What is Digg?125 Comments
- inactive, on 11/14/2008, -1/+63hopefully its because people are tired of paying for hollywoods recycling of crap into a sequel of crap.
- MatthewDuke, on 11/14/2008, -0/+44Hey, Crap 2 was actually pretty good.
- Bloodwine, on 11/14/2008, -3/+46Hollywood suffers from the same problem as Detroit ... they both make complete *****. Sure there are a few gems here and there, but overall the quality is subpar.
Hollywood could use some tough times to be honest, it'll make them take more risks and maybe we'll see a new era of good movies. - jericko, on 11/14/2008, -0/+43I think it has less to do with the economy and more to do with the fact Hollywood is just re-making all the movies we saw when we were a kid in the 80s. Do they really think we are going to pay $11 to see a re-make of the karate kid?!?!?!?
- imronburgundy83, on 11/14/2008, -6/+37Good, actors and actresses get paid way too much for what they do. I'm tired of seeing so-called "news stories" about actors' babies and adopted kids. No one cares. People have kids every day. Get over yourselves. I blame women for this phenomena.
- punchinelli, on 11/14/2008, -0/+27A good way to get out of this situation would be to, you know, make good movies. Instead we get movies about chihuahuas in Beverly Hills.
- DivisibleByZero, on 11/14/2008, -1/+16Didn't Hollywood make a killing during the great depression? People trying to escape their ***** lives for two hours and eat some popcorn?
Of course that plan doesn't work so much now when going to the theater costs $15 for a ticket and another $7 for a medium popcorn.
I don't doubt more people will choose to have friends over at their house for "movie night" instead of going and spending $75 on watered down drinks and door prices at the dance clubs they currently go to. Hollywood needs to capitalize on that with some good streaming video solutions. - IphtashuFitz, on 11/14/2008, -0/+12One sequel I can usually deal with. But when it gets to the point of releasing Crap Hard with a Vengeance, Crap 4: Crap's Revenge, Crap vs. Vomit, Crap the Musical, Crap the Revenge, Crap Revolutions, etc. then all bets are off.
- zaffir, on 11/14/2008, -0/+11No, in tough times they will stop taking as many risks as they can. Why risk millions on an unproven franchise when you can make High School Musical 4 and print money?
- MatthewDuke, on 11/14/2008, -2/+13Sounds like something a Cobra Kai would say...
PS No mercy. - lead2thehead, on 11/14/2008, -0/+11Well let's see if we can get to the bottom of this. The following movies are playing right now:
Beverly Hill Chihuahua
Madagascar 2
High School Musical 3
Hellboy 2
Saw 5
Soul Men
The Secret Life of Bees
Max Payne
Yeah, it must be this damn economy. People should be lining up around the block to see these movies. - WhiskeyLemur, on 06/30/2009, -0/+10Yep. Hollywood did fabulously well during the Great Depression, but the entertainment situation now is absolutely incomparable.
In the 1930s, your entertainment options were severely limited. Even TV was not widespread yet, so if you wanted to make an evening of it, your options were pretty much movies, live concerts, parties, restaurants - that sort of thing. If you stayed home, your options for escapism were "books" or "books."
Now we have an absolute deluge of options: cable and Internet (which are already budgeted, remember), video games (which give you days of entertainment instead of hours), rented movies (often rented very cheaply from your cable provider)... The list goes on. There's no need to leave your home to get away from it all.
That's aside from your very valid point about the cost of movie tickets. I would love to see a comparison of the price of admission (and the cost of movie production) then and now, adjusted for factors like inflation, cost of living, and household income. My gut feeling says that the prices were much lower for both in the '30s, but I could be way off base. The point is that if we had as few options now as we did then, more people would cough up the $20-30 to go see a movie. - Wryly, on 11/14/2008, -0/+9Bring back quality. I'll pay to see Michael Clayton. I won't pay to see Saw V.
- Senturion, on 11/14/2008, -0/+9I hate to break it to you but in tough times people take LESS risks, so be prepared for more crappy comic book sequels and the further destruction of Vince Vaughn's career.
Studios have already begun cutting the budgets or outright closing their independent production houses outright, the only movies that will get green-lighted are ones that are guaranteed to make money, so that means no risks.
I wish you were right but history says that things are going to get worse in Hollywood before they get better. - MatthewDuke, on 11/14/2008, -2/+11I agree. Cigarettes and beer maybe, but not general entertainment like a family of 4 going to see a $12/person movie.
- alais, on 11/14/2008, -1/+9Ohh no what will Hollywood do! Oh the humanity.
- inactive, on 11/14/2008, -0/+7it was craptacular.
- inactive, on 11/14/2008, -1/+8Agreed.
It's like they ran out of ideas after 2000.
Even when they're not remakes the movies suck.
2008 all together sucked. - inactive, on 11/14/2008, -4/+11Yeah. But this time it's file sharing that hollywood is going to have to figure out how to shrug off.
- xLSDx, on 11/14/2008, -0/+7I would if they changed the ending so Johnny wins.
- TheInformer, on 11/14/2008, -0/+7No, it's putting out substandard movies that Hollywood needs to fix.
- dynamojoe, on 11/14/2008, -0/+7They'll just find some way to blame it on bittorrent.
- WhiskeyLemur, on 06/30/2009, -0/+6It's a bit of a catch-22 for movie makers, in several regards. Movies are SO expensive to make that the producers need to convince the investors that the product is solid, which means that almost no one is willing to take a risk on an avant-garde film - or any film which does not follow a proven formula. Unfortunately, formulaic films are tremendously boring, so people stop watching them. Every once in a great while someone manages to break out a new formula, which is fresh the first couple of times around ("Equilibrium" and the original "Matrix" come to mind) but quickly gets stale as more and more people jump onto the proverbial bandwagon.
The other catch-22 is that thought-provoking, intellectual "art" films are seen as appealing to a very narrow audience. They aren't expected to make as much money, so there is less cash available for advertising. These movies don't get the same exposure as the Ben Stiller drek, so naturally fewer people go to see them and they're less profitable. This in turn reinforces the stereotype that people don't want to see these sorts of films, and so on.
I don't know how to solve these problems. I suspect that the entire Hollywood model is about to go the way of the economy, and will need to be reinvented from the ground up. I would postulate that we're going to end up seeing a lot more independent, low-budget flicks, probably advertised and distributed on the net to a large extent. As for the big-ticket productions? Evolve or die. - darkstar949, on 11/14/2008, -0/+5I don't think that internet piracy has as much to do with it as people would like to think. I think it is more the combined fact that there have been a lot of really lousy movies coming out and movie theaters are charging an arm and a leg to go see them. Lets face it, if you have a pretty good idea that you don't want to see a movie, are you going to go and pay $10 to go see it anyway? Likewise, if you don't have $10 worth of spare cash sitting around, are you going to go an see a movie?
I would actually be a bit more interested to see how the subscriptions for Netfix are going right now and if they are up then people might be turning more towards other routes for getting movies. With the home theater equipment that are currently on the market there really isn't even much of a reason to go to the theater unless you want to see something when it first comes out. - inactive, on 11/14/2008, -2/+7Very informative article. I never realized that the economy was the cause of the lousy movie selection these days. I thought it was caused by global warming.
- acknotSW, on 11/14/2008, -0/+5Or just plain bad remakes.
- ColorBlind, on 11/14/2008, -3/+8***** um'
- Ishiguro, on 11/14/2008, -0/+5Then in Karate Kid II Johnny goes to Okinawa, and helps Sato bulldoze the village.
- nesagwa, on 11/14/2008, -0/+5You forgot the magic of radio.
People loved that ***** radio thing man. - newsheatdotcom, on 11/14/2008, -0/+5Or they could just lower ticket prices...
- darkstar949, on 11/14/2008, -0/+5@Lythium - Actually, board games (e.g. Monopoly) and card games were very popular during the depression as well. There was also other stuff that you could go out and do, such as going down to arcades.
- ROBINEW, on 11/14/2008, -0/+5And don't forget about the $8 popcorn and $5 drinks.
- dsmx, on 11/14/2008, -0/+5Bringing the total to $96 which seems slightly excessive to me.
- AtraNoxVII, on 11/14/2008, -0/+4The remake of the Karate Kid has Will Smith's son...
There hasn't been a black karate kid since the 80s in a movie called Barry Gordy's The Last Dragon, awesome soundtrack and choreographing.
Bruce Leroy!
I've Got THE GLOW! - uberfu, on 11/14/2008, -0/+4Yeah - poor ***** actors! So what if Tom Hanks doesn't make $150 million on his next film and he's forced to live with only $15 million_ Big ***** shame!
- dwright99, on 11/14/2008, -0/+4Uh oh, another bailout coming. They're to big to fail.
I wouldn't want to see Tom Cruise's salary cut to 15 million a picture. - Ishiguro, on 11/14/2008, -0/+4Yes, this was the case when movies were a nickle. I dread going to the movies b/c of the price, the people, and a few other fun reasons.
- DivisibleByZero, on 11/14/2008, -0/+4I'm not sure the economy is taking a toll on them so much as the combined efforts of them making really ***** movies, and internet piracy. You could argue that the economy is increasing peoples' incentive to pirate, but I'm pretty sure the crappy movies thing is all on them.
- junkwheel, on 11/14/2008, -6/+10"because worried consumers spend more on entertainment when times are tough"
Where did this nugget of wisdom come from? - imronburgundy83, on 11/14/2008, -3/+7It's economics. It's been around for a while.
- ronaldinho, on 11/14/2008, -2/+6Sometimes I wonder whether the urge to be nosy and gossip is wired into women's DNAs
- inactive, on 11/14/2008, -0/+4Theatre sales have been in decline for years, I've known this, you've known this. I'm sure this hasn't been the first time Hollywood hasn't bounced all the way back from an economic downturn.
The real reasons you know the economy is bad when stock graphs look like lightning bolts, banks are collapsing, people are losing their houses and jobs by the thousands, and nobody knows what the solution is. - inactive, on 11/14/2008, -1/+5someone needs to humble those condescending freaks.
- absurdist, on 11/14/2008, -1/+4What?!?! You mean they'll have to cut back on their supplies of blow and 12-year-old hookers? Oh, the huge manatee!
- Manther, on 11/14/2008, -0/+3craptastic!
- spamiswhack, on 11/14/2008, -0/+3Not true anymore since it costs like $60 for a family of four to go see a movie these days. Money is better spent on video games which offers way more bang for the buck.
- inactive, on 11/14/2008, -0/+3why are making remakes of TV shows that sucked in the first place.
just fire all the ponytail headded (macbook using) copycat cliche writers who have no imagination. fire all the people who veto anything that is not "safe"
and get back to work making original movies. - MothBoy, on 11/14/2008, -0/+3Movies used to be cheap entertainment. Now it's forty bucks to take a date to a movie with popcorn and a drink. They have turned going to a move into a luxury in good times, which will now bite them when times are bad.
- PGPirate, on 11/14/2008, -0/+3Think about the actors through this crisis. They will have to downgrade from the Learjet V to the Learjet IV.
- secrity, on 11/14/2008, -0/+3At that time a movie was a nickle and popcorn was also a nickle. The theaters also gave away glass dishes to moviegoers - this is where much of the "depression glass" came from. I am not sure how they gave the dishes away, perhaps it was through a raffle or as advertising for some product.
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