The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies
Good Will Hunting is my favourite movie. I am fascinated by the way the film profoundly explores relationships and introduces interesting dynamics with the people in the main character’s every day life. If you’ve been following new releases lately, you might have noticed that there aren’t many movies like Good Will Hunting available in theaters. A lot of new cinematic releases center around recognizable characters and are packed with special effects, flashy stunts and nonstop action instead of meaningful dialogue (i.e: Marvel Cinematic Universe, DC Universe, live remakes of Disney Classics..etc.).
The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies, written by Ben Fritz explains why in this age we will probably no longer take a trip to our nearest theaters to see movies like Good Will Hunting, A Marriage Story or even dramas that are centered around more familiar characters like Steve Jobs or the Social Network.
The author uses emails leaked from Sony to piece together a narrative of a company that fails to respond to the structural changes in the movie industry and hangs on to its old ways by betting on movies that have long gone out of fashion at the box office.
My takeaway from this books are:
- The movie industry has always been a bad business and is worse now: My day job is to analyze businesses and determine their potential rate of return and I, along with anyone else in my position, would get fired on the spot if I recommended investing in a movie.
It takes serious upfront capital to pay decent actors, film in interesting locations, apply CGI and that’s after you’ve probably spent a fortune on buying the rights to a story from a screenwriter.
In the past, the industry would recoup some of this investment through ticket sales at the box office but the main source of profit was from the re-watch. Close to 50% of revenues came from when we’d all flock to Wal-Mart and buy VHS tapes or DVDs for $15-$30 a piece. That is all gone now.
- Technology killed Good Will Hunting for the big screen but it may save it through direct-to-consumer streaming: It no longer makes sense for a movie studio to pay $30 — $50 million dollars to make a drama with little to no CGI for an increasingly global audience looking to go to theatres to revisit familiar characters and be stunned visually. Especially when they can no longer make up for low box office revenues with DVD or VHS sales. As Disney has figured out, if you’re looking to appeal to as many people as possible, you are better off spending $100 million on superheroes with easy to follow plots and minimal dialogue
However, direct to consumer platforms such as Netflix offers everyone the ability to personalize their consuming habits exactly to their taste. With over a 100 million subscribers, this means that there may be enough people who like to watch dramas or rom-coms on Netflix that it makes sense for the company to spend money on them. And that’s exactly what has happened.
A lot of the directors that made movies for theatres before the 2010s like David Fincher and Martin Scorsese are finding that Netflix is increasingly willing to bet on them instead of the traditional movie studios who deliver their content primarily through the big screen. Whether Netflix or any of the other direct to consumer platforms will see sustained profits from aggressively doling out bags of cash to high profile producers and directors remains to be proven.
- TV > Movies: I do have to admit that prior to reading this book, my main reference of the inner workings of the film industry came from watching all 8 seasons of Entourage. In the early season the main character, a budding A-lister, is reluctant to take jobs for TV series and insists on making traditional movies. For whatever reason, being part of a TV series was looked down upon by top talent. Many of the top actors at the time would transition from TV to Movies and never look back — i.e. George Clooney, Will Smith.
The reverse is true today. Other than the obvious financial incentives to be part of a superhero movie — it’s hard to see classically trained actors finding themselves fulfilled by only participating in a Marvel or Fast and Furious movie. This is why we’ve seen A-listers returning to TV — i.e. Oscar winning actors, Matthew MCconaughey and Mahershala Ali in True Detective.
TV series are starting to become a larger part of pop culture and are becoming a more effective way to deliver more thought provoking and sophisticated content (i.e. Black Mirror, Breaking Bad, Mad Men). The longer form of tv series allows the creator to also capture the audience for a much longer time which is necessary when you’re competing against endless sequels, spinoffs, and live remakes of old movies.
By the time I finished reading this book, it became clear to me that the media landscape is changing rapidly and I will need to adapt with it by consuming he type of content I used to love in different ways. It will be interesting to see how we all adapt to this new environment. I do believe that in our current environment where we all have an abundance of options and easier ways to watch them, we will all just end up watching what we like the most. There may be fewer and fewer hallmark movies that everyone has seen (think Home Alone) and we may find ourselves holed up in our respective niches. Water cooler conversations will never be the same (if those actually still exists).
