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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> ... California doubled the annual assistance it gives to film and TV productions to $750 million to stop them from fleeing the state.

750M/38.9M = $19.28 per resident

Why can't we call a taxpayer subsidy by its right name?

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.

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.

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!)

Original:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-13/hollywood...

$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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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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.