omg: Steve Jobs agrees with me about how Hollywood will have to changeI've been talking about it loudly and frequently for ages: the entertainment environment is changing rapidly, all sorts of new options are available for acquiring and viewing movies, and Hollywood should be listening to how its customers are telling the industry it needs to change. Going to the multiplex is an expensive and unpleasant proposition these days, and certainly not worth the hassle and the cost when the movies on offer are so terrible so often. (There's a good reason why box office receipts are down so sharply this spring: the movies suck.) Hollywood might boost its takings some, even with the same crappy movies, if it gave us more options for seeing new movies: day-and-date DVD releases and day-and-date on-demand options. Hollywood, of course, doesn't care what I think, and keeps refusing to listen to me. Maybe Hollywood will listen to Steve Jobs? The Apple honcho spoke at the recent D8 conference, which covers “All Things Digital,” and some of his comments seem to suggest that he and Apple are ready to lead Hollywood into this brave new world. “We want to let people watch whatever they want, when they want,” he said to the crowd of industry types who paid big bucks to listen to his wisdom. “That's what needs to change.” And this: “I even think you'll be able to watch a first run movie before it hits theaters... if you want to spend a bunch of money.” That's already happening, in fact, with plenty of low-flying indies and foreign films: We're seeing many films available on a pretheatrical rental basis via Amazon's Video on Demand service Jobs suggests that Hollywood may not quite understand that its customers are not the multiplexes or the DVD retailers but the people who actually buy movie tickets and watch movies: When we went to music companies, we said who is your customer... they said Target, and Best Buy -- they thought the retailer was the customer. What changed in that industry was the front end, the distribution and marketing was able to be done in a much more effective way, going right to the end user. This came in response to a question from “one of the owners of Village Roadshow pictures,” who seemed to think that it was a good thing that the studios have “made a great business of forcing the consumer to come to us.” So there may be a way to go still before Hollywood gets it. But Jobs, at least, seems to understand where things are moving, and with the iPod and now the new success of the iPad, perhaps he can hurry things along a bit. support
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Wed Jun 09 10, 12:39PM categories: easter eggs talent buzz permalink 6 pre-Disqus comments Disqus comments tip jarshare
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Amazon Video on Demand
Apple digital convergence Hollywood hates movie lovers omg on demand Steve Jobs related· question of the day: Would you pay $30 for an on-demand rental of a new theatrical film release? · ‘Inception’: it’s really, really pathetic... · because no one will listen to what the ‘Hurt Locker’ pirates are saying · question of the day: Will 3D kill movie stars? · question of the day: Does an on-demand DVD business make sense? · retro ad: 1990s Apple “The Crazy Ones” commercial · cinematic roots of: ‘Middle Men’ · question of the day: Is it too soon for a Steve Jobs biopic? Who should play him? · watch it: “Steve Jobs demos Apple Macintosh, 1984” · is Betty Draper misunderstood?; the end of cable TV?; why never to throw away someone else's action figures; more: leftover links bloggyprevious post: trailer break: ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I’ teaser next post: watch it: “Every Jelly Baby Scene - Doctor Who” |
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posted by Wart (Wed Jun 09 10, 11:51PM)
What makes this very interesting is that Steve Jobs is not just the Apple honcho but is also on Disney's board of directors (since Disney bought Pixar in 2006). So he might actually be in a position to do something about this.
Also, speaking of knowing who your customers are, Dell went from a college dorm room to a leader in the computer industry by eliminating the retailers and selling direct. Books have been written about it. I do not understand why the music and movie industry continue to be dominated by people who are so astonishingly bad at business.
posted by misterb (Thu Jun 10 10, 3:21AM)
The movie business model has more in common with books and music than with computers. The dirty secret of the arts business is that a very small number of your products make the vast majority of your profits. If you could tell which were the money makers beforehand, showbiz would be like selling shoes. The studios have run the business for so long because they were the only ones who had the money to get a movie made. They maintained their iron grip on distribution to try to tilt the odds in their favor.
Now that they are losing their control of the distribution, they will only put their money into the surest bet they can find. Hence the absolute lack of creativity in new movies being greenlit.
Maybe there were some benefits to the old ways after all.
posted by RogerBW (Thu Jun 10 10, 5:31AM)
Being fair, I think that pretty much everyone who isn't currently making money off the current system knows the system has to change. So does Hollywood, probably - they're just sucking the corpse dry for as long as they can.
misterb, the hardware is getting cheaper, and as the star system blatantly falls apart the cost of making a film is coming down as long as you stay away from expensive stuff (mostly SFX). What's mostly missing IMO is a distribution channel that allows for profit even on the small scale. I'd love to see lots of small cheap films made by people who'd never get a chance in Hollywood because they still have some creativity...
The customer focus makes a lot of sense. If you work for a studio, you can have a meeting with the guy from Target and get a definite commitment: we'll buy X thousand DVDs at price Y. Ditto with a theater chain. It's all normal business. Trying to appeal to individuals is a completely different game, and all they know how to do in that field is pay a publicity agency.
posted by misterb (Thu Jun 10 10, 12:16PM)
@RogerBW,
Yes, I was thinking about the lower cost of movie making as I wrote my OP. It's the youtube problem, though, how does an inexpensively made movie get the attention (or lack of attention) it deserves? The odds of going viral are smaller than having a Hollywood hit, and much harder to monetize.
Here's the key to me, and I hope MaryAnn likes this:
critics! We need some brave souls to wade through the millions of hours of crap to find the few minutes of diamonds, and we ought to pay them to do it.
posted by e (Thu Jun 10 10, 12:32PM)
I enjoy sitting in a big theatre to see movies, going somewhere enhances the experience to me. I think you lose something sitting at home, it invites distraction. That being said, the theatre model has to change somehow for it to continue to be viable, I just have no idea how to fix that.
posted by Ryan H (Thu Jun 10 10, 5:56PM)
@RogerBW
The cost of making films has never been a barrier to entry. People have been making indie films to professional standards for decades now. The two biggest costs of production have always been people and locations. Equipment costs have never stopped anyone who has figured out how to pay for those.
The problem has always been making the money back. You can have the best film in the world but if you can't figure out how to get people to hand over cash to watch it you will never be making a second one. That goes the same for a $50k shoe-string production or a $50m big budget film.
One of the problems with the internet is that it has provided an amazing theoretical distribution channel. It's so amazing that it has actually started to undermine and collapse the current distribution system before that theory has become a reality.
My guess is that the first iTunes or Netflix original series will get announced in the next year or two. We were almost there with Dr. Horrible but one-off small scale projects don't have quite the weight that a full-fledged series or movie would. After that I'd expect that a major share of the production industry will be aimed at online distribution within another few years.