Who Is Killing Cinema? – A Murder Mystery

If you're asking why we left out potential suspects like TV or the pandemic or capitalism, I explain all of those in the bonus companion video over on Nebula nebula.tv/videos/patrickhwillems-the-other-suspect…

I would argue that the death of the move star was a deliberate choice on the part of studios, not an accident. Movie stars have power and studios hate it when anyone besides themselves are in control. Studios control the franchises, not the movie stars. If everything is a franchise, then actors have less power and influence.

Gone Girl came out in 2014 and made $369m against a $61m budget and was a huge hit that everyone was talking about in a way they would talk about a big hit from the 90s. It was also David Fincher’s most financially successful film. It came out the same year as Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain America 2, and X-Men: Days of Future Past. So clearly Scorsese was right when he said that audiences see what you allow them to see. And Gone Girl made similar money to superhero films comparatively to their budgets. It made over 6 times its budget. That’s a hell of a return on investment.

One of my media professors in college (2006ish) told our class how in the near future we would see bog screen TV's get exceedingly cheap and light weight, (which also weighed 150+ pounds) and that movies would be released in theaters and for rental/on demand simultaneously. Man he nailed it.

The death of the movie star phenomenon strikes home when I think of how much of a big deal my grandmother made of actors such as Clark Gable and Shirley Temple, which I have trouble fully comprehending.

It doesn't help that Disney is now forbidding any movie theaters to screen old fox movies. They are mostly declining theaters that are usually run movies when they are new and first released, and only really gave permission to independent theaters. They are putting everything in the Disney vault so they can artificially inflate their value. I hate Disney so much

I can’t believe you never mentioned skyrocketing ticket prices. They’re pricing more and more of the audience out of the the theater experience.

I was devastated when Netflix announced they were stopping DVDs, now if you don’t have every streaming service then some things are just unobtainable

This made me realise how Star driven the Bollywood movies still are.. Like you can slap Shah Rukh Khan's face on a poster and people will still flood the theatres without even looking up the synopsis.

One thing this video misses (though it's brought up in passing) is the monopolization of the physical theater into just a couple of large chains, which imo has caused prices to climb precipitously. The small local cinema or regional chain where you can get a ticket and refreshments for a few bucks is gone, you're more and more forced into huge cineplexes (usually far from downtown, built in giant malls or shopping centers on bypasses) where you'll pay $15 per person for tickets, more like $30+ per person if you add food. I think that can't be ignored if you're worried about the "frequency" of peoples' movie trips. I know I've gone to the movies 2 or 3 times more frequently since I moved near a downtown that's lucky enough to have a small theater with tickets under $10. More peripherally, I would throw in the "death of third places" thesis. The demise of arcades, roller rinks, bowling alleys, etc, which in the 1980s-1990s would often be built adjoining a theater (or even inside the theater in the arcade case!), has damaged the theater's ability to act as a casual hangout spot.

Something I’ve always thought was a missed opportunity for streamers was to give us what we really have lost from DVDs: extras! Bloopers, deleted scenes, directors and cast episode commentaries. I remember LOVING these as a kid on DVDs of movies and shows I love, and we just don’t get these now. Streamers should start dropping those again a year or so after a show/movie is released to reinvigorate conversations and give those DVD vibes. HBO is the closest to that but they just need to take it one step further

Going to the movies went from a hobby to an event to a chore. It just got too expensive to go to cinemas, and that trend started 20 years ago. Instead of addressing prices or putting more old movies back into circulation, they squeezed international distribution, stuck to gimmicks and milked big hit genres until they thinned the herd of ideas. I stopped going to the movies long before Netflix.

Hollywood is a small group of safe players —- they’re not creatives as opposed to mass producing safe stories that garner little to no praise. The bar is so low that cinema has in essence killed itself.

Your Honor, I present further evidence for the Netflix case: While I’m a big fan of Netflix, the moment they announced they had 88 million paid monthly subscribers, it was as if a starting gun went off for every studio to launch their own streaming platform. This race not only dealt a massive blow to DVD and home video sales, but it also dulled the desire to watch a movie in theaters. It fostered the ‘I’ll just wait for it to hit digital’ mindset.

Gen X here: I remember a time when my friends and I wanted to see "a movie" and we opened the paper to the movie section and looked for something acceptable around the time we wanted to go, +/- an hour. This worked because a 12 screen theater had 10 different movies playing. To us, the social experience of going to see a movie together and then talking about it over dinner was the fun - the movie was almost secondary to that mission.

a24 has shown that people will watch good quality films (and tv shows) even from fairly unknown and quirky filmmakers. the appetite has never been greater for original movies. make them and people will come rushing back to the cinemas.

Makes me glad that I've been slowly building a personal archive of physical media currently consisting of over 200 films and 100 anime features, mostly horror, cult, and art films from the 70s, 80s and 90s. I used to stream my favorite films to a small online audience but now I enjoy showing these films to friends and visitors in my basement theater. I love it so much that I've considered inviting strangers over to watch movies with me, lol

I think another symptom that you didn’t really talk about was how modern television took away a lot of the gravitas of movies. It’s easy to forget in our modern day but there used to be a time when film was seen as “above” television. Film actors would be people who USED to be on TV and any time a film star did appear on TV it was for a one episode guest appearance. The idea that an actor like Pedro Pascal could be both a TV and film star was unthinkable. They were even in completely separate unions up until 2012. Film always had higher budgets, better stunts, and better effects. But as the production value for TV steadily increased audiences started seeing TV as a longer equivalent to film. The ultimate example of this is Stranger Things season four where every episode is long enough and has enough effects to be a mid-budget movie. It’s telling that a lot of the most popular adult dramas of the past few years have been shows not movies.

I think one of the problems and one of the reasons for the whole "I’ll just wait for it to hit digital" thing is, that theaters are too expensive. Tickets are high priced, food and drinks are high priced, any games/arcades may also cost money. Some people just don't have enough money to spend on going to the theater to see a movie they may not even like. It's why people sometimes sneak food and drinks into the theaters. Why pay all that money for 1 movie for 1 day when you can get a monthly subscription to a streaming service and get access to 100's of movies and tv shows and wait for new movies to come to the platform to watch anytime you want for a 1 time a month fee from the comfort of home.

I’m amazed by how this man can capture my undivided attention for a full hour and a half. Usually these days I watch most YouTube videos at double speed, and they rarely exceed 20-30min in length. I sat and deliberately watched this in its entirety at 1x speed. He’s like the Michael of vsauce of movies.