Comment by echelon
2 days ago
Amazon needs to be broken up. They are a web host, e-commerce giant, consumer electronics company, grocery store, primary care doctor, and movie studio. That is so wildly fucked.
These companies are entering into entirely new markets, destroying the value, giving it away for free, all subsidized by unrelated business unit profit.
One of the core reasons why Hollywood is floundering is because tech giants are doing this.
Why don't we do trust busting anymore?
Hollywood is floundering because:
- there's no secondary market for VHS & DVD anymore. Almost all the money has to be made on opening weekend
- in recent years, content has become preachy instead of focusing on being entertaining
Netflix & Amazon movies are ultra-low quality; you couldn't pay me to watch it. A quality Hollywood production that was made to entertain instead of persuade can still easily outcompete tech company movies
How much is the secondary market for streaming? When Netflix picks up a major studio release, how much do they pay? Or if it's available on Youtube/Amazon, how much do they make on that?
(All of this is made weirder by the fact that half of the biggest movies every year come out of Disney and go straight to its own service.)
Here's Matt Damon explaining the economics of the evolution from VHS -> DVD -> piracy.
He doesn't directly address how much Netflix pays for rights, but presumably the answer is "not enough".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jx8F5Imd8A8
> in recent years, content has become preachy instead of focusing on being entertaining
I'm not sure I feel this? From my perspective, the Marvel films feel like a counter example, where they only care about the "entertainment" (arguably the opening weekend!), and there's no lasting quality to them. Each one individually is a reasonable way to pass 2 hours, but they feel like junk food films, I don't feel better for having watched them.
The alternative is things like A24's output, which one may call "preachy", but while I might not enjoy them in the same way as turning my mind off in front of Avengers 8: Avenge Harder-er, they have a much bigger impact on my life and satisfy me much more as a viewer.
Having a diverse cast and talking about things that used to be taboo is not being preachy.
Call it what you will but doing the above for reasons of “representation” or “education” rather than entertainment is simply not a fun experience for anyone, even the self-righteous people making those films.
A business needs a laser focus on how it adds value to its customers or it’ll die.
7 replies →
let them let the customers choose also it allows them to amass substantial capital that can then be spent on R & D that maintains the lead of the US in some areas, as a multinational there is a lot of money coming from other countries that is beneficial to the U.S.. If China is the only country where MegaCorps, then it would be hard for segmented U.S. firms to compete with them
We did. In fact, some of the Biden-era antitrust lawsuits are still active, AFAIK. What happened is that the capital class acted swiftly and firmly to shut down the FTC (and SEC), by brown-nosing Trump[0], so that the federal government couldn't challenge them.
The word "deep state" gets thrown around a lot here, especially by the people who thought Trump was going to stop this bullshit, but it's useful to describe what's going on: the accumulation of informal power structures that render the formal, legitimate one ineffective. Hollywood was part of the last iteration of the deep state; but they are being gradually pushed out of it, both because they are on Trump's enemies list and because tech centralizes power and control far faster than artistic industry does. In other words, Hollywood is no longer useful and is being replaced with something worse.
[0] To be clear, about half the DNC was hoping a judge would block Lina Khan's lawsuits and make her look weak enough to be replaced with a stooge.
we barely do democracy anymore