Sunday, August 27, 2023

It's the end of the Hollywood world was we know it part II b Streaming

 

Speaking of streaming, YouTuber Dan Murrel complained about how Hollywood Billionaire CEO/Movie studio heads like Bob Iger are complaining this isn’t the time to go on strike because Hollywood is struggling (especially Disney).  Meanwhile all of the other problems plaguing the Hollywood system “are coming straight from the top.  The producers and CEO they were the ones who dumped tens of billions of dollars into a streaming strategy that even now though most outside observers said this was going to be the case apparently (streaming) is not going to be the revenue generator (thought it) was going to be.” [i]  

Which is true.  In fact, it’s obvious to me and to several other Hollywood insiders[ii] we’re in the midst of an entertainment bubble that’s bursting.  And I’m not referring to some bubble effect that may have been present in a 1930’s Busby Berkley musical.   Like 1600 Dutch tulips, Beannie Babies, the dot.com boom and the US housing market of 2008 Hollywood is faced with overvalued assets in the current entertainment market.  When those financial bubbles burst it’s the regular people who suffer the effects of the busts not the bigwigs on top.  When I was caught up in the Beanie Babies bubble I lost $700  to Ty Warner on my vast collection and part of me at the time thought spending $50 on stuff I didn’t really need from a local stationary shop, including a tacky knock off “Titanic” necklace,  just so I could have the privilege of purchasing a Princess Di beanie baby for the $7 she was actually worth was a sound investment choice.   So, how did this Hollywood bubble form?   Simple, all of the Hollywood movie studios wanted to be Netflix without realizing why Netflix managed to survive that late 1990’s dot.com bubble to begin with. 

Netflix co-founders Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings wanted to duplicate the success Jeff Bezos was having with Amazon.com.   So, they created a website where people could rent DVDs through the mail for a monthly fee and watch as many or as few movies as they liked without the pesky late fees Blockbuster Video charged if you dared to deposit your rented VHS copy of “Jurassic Park” two seconds after midnight on the 2nd day of the rental.  This in turn eventually lead to streaming online movies through their website and like HBO before it eventually Netflix began to run some original programing.   Prior to 2012 no one turned on Netflix to watch new shows.  Netflix was a benefit for someone like me who, while still living with her mother & father from 2008-2013 wasn’t able to watch a controversial but excellent show like Vince Gillian’s “Breaking Bad” when it first aired on AMC TV.  I didn’t watch “Breaking Bad” the 1st time around because I didn’t have a TV in my own room, I couldn’t afford to get cable for myself, and my internet connection was still a little slow.  With only one TV in the household my late father would rather watch a cheesy sci-fi show or superhero movie than a story of how an everyman high school chemistry teacher devolves into a major crystal meth crime lord.    So, it was either watch what my father was watching on TV or ignore it and read and/or write (or hang out with my then boyfriend and now husband who didn’t have cable).    Binge watching “Breaking Bad” on Netflix was better than if I had managed to watch it when it 1st aired on AMC.  Instead of being pregnant for 18 months like an elephant Skyler White was pregnant for mere weeks.  By binge-watching “Breaking Bad” you experience the two-year timeline of the show instead of the 5 years the show took to make and air.   Netflix essentially gave me the ability to binge watch a rerun on my timeframe instead of hoping and trying to figure out if and when AMC would rerun “Breaking Bad” on their network or who in the network TV universe would be willing to show a rerun of “Breaking Bad” and would it air at a time I was available?    This Netflix advantage had many people realizing “Why I am paying for cable just to watch a show like ‘Breaking Bad’ on AMC when I can cancel it and just go with an internet connection and a Netflix subscription.”  This, then made Hollywood nervous as people started dumping the overpriced cable subscriptions in favor of Netflix or Amazon Prime or Hulu and cutting off of another revenue stream.    

So, when a big time media studio like Warner Brothers saw how well Netflix was doing streaming shows like “Friends” (another show I didn’t really watch much when it first aired in the 1990’s) and how no one was paying Nickelodeon to watch reruns of “Friends” during Nick at Nite they thought-Hey why settle for some rerun royalties when we can get those dollars back for ourselves.   This meant when Time Warner HBO Max launched in 2020, they pulled shows they produced from other streaming platforms like Netflix to air on their own HBO MAX.  The problem is most of HBO/Time Warner/Discovery content was made during a different era.  When “Friends” was an anchor of NBC’s “Must See TV” on Thursday night it didn’t matter if I personally chose to do things with my real friends instead of staying at home and watching what Rachel, Monica, Phoebe, Joey, Chandler and Ross were up to.  Jennifer Aniston, Courtney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Mathew Perry, and David Schwimmer were going to get their million dollar per episode salary thanks to the millions NBC was charging advertisers for a 30 second commercial to air on that show that 30 million other people were watching.   The cast “Friends” were still probably earning their million per episode even when it became part of WGN late night rerun line-up in the 2000’s whether I chose to stay up and watch with my boyfriend or chose to go to bed instead.   The 588-2300 Empire jingle was sufficient enough to put the jingle in the “Friends” cast’s pocket.   Now, Dallas Jenkins and the CW are bragging about how a million people tuned in for the TV premiere of “The Chosen” (an episode that first came out on Angel Studio’s App in 2019) and it seemed to hold against a bunch of other prime time networks with slightly better ratings but by no means the mega-ratings of network shows of the past. With streaming, who knows who is tuning in where and when and is it enough to sustain Hollywood budgets? 

I’m not enough of a media expert with bunch of charts and statistics to back up what is and isn’t hot in media (traditional, modern social or otherwise).  My husband complains that we have nearly every streaming platform out there.  I’m not sure how true that is.   I’m sure I can add on a few more but I’m not sure I want to because I know I only occasionally watch a few shows on each one of them.   The last one I watched on the Hulu platform was a show called “Reboot” which satirized this trend in Hollywood to just rehash the previously successful stuff only slightly darker, sexier, and deconstructed/woken up from the original ideals that made the original a success, hoping people will tune in and watch for nostalgia factor rather than it’s a really good show factor.   Ironically the last episode of “Reboot” talked about how “Reboot” ‘s reboot was cancelled by Hulu which I just read Hulu did to “Reboot” in real life.  Why?  I guess not enough people watched it to justify a 2nd season.  Maybe in an ironic twist Keegan Michael Key chose to leave the show to go on to star in Apple+  “Schmigadoon” the way his fictional character chose to do on the fictional show.   Speaking of nostalgia and Apple+  if I want to revisit portions of my childhood media consumption like Peanuts, Fraggle Rock, Sesame Street or Mister Rodgers Neighborhood I’ll have to keep up the $6.99 monthly Apple+ fee to watch those, but let’s face it- I’m likely to revisit a once upon a childhood time tale only once in a great while.  The last grownup show I watched on Apple+ was “Ted Lasso” and I do hope that the show sweeps the best comedy series category whenever the Emmys writers come back and Jason Sudeikis can formally accept.   Otherwise, I’m not seeing too much in the lineup I want to watch.     Same goes for Paramount+  where I watched ‘Star Trek: Piccard” and if I want to take a trip down memory lane for the other “Star Trek” shows I loved as a child/teen/young adult I may still need that subscription.  Maybe some of the “Yellowstone” Prequels like 1886 and 1923 may go on my TV someday watch list but ironically I have to get a Peacock subscription just to see the original “Yellowstone” TV show as well as the classic 1930’s Monster Cinematic Universe with Halloween coming up.    Part of the reason why I think my husband and I are able to afford all of these streaming things is because we are a DINK couple.   If you have a family maybe you’ll need to limit yourself to something like Apple+ or Disney+ where you can watch classic animated as well as their modern remade counterparts.

Speaking of Disney remakes-


 

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It's the end of the Hollywood world as we know it and I feel fine- Part IIa Movie Management

 

Once upon a time, Hollywood was a series of vertical monopolies with steady streams of cash allowing actors/writers/directors to be put under weekly/monthly/yearly contracts.  Most of the major movie studios were founded to provide movies for theater chain magnates like Universal’s Carl Laemmie[i] Metro’s Marcus Loew[ii] and Paramount Adolph Zucor [iii] that were cheaper than the patten owned Edison films that were Tik Tok/YouTube of the late 19th and early 20th century. (Seriously check out the oldest cat video here- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k52pLvVmmkU ) .  Louis B. Mayer, cofounder of legendary golden age Hollywood powerhouse MGM famously said  “Movies are the only thing you can sell and own at the same time.”   For just 25¢ (Average weekly wage was about $14-$18 a week during the 30’s [iv]) you could spend an evening at a movie and escape from your harsh hard -working life if you were lucky enough to have a job.    In the 1930’s 65% of all Americans went to the movies once a week. Now it’s down to 10% and most of those who do go on a weekly basis probably have movie critic somewhere in their job description.  Back in its heyday according Turner productions’ 1992 documentary “MGM: When the Lion Roared”, which originally aired I believe either on TNT or TCM (and I had to go to my mom’s house to watch her copy of it on DVD because it’s unavailable for streaming anywhere) sometimes studios like MGM could take a chance on a picture bombing.  With nearly 52 pictures a year in the 1930’s & 40’s if something like “The Kissing Bandit” staring Frank Sinatra and Kathryn Grayson flopped the 6.8 million “Easter Parade” staring Judy Garland and Fred Astaire made would cover it and MGM had other guaranteed income from its Loew’s theaters for the other average ho hum movies people went to because they were bored on a Saturday night.  Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, Universal and Paramount studios had similar structures/economics.   Then in 1948 The US Supreme court said most movie studios were in violation of the [v] 1890 Sherman anti-trust act and had to dump their theaters at the same time television was evolving from some exotic luxury device to something everyone would deem a necessity for modern American living.  And Television of course was free thanks to its commercials for Tide soap, Kellogg’s corn flakes and Chesterfield cigarettes that paid for the Cleavers, the Kramdons, the Andersons, the Nelsons, and especially the Ricardos to come into America’s home night after night. 

 

So, movie studios innovated with stuff you couldn’t see on TV.  They went with 3D (still a hit or miss novelty) and smell-o-vision.   They went with big time color widescreen epics like “Ben Hur” , “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea”, ”The Robe” , “Brigadoon”,  “An American in Paris” to name a few from the 1950’s.   They also amped up their sex appeal by promoting the outright sexiness of a Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor (not their beauty but their sex appeal).   Eventually movies began to incorporate things you couldn’t see on TV like actual sex and violence or say on TV (just ask George Carlin).  Movie studios also slowly began to get into the TV business by producing shows as well and in the case of Fox, Paramount and Warners eventually they got their own TV networks.   Heck some like Universal got into the amusement park business as well.    The problem quickly became (and it still an ongoing problem to this day) every movie becomes a crap shoot the movie studios have bet the house on and most movie studios don’t want to loose the house.  Part of the reason why MGM is more like a kitten mewing instead of a lion roaring is because they let their directors go wild with their productions and subsequent production budgets in the 1950’s & 60’s.   Directors like David Lien and his film crew traveled overseas to Holland twice just to get a perfect shot of a field of jonquils for Omar Sharif to wander through in “Dr. Zhivago” for less than a minute on screen.   Was it worth the money-maybe?

 

 Heck Hollywood only greenlights a movie script (or asks someone to develop a screenplay)  if there is a hope of making money like a best-selling novel (Wizard of Oz, Harry Potter) or comic book nowadays.   They always think audiences will love a remake.  For 1959’s MGM “Ben Hur” it was.  For 2016 Paramount “Ben Hur” remake it wasn’t.  (Original film came out in 1925).   Movies have to be these spectacular specatulars now to motivate someone coming out.   Even with something supposedly that will guarantee a success there needs to be more than a concept to draw an audience in.  With gas at $3.57 per gallon, a loaf of plain white bread around $2, milk $4.32, rent around $1,700 month movies tickets nowadays have to be worth the price of the $11-15 price being paid. 

 

For example, I chose to see the “Oppenheimer” half of Barbenheimer on IMAX and my ticket plus a slightly fuller box of popcorn than what I would have consumed if I microwaved a bag of Orville Redenbacher at home and a bathroom dixie cup sized cherry coke (with a pouch of Welsh’s fruit snacks thrown in for free)was about $21- an 84% increase from the price of a movie ticket Robert Oppenheimer would have paid in the 1930’s.  Christopher Nolan is perhaps one of the last famous directors (Spielberg, Scorsese, Tarantino, Lucas) whose name alone would cause the film to become a blockbuster.  It was an experience watching that Trinity bomb explode across the entire 52’ X 72’  IMAX screen and feeling the effects of the explosion.  I even was reminded of a quote from late great 80’s & 90’s Sun Times movie critic Roger Ebert who explained the joy of watching a movie with the crowd and laughing when everyone else laughs or cries whenever anyone else cries.    Still, the last time I went to a movie before “Oppenheimer” was November 22 and I was trying to support my favorite show/director in a Fathom Events movie special screening of the season premiere of “The Chosen” season 3. In other words, I had to have a very specific reason to go.  

 

Many of the 2023 flops are by Disney which, when movie theaters closed during the pandemic, made people realize it’s better to wait for something like “The Haunted Mansion” to come on to Disney + where a family of four or more can sit around a big TV screen and still be amazed at the movie for just $9.99 a month with commercials and pop two bags of aforementioned Orville Redenbacher from a $5.99 microwave popcorn box with M&Ms box for about a $1.50 from Walmart instead of the $4.50 the movie theater was trying to charge me.    Furthermore, Disney has to pour hundreds or millions of dollars for these spectacular spectaculars because I’m not sure the old Michael Eisner strategy from the 80’s and 90’s Disney I watched when I grew up would work.  The Eisner era of Disney had what he termed 1st and 2nd base hits that would keep the studio on solid financial ground.  Something like “Three Men and a Baby” that featured big time TV stars like Tom Sellek and Ted Danson at the height of their “Magnum P.I.” and “Cheers” fame and B list movie star Steve Guttenberg from the popular “Police Academy” series fumbling to be fathers to a cute little baby that got left on their bon vivant bachelor penthouse doorstep.  It was a relatively cheap film to make, got a lot of laughs and made for something for people to want to go see in theaters when they were once again bored on a Saturday night.   It was a hit, but not like Star Wars box office hit numbers.   And, as much as current Disney CEO Bob Iger would like to try that strategy, I guarantee nobody is going out to see an average movie like “Three Men and a Baby” because the last thing anyone is nowadays is bored on a Saturday night thanks to all of the streaming options.

 

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Saturday, August 26, 2023

It's the end of the Hollywood world as we know it and I feel fine: Part I-The Labor Side of the Argument

 

The week of July 9th- 15th 2023 will go down in Hollywood history for two notable things-

1.     First, Tom Cruise-the last true Hollywood movie star released Mission Impossible 7 to $80 million dollars as the box office it’s opening week.  While $80 million is a rather impressive number that’s still way under the$295 million it cost to make and may join the list of bigtime summer blockbusters ("Indian Jones & the Dial of Destiny", "The Little Mermaid" live action remake, "Elemental", "The Flash", "Ruby Gilman Teenage Kraken") that have tanked and/or been a disappointment at the movie theaters in the summer of 2023.

2.      Second, big time movie stars like Cruise joined the ranks of other unknown actors in the Screen Actors' Guild with their brethren in the Writers Guild of America by going on strike thereby shutting every type of scripted drama/comedy down even if a producer/director was lucky enough to get a script from a writer before that writer went on strike back in May.   Last time both unions were on strike was when Ronald Regan was president of the Screen Actors’ Guild in 1960 and that may have been the only time Ronald Regan was in favor of a union.  

When it comes to the Hollywood Strike I can understand both sides to a certain degree.  I certainly have empathy for what the average Hollywood writer is going through.  Vox[i]   explained TV shows used to be a minimum of 24 shows a season with several writers crafting the plot, characters and dialogue. With an extended TV series run writers often had the ability to go on the set and learn other ropes about TV production.  This in turn influenced how they wrote.  For example, my dream job is to be a writer on my favorite biblical TV show “The Chosen”.   I even took a step towards making that dream a reality by sending in what is called a spec (as in speculation of what I think was going to happen on “The Chosen” based upon reading the bible & following “The Chosen” plot lines) script to Dallas Jenkins.  However, I sent it to the wrong mailing address.  Even if I did send it the correct address to begin with Jenkins would have looked at my title page and thrown that script unread in the trash because he has publicly stated he doesn’t want to film that particular biblical scene my script was based around.  Why?  Because the Gospel story I wrote my “Chosen” script around would have cost a minimum of half a million dollars in special effects if you go with the Gospel story alone.  Furthermore, my script probably doubled that SFX amount but in my defense of my script it isn’t my fault God decided to show off to Elijah in I Kings 20:9-13 before saying hello to him. 

Back to my main point-once a TV writer had experience learning what it costs to put on a show and how things work in the Hollywood production world they eventually try to become their own TV producer of their own TV shows.  Now, your average TV show is down to 8 episodes a season and you can binge watch them all at once in an afternoon. This means that your modern TV producers/big time studio streamers think writers can therefore write the entire series in an afternoon as well and be satisfied with one paycheck.   It’s no wonder some of these writers find themselves on food stamps or taking odd jobs between writing gigs which in this streaming era you think would be plentiful. 

Both the writers and the actors are also fighting for bigger residuals which essentially is a royalty check for using their words, in the case of the writer, or performance in the case of the actor on screen.   One YouTuber/actress named Makayla Lysiak showed her residual checks she received from a previous acting gig.[ii]   Let’s just say the studios paid more in postage and she would spend more in gas to deposit those checks at the bank.  Actors are also trying to go back to in person auditioning which also makes sense since actors are perpetually broke and it may come down to who has better video equipment instead of who gave a better audition.    Not to mention in person auditioning gives actors a chance to network with casting agents/directors who may keep them in mind for future projects.  Once again using an example from one of my favorite TV shows “The Chosen” is an actor named Noah James[iii] who portrays Saint Andrew.   Now James initially auditioned to be the shepherd in “The Shepherd”.  However, James lost the part to another actor.  As soon as Jenkins crowdfunding money came through James again auditioned for “The Chosen” at first for the part of St. Peter but, well, when you’re competing against an actor born and raised in Capernaum, Israel, you’re probably not going to get that part.  James then tried out for other roles and Jenkins liked him enough figure out which one of Jesus’ other eleven disciples James could portray eventually casting him as St. Andrew.

Both writers and actors of course are terrified of the Artificial Intelligence revolution that is taking over the world.  In some ways artificial actors have been a thing since George Lucas created a crowd of CGI aliens in “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace” and Jar Jar Binks.  In the case of Jar Jar though Ahmed Best did provide the funky voice and wore a modified costume on the set so Liam Neeson, Natalie Portman, Jake Lloyd and Ewan McGreggor could have sight lines when they had to interact with this as of yet unseen character.  I’m not sure if the CGI actor technology has improved to the point where you have to use a Turing test for your average on-screen background actor, but that day is coming.  Another YouTube video I saw from Adam Conover formerly of Tru TV’s “Adam Ruins Everything” had him complaining some Chat GPT program plagiarized [iv]his former Tru TV show when he asked for the robots to write a script.  And it makes sense.  Keep in mind the word robot has its roots in the Slavic word for worker or perhaps even slave and slaves are never free to think independently of the source material.   As much as a robot takeover of the world has been the plot of many a Sci-Fi film, nowadays it may be a reality. The other day I walked into a McDonalds because I had some time to kill before I met my husband in Lemont.   There was no cashier at the counter.  Instead, I was greeted by a large screen where I could tap to order my food and I had to take a number to have someone bring me my food which was completely contrary to the McDonnald’s brothers’ original speedy service system.  If I wanted to use a machine to order my food, I would have downloaded the McDonnald’s App on my smartphone and used it. I don’t want the McDonalds app to be on my phone because the last thing I need is some notification on my smartphone reminding me that a deliciously large 480 calorie, 23 fat g, 400 mg sodium laden French fry is only $1 if I order it on the McDonalds app.   My medical bills will be far more than the sale McDonalds is offering me!      I wanted to talk with a human cashier but for some reason that local Lemont McDonalds seemed to give me no choice.  So, if a big-time corporation like McDonalds is using computers/robots to help with cheap food orders it wouldn’t surprise me that a Hollywood movie studio would try something like this to save money as well on something that cost a lot more money than $1 French Fry.

Which brings me to the other half of this argument-The fact Hollywood movie/streaming studios are indeed broke.  Or are they?

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