). They also conveniently leave out Barbie despite being a recent movie, super “woke,” and being a huge success.
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