The tenor of the post is more along the lines of "how can I adapt" rather than pining for the glory days, so that's nice, but I also have very little sympathy for this person.
The movie market was like a fiefdom, much like the music industry 20 years ago, and now streaming and internet have democratized access and content creation. You don't get $20M budget at the cost of hundreds of other independent films? Yeah, sorry, boo-hoo.
We're living in a golden age of TV. In the past decade there have been many in depth TV series that only a handful of movies dared to explore precisely because the industry was hits driven.
More than that, I've seen some exceptional B-movie sci-fi movies on Netflix in the past 10 years as well.
People who win at this type of game have the equivalent of survivorship bias. They don't realize how much is sacrificed to create their hit movie and how the industry contorts content to serve their distribution model.
Also, giving more projects $5m is not a victory if the cost of a proper production is $20m. It’s just an explanation for why quality is dipping.
Or following your logic and “hundreds of other films”, it seems like you’re under the impression that a good film can be made with $100k.
I’m finding more blind spots and jumps to conclusions in your comment than in the admittedly poorly written article.
Give that, it doesn’t surprise me that you’re one of the ones who are looking at what’s being served as tv shows and actually enjoying it.
If you ask me, “the golden age of TV” is a meme based on a handful of shows, all of them made at the onset of the new economy when the nascent methodologies of the new economy led to authors having outsized influence for a short period of time.
There’s something seriously brainwashed about looking at what’s at offer today and still concluding that because the Sopranos exists we’re still producing good content.
I will give you the enjoyable b-movies, but also remind you that those have existed always, and often in greater numbers.
Camera technology is so ubiquitous now that an unknown can create content on a shoestring budget. It's now more about gumption and talent instead of gumption, talent, and having enough money to rent professional equipment.
I can remember an indie film shot on a digital SLR camera with a $6,000 budget picking up festival awards a decade ago.
In general, indie production - in every medium - is run on some combination of favors and gaslighting. You can get away with being more intensively exploitative in the moment, taking fewer precautions, and doing things in non-standard(less effective) ways precisely because you're the little guy and the real victim here.
If we're talking about supporting an industry with professional talent, pointing to the entry level capital cost isn't the way to do it, because there's an element of Baumol's cost disease, where the relative cost of your talent rises because everything else got cheaper. And you want to have the ability to pay people to go the extra mile without duping them. You can certainly make more varied kinds of productions on modern tech and budgets than before, but if there isn't an income stream that keeps the talent base there, you end up with privileged talent that can buy their way into an arts career, not veterans who built an artisanal skillset in the process of staying employed.
I suspect we're actually going in the direction of more and more adaptations. The Marvel movies and Star Wars shows are basically that; Dune, White Noise are both book adaptations. Anime succumbed to it a long while back and most of what's released each season is from a manga or light novel. It's a robust model because it can frame the production budget as an advertising cost, while also tapping into the success of the source, spreading out risks.
But adaptation, as good as it can be, pushes the medium to be in service to its source material, and to "give fans what they want". It's not building off the nature of the medium itself, so it's also somewhat unsatisfying if you really want the films and shows that push boundaries.
Cost of a camera is a tiny piece of good production. There's still good videographers, lights and people to aim them, sound equipment and people to hold them, actors, editors, and so much more. Saving even $100k on a camera is nothing.
I agree — if you allow that YouTube is the means of distribution for an indie-filmmaker. (For better or worse.)
I remember when, in the 80's, sci-fi conventions were perhaps one of the few means of recognition that the Super-8 indie guys get exposure (and maybe a career) with the likes of, for example, "Hardware Wars".
> I will give you the enjoyable b-movies, but also remind you that those have existed always, and often in greater numbers.
Don't think this is true. If you consider a lot of self-produced Youtube clips as C-movies, there are way more today. And audiences have voted for what they want: they want more lower-production-cost movies in their exact niche than academic film-art blockbusters like Ben Hur.
Sure, if you consider a lot of self-produced Youtube clips as C-movies. But I think historically B-movies were paid for by Hollywood studios (but given shoestring budgets). It's hard to imagine a time in history where the 50's and 60's didn't dominate with B-movies.
Perhaps with the collapse of the drive-in, the matinee, there has not been a compelling business model for the studios to finance B-movies for decades now.
> There’s something seriously brainwashed about looking at what’s at offer today and still concluding that because the Sopranos exists we’re still producing good content.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
The Wire
You're the Worst
The Good Place
Too many decent-to-great sitcoms and sketch-comedy shows to list.
Ditto adult animated shows.
Justified
Evil
Several great limited series (e.g. The Haunting of Hill House)
I could keep going. The last couple decades have given us a lot of really good shows since The Sopranos. I watch a fair amount and still have a backlog of probably-great stuff I haven't gotten to yet (including, actually, The Sopranos!) and continue to stumble on shows I've never even heard of that turn out to be really good.
I'm going to stop now but I hope I've made my point. I've watched many of the above. I've heard about most of the above.
Your tone is pretty snarky so I'm not sure if it's worth responding but here is a list of TV shows, all within the last decade, that I believe are exceptional and not limited to "just the Sopranos":
* Chernobyl
* Rick and Morty
* True Detective
* Fargo
* Severance
* 1883
* Mindhunter
* Westworld
* The Knick
* The Peripheral
* Succession
* Years and Years
* Orange is the New Black
* Halt and Catch Fire
* Insecure
* Watchmen
* Atlanta
This is only from 10 minutes of searching. You'll note that many of them are produced, directed, written and star high profile artists. The subject matter that they deal with can be done at a pace and care that's impossible to do with a 2-3 hour movie. The quality of the above series or mini-series was virtually non existent, maybe with some very few exceptions, before 2000 and only began to pick up pace in 2000 to 2010.
Watchmen was amazing, so I don't understand the issue. Each individual episode was carefully, and cleverly, crafted. We were watching several other popular shows at the same time, and the contrast was really apparent, with Watchmen in a completely different league.
Chernobyl is terrible. Anti-nuclear and anti-soviet propaganda disguised as a "true story". I can't stand movies and TV shows who claim to be historically accurate while being almost completely made up.
Rick and Morty is also bad. After two episodes I was already bored of the shtick.
Fargo is by far the best series on that list. Seasons 1 and 2 are incredible.
> After two episodes I was already bored of the shtick.
Highly suggest to reconsider. It explores many previously unexplored concepts later on. The beginning was ugly, especially if you liked Back To The Future.
I don't know who is right here, but I'll provide an anecdote.
I know someone that wrote and directed a movie that had a very well known actor (you've heard of him) and had a limited run in theatres. Through that process I go to know a bit about the industry itself and it was very much a good old boys club where you absolutely had to play ball. Things like processing the formats was done with extremely expensive systems and if you tried to go around them no one would respond to you.
I don't know if it's better now, but I can imagine it is.
What 'centralized' in a world that now has 'creator economy' as a thing.
> Also, giving more projects $5m is not a victory if the cost of a proper production is $20m.
Is there any objective definition of that 'proper'. Rhetorical question, obviously, for there isnt.
> it seems like you’re under the impression that a good film can be made with $100k.
It doesn't seem like it. It is like that. Many movies like Paranormal Activity, Parasite were made with low budgets.
> Give that, it doesn’t surprise me that you’re one of the ones who are looking at what’s being served as tv shows and actually enjoying it.
Yeah, people are actually enjoying TV. That shouldnt be a big surprise.
> If you ask me, “the golden age of TV” is a meme based on a handful of shows
How is that any different from the golden ages of cinema in which unending series of rehashed crap were produced to profit off of audiences that had no alternative but to pay for them.
...
Its much better for things to be distributed, democratized and in the hands of more people than small cliques of profiteering feudal lords monopolizing them and deciding what happens. Especially regarding content.
Filmmaker here - Parasites budget was in the 10 million range. Paranormal Activity's initial budget was in the 15K range (tiny, even when it was shot 15 years ago), a further 200k was spent on post production and reshoots when it was picked up by a major studio. This doesn't count the many millions both had spent on marketing - which is often up to twice a productions shooting and post budget.
High end filmmaking has gotten 'cheaper', in that you can use virtual production to simulate environments etc. And undoubtedly shooting 'digital' is cheaper than film development. Although nowhere near as much cheaper than you might think, once the cost of a DIT and professional colour grade is thrown into the mix. However the standards of both independent film and TV production are enormously higher than they were 15 years ago.
It's not that it's impossible to make something cheaply - I'm involved in the kino kabaret movement, where amateurs and professionals alike join together to make effectively zero budget films over a weekend.
However - the cost of producing a decent film has not dropped to a few thousand. Quite the opposite. Given the high production value of contemporary indies, it's inarguably more difficult now to make something that will play festivals and sell to distributers for an 'ultralow' budget.
Moreover, lots of the budgets you see quotes are as low as they were because the film was effectively subsidised by a small production company. In other words, everyone worked for free and used borrowed gear, often worth hundreds of thousands. For reference a fully kitted out Arri Alexa 35 or LF is over 90k euro to buy, and over 1k per day to rent.
A decent budget for a short film is in the 40 - 50k range, once everyone is actually getting paid for their time. Couple of million dollars / euros would be a low budget film, with favours pulled in and everyone working for less than half of their rates for commercial work.
> High end filmmaking has gotten 'cheaper', in that you can use virtual production to simulate environments etc. And undoubtedly shooting 'digital' is cheaper than film development.
That proposition would mean that the reason why majority of the last decades' top budget movies were rehashed crap was because of the exorbitant profit margins and exorbitant money paid to stars rather than anything related to the movies' production. So it was just a case of capitalism hollowing out things for profit like in any other field.
> However - the cost of producing a decent film has not dropped to a few thousand.
I don't think anybody ever made that argument. What people say is that things became much cheaper and therefore democratized. Which is in line with what you said.
The original post in this thread advocated for making hundreds of indie films vs one film for twenty million.
> That proposition would mean that the reason why majority of the last decades' top budget movies were rehashed crap was because of the exorbitant profit margins and exorbitant money paid to stars rather than anything related to the movies' production.
It's more complicated than that - at the top end film budgets are vastly higher than they were a decade ago. Regularly topping 200 million. But more importantly, studios have making far fewer films and pining their success as a business on a 'super' hit driven model. This is almost a separate industry than film at this point, with grosses in the multiple billions before merchandising is taken into account. It's not really what the original article is about - they're talking about hit 'indie' films, in the 20 million ball park.
Arguably the issue with movies of the last decade has been the creation and duplication of transmedia franchises at the expense of making standalone original films.
> The original post in this thread advocated for making hundreds of indie films vs one film for twenty million.
That doesn't mean that each indie film would cost $10k. Not that someone couldnt pull off a good movie like that for $10k. However, more people being able to make movies from $10k or whatever low amount would mean more chances of good movies being made.
> But more importantly, studios have making far fewer films and pining their success as a business on a 'super' hit driven mode
Yeah. Profit maximization instead of risk taking. The same problem everywhere - gaming industry has been consolidated in the hands of few big companies which started making endless rehashes of previously successful games to suck out more money from gamers instead of making new things. Profit maximization. Capitalism.
Those aren’t opposites. In a democracy, if everyone is allowed to post political pamphlets in the town square, the central location of the square doesn’t mean it’s not a democracy.
I would agree, but right now that square is more akin to being owned by several private companies, each with their own policy which can (and will) throw you out and bar you for any reason they deemed fit.
> You don't get $20M budget at the cost of hundreds of other independent films? Yeah, sorry, boo-hoo.
This is the part of the article I don't grasp. The article kept saying things like:
> however, subscription services cannot only cater to niches, they must try to be everything to all people, which places more value on the content platform and its library than the quality of each individual piece of content.
That seems like a more accurate description of the old model. A box office blockbuster film must be everything to everyone. A NYT bestseller must be be everything to everyone.
The subscription model in both visual media and books has unlocked unexplored niches. There is tones of anime all over Netflix. I have read a bunch of "progression fantasy" on Kindle Unlimited, exemplified by the Cradle Series by Will Wight. This sort of media would never have survived under the old model, as it is too niche. Will Wight doesn't care about making NYT bestseller, he is focused on cultivating his 1000(0) followers.
But, for profit-driven businesses like Amazon, the goal isn’t to barely make money, but it is to maximize the amount of money coming in.
It was quite sad for me when "The OA" and "Mozart in the Jungle" were cancelled.
It's not like these companies are okay making less money in some projects, and making more money in a few. They want to _maximize_ money from all projects.
> A box office blockbuster film must be everything to everyone. A NYT bestseller must be be everything to everyone.
Yes, and the more depressing part: to make the model work, there will also be a huge effort to mold everyone into the blockbusters’ public, the bestsellers’ buyer.
Your movies will make a lot more when you have options to nudge people’s tastes.
I've been on-and-off curiosity stream(+nebula) and dropout tv, the former for several science/tech/logistics related youtubers' longform content, and the latter for comedy.
While I wouldn't call those categories especially niche, but I've grown to enjoyed their content more than current offerings from netflix and amazon prime to be frankly honest, and I'm all for it.
It seems vimeo found their niche(?) of a market providing white-lable OTT service, which I'd assume makes spinning up a streaming provider for a niche market even simpilier.
Had to look up 'progression fantasy'. So it's basically like a niche genre that uses more or less the same structure as Dragon Ball Z (characters getting progressively more powerful over time)? Or am I misunderstanding it?
In a sense, yes. I read a good number of works that overlap with the "progression fantasy" genre, and I'd say they have 3 main characteristics:
1. Fantasy. They have interesting and engaging fantasy worlds. There's a lot of mixed results here, I personally don't think DBZ or Cradle are that interesting.
2. The main characters are empowered to actively participate in events that surround them. The trope here is that they fight back against the latest unfairness of the world, but more creative storytelling can make this very fresh and interesting.
3. The main characters aren't defined by their circumstances. They prove themselves by their work ethic or cleverness, not by being born to a powerful family.
Most works in this category are rehashes of CRPG or Xianxia tropes. I'd personally recommend Mother of Learning as the best progression fantasy I've read.
Yes. I'm not sure about GP's point that it never would have survived under the old model either. It's a pretty common trope in Wuxia, one of the oldest genres of literature still active today.
> In this new model for storytelling, volume is more important than quality.
> which places more value on the content platform and its library than the quality of each individual piece of content. (this one is repeated twice)
> The subscription model means content providers are paid regularly no matter the quality and quantity of the product
The idea that the hit model with large budget waste is the only way to drive talented people is just wrong, people can produce great content on low budget, it's just another kind of talent, for another kind of content.
Certainly platforms should not try to produce content alike the ones of the hit model, but I'm not that sure that the public, and neither the industry, is losing that much.
> and now streaming and internet have democratized access and content creation
Unfortunately this has come with a real decrease in artistic/creative value.
For all intents and purposes almost everything that Netflix now has on its platform is basically crap, I've last spent about half an hour trying to find something nice to watch but nothing. I would have settled on the spot for light but original comedy like "American Pie", but couldn't find it. The same goes for HBO Max (granted, the first season of "White Lotus" was ok-ish, but by the second season you could see half of the directorial and writers' takes coming from half a mile away).
I feel the same way. There are a few funny shows, like Succession, but most other series, even if they have an interesting start, decline very fast. Visually they're all OK to very good. But the writing is boring, often appalling.
Yeah the writing is horrible on the vast majority of these new shows/movies, they've been able to cover it up with amazing production values and paying for high quality acting but once you are no longer dazzled by that the story just leaves you with nothing compelling.
Part of it is they are just producing so much content that the marginal quality of each script that now gets made is lower, but I do think script writing is an art that has been reduced to a series of tricks and cliches and storytelling has massively suffered.
There are a lot of people who look at a streaming channel’s lineup and say ‘huh; they have one or two good shows but the rest is just awful’
Trouble is, they all are pointing to a different couple of shows.
I mean, you’re aware that ‘Succession is the only good show’ is not an objectively true statement, right? That other people might disagree with you about that?
So I don’t know what your prescription here is. Do you want to just be able to subscribe to SuccessionTV?
I don't even like Succession so much, just didn't want to pick a fight with its many fans :) Actually it's an objetive fact that you can't say too loud that you don't like it, or else... anyway, I'd rather not talk too much about shows that I liked, disliked or started liking, later got disenchanted. It'd be distracting for the discussion.
Since you asked: what I would like is just to buy Succession. Do you know what happens when you want to watch something that's not on any platform? There is this cambrian thing called Blu-ray or you go straight to precambrian with DVD.
But if I'm not mistaken, there's no way to "buy" a digital copy of a movie or a series. Or even "rent" it. I don't really think I'd watch Succession a second time.
Mostly everybody prefers torrents, if they're available, that not always happens, specially in other languages. If not, you need a Blu-ray reader and paying not so nice prices from Amazon. Add some reaping software if you don't quite believe that optical disks last a hundred years.
If you come to think it, platforms really aren't. They're subscriptions to catalogs. Also moving catalogs. I've paused a season for some days, then found out that it had become pay-per-view at Amazon.
I suspect that the real power of "platforms" is copy protection... again. Studios wouldn't allow non-DRM shops, so they insist in DRM in the browser and thus they've given all the power to the gatekeepers.
This mirrors what I am seeing as well. Lazy writing that produces a reaction of “why did they even bother making this movie?” despite the good actors and videography. Is it because good writers are difficult to find or, as with the actors, are the writers being constrained as well either by the streaming business model or poor taste in story selection by the streaming execs? The emergence of generative AI might make this even worse, as it’s only a matter of time till these are used to churn out scripts; although some of these scripts are so bad, maybe it has already started?
Anyway, I find myself terminating movies earlier and more readily than in the past due to the higher frequency of disappointing dialogue and story lines along with the fear of wasting my time. My response is cancelling streaming subscriptions for a year or so and then resubscribing for a few months in hopes that a few decent new pieces of content were created.
I have the opposite view, netflix and other streaming services have lots of good material while TV and movies before streaming rarely produced material I really wanted to watch.
I'm with you on TV (though I think that's kinda a coincidence, and I certainly don't associate Netflix in particular with good TV, though they do have the rare hit) but there are so many outstanding 20th century films that I don't expect to get through more than half of them before I die.
Take any of the last 3 years, and then let’s compare that to the past, and let’s compare what came out in e.g. 2022 and 1992.
That you think things have gotten better is one of those things that makes me lose hope for the future of humanity, because clearly we are so different that we’re perceiving completely, vastly different realities - we might as well be living in parallel universes and it’s just a perversion that we can perceive each other.
Maybe your just are getting old, and have different taste than what the movie/tv studios cater for today. If you were a kid during the 80ies, today kids are going to be looking at the content from that time with the same view as you were looking at stuff from the 40ies-60ies.
Just because a movie looks better doesn’t mean it is a better movie. There has been trash made during all eras, but today is about volume, not quality, so finding the gems is much harder and frustrating.
Do we really need to have another movie about super heroes or another movie about rescuing some retiring tough guy’s kid from a bad guy? Or another movie that spends the first half rotating between character building scenes filled with silly, rote dialogue and no story line? Or another movie that takes an old, tired story and simply replaces the characters with a new set of characters intended to signal the importance of a particular demographic group? Or another Jurassic Park, Hangover, Rocky, Transformer, Terminator, Star Wars clone? Yawn.
> Maybe [you] just are getting old, and have different taste than what the movie/tv studios cater for today.
But why don’t they cater to older folks? Typically, the further one progresses in one’s career, the more money one makes, and the more disposable income one has. I know that I now regularly spend sums now that I would have considered unbelievably profligate in my youth. Why don’t advertisers and producers target me, instead of some kid who still thinks $1,000 is a lot of money?
This is just a guess but I'm sure somebody has analyzed this novel model you propose where they charge more for the streaming service but target it at older, richer viewers and decided it doesn't pencil out:
How many people are really tons richer as they get older? Not especially many, this is an upper middle class phenomenon.
Given this small audience, are those people willing to pay 20x more per month for a streaming service to make up for that? Probably not.
If they get young people hooked on this cheap content now, they can keep charging them for it for their whole lives. How many times have you bought /The Goonies/ or /Die Hard/? The copyright holders of /Euphoria/ hope to be doing the same thing in 40 years.
It's similar to consumer packaged goods (deodorant, laundry soap, etc.) where the lifetime value of a customer is loads better if you get them into your brand when they are young. Convincing a 65 year old to change brands of shaving cream is both expensive (they have high standards and preferences from decades of shaving) and has low return (they won't be buying shaving cream for much longer). Convincing a 15 year old to buy your brand of shaving cream is relatively easy (they don't have any habits around which brand to buy, and also not much experience/preference) and they will be buying it for decades to come, so it will be a big return if it works.
Speak for yourself. I was a kid in the 80s and would rather watch things produced in the 40s-60s than the mindless shit that pervades most streaming services today.
You get the benefit of hindsight, too. Picking some reasonable top 25 films from any previous decade to watch, starting with perhaps the 1930s, will tend to yield pretty damn good results.
Of course, it's also the case that an absolute shitload of good-to-great films do come out every year. Very few (but some!) of them get huge budgets and a big marketing push, but there are lots of them. Average quality may be low, but the volume's so high that there's still more good stuff coming out than I, personally, can keep up with.
> an absolute shitload of good-to-great films do come out every year.
Pick any of the last 5 years.
If there are shitloads, then you should easily be able to name 5 great films from that year.
What are they?
Note; I can easily do this for any year from let’s say 1990 to 1995, but personally I can’t for recent times. Am I just missing the quality? Maybe. Excited to see what you come up with.
Nope (probably just in the "good" grouping, not great)
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That's, uh... just from the "popular this week" screen. And only the ones I've seen, so I know they're good. But I'm pretty sure all those are last five years, or close to it.
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Digging back to 2018 and later (we can say 2018 counts since 2023 just started, right?):
Annihilation
Sorry to Bother You
High Life
Midsommar
Uncut Gems (god it's so good)
Jojo Rabbit
The Lighthouse
The Green Knight
CODA
Spontaneous ([EDIT] It seems very dumb but wow is it a gut punch, when you start to think about what you're watching and make some connections to real life)
Red Rocket (small-scale brilliance)
RRR
Watcher
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I just realized I misread you as asking for 5 good ones from just one of the last 5 years, not 5 total from the last 5 years, but I think that gets the point across? Despite my leaving off a whole bunch that may be more taste-specific, not having watched even 1/3 of the films from that span I have good reason to believe are good, not exhaustively mining that timespan (I bet I could double the size of that list without changing how I was selecting them), and also omitting a bunch of more-popular movies that I think were at least decent.
[EDIT] Hell some years you could get to 2-3 good ones just by looking at what A24 produced that year, nothing else.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your list, even though some of those are mediocre at best, but yeah I did mean per year, and limited to Hollywood (Parasite for instance not counting). And no, ok, I will also straight up disagree with the second Knives out Movie which I thought was absolute trash. A perfect example of poor storytelling and the form over substance of modern cinema.
But just taking say 1992 you have Last of the Mohicans, The Unforgiven, My Cousin Vinny, Malcolm X, Bad Lieutenant, Scent of a Woman, Reservoir Dogs, Dracula, Chaplin.
And then a bunch of fun schlomp like Arizona Dream, Basic Instinct, Sister Act, Army of Darkness, Home Alone 2, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Mighty Ducks, Wayne’s World.
These are all undoubtedly great movies.
And then another huge bunch of watchable stuff easily comparable to some of your mentions like Watcher or High Life.
And 1992 is not an outlier.
In 1993 you have Jurrasic Park, Groundhog Day, Whats Eating Gilbert Grape, Scindlers List, Meanace 2 Society, Alive, Dazed and Confused, Falling Down, In The Name of The Father, True Romance, Demolition Man, Carlitos Way, The Secret Garden, Philadelphia, A Perfect Workd, Cool Runnings, Short Cuts.
In 1991 Silence of The Lambs, Ternimator 2, JFK, Point Break, Thelma and Louise, Boyz in the Hood, The Doors, My Own Private Idaho, Barton Fink, The Fisher King, Naked Lunch.
In 1990 Goodfellas, Hunt for Red October, Total Recall, Edward Scissorhands, Home Alone, Godfather 3, Dances with Wolves, Tremors, Back to the Future 3, Awakenings, The Witches, Wild at Heart, Jacobs Ladder, Nikita, Slacker, Millers Crossing.
And the quality difference is massive too, not just somewhat better. Like just Millers Crossing is miles better than anything that has been made in the last 5 years, and I’m picking at random.
In 1994 Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, The Lion King, Speed, Ace Ventura, Dumb and Dumber, Stargate, Natural Born Killers, The Crow, Clercs, Maverick, Ed Wood, In the Mouth of Madness, Interview With The Vampire.
I could go on.
And this is not even talking about how the 80s is a better decade for cinema, or how the 70s is the peak of the power of the author with far more experimental, artistic, and substantial productions.
Has quality declined? Yes. Massively. Humongously. Stupendously.
2022 - Kimi, After Yang, Crimes of the Future, White Noise, Official Competition, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Tar, Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon
2021 - Nightmare Alley, The Card Counter, Zola, The French Dispatch, Come True, Don't Look Up, I Care A Lot,
2020 - I'm Thinking of Ending Things, Mank, The Sound of Metal, Possessor, His House
2019 - Climax, Uncut Gems, Parasite, Vivarium, First Cow
2018 - The Clovehitch Killer, Prospect, Mute, Anon, Mandy, The House That Jack Built, Cam, Sorry to Bother You
2018 had a glut of Netflix sci-fi B-movies that I think are very solidly good if not so great. I think they're underrated so I included them. I might have also messed up on the years.
These are all films I've seen. There are many others that I suspect are even better that I haven't seen.
The top 5 scripted TV shows in 1992 were Roseanne, Home Improvement, Murphy Brown, Murder She Wrote, and Coach. The only show in top 30 that I would say was any good is Seinfeld.
Today, broadcast TV seems to be mostly procedurals and cable TV is mostly reality. If you like sitcoms, there has definitely been a dropoff since those have lost popularity.
Streaming is where can find the good TV shows. Remember, 1992 is before HBO started making good dramas and those were pretty rare before then. The big advantage of streaming is the variety, there are a bunch of mediocre shows in genres that barely existed before.
I just finished watching Derry Girls on Netflix, a comedy set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. I would rather watch the 18 episodes of that than any amount of 90s sitcoms.
I'd trade all the Friends and Seinfeld in the world for more stuff like Breaking Bad, the first 4 seasons of Game of Thrones, etc. I have no interest in generic settings with laugh track based cheesy one liners, and that was the bulk of early 90s television.
And presumably, how many talented people don't make it because they lacked their first hit, being squeezed out on the long tail, often sacrificing their wealth and health in the process.
> and now streaming and internet have democratized access and content creation
It's the other way around - they have more monopolized (or rather, oligopolized) the content creation and distribution aspect. Say you're an independent producer... small "arthouse"-style cinemas have closed down shop everywhere because it simply isn't worth it to run them any more without serious financial assistance, which means you essentially have to put your movie up on Youtube/Vimeo/whatever and completely lose out on income besides the assistance money from moviemaker funds, crowdfunding, government facilities and rich sponsors.
Alternatively, you focus on monetization via Netflix - but unless you are already well-known enough that your name will get your movie into Netflix anyway, you have to do that upfront because of Netflix' technical requirements [1], so you lose out on quite a bit of artistic freedom, not to mention the "Netflix look" aka color grading [2].
I might be wrong, I'm not well versed in this area, but it'd be nice to have some data that backs up claims (either yours or mine).
The first thing is that making a living off of art is hard, so we're really talking about the difficulty pre adoption of widespread streaming services vs. post widespread adoption of streaming services (I guess 2015 or so).
YouTube is a different model but there are many people making a living from producing content. As an extreme example, Mr. Beast is a triple digit millionaire [0].
I've heard anecdotally that getting series made on Netflix, especially if you're a star is (or at least was) easier than getting a green-lit for movie funding.
At least for cinema closures in the US, there's tons of reports from the early covid days until a few days ago [1][2][3]. In Germany, the situation is just as bad - about 70% of cinemas do not have money left anymore for (sometimes sorely needed) renovations or equipment upgrades [4].
I guess I wasn't clear. I'm talking about the ability of artists to get funded and the ability to make a living off of it. Maybe also the quality and quantity of new movies or shows.
My belief is that it's easier now than ever to make a movie or TV show by getting a deal with a streaming service. This is in comparison to making a living from the industry that the post is talking about ("hits-based" movie making).
Record stores went out of business when vinyl was replaced by cassettes. Video rental went out of business during the early days of the internet. Brick and mortar music stores declined with the availability of mp3s online. Book stores declined in popularity with the rise of Amazon. So, too, are cinemas declining with the offering of on-demand movies and TV.
I guess your assumption is that small art houses are the drivers of weird, niche culture? I would disagree. The availability of platforms that get media in front of more peoples eyes and the lowering cost of creating and distributing that media are what I would guess as the main benefit of producing weird, niche media.
I love cinemas but the world changes and if their model only exists when the movie industry has a stranglehold on the distribution, then, as much as I hate to see them go, they're just not viable anymore.
First I saw of constant over-saturation was MTV shows where people fight in a house and talk to the camera. I'd walk by my college roommates' rooms and the neon colors were always BEAMING! Also emotion-leading music every scene. It often means the audience needs hand-holding. Netflix does this plus horrible storylines and characters.
I've seen some good gems but most feels like it was made in a weekend with a title and a thumbnail that let's you know the entire movie. Example: "3 Years", thumbnail is a couple's faces looking not so sure.
I have no idea why "you have to decide if you plan to stream as your distribution, and if so meet their technical guidelines, before filming" is an issue. Can you explain why that's bad?
It makes sense to me that it is an issue if you're a small arthouse, aka you're wanting to do weird stuff that probably violates some technical guideline somewhere. It's like an aggressive auto-formatting on a codebase. Sometimes you do want to break the format because it's more legible in one specific thing. It's fine most of the time, but a small arthouse is very likely trying to be the exception, not the rule. They want to be exceptional.
I sort of see what you're saying — hopefully the new streaming world we've found ourselves in can allow for more "long-tail" content. But "we're living in a golden age of TV" sounds so ... gross.
The movie market was like a fiefdom, much like the music industry 20 years ago, and now streaming and internet have democratized access and content creation. You don't get $20M budget at the cost of hundreds of other independent films? Yeah, sorry, boo-hoo.
We're living in a golden age of TV. In the past decade there have been many in depth TV series that only a handful of movies dared to explore precisely because the industry was hits driven.
More than that, I've seen some exceptional B-movie sci-fi movies on Netflix in the past 10 years as well.
People who win at this type of game have the equivalent of survivorship bias. They don't realize how much is sacrificed to create their hit movie and how the industry contorts content to serve their distribution model.