Thursday, April 21, 2011

Not piracy but the lack of intelligent movies is the problem

John Carr wrote a remarkable article about the obvious failure of Hollywood
producers who all too often make rather stupid decisions and have not to
bright strategies.

Carr poinst not only at the decline of twenty percent at the box office recently
but goes further:

"If Hollywood continues down its path of churning out tired remakes and franchise
entries, they will inevitably sacrifice huge swaths of the movie-going public, and
eventually start losing their core teenage/young adult base. (Put bluntly, the fact
is: crap all dressed up is still crap.)

It's odd. Just when a movie like The King's Speech proves to Hollywood that
boomers will go to the movies in droves when an intelligent, high-quality feature is
offered, they turn around and go back to pushing all their 3-D product for kids."

The practically permanently declining TV programmes, the films offered on TV,
are the other obvious evidence of the lack of good movies. John Carr thus asks
with good reasons: Are Movie Theaters an Endangered Species? 

The crisis in the film industry began in 2009, not just in LA, but other countries as
well. (A search with "movie industry crisis" on the net turn up quite a lot.) This
crisis came parallel with the financial crisis, interestingly enough. One of the big
mistakes that led to it was the idea to make a lot of money with stupid movies, a
concept that did not work out.

Occasionally a report in the financial pages mentions an investment
fund or other investment vehicle that invested in movies is performing
badly, if not being bust altogether, that these funds had financed
Hollywood flops.
The idea a couple of years ago was to finance some, mildly stated,
silly movie and make lots of money out of that. The same idiocies as
elsewhere in the financial sectors were also committed with non
market worthy movies. And, when looking closer, it is often those
who sit on such non market worthy movies who blame whoever
and whatever, are close to blackmail the general public for some
money to compensate them for the mistakes and follies.

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