Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis

My fiance mentioned we haven't gone to see a movie in theaters in years and it would be fun to go.

I checked what was playing and:

2 tickets, 2 sodas, 1 popcorn.

$86 dollars.

Don't know if I'll ever go to a conventional movie theater again.

The little dinosaurs are ignoring the great big elephants in the room: gaming. The article doesn't mention it. The market for video games in 2024 was around $225B, compared to movies at around $33B. Hollywood has worked very hard not to realize that their industry has become niche and have succeeded.

My last week may be an indicator. I've watched zero TV or movies but have spent about 40 hours helping a small colony of scrappy hard working beavers survive on post apocalyptic earth. Steam got my money, Hollywood didn't.

The cultural relevance of movies, and American made movies isn't going anywhere anytime soon, but I think the economics of streaming is finally playing out in the loss of the geographical concentration of power in Hollywood and California.

This is the endgame of the feedback loop of streamers causing industry consolidation... the direct connection of dollars people spend to sit in a theatre seat was slowly declining, but now I think it's gotten so small that it no longer matters- and once the whole box-office feedback loop disappears a lot of the economics of how films are produced are being forced to change.

One of the reasons that people have loved to make fun of Hollywood for literally it's entire existence (besides the fact that the meta talk is self-indulgent artist stuff) is that making movies with so much money and waste is fundamentally ridiculous.

The optimistic viewpoint is that maybe new AI production tools will trigger a re-democratization of creative movies in the next wave, like in the 70s and the 90s indies.

Everyone is complaining about movie theater prices. But, I'll also complain about streaming prices. I want to watch The Secret Agent and it's $9.99 to rent on Apple TV. It doesn't seem to make sense in comparison to month all-you-can-watch subscription prices.

Good riddance. It won’t be missed. Very little of Hollywood benefited humanity - it was mostly a tool of the rich and governments to propagandize. It was just an another opiate for masses. It was built on ruthless exploitation of labour and consumers.

My 2c: They should stop concentrating on appealing to the broadest audience. Formulaic heros' journeys, franchises, predictable characters acted by the same narrow set of the the most-attractive people etc.

Safety and mass-market appeal over creativity.

For contrast: Books, non-AAA video games, and movies from smaller studios still produce high-quality, creative efforts I continue to be excited about. Big-budget movies (and games), and Netflix shows are mostly bottom-feeder stuff.

Maybe I'm insane or it's my age, but I can't watch new movies/shows without just seeing propaganda agendas at every turn. Really kills it for me.

I watch a film every single day since Covid. There are great films everywhere every year. I'm not american but the sooner you ignore the american cultural imperialism is the better (or at least the films that don't premiere at competition festivals). There is a whole world outside of America.

There just aren’t as many good new movies. Most movies we watch at home are from decades ago. If we didn’t have streaming maybe we’d go to the movies more often, but it’s hard to say.

A few movies we watched are not worth the money. To stay afloat they have to raise ticket prices, but if we’re paying so much, the movie better be absolutely outstanding, and the are just not usually, so we stopped going.

So many more products are competing for finite attention now. And the solution to that problem is not to productize your commodity imo, art created for the sake of selling is not art.

Nobody else to blame but themselves. Of course, Hollywood is full of narcissists so they'll blame everyone else, e.g. streaming, prices, etc. but the reality is of the last 10-15 years of mainstream US cinema is:

- Scripts that sound more like an HR meeting than a good story.

- Blockbuster superhero movies that are all the same movie.

- Lots of remakes that added modern CGI flare and destroyed the artistic value of the original.

- As consolidation of studios happens, way more "safe" stories that aim to not offend anyone. I think the only one able to get away with it right now is Tarantino.

Prices, streaming, theaters, etc. -- they're all accessory to the problem. People went to the movies for enjoyment, why would they go to endure them? There's no cultural collective experience anymore in the sense of going to see Lord of the Rings or Matrix with your friends for the first time.

Also this is happening throughout all media. Music and video games have the same kind of discussions.

Most recent in theater movie I was was "F1" because I thought the audio experience would be worth the ticket price. While the audio was good, seat quality was sub par, popcorn stale and soda was from a Freestyle machine (YUK!)

$100 to go to the movies for a family of four. No thanks. There’s no mystery why the movies are dying. They’ve priced themselves out and then they give away the product on streaming several months later anyways.

If they want theaters to come back then they’ll have to put movies behind a paywall again.

The most interesting part:

> North Americans are going to the movies about half as often as they used to a decade ago, based on the number of tickets sold at cinemas in the US and Canada.

50% down in just 10 years is massive.

Here's a great video-essay on adjacent topic: Why The Movies Don't Feel The Same Anymore

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoldOz5YyAw

I put more stock in the the Sundance and Cannes jury prizes: even if they're comprised of the elites who can afford to go to these festivals, they've still got far more artistic sense than the ossified corporate board that the Academy has always been.

I mean when you have Larry Ellison and other goons pledging investments in these major studios, it's no wonder people who actually enjoy watching movies don't want to give their money+time to watch some dumbed down bottom of the barrel slime that AI has decided people will sit through.

Thankfully, filmmaking is becoming more and more independent. It's never been easier and cheaper to make a movie and share it to millions of people on YouTube or Vimeo. Why go through Hollywood, investors, or give money to festivals for a chance at success when you can just upload the thing and see what happens?

I haven't been in cinema in the past ~10 years and to be honest I wouldn't care if no more movies were ever made, simply because there are hundreds, if not thousands, amazing movies made since the beginning of the cinema that I didn't watch. Most of the new movies are crap anyways, so why waste time and money when I can watch a classic movie instead which has a much higher probability of me enyjoing it.

A few years ago, someone on Twitter had a really cool proposal for how to revamp the entire format of the Oscars, even taking the importance of commercials into account, but I can't for the life of me find it anymore.

Actors being this wealthy and famous has always been a mystery to me. Oh so you are a good looking person that recites other people's words for money while faking emotions? And you can take as many takes as you can and your fuckups will be corrected in post-production anyway? Well I guess the work you do totally merits the hundreds of millions of dollars you've amassed. Like even kicking a ball or whatever makes more sense to me because there is an objective measurement of what it means to do it well, while with actors its mostly about sympathy or preference

They have no one to blame but themselves, judging by the quality of Hollywood movies in recent years.

Another victim of the efficiency of the market.

Market forces know no culture except what consumers pay for. Absent real care, stewardship and focused investment, the product will always get cheaper.

And of course consumers' tastes are under attack from another direction: their attention spans.

Some load-bearing pillars of human culture are weakening.

The main issue was the content the movie industry produced which looked like a lot like some AI slop. I think the DEI lecturing was another nail in the coffin. Unless that changes and they magically add something new to the cinema experience I think they will keep diving into irrelevance because now everybody can produce AI slop.

Is this article a weird cut-paste of older content? This passage makes no sense in the rest of the context, the tense is all wrong.

>Starting in 2029, the Oscars will also be streamed globally on YouTube, which the academy hopes will attract new audiences and reinvigorate the ceremony’s popularity after years of declining viewership.

Edit: I read 2019 not.. 2029. That's actually incredible. Are they going to get in on tiktok for 2039 next?

The Oscars are the heart of the problem. One definition of “celebrity” is “person who is celebrated”

Hollywood is so used to getting high on its own supply that it really thinks we want to see an AI slop video of Brad Pitt fighting Tom Cruise. People there just don’t have any information at all about what anybody outside their bubble thinks so of course they make samey big budget pictures and samey small budget pictures. Unless they shut down their communications channels and disperse geographically they are going to keep doing the same thing over and over again and be wondering why they keep getting the same results.

And that gets us to why they will never reform, they know their numbers are terrible but think this is (1) cyclical and (2) due to technological changes so they’ll never get it that running ads that make it sound like somebody else cares about Tom Cruise doesn’t really make people care about Tom Cruise, it just makes them ignore advertising messages.

Safety and mass-market appeal over creativity.

There are some studios who do this already (A24 for example who have produced a number of relatively popular films). But agreed that the big studios have focused on sequels and formulaic content for the most part

I think it’s the finance people. They have decided every creative movie made represents resources and time that can’t be used for a “sure-thing” franchise schlock movie.

Sure, but Spider-Man CXXVI is a sure bet for a safe ROI. Nobody knows what Chopper Chicks in Zombietown will yield.

Books are a great example - even popular books will now have a readership in the tens of thousands, at most. Nobody makes money - it’s an art, not an industry.

- Theatrical releases are how movies make most of their money, not giving them away for free on streaming. Box office margins are huge, but renting licenses to streamers is limited and fungible with all the other mountains of content they license.

- Box office optimizes for novelty, streamers optimize for "don't churn" - very different criteria for investment.

- Disney cannibalized the box office with Marvel Star Wars, which killed the mid market and killed innovation. This is your point. Disney's success and tentpole successes in general killed innovation and diversity and made the market more winner-takes-all. Comedy movies barely exist anymore. There are few $50-75M films now. Little original content. Now films are engineered for maximum audience penetration and maximum box office revenue. This changes how films are written and who they are written for. The answer is "everyone", and that means "safe", "predictable", and "repeatable". No gambles. Everything else has to fight for table scraps.

- End of ZIRP puts us back in 2000. Money used to be free. Now it's expensive. It's not as easy to underwrite productions anymore. Less innovation.

- Dopamine machines fit into your pocket and suck up time and attention. Gaming is also huge now. Less people going to the movies because plenty of alternatives exist.

- The $400 80'' plus Netflix versus the expensive theater, concessions, and rude people have made theaters unattractive. Theaters are where film margins come from. Without that revenue, expensive movies will be scaled back.

- Labor costs less in Europe and Asia, even with ample tax subsidy. The LA and American jobs and infrastructure are drying up. These are lifelong careers that are ending.

- Global audiences want global stories. American culture isn't local, and local talent can now make high quality productions. Asia is turning out banger after banger.

- Youth want youth mediums. Movies feel slow and boring. TikTok is where it's at.

- AI is now a thing.

All of the fundamentals have changed.

I will debate one point you raised:

> most-attractive people

Most people prefer to look at attractive people. It's an almost universal preference. Tried and tested throughout time. In film, those attractive people also need charisma.

Except that pretty much as soon as movies started being made, people have said this about movies :)

not appealing to the masses is DEI; perfect robotic formula are just common sense.

Obviously.

Maybe I'm insane or it's my age, but I can't watch new movies/shows without just seeing propaganda agendas at every turn. Really kills it for me.

My fiance mentioned we haven't gone to see a movie in theaters in years and it would be fun to go.

I checked what was playing and:

2 tickets, 2 sodas, 1 popcorn.

$86 dollars.

Don't know if I'll ever go to a conventional movie theater again.

They have no one to blame but themselves, judging by the quality of Hollywood movies in recent years.

The most interesting part:

> North Americans are going to the movies about half as often as they used to a decade ago, based on the number of tickets sold at cinemas in the US and Canada.

50% down in just 10 years is massive.

Here's a great video-essay on adjacent topic: Why The Movies Don't Feel The Same Anymore

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoldOz5YyAw

Another victim of the efficiency of the market.

Market forces know no culture except what consumers pay for. Absent real care, stewardship and focused investment, the product will always get cheaper.

And of course consumers' tastes are under attack from another direction: their attention spans.

Some load-bearing pillars of human culture are weakening.

To be fair, there's plenty of that in older films and TV series as well, particularly "golden age" material from the 1940s -- 1970s, which played strongly off WWII, Cold War, and pro-business themes, with occasional ventures into counterculture works for the latter.

The original Top Gun (1986) was describe at the time as the US Navy's most successful recruiting campaign ever, noted in this 2004 account citing 1990 correspondence with then Secretary of Defence Dick Cheney: <https://archive.org/details/operationhollywo00robb/page/180>. Similarly endless war, cowboy, biblical, and rom-com films of that period.

Should art not of a point of view?

Most if not all the ticket price goes directly into the studio's pockets.

So the theatres stay alive by selling concessions.

I'd wager everyone here complaining about prices would also wax poetic about how theatres don't "pay a living wage" to the kids scooping popcorn and would immediately drive home in their $100k Rivians or Teslas so they can give a one star review on Yelp or complain on Reddit about the bathrooms or floors being dirty or sticky.

These same people wouldn't bat an eye at paying $14 for a food truck grilled cheese and leave a tip.

You can't have it both ways.

The last movie we attended people were incredibly disruptive throughout the film, to the point that it was difficult to focus on the film. Some people enjoy screaming, laughing, and talking as part of the experience, but it's apparently been normalized beyond my tolerance threshold. Add in the cost and overall movie quality decrease of Hollywood productions, and it's difficult to justify.

Presently, we watch foreign movies at home 95% of the time and maybe a Hollywood production when they manage to find their roots and create something worth watching.

Where is that? Tickets here are only $7-10 each (except maybe some IMAX or similar showings) and two drinks and popcorn would be $15-25 for two people (size dependent). This is in Colorado.

EDIT: I was going off of memory, but matinee/child/senior pricing is apparently $9.75 at the theater I usually go to, evening is $13.25 (I never go in the evening, had forgotten what that price was). They have a two drink and popcorn combo for $22.10. So the worst case of evening prices (again, not considering IMAX, just regular screens and seats) for two with that combo is $48.60. That's not cheap, but it's not $86 either. And if you're willing to share the drink and go to a matinee you can cut the price to $34.80. This is a Cinemark, a pretty big theater chain.

Then I guess you aren't familiar with the 20 minutes of trailers, 1 minute of Cocacola ad and 2 minutes of other completely irrelevant content before the movie actually begins.

Where I go it's about $33 for two tickets bought online and probably $20 for those snacks, though we usually share a drink and a popcorn. The theater is still usually empty.

The market-clearing price is nearly zero except for some new releases. Oppenheimer was sold out in its first weekend, for example.

Anyone who went to movies before about 1999 remembers them being a lot more popular.

I still go to arthouse movies regularly, mostly because it forces me to give them undivided attention

Although, I’ll admit I go way less often than two years ago when I was full time WFH. Which begs the question if I just went for a reason to leave the house

What theater is that at? Sounds like a mega chain like AMC or Regal. The local indie theater we go to in one of the 5 largest American cities has never been over $15 per ticket and adding popcorn and a drink is maybe $10 more on top.

Support small theatres, you won’t get charged like this.

if you love cinema enough

For a long time now I've felt that there's only situation where it makes sense. That's movies where it is something about it would make it much more enjoyable on IMAX or similar with a professional sound system. So something in the visual spectacle category.

For any normal movie I'd rather just watch it from my couch. But for the once in a while, over the top, blockbuster I'll still go to a theater.

Presumably, the business goal is to steer you toward (recurring) subscription rather than (one-off) pay-to-watch activities.

This is one thing I really despise about the streaming world. When rental stores were a thing you could grab older movies from the bargain bin to rest for $1 or less. Now all movies are the same price no matter if it's new or 30 years old.

If they want theaters to come back then they’ll have to put movies behind a paywall again.

Yeah, I think the prices also have resulted in a massive change in how consumers decide to go to movies as well. With the price so high for a family of four, people rely much more heavily on positive word of mouth/reviews before making a decision.

So people are much more risk adverse. I've never understood why they don't do tiered pricing based on the type of movie it is. If it's not a mega blockbuster type film, reduce the price a bit to make it easier for people to take a risk and try out a movie without it being a 90%+ rating on rotten tomatoes. I'd personally probably go a lot more if a movie like say Marty Supreme was $10 instead of $20.

So do you want to pay more, or less? I am confused.

And its $100 minimum... at least in NYC. Right now its 20-25 a head and that doesn't include transportation or food.

The missing middle from 20 years back is rentals. That was $5-10 a pop, people rented almost weekly. The option is there digitally now but its not in the public conscience for the same reason as cinema, people can just wait for the streaming option as the turnover is so short. (And granted, more people went to the cinema back then)

Meanwhile consumers are whining about the increases in streaming cost and diffusion, and low quality content. It had to happen, the math wasn't working out. In the social media bubbles users argue they will "just pirate again", over and over as though those who would care to don't already do so. Its toothless. Average people are not going to pay for a VPN and navigate things they don't understand just to pirate. They will eat the cost, whether it be streaming or renting

I doubt increasing the price of their goods will work when the supply of alternative ways to spend time at almost zero cost is near infinite.

thats so much cheaper for a family of 4 for 3 hrs compared to other options.

what are the other cheaper options? going to free parks and museums? i am sure going to free museum will be a big hit with the kids :]

Cannes is free to attend for film professionals. Always was. You only have to find a hotel.

At Sundance you could stay in Salt Lake City or Heber City and have fun. Free busses.

Oscars are not about the arts, nor about quality. Never was.

There just aren’t as many good new movies. Most movies we watch at home are from decades ago. If we didn’t have streaming maybe we’d go to the movies more often, but it’s hard to say.

> There just aren’t as many good new movies.

Is this true, or you just can’t discover them anymore because everything else competes for your attention? Arguably in the last decade more great content in both movies and TV shows produced than ever, it’s just so much, that it’s hard to choose.

> To stay afloat they have to raise ticket prices, but if we’re paying so much

What are you paying when you go to the cinema? Just went to the cinema today to see Hoppers, and was slightly surprised that the tickets were only 8 EUR per person, then we spent maybe 5-10 EUR per person on snacks too, so ended up paying maybe ~15 EUR per person overall. This was outside a metropolitan city in South-Western Europe, maybe that's why, or I've just lost track of what's expensive/cheap.

We pay $6 tickets for first run movies on Tuesdays at the Studio movie grill as a cheapish date night with movie + dinner + drinks and reserve seating

Movie theatres hardly make any money from ticket sales with 80% of the ticket price going to the studio during the first two weeks and then declining. They make money off of concessions

Can you tell me your top 3 of every year since Covid?

Yes they should never had a Black lady playing an orange alien from Tamarin on the Titan TV series. It just wasn’t realistic.

We should just have all White males leading movies

This is such a college freshman worldview take, IMO.

Hollywood produced some of the most influential pieces of art of the last century and it permeated global culture in a way only comparable to Renaissance-era Florence. Even if your simplistic take stained by marxist propaganda is true, you shouldn't just casually dismiss the labor of hundreds of thousands of artists and technicians over a century simply because you've become jaded by Marvel slop.

So many more products are competing for finite attention now. And the solution to that problem is not to productize your commodity imo, art created for the sake of selling is not art.

If you don't productize something you won't make money and then you'll starve and die.

This is a boring opinion. It's the equivalent of what happens to many older adults when it comes to music. All of the best songs came out in their teens to about 30 so what's the point of listening to anything new? It assumes there is no innovation and the person just traps themselves in the past.

You could say there hasn't been any good new music since 1970 and humans have been making music for thousands of year. Or you could try out the many new genres and eventually find something new and exciting.

it just seems like a very boring way to live out your life.

Theatres don't just show new movies. There's something very special about being locked in a dark room with a big screen to watch Alien or Barry Lyndon. Older movies especially look great in a theatre and some of the magic is lost on a smaller screen.

90% of any content is crap but you're missing out if you like movies and you haven't seen Sinners, The Bone Temple, or NOPE (to name a few recent great theatre watches).

There is very little incentive to make good movies now, especially when zoomers' attention spans are maximum 2 minutes. I still enjoy a classic movie or two but I'm running out of movies to watch even then.

The same argument could be made for the book industry, where there are centuries of content available. And yet, people still read new books.

Enshittification seems to be the modus operandi in every business. The music and the movies from current era feel like they're made for idiots.

I went to see Avatar. I only go to the movies once a year its a kinda tradition on New Year's Day.

It cost me 50 eurodollars for two tickets. And people complain Netflix is expensive!

Young people are going to prefer content that caters to their cultural zeitgeist and worldview. This is why new media is continually made and we don't all just listen to Mozart.

Everything changes and evolves. Fashion, music, games, young adult fiction, memes.

You wouldn't limit yourself to your grandparents' taste, would you? (I didn't say parents because some kids are instilled with parental preferences. I grew up around kids in the 00's who said the Beatles were the peak of music - obviously learned preferences straight from their parents.)

You might not understand youth culture because you grew up before them and have different tastes. We're imprinted with preference and nostalgia for our youth, and we can see changes to that as a hideous affront. The next generation is meanwhile going through the same cycle we did.

The optimistic viewpoint is that maybe new AI production tools will trigger a re-democratization of creative movies in the next wave, like in the 70s and the 90s indies.

I think the issue is that content creation and distribution has already been fully democratized. How many hours do people spend watching videos shot by individuals on their phones in their apartments?

Combined with streaming, there's just an overabundance of "good enough" content at everyone's fingertips. The moat that protected big-budget feature films is gone. You don't see a trailer for a movie and salivate and wait for it to come out, it just blends in to the stream of 5000 other things you can watch right now.

Cultural relevance of movies is already greatly diminished. Maybe these AI tools will trigger a reversion of movies to the days of the nickelodeons where plot, story, and character are irrelevant and people just shell out money (attention) as long as the moving image looks cool.

As much as I support unions and labour rights, the last SAG-AFTRA strike mostly just helped the big studios realize they could do more with less.

Hollywood is a factory town at the end of the day, and we all know what happened to most factory towns in America. This one is just getting there a few decades after the others.

Small but important correction: the biggest issue for the movie industry aren't streaming services or them filming in locations with good tax incentives like UK or Australia but Youtube.

It's hard to compete with millions of videomakers, some of them extremely skilled and able to produce interesting content on a budget.

The cultural relevance of all kinds of American media has been declining as the U.S. is not cool or aspirational anymore.

American movies suck.

> The optimistic viewpoint is that maybe new AI production tools will trigger a re-democratization of creative movies

I don't think so.

Part of the downfall of movies -- blockbusters movies anyway, the kind where being a box office hit matters -- is that they have seemed produced like AI slop even before AI. Making it easier to produce more slop isn't going to fix this.

Then there's one thing making noise in my brain. It's not polite to say it, but here it is anyway: should movies be democratized? And art in general? Maybe people without the means of making art that reaches millions shouldn't be enabled by AI. Maybe it's ok that not everyone can produce this kind of art. Maybe the world is saved from a crapton of, well, garbage. More than what's currently being produced, anyway.

As for non-blockbuster art, it's already democratic. Everyone can grab a phone camera or a paintbrush and create art for their friends and family. And that's ok.

The Oscars are the heart of the problem. One definition of “celebrity” is “person who is celebrated”

I think it's the opposite problem, they have too much information and data, which means they aren't making lots of gambles on new/different scripts anymore but making very safe bets because everyone is terrified of losing their cool high paying jobs.

> AI slop video of Brad Pitt fighting Tom Cruise

The video you are referring to was not produced by Hollywood, it was created by Irish director Ruairi Robinson, basically as a test of the new Seedance AI.

I'm not saying that Hollywood isn't out of touch, I'm just saying that nothing about Hollywood can be inferred from that video.

"Hollywood" thinks we want AI slop in the way that hackers think we want video with unskippable ads.

- Scripts that sound more like an HR meeting than a good story.

- Blockbuster superhero movies that are all the same movie.

- Lots of remakes that added modern CGI flare and destroyed the artistic value of the original.

- As consolidation of studios happens, way more "safe" stories that aim to not offend anyone. I think the only one able to get away with it right now is Tarantino.

Also this is happening throughout all media. Music and video games have the same kind of discussions.

Is this article a weird cut-paste of older content? This passage makes no sense in the rest of the context, the tense is all wrong.

Edit: I read 2019 not.. 2029. That's actually incredible. Are they going to get in on tiktok for 2039 next?

I don't game at all but watch at least one movie a day as my relaxing time: criterion collection, mubi etc. I go to an indie cinema about once a month, often to see older movies as much as new ones. The cinema is rarely full but they have a good café and affordable subscriptions and I'm guessing some municipal funding, they won't ever run out of films to show. Though the day A24 goes out of business will be my sad day.

The biggest competition for movies is actually from Youtube.

While the streaming business led to a growth of the movie industry, pre Covid and pre strikes at least, it's difficult to compete when millions of people can produce good content for low prices.

On top of that, it doesn't help that movies stopped innovating, 2025 box office was entirely dominated by prequels and sequels.

I don't care about avengers, I really don't, the first bored me enough.

Of note here too: There's been a lot of (social media at least) backlash against AAA studios lately. Anecdote: 2025 had a number of great (High quality, popular, award winners/nominees etc), and they weren't from big studios. There seems to be a niche middle-budget level that produces wonders. Just to limit scope to 2025: KCD2, Expedition 33, and Blue Prince were all incredible games. Expedition 33 has my favorite sound track (Or album in general?) of all time. Death Stranding 2 is another great one. By a big studio, but let a creative person run wild with it.

I suspect the problem with AAA games is the same one movie studios face; mass-market appeal and profit-driven-design degrades the experience.

The time I used to spend watching movies is now spent on YouTube.

With the high quality cameras and drones at approachable prices, it's amazing to watch individuals create videos at such high quality but also has a bit of that DIY vibe that makes it more relatable and enjoyable.

My current fav is watching 4X4 overlanding videos of people driving along some stunning landscapes.

That game sounds interesting. What is it called? I only saw Beavers Be Damned when I searched Steam.

The gaming industry has been bigger than the film industry for decades. This isn't new.

That’s because Hollywood makes movies, not videogames. You also spent a few hours driving but Hollywood hasn’t done anything about it because they are not in the business of making cars.

As I wrote elsewhere, I think TV is what is actually consuming cinema's lunch. The average hours spent watching TV have only gone up over the years, but the same is not true of film. Gaming as a "primary" hobby is also quite male-coded (women tend to play on their phones, but they spend by far the most amount of time watching trash tv and Bridgerton or whatever).

Didn't The Game Awards receive more viewers than the Super Bowl? It used to be referred to as, like, "the Oscars for video games", but now it's immensely more popular than the Oscars.

> The little dinosaurs are ignoring the great big elephants in the room: gaming

Partially, but a massive issue has been the offshoring of Hollywood [0].

UK, Canada, EU states like Ireland and Poland, and others match dollar-for-dollar in subsidizes to incentivize local production, and factoring in lower salaries are able to outcompete even Georgia.

After COVID and the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike, production completely left Hollywood.

Film production is high risk and expensive, so margins really matter, so the double whammy of the COVID shutdowns and then fhe WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike became existential.

California has been trying to reincentivize onshoring [1], but it's too little too late. Hollywood even lobbied the Trump admin [2] for a 100% tariff on foreign produced films [3] which more diversified media companies pushed back.

[0] - https://milkeninstitute.org/content-hub/research-and-reports...

[1] - https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/06/gavin-newsom-hollyw...

[2] - https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/15/hollywood-lobbying-...

[3] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g78e809zqo

Hollywood seems to have never realized that the point of works like LotR and Star Wars was to take the ridiculous extremely seriously. The bad CGI didn't matter because every actor took it seriously. A marvel-ized star wars with great CGI is still a bad movie because nobody on screen takes it seriously despite how realistic the graphics are.

Actors have a kind of legally-enforced monopoly. They're not employees you hire, they're products you buy.

If you want to make a movie staring Nicole Kidman, you have to pay whatever Nicole Kidman wants you to pay. You're legally forbidden from hiring an "off-brand" person and making her look indistinguishable from Kidman.

If you want to hire a Scala programmer, there's plenty of easily-replaceable people willing and able to do that job. No single person dictates how much money Scala programmers make.

Famous actors are basically a category that they're the only member of, and so they can set their prices. You can switch to a different category )(just as you can switch from Scala to Typescript) if one becomes too expensive, but that too carries some expense.

Franchises have a similar problem. If all your friends are watching Game of Thrones, you too want to watch Game of Thrones, even if there are other shows which are just as good. This means the Makers of GoT can dictate GoT prices, because the government gives them a legal monopoly on GoT distribution.

It's celebrity. People want to imagine themselves like these icons they've built, even if only through the laziest of efforts. I wonder if it's an innate human trait to aspire to be like those we admire.

I don't want fame, but if I did I would want a lot of money to give up my freedom to be chased by paparazzi for the rest of my life.

There's certainly a lot of actors that seem to just phone in a performance and are mainly hired due to their looks and high profiles, but don't forget about the actors that can elevate just about any role that they're in due to their skills and artistry.

What exactly doesn't make sense? The Oscars are moving to streaming the event globally on YouTube (bunch of TV channels has said they'll stop broadcasting it in 2029), and the viewership of the Oscars has been declining for years. I'm not sure I see what's wrong in there.

Hm, what's wrong with it?