Posted on 06/21/2013 3:38:07 PM PDT by ak267
Lynda Obst, producer of blockbusters including Sleepless in Seattle and The Fisher King, says Hollywood is in serious trouble. In her new book, Sleepless in Hollywood, Obst says that thanks to the crash and burn of the DVD industry, the entire Hollywood profit model is at risk. She says an industry leader told her, “The DVD business represented fifty percent of their profits … Fifty percent. The decline of that business means their entire profit could come down between forty and fifty percent for new movies.”
Major actors and actresses are seeing their pay slashed. Directors and writers are watching jobs go down the tubes. One studio head told Obst about “famous players who regularly came to [a studio head] begging for favors – a picture, a handout, anything.”
(Excerpt) Read more at frontpagemag.com ...
Everything in this article is wrong.
When Obst talks about actors going begging, she’s talking about actors of her generation. And it’s nothing new. There comes a time when every actor can no longer get work. They age out.
Tom Cruise, Johnny Depp, Robert Downey, and Will Smith currently command the highest salaries ever paid to any actors. Ever. The stars of “The Big Bang Theory” are getting fat salaries on the TV end of things.
The death of DVD doesn’t mean the death of the entertainment industry. It’s just a delivery system. It’s outdated, like VHS tapes, and all it means is Netflix and other online delivery systems are rising. And people still pay for them.
The television business has never been bigger or more profitable. Box office is down, but only slightly.
Foreign pre-sales are down? So what. Foreign box office profits have never been bigger.
Oh, and even if any of this were true? They’re still not going to let conservatives play in their sandbox, so let that balloon go.
You may have posted this article to get some traction or attention. Or, you find it contains some elements of truth and possibilities.
I don’t know.
There is a sea change in media that will take this country by storm.
I wrote about it here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3015497/posts
But wait there is more.
Watch this and you should get a better idea of what I’m talking about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mu0RKxjtD1k
listen to how they were funded. Listen to what Breitbart said about “Re-Tweeting”
Then put that together with my post.
Oh my heart bleeds for them! Damn liberals didn’t mind crushing conservatives with their crap and now the chicken came home to the roost. Screw Hollywood.
Leni
Hollywood is always in a panic. I’ve seen it firsthand for 30 years.
The difference is that leftists will back dud after dud and flop after flop - all to keep hammering home their message. Whatever its creative flaws, AMERICAN CAROL had a lot of good things to say about American values.
Narcissism unwound won’t be pretty.
My contention, is that their efforts to save themselves will fuel their own demise.
I wasn't aware that the DVD industry has crashed and burned. I expected movie theater prices to self-destruct first.
Major actors and actresses are seeing their pay slashed. Directors and writers are watching jobs go down the tubes. One studio head told Obst about “famous players who regularly came to [a studio head] begging for favors – a picture, a handout, anything.” According to the studio head, these stars “have extremely high overheads … They have multiple houses, wives, and families to support. They’ve made movies for years, they were on top of the world and had no reason to think it would end. And then suddenly it did. They’ve gone through whatever savings they had. They can’t sell their real estate … It’s a tragedy.”
It'd Schadenfeude on steroids.
Deserved hubris for a class of morons who haven't the brain cells to understand what is described as scalability in the book The Black Swan, which, incidentally explains also the "big surprise" about the demise of the DVD as a saleable single item.
I am not convinced that the DVD is dead. Allowing the government to have life or death control over the internet, the "cloud" and everything in between, makes the demise of the DVD not quite certain. Like movie prices, there is a tipping point in the price increases beyond which there are diminishing returns.
The certainty of the "new" technology is not not so certain; there is no substitute to "owning" a movie without having to rely on other technology under the control of others. Buy a very low priced player, and you can watch a DVD forever, at no increase in price.
...add to that, dump the (C)rap sound tracks!
Thew demise of the leftist monolith in Hollywood has been eagerly anticipated for 20 years. Like cold fusion and interstellar travel, we’re still waiting for it to become a reality...
Indeed. I always crack up when they boo-hoo the "Blacklist Era" when they employ their own, far more vicious one against conservative actors, writers, et al.
There's two books, that if made into movies, would rival "Raiders of the Lost Ark" with the American audience:
1) "Under the Red Sea Sun" by Cmdr. Edward Ellsberg. The guy inherits a totally trashed Italian Naval base in Eritrea in 1942. With no help from Washington and just a few Americans and local labor, he:
a) Raises a 600' long Italian dry dock in nine days when all the "experts" claim it will take dozens of divers and hundreds of mechanic six months.
b) Rehabilitates over seven wrecked large machine shops and in 30 days is producing more than the Italians did.
c) Using a Capitalist approach, gets "worthless" native labor working at top speed in scraping bottoms and re-painting the Tobruk supply ships, turning them over in 1 1/2 days.
d) Raises a floating dry dock, ruined by an inept British salvager, in a few days, using gasoline tanks from an abandoned airfield as pontoons.
e) Figures out how to repair three priceless 600' feet long British light cruisers in a 400' long dry dock.
Doing all this and more to a constant chorus of "It can't be done."
2) "On the Bottom". The raising of the sunken sub S-51.
Outstanding examples the American Can Do "shade tree mechanic" attitude.
See Edward Ellsberg.
>> The viewing audience is disaggregating.
Bingo. And on top of that, much of the under 40 crowd is much more into gaming than movies.
The U.S. interactive entertainment industry is in the $20 billion range in annual revenue (2012 numbers per esa), vs. around $10.8 billion for U.S. movie box office.
That are younger people are getting relatively less propagandized by our movie industry does not bother me one bit.
My trunk is full of projects that would find a happy audience if I could get them past the bigotry of the buyers. But I’ve managed to sneak a few through over the years...
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