“The Flash,” a superhero adventure starring Ezra Miller, emerged victorious over Pixar’s “Elemental” in a battle of box office lightweights. This weekend’s two n…
Read more. There are more things to say than there are people to watch them. The problem is that film is art and investment bankers are the world’s worst artists. Going to movies to watch investment bankers is always terrible. They are just too dumb to realize they are always in front of the screen every time they get any control whatsoever. Investors are always conservative, and this makes copycat crap with overpaid management and cast for a formula that is anything but what people want to watch now.
I mean, even now the overwhelming majority of movies are about white men. Maybe there are other cultures, ethnicities, minority groups, etc with vastly different stories to tell? Give me a romcom about a T4T couple, or about a historical fiction about Thai mythology, or the Australian aboriginal origin stories. IMO there are lots of stories from around the world waiting to be told…
But we wont get those, we have the 653rd marvel movie coming out instead.
It’s more that so much IP is locked up behind very risk-averse megacorps, set the copyright term to 30 years (enough to profit from the initial hype and a nostalgia cycle) and it’s in the public domain without exception then we’ll suddenly see a much richer popular culture. People like to think Disney and other huge firms are creators but I’d liken them more to hoarders or the sort of people who buy restorable classic cars only to carelessly let them rot away into a puddle of rust.
If I was a dictator of a country IP reform would be quite near the top of my agenda, only an arrant philistine would argue for corporate control of Shakespeare or the Iliad in my opinion yet we think so lowly of our modern culture such greedy and disrespectful hands are allowed to monopolise it. By all means let creators profit from their creations for a while after they’re invented but what we’ve got today is an obscenity.
A less extreme version of this would be a ‘shit or get off the pot’ law that either forces an auction or better yet returns IP to the public domain that’s not been used over the last x years in a meaningful way.
I sometimes wonder if all ideas have just been done now, like if there is nothing new left to say?
Read more. There are more things to say than there are people to watch them. The problem is that film is art and investment bankers are the world’s worst artists. Going to movies to watch investment bankers is always terrible. They are just too dumb to realize they are always in front of the screen every time they get any control whatsoever. Investors are always conservative, and this makes copycat crap with overpaid management and cast for a formula that is anything but what people want to watch now.
I mean, even now the overwhelming majority of movies are about white men. Maybe there are other cultures, ethnicities, minority groups, etc with vastly different stories to tell? Give me a romcom about a T4T couple, or about a historical fiction about Thai mythology, or the Australian aboriginal origin stories. IMO there are lots of stories from around the world waiting to be told…
But we wont get those, we have the 653rd marvel movie coming out instead.
Great point, there is much to tell from elsewhere in the world. However Hollywood tends to take that and make it pretty much the same film again.
Maybe the issue is that Hollywood has run out of ideas and the solution is we need to be getting our films from the other ~woods instead
It’s more that so much IP is locked up behind very risk-averse megacorps, set the copyright term to 30 years (enough to profit from the initial hype and a nostalgia cycle) and it’s in the public domain without exception then we’ll suddenly see a much richer popular culture. People like to think Disney and other huge firms are creators but I’d liken them more to hoarders or the sort of people who buy restorable classic cars only to carelessly let them rot away into a puddle of rust.
If I was a dictator of a country IP reform would be quite near the top of my agenda, only an arrant philistine would argue for corporate control of Shakespeare or the Iliad in my opinion yet we think so lowly of our modern culture such greedy and disrespectful hands are allowed to monopolise it. By all means let creators profit from their creations for a while after they’re invented but what we’ve got today is an obscenity.
A less extreme version of this would be a ‘shit or get off the pot’ law that either forces an auction or better yet returns IP to the public domain that’s not been used over the last x years in a meaningful way.