The Covid Cinematic Wasteland by JEWELSTAITEFAN

CINEMA

The Covid Cinematic Wasteland

POSTED BY: JEWELSTAITEFAN
UPDATED: Wednesday, December 6, 2023 19:36
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VIEWED: 6440
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Sunday, December 3, 2023 11:00 PM

People obviously will go in full force to see movies that are worth seeing. The fact that we have 4 movies post-Covid theater shutdown that have grossed well over $1 Billion, and several others that got close to a Billion are proof of this.

But the days of Disney/Marvel making $1 Billion+ every time they put something out and DC flicks grossing $500 Million to $1 Billion+ are long gone.

It didn't have to be that way. They chose not only to oversaturate the market and show the same story with a different wrapper over and over and over again, but they race and gender swapped them needlessly into oblivion on top of it.

It's not as if they didn't have a barometer for how that would pan out. Just look at the source material. The comic book industry itself is on life-support after firing all the white males that used to run it and replacing them all with diversity hires that self-insert at every opportunity and couldn't write a good story to save their lives.

Get woke. Go broke.

Period.

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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Monday, December 4, 2023 12:28 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
People obviously will go in full force to see movies that are worth seeing. The fact that we have 4 movies post-Covid theater shutdown that have grossed well over $1 Billion, and several others that got close to a Billion are proof of this.
. . .

Get woke. Go broke.

Period.

Good heavens, 6ix. You are stupid. The people still going to the movie theaters are teenagers escaping from their parents and socializing with their friends.

I know why people are not going. Here is a highly-rated movie that you can watch at home for free. Why go out? Hollywood was worried 60 years ago that TV would decrease ticket sales. It did. Now TV is even better than 60 years ago and, once again, it is reducing ticket sales.

Killers Of The Flower Moon 2023 720p AMZN WEB-DL H264-FLUX
Posted on Dec 4th, 2023 at 5:1 pm
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Killers of American history, their politicization of business and the dividing of America
Conservative media has become an outrage factory, targeting products and dividing America.

By Chris Tomlinson

I think the only thing conservative media has going for it is racial grievance, convincing older white people of their imminent demise if they don’t elect white supremacists. Bankrupted of ideas, these billionaire-financed outlets have become nothing more than outrage factories.

Conservative media wants to make every aspect of American life political. Want a vaccination? Woke! Don’t want to pay taxes? Righteous! Want renewable energy? Woke! Want a military-style rifle? Righteous! Electric vehicles? Woke!

Why? Because powerful people with financial interests vulnerable to human progress want voters to elect backward politicians who will protect their profits.

So, partisans work to make every consumer purchase a political talisman.
Which is why 6ixStringJack keeps predicting. His politics require him to do that.

https://web.archive.org/web/20231027123830/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/business/columnists/tomlinson/article/killers-flower-moon-partisan-history-division-18445918.php

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, December 4, 2023 1:07 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

The same thing that happened to music in the recent past is now happening to movies:

U.S. Recorded Music Sales Volumes by Format
1973 to 2022, Format(s): All

https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/

People have almost stopped buying vinyl records and compact disks for music because they had to go shopping to buy those. Now they don't go shopping. They get music over the internet. People are not buying as many movie tickets because they have to go to the theater to use the tickets. Instead, they get movies more and more the same way they get music, over the internet.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, December 4, 2023 1:29 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Is it curtains for the big screen?

A disruptive new idea is dividing Hollywood’s biggest film-makers — and threatening the future of cinema

By Tom Shone | May 23 2016
https://www.ft.com/content/0b17ede8-1c1c-11e6-a7bc-ee846770ec15

If the cinema is dying, no one seems to have told the crowds at the annual powwow of Hollywood’s distribution chiefs. At Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, the stars are out in force: Will Smith, Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt, Russell Crowe and, by video-link, Tom Cruise and Vin Diesel. Upstairs, vendors hawk their latest audience-enticing gizmos, from $2,500 leather chairs and state-of-the-art wine-vending machines to bespoke 3D glasses, 4D seating systems — and bite-sized Snickers bars.

There’s one new venture, however, that seems decidedly unwelcome at CinemaCon. Sean Parker, creator of the file-sharing website Napster and one-time scourge of the music industry, has pointedly not been asked to present in public his newest project, The Screening Room.

Parker’s proposal is radical: a video-on-demand system that would allow people to stream films the same day that they arrive in cinemas, enabled by a $150 set-top box and costing about $50 a movie. It has the potential to upend an industry that has been reluctant to come to terms with the rise of all things digital, and continues to focus its marketing and publicity might on a film’s opening weekend in cinemas.

The loudest cheers of the convention are reserved for the film-makers who dare to take potshots at Parker’s scheme. “Why are we in a rush to turn movies into TV shows?” asks Todd Phillips, director of the three Hangover films. Kevin Tsujihara, chief executive of Warner Bros Entertainment, tries to assuage the fears of cinema owners: “I assure you,” he says, “we are not going to let a third party or middleman come between us.”

Parker and co keep a low profile, meeting behind closed doors with executives while their proposal becomes the conference’s piñata. For the most part, The Screening Room goes unnamed, but James Cameron, who announces that he will be making four sequels to Avatar, won’t be cowed.

“Despite what the folks at The Screening Room say, I think movies need to be offered in the theatre on opening day,” he declares, to cheers. “So boom!”

. . . .

Perched on the San Andreas Fault, sandwiched between ocean and desert, Hollywood is an apocalyptic town, long imagining itself on the verge of extinction. Even so, the signs that its traditional business model is under attack are everywhere. According to the National Association of Theatre Owners, US movie attendance peaked in 2002 and has been steadily declining ever since. To compensate, theatres have rolled out new technologies such as 3D, Imax and premium large-format cinemas, raising their ticket prices and thus keeping the box office at record-breaking levels.

But those broken records are an illusion — fewer people paying more money. The majority of us are increasingly staying home. At Cannes this year, the studio with the most films in competition — including Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson and Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon — and also the festival’s opener, Woody Allen’s Café Society, was not one of the big studios, but the streaming service Amazon.

“We have to adapt,” said JJ Abrams at CinemaCon, to what he called the “age of piracy, digital technology and disruption”. Walking the red carpet before a party at Parker’s Bel Air residence a few weeks later, The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, who with Abrams, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese is one of a handful of key film-makers to support the Screening Room proposal, was franker. “Fifty per cent of Americans did not step into a movie theatre last year, and of the 50 per cent that did go into a theatre, 95 per cent of them went to one or two films,” he said. “That’s the people we are trying to target.”

Neither Jackson, Spielberg, Abrams nor Scorsese can be accused of being enemies of the medium, and nor are they inclined to vote against their own interest as film-makers. Yet they are not the only ones to have anticipated a fundamental shift.

“What you’re going to end up with is fewer theatres,” George Lucas said during a panel at the University of Southern California in 2013. “Bigger theatres, with a lot of nice things. Going to the movies is going to cost you 50 bucks, maybe 100.” In 2014, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the co-founder of DreamWorks, suggested that we are close to an era when films will only last in cinemas for three weeks. He argued that a film will come out in cinemas for 17 days — three weekends — which is where 98 per cent of films make 95 per cent of their revenues anyway. On the 18th day, the film will be available everywhere and you will pay for the size: a movie screen will be $15, a 75-inch TV will be $4, a smartphone will be $1.99. “When that happens — and it will happen,” said Katzenberg, “it will reinvent the enterprise of movies.”

. . . .

Big and small screens have been locked in existential combat since their inception. In 1946, 78m Americans went to the movies a week. By 1971, that figure was 15m, as the ageing movie audience settled down in the suburbs and put their feet up in front of the TV. Hollywood’s response to the decline was then, as now, a flurry of format changes and the development of big spectacles such as Cleopatra and Dr Dolittle to draw people back into theatres. Many of these failed, miring the studios in even more red ink. It was not until the mid-1970s, with films such as Jaws and Star Wars that they began to get the formula right, with a lifeline thrown to them by a teenage audience. But blockbusters have a design flaw: their marketing costs are enormous — opening a movie typically costs anywhere from $20m — and they spend less and less time in cinemas. To take a recent example, ticket sales for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice dropped by an astonishing 68.4 per cent on its second weekend, as comic-book fans returned to their dens.

Meanwhile, things have been changing on the small screen, with glossy series such as Game of Thrones bringing a new level of sophistication and prestige to the medium. “As television gets more into character and more like extended indie movies, the job of movies is to become more and more extraordinary,” says Lynda Obst, veteran producer of Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and Interstellar (2014). “We can’t do the same job that television is doing so well.”

So what does set film apart? Arguably, it’s more visual than television. It has our full attention: each frame must pull its weight in terms of narrative and spectacle. That is why it is a director’s medium: it envelops us. TV comes to us, into our homes, casual, familiar, favouring habit-forming episodic narratives. That is why it is a writer’s medium. The big screen glamorises — its stars are the stuff of myth; the small screen is more like a member of the family.

“I think you can probably watch Bridge of Spies at home, but I wouldn’t want to watch ET there,” says Obst. “I wouldn’t want to watch The Revenant at home. And something like The Avengers, it’s too much fun laughing with the audience. These things are communal experiences. We watch TV at home and we feel differently about television stars than we do about movie stars because the movie screen is much bigger and much more mythical. That’s why the material is intrinsically different.”

. . . .

Hollywood’s distribution chiefs have been toying with plans like Sean Parker’s for years, attempting to make their films available to watch at home as close to the end of their theatrical run as possible — or rather, as close as they deem possible without cutting into their own profits — while the marketing is still thrumming in our heads. In 2013, Bong Joon-ho’s futuristic action flick Snowpiercer was released on VOD only two weeks after it hit theatres, a decision that paid off handsomely: the film topped its $4.6m at the box office with a hefty $7m from VOD sales.

“We found about one in four consumers expressed definite interest in paying for a theatre service like [The Screening Room],” says Chris Rethore, a vice-president at MarketCast, which conducted a study of the market for premium VOD services in late March. “Higher-income technophiles and parents were drawn to it, not just because of their kids but also because they have trouble getting out to have a night at the movies.” Interestingly, the interest remained pretty constant regardless of genre, whether it was an action spectacle like Captain America: Civil War (which 21 per cent would like to watch at home) or an art-house biopic like The Danish Girl (20 per cent).

So the sense of existential threat is rising, expressed in the resistance to The Screening Room at CinemaCon, and also in the hefty kickbacks to theatre-owners with which Parker has sought to sweeten the deal. Participating distributors would get 20 per cent of the $50-per-view proceeds, while consumers would get two free tickets to see a movie at a cinema of their choice. “Parker is giving movie theaters the opportunity that record stores never had, but it’s up to them to take it,” suggested the film journalist Bryan Bishop on The Verge.

But then many film-makers would argue that movies should be consumed differently from music: a song is a song wherever you play it, whereas films were built for the big screen. The onus will increasingly be on them to prove it: if Parker’s scheme or another like it succeeds, it could well force film-makers to ramp up their efforts to come up with movies that are even better suited to play well in cinemas than at home.

“I don’t think that experience is going to die,” says Obst, “although I do worry that eventually we will all be inside on our huge computer screens, watching all of the different types of entertainment together. But I don’t know. I just think we need each other more than that.”

_____________________________

Movies can be richly sophisticated and infinitely complex, but their secret is simple, writes Danny Leigh. It’s scale: the bullying logic of the big screen, pushing everything else into our peripheral vision.

Take the berserker high jinks of the modern action movie. At that end of the industry, things are only getting bigger: the new breed of Star Wars films, beginning with last year’s The Force Awakens, have been made specifically for IMAX screens, not the dinky confines of smart TVs. But the problem with downsizing runs deeper than blockbusters.

Film evolved as the art of mixing deathless images and minute detail on a screen big enough to accommodate them. That was the language movies spoke. Think of Stanley Kubrick ending The Shining with a close-up of an old photograph that on TV would simply make you squint.

Cinema elevates. Spotlight, an account of the cover-up of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Boston, took place in a strip-lit newspaper office staffed by reporters in cheap shirts. And yet, with a scald of outrage at its core, it made perfect sense as big-screen drama. The acting had the subtlety that only comes when the actors know their faces will be 10ft high.

But scale isn’t everything. What’s also important is the handing over of control. The film watched at the cinema says it will start at the time it says on your ticket and it is, essentially, bigger and more important than you are. Nothing breaks the spell of the movie more instantly than the pause button. Of course, ever since the first video recorder, that breakage has been ours to make — but only after the film had a life in the cinema, which we knew was how it should really be seen.

Slim as it was, the commercial exclusion zone around a new movie often felt like the last buffer around film itself. It was a gesture to the strange magic of communal movie-watching (no comedy is funnier than the one you laugh at in the dark with strangers) — and to film as an art that was, just sometimes, worth interrupting life for.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, December 4, 2023 3:54 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

You are full of shit and not even worth debating.

Everything you just said is wrong.

It should be a very familiar feeling to you.

Stick around long enough, and I'll be tracking the rise-again of Hollywood after they've purged the idiocy.

Every argument you and I have ever had ends up going my way when given time.

We're playing Chess here, dummy. You're never going to win if you keep playing checkers.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Monday, December 4, 2023 6:17 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You are full of shit and not even worth debating.

Everything you just said is wrong.

It should be a very familiar feeling to you.

Stick around long enough, and I'll be tracking the rise-again of Hollywood after they've purged the idiocy.

Every argument you and I have ever had ends up going my way when given time.

We're playing Chess here, dummy. You're never going to win if you keep playing checkers.

Seven years ago, Hollywood was in denial about what streaming could do to ticket sales in theaters, but Hollywood will go the same way as the music industry has gone. Few CDs and vinyl records are sold and, eventually, few theater tickets will be sold. Live music shows still exist and, perhaps, Hollywood will invent something as compelling. Hollywood tried 3D and IMAX and Dolby Atmos Cinema Sound. Maybe those three, or something better, will save the theaters from slowly going extinct.

U.S. Recorded Music Sales Volumes by Format
1973 to 2022, Format(s): All

https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, December 4, 2023 6:58 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

They need to start making good content again.

They're all losing money on streaming. If movie theaters die, Hollywood dies.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Monday, December 4, 2023 7:08 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
They need to start making good content again.

They're all losing money on streaming. If movie theaters die, Hollywood dies.

Ha-ha! You sound like those oldsters in the 60's complaining about Elvis Presley and the Beatles. If only there were more singers like Doris Day and Frank Sinatra at the Coconut Grove . . .

Hollywood should make more musicals (Sound of Music, South Pacific, Oliver!) and Westerns. That's The Future of Entertainment. Or maybe not.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, December 4, 2023 9:35 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
They need to start making good content again.

They're all losing money on streaming. If movie theaters die, Hollywood dies.
Ha-ha! You sound like those oldsters in the 60's complaining about Elvis Presley and the Beatles. If only there were more singers like Doris Day and Frank Sinatra at the Coconut Grove . . .

Hollywood should make more musicals (Sound of Music, South Pacific, Oliver!) and Westerns. That's The Future of Entertainment. Or maybe not.

Sure I do.

I remember when you told me that Lightyear wasn't made for me.

Then it grossed only $218 Million worldwide on a $200 Million budget and lost over $250 Million for Disney.

Then in 2023 Disney managed to lose over $1.8 Billion at the box office when Universal somehow has managed to earn $1.5 Billion.

I don't know, buddy. Universal seems to be doing something right, seeing as how it's pulled in nearly $4 Billion gross worldwide on only $1 Billion on combined production budgets in 2023.

Your problem is you don't look at the data. Disney's problem is I've recorded it all for the year.

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=65735

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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Tuesday, December 5, 2023 8:02 PM

JAYNEZTOWN

Here's what I noticed since 'Covid' hit and then post-Covid that whole SJW Diversity gay lesbian islamic Black Transexual quota that is making everything 'Hollyweird'

Movies are selling and shows are again making some money but they might not be as big as they were...some hits Topgun remake, Reacher, Spider-Man No Way Home, Oppenheimer, Barbie....but overall I would say Hollywood is flopping
A Disney show 'The Mandalorian' did ok for a while but they seem to have ruined it
The epic past runs of Scifi tv shows might be done for a while
Trends which do not change, reality tv, cooking shows, detective shows like NCIS: Hawai’i or some Xfactor America idol will have high ratings
Sportsball or News or some Gameshow of course will sell better or 'The View' as Most-Watched Daytime Talk Show

The Video Games and Comicbooks are not selling like they used to, people play old games, read old comics and buy Manga comics and Japanese Animation product from overseas. In the past Marvel and DC have dominated, you did have indie brands 'Image' comics or the French waves or British Dredd but I never seen it this bad, Marvel and DC took over the market, cold to other ideas they got big and now they have crashed it all and anything from Japan is selling better.

The Flash flops, Blue Beetle, Indiana Jones remake flop, The Marvels...they are all flopping

Indie film has grown, the slasher the horror genre is back, some tried to cancel the creator of FNaF but the product made big money.

Foreign video game brands like 'Mario' sold

People are watching foreign and oldies movie products, the South Korean Squid Games, South Korean Vigilante, South Korea's Moving tv show, German 1899, Japan Godzilla, a Japanese anime SPY x FAMILY, the Spanish 30 Coins, En helt vanlig family, American's are watching shows and movies with 'subtitles' I never thought I would see the day and they will even watch reruns of old Home Alone, Halloween broadcasts and cinema showings, Scot Pilgrim or old Dragon Ball Z than something hip and hyped and 'current'

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Wednesday, December 6, 2023 10:58 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

I recently heard somebody say "There is already enough content made in the world for you to watch and enjoy for the rest of your life without watching the agenda films and tv shows that are being pushed today. Just get all of those on physical media".

He wasn't wrong. If you can't live without movies and TV shows, you could spend all the free time in your life watching everything ever made up until 2010 and probably not finish it before you died.

Indie is hot right now. Particularly in the Video Game and Comic Book space.

Dave Cullen had a really great short video on this topic just the other day...

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Wednesday, December 6, 2023 7:36 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

To add to the above post...

Tools like the Unity engine have made making video games easier than ever before, and if you look on Steam there are a LOT of great indie games for under $20.

Here are a few I've played this year that were particularly good.

Death Must Die is still currently in Beta, but it's very playable.

The Last Faith is one of the best games I've played in years.

Lunacid is a great throwback to From Software's early King's Field titles from the PS1/PS2 era, way before the Dark Souls/Bloodborne/Elden Ring titles. Despite the fact the single guy programming it turned out to be a raging leftist and needlessly added Pronouns to the character creation screen after the whole Starfield thing a few months back just to piss people off (they have no effect at all on gameplay and aren't ever mentioned at all in the game), I have nothing else bad to say about the game. It's a great play for anybody who loved King's Field back in the day.

It's a shame he did that to himself. He's had to run quite a few sales because it pretty much tanked his title. I know he spent a LOT of time making that game on his own and because he wanted to make a political statement he lost a lot of money.

One thing I'd like to point out specifically that I think is extremely impressive with all of these titles is their fantastic soundtracks. Every song in the trailers above are in the games and that only scratches the surface on most of them. Lunacid and The Last Faith in particular have a very deep catalog of songs played throughout.
--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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