Is Hollywood's decline irreversible?

It interesting actually looking at the movies from the 21st century to make my list, with that budget point in mind:

In the Mood for Love 2000 Hong Kong Wong Kar-Wai
Mulholland Drive 2001 USA David Lynch ESSENTIAL
Donnie Darko 2001 USA Richard Kelly
Uzak 2002 Turkiye Nuri Bilge Ceylan ESSENTIAL
No Country for Old Men 2007 USA Joel and Ethan Cohen
Wall-E 2008 USA Andrew Stanton
Embrace of the Serpent 2015 Colombia Ciro Guerra
La La Land 2016 USA Damien Chazelle ESSENTIAL
The Lighthouse 2019 USA Robert Eggers
Apollo 11 (doc) 2019 USA Todd Douglas Miller
Fire of Love (doc) 2022 France Sara Dosa

My first impression is that the only one with anything like a big budget (in movie terms) would be Wall-E.

1. It's not the individual gamble, it's the sheer number of them. Instead of asking 'are any of these ten movie ideas worth a big investment?', the studios ask 'which three of these ten ideas should we heavily invest in?'


The big studios have become 'problem gamblers'. If they lose, then they gotta bet big to make their money back. If they win, then they're on a hot streak and need to bet even more.


2. I love it when movies come back and I hope we see more of it, but there usually isn't many people in the theater with me. The only ones that seem to get a lot of viewers (at least from what I've personally seen) are the kids movies. I think releases of 'classic movies not meant for kids' will continue to be niche. But if I'm wrong, I'll be delighted.

2 continued: a possible exception are concert movies, which seem to do fairly well, although they aren't films in the traditional sense.


I LOVED seeing the Talking Head's Stop Making Sense on the big screen.

I keep mentioning it, but it's such a shame that Concert for a New South Africa wasn't properly promoted last year and was only available for 4 nights and at a few cinemas in a few countries, because it has 99+% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and however good all the footage etc might have been in that Talking Heads film (which I've note seen), we are talking here about one of the very most talented musical performers in human history, at close to the top of her game. It's an amazing show and more people ought to see it.
I am in 2 minds as to whether it should be in my greatest 100 films, because I think it is one of the greatest most enjoyable experiences of any movie, but it's really just a video of someone singing, there's no more to it than that.

I don't understand. I thought the budgets only got bigger and bigger, and GLADIATOR 2 is a perfect example of that. They must have known that the sequel to this beloved classic was going to be met with scepticism (to say the least) but that didn't stop them from forking out a quarter of a billion. Most people can't even imagine how much money that is.

I don't think people will lose interest in films so if they no longer want to go to the cinema then it can happen on streaming. And why go to the cinema when the screen is only slightly bigger than your preposterously huge TV set?
Money is not the problem, never. There are many people who have too much of it and they will protect their economy at all costs. Scaling back doesn't seem to be an option in that model.

It's the same as with music: most of the good stuff has already been done hence the desire for all kinds of retro.
There are still very skilled filmmakers but it doesn't compare to the peak of creativity in the second half of the 20th century, and I'm afraid too much has changed to make that happen again. We can mourn the things we've lost or be grateful for the good things that have happened.

The "movie star" is a dying breed. Talent, sure, but not many charismatic and recognisable actors, at least not enough to occupy the endless stream of films.
Never meet your heroes, as they say, well be afraid because the ones with a twitter account will tell you everything you don't want to know about them.

Lastly, most modern films look like sh*t. From dreadful interiors to overtly sharp picture quality to insufferable dialogue - but this is something that can be fixed. They won't do it, of course, but hey, I still got the Roman Polanski films on DVD if I'm in the mood for something seriously good.
They can't take that away from me...or can they?

My question about this is whether the iconic version of "Hollywood", that place where you enter a fantasy world through a big gate, past the guards, into a place where people are pushing around racks full of costumes and dollies with scenery (someone just passed with a couple of cactuses) exists even now. There are zillions of location shots, movies made in many places, productions even in my home town of Baltimore, but the mythology of "Hollywood" persists. It's kinda similar to how all of the stocks and finances are in New York and all cars are made in Detroit from steel refined in Pittsburgh.

None of it is like that anymore since everything has gone global to some extent. It's sort of a language convenience. When you think of movies, you say Hollywood. When it's cars, the entire American industry is referred to as Detroit. I don't think Hollywood as an icon will disappear, any more than Detroit will be the icon of the US car industry, but, as more time goes by, it just becomes a word we use without reference to the numbers and facts.

It seems to me that everything has been compartmented to a ridiculous degree, specially in terms of budget and distribution. Since mid budget movies are disappearing or relegated to very specific genre experiences, what gets to theaters are hyper-inflated budgets delivering bombastic blockbuster experiences in hopes of returning enough of their unreasonable costs. Meanwhile, low budget has its own "market" outside of theaters and in cult spaces, festivals or as streaming filler.

I guess Hollywood was always a bit like this, but there has been an exacerbation of these issues over the last couple decades. Every "important" movie costs 200 millions at least, and they all compete to be a greater than life maximalistic experience to get at least 300 millions in ticket sales. They all are 150+ minutes length, because the experience has to be exhausting as well in runtime to be considered worthy, and they are all endless franchises with safe revenue prospects, or desperately hoping to become one.

Not limiting it to Hollywood then, for those who thing the movies are pretty much gone, what would you say was the broad peak?




I would start in 1938.


I think I'd end it somewhere between 1982 and 2001.

>The big studios have become 'problem gamblers'. If they lose, then they gotta bet big to make their money back. If they win, then they're on a hot streak and need to bet even more.

I feel the problem is lack of risk, not them screwing things up. Big CGI action movies are the "safe" bet since studios gamble on the fact that the nerd communities will watch anything as long as it's catered to them. We see less stuff in theaters because studios don't want to risk the cash on the non-action crowd.

>Every "important" movie costs 200 millions at least,

Many of the "important" Oscar darlings did not. Brutalist was shockingly cheap.

In terms of ticket sales in the 1920s, about half of the U.S. population went weekly to the movie theaters. Theater attendances has been declining ever since.

Being an Oscar darling however I don't think defines importance to the industry nowadays, and most of all it does not guarantee proper distribution, let alone to the level bombastic blockbusters being released every two days get. The box office tops are filled every week with these movies barely returning their inflated budget, and meanwhile a lot of prestige films are relegated to a few theaters and weeks of distribution. And I only assume it's better in the national market, because the international distribution is often much worse than that.

Also, let's see how the award popularity of The Brutalist affects Brady Corbet's next project, because I have some serious doubt that it will get the attention one would expect for an Oscar darling.

Yeah, you even put quotes around it to preclude exactly that kind of response, I imagine.

Lower your standards and you see the decline disappear.

It wasn't my intention but I guess it could happen. I mean important for industry and distribution standards (and therefore expected viewership), which is not something that aligns with my thoughts on what should be considered important in film production (because to me this is the consequence of a rigged market and an artificial trend to overbudget everything), hence the quotations.

>Lower your standards and you see the decline disappear.

No need. Just go digging for lesser-known releases. There's plenty of movie buffs and podcasts trying to promote this stuff. You just have to catch wind of them and enjoy.

I saw something today (although ironically I have no idea whether it was fake or real) of Elon Musk asserting that at some point AI will be able to write literature, write music, paint, and make films better than humans ever have.

I meant to reply to this and forgot.

It's an interesting point.

I think I was going to say that you could consider peak in 2 different ways, 1 being ticket sales and the other being the 'greatness' of the films. I'm not sure that anyone could reasonably contend that the films of the 20s were pound for pound the greatest that were ever produced.

On popularity btw, it would be really interesting to get a graph of the number of cinemas or even better number of cinema seats in the US every year! Would take some research though!!!

For sure there were lots of fluffy quicky made in one week silent films back in the 1920s.

Per population...that would be cool, maybe some scholarly researcher will find that info and post it.

>Being an Oscar darling however I don't think defines importance to the industry nowadays

I'm not really sure what this means about defining importance but we just had one of these movies in Oppenheimer absolutely crush it at the box office. Now maybe this is the Christopher Nolan effect (partly fueled by his lingering popularity from the Batman and sci-fi films which cater to the nerd crowd). But, no, I don't expect the Oscars to solve the box office issues (that's a generation thing) but I will always point at the Oscar films as proof that we are clearly still getting fun and creative new films.

>Also, let's see how the award popularity of The Brutalist affects Brady Corbet's next project, because I have some serious doubt that it will get the attention one would expect for an Oscar darling.

Well we already have one example. Bong Joon Ho surprised everyone with Parasite as an Oscar darling with about a 10-million budget and he got 100-mill to make Mickey-17. I can't say the same about Brutalist since it didn't quite get the same universal praise...and it's not like it cleaned up at the Oscars.

Funnily enough, for me the real peak of fm making (apologies to Kubrick) is 1946 to 1966.


And I reckon of the best 40 films in that period, only 9 were American, and 4 of those 9 were by a British director.