/ent/ - Entertainment

For people who don't wanna click:

Title:
Original Movies in 2025: Oops, All Flops!

Description:
Movies, what have you done? The trend so far in 2025 is that any movie with a modest budget that’s not based on a recognizable property has been underperforming or flopping at the box office. Mike and Jay, seemingly with nothing better to do, have decided to look at the numbers and discuss this trend. What does the future of movies not based on video games and comic books look like? Does the long-established model of theatrical release need to change? Nobody knows and even less people care.



I didn't watch the video but isn't Sinners doing well at the box office?

'Sinners' Scares Up the Highest Domestic Opening for an Original Movie This Decade! https://bloody-disgusting.com/movie/3864964/sinners-scares-up-the-highest-domestic-opening-for-an-original-movie-this-decade/

Some comments:



"On Mike's point about spending $25 to buy a new release every time, it's important to note you don't own that movie, you are buying the right to have it in your digital library for however long the streamer has the rights to it.
The can take it back from you at any time, and they will. Most platforms don't even let you download a "real" copy to your hard drive free of playing restrictions. Even though it's your movie now.

They're stealing from you. If buying isn't owning…"



"They dont even make profit from dvd/blu-ray releases anymore, because they stopped selling them like… almost everywhere. Target and Bestbuy dont sell them. A movie that bombs at the theater cant succeed in the secondary market because theyve gone FULL digital. It stinks. I wanna own my movies for real. They keep changing for the worst."



Are people waking up or is it just consumerist complaining but not actually going to/be able to do anything effective about it?

Anyway I don't watch those frauds

>>9219
Is this the guy who made the famous videos analyzing star wars?

>>9222
Why are they frauds?

>>9223
They watch too many movies. Mao Zedong said reading too much is harmful. I think the same applies to movies. They are cynical and complain but in a consumerist way. This is liberalism and reactionary. Furthermore I was neutral on them until I found out they disliked a movie I liked.

>>9224
Wtf are you talking about dude? What's wrong with enjoying film? It's an art medium. Marx said the more you live laugh love the more communist you are.

>I was neutral on them until I found out they disliked a movie I liked.
Okay that's all I was asking

>>9225
I also have a problem with people looking towards them for takes instead of thinking of their own.

Just because people watch them does not make them knowledgeable.

>>9219
>I didn't mean to call all of china racist against black people but we all know you are
Aaaand I'm done with this slop.

>>9227
See, I knew they were libs. Fuck 'em and their lamenting about their dying consoomer culture.

Furthermore for context, The Women in the Yard either not playing in China or not making money in China):

- It seems to be a supernatural ghost/spirit film. China has banned superstition before or put disclaimers in supernatural stories
(which may have to do with China's history such as superstition during the Century of Humiliation (look up "supernatural Boxer Rebellion"),
and Indonesian communists getting killed because CIA told civilians that commies are having Satanic blood sacrifice orgies, which some say was an influencing factor for China's decision to launch a Cultural Revolution)

- China limits the amount of foreign movies allowed each year, I doubt this low-key unknown supernatural film would get in over stuff like blockbusters such as Godzilla



PS. Alien Romulus was allowed and made lots of money in China and it was shown uncensored! A sci-fi horror was allowed!

Nice, another informative redlettermedia video. Oh wait, am I supposed to hate them for some reason now?

>>9219
Lets adresse some points

<why are horror movies flopping
the real world is slowly turning into one, there is less demand for fictional scary, when there is so much real scary.

<Chinese people don't watch movies with actors that have a dark skin tone.
This could just be a made up psy-op to bias the media industry against China.
If this is true, that is unfortunate, but as long as they are not actively discriminating against people, not wanting to watch a movie can't be racism.
We have an anti-warmonger bias, so we assume that China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela,… bad is false by default unless proven otherwise.

<People lacking the discretionary budget to buy movie tickets
Well look at it this way the economy is producing surplus and that can be spend on a number of things. The neocons are popping a roughly 50 million dollar drone about once a week over Yemen, that's 10 indie-movies per week evaporating in the sky. If you go look at the amount of money that was burned in Ukraine … that's more indie movies you could ever watch.

<the word for hijacking ships
Well that's a consumer protest. There's a few reasons:
Too many hoops in the "blessed distribution channel"
Lack of personal controle over personal circumstances in the "blessed distribution channel", purchased "content" keeps disappearing.

ideological opposition to "copy-right":
-protection of personal property, every "DRM" mechanism is a violation of personal property, if you used the formula for calculating damages that the entertainment industry used in their crusade against the internet, it's heptillions of dollars.
-Free-market libertairans oppose it on the basis of it being a anti-competitive monopoly mechanism
-humanitarian grounds: "copy-right" doesn't just affect entertainment, it also affects medicine and a bunch of other stuff, and it kills an estimated 1-5 million people per year by denying them access to stuff that could save their lives.
on human rights grounds, "copy-right" also is a censorship mechanism that is incompatible with freedom of expression, and the attempt of imposing copy-prohibition-terror is also resulting in privacy-violation-terrorism.
-the enlightenment crowd sees "copy-right" as a return to the dark-ages, the technical ability for cheap and easy information duplication without interference is what enabled humanity to have general literacy, science and technology. Any means of interfering with that is an unspeakable evil. By giving money to the entertainment industry, one indirectly funds the lobbyists that try to enact repression that seeks to drag down civilization into the abyss.
-opposition to the mafia, "copy-right" "enforcement" has morphed into a protection racket

<the movie industry is dying it needs a new business-model.
Yes that is true, specifically one that doesn't fight against technology, digital technology is really good at duplicating information and sending it everywhere, try going with it instead of against it.

Lowest common denominator sequel/remake/prequel slop is going to get replaced by continuously generated Ai-slop.

There has been a viable business-model on the basis of a culture flat-rate for a long time, it eliminates distribution monopolies entirely and replaces it with free market for producers and customers. It's probably not optimal if you want indie movies because it would still have a funnel effect where a lot of money goes to the lowest common denominator slop, but financing for indie movies would be better than today. Basically everybody pays into a culture-fund and that gives money to distributors and producers on the basis of what people download from the culture fund database.

The alternative is to create a new model on the basis of not pay-walling content at all and instead subsidizing it with merchandise. If you can figure out how to do "pre-vatisment" crowdfunding becomes possible, but for that to work you have to make all movie assets copy-left, so that you build up a stack of no-cost assets that lowers the cost of subsequent productions and creates a force multiplier for this model.

<Are movies being devalued ?
Yes media is becoming ephemeral again, because people can't accumulate a durable collection. And that lowers the value proposition.
With physical media that is possible, if you eliminate drm and make media more durable.

For example we could make an optical, entirely solid state "data-crystal" where both the media and the reader would last perhaps a century.

The reader would only have a lled (laser light emitter diode) and a ldd (light detector diode) plus some signal processing circuitry. The "data crystal" would exploit a physics effect that lets you reduce the apparent speed of light in a transparent material. That means you can make the light travel along a very long winding corridor that has tiny obstacles that direct some light out of the medium, making it blink. By reducing the apparent speed of light you can make this happen at a speed where electronics can keep up with the blinking rate. (this only describes a single data block, not the entire storage)

A "data-crystal" would be produced by (ab)using old 60+nm photo lithography equipment. Making it mostly cheap and durable with good enough data-density and data-transfer speeds. The motivations for people to buy this is the archive quality of data storage. That means it can't have any compatibility obstacles, so no exotic formats and definitely no drm.

The less physical alternative is to create a resilient distributed online database with properties such that nothing can be removed from it and access can't be cut off. I would also look into resilience to financial censorship.


>>9229
>Nice, another informative redlettermedia video. Oh wait, am I supposed to hate them for some reason now?
Well they kinda asked people to consider giving 25 bucks per movie to distribution channels where you rent an impermanent access license that may or may not be revoked at some random point in the future. That is an abusive relationship. If you choose a distribution channel that is not abusive, there is something akin to religious fundamentalists accusing you of imaginary crimes, which is a different kind of abuse.
We are at a point in time where times are getting tough because the people who command the surplus of society are too stupid to rebuild the industrial base and repair the infrastructure, and the politicians have gone mad, they're no longer talking about a prosperous future, they screech about war, death and destruction and increasing amounts of persecution against the general public.

Red letter media is asking how to save movies, while people are reaching a point where they are beginning to evaluate whether it's worth the pain.
That's the disconnect you see in this thread.

What red letter media wants to save in a more general way is intelligent story telling, but the ruling classes want bread and circus to distract people. The amount of resources a system like this will allocate to story telling is inversely proportional to how intelligent it is. And the worse the upwards wealth-redistribution gets the fewer the resources there will be to produce good movies.

I think the choices are change the economic system or slash the production value.

who else thinks the best way to keep a girl silent is to put a cock in her mouth?