Hollywood Has a Millenial Problem

theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/06/hollywood-has-a-huge-millennial-problem/486209/

How will Hollywood overcome this? Will this problem effect the future of cinema?

I hope we have a Netflix for newly released movies one day.

There's no problem.

>How will Hollywood overcome this?

get better writers. Movies and television have done a complete 180. It used to be that movies were prestigious entertainment and tv was trash, now it's inverted. Big studio blockbusters need to get better writing to go along with their stupid special effects budgets

I love film and I can't stand going to the cinema.

Shitty gouging popcorn prices.

All the staff are fucking dumb bastards on minimum wage.

Projection done by computer.

Humanity on their fucking phones.

Hollywood deserves this. They lost sight of the art of distribution.

I read a recent analysis that suggested that cinemas will only survive by being opera tier deluxe experiences. 100 dollars a ticket kind of deal.

If you don't live in a big city with a decent arthouse / cinephile cinema there is no reason to support this tawdry excuse for entertainment.

Took senpai to see Jungle book. 50 quid for tickets, 30 quid for snacks. The 3D was fucking broken.

Fuck these kikes. They deserve to fail.

I'd rather save money and get video games instead. For $17, most movies aren't worth it. I saw the latest X-Men movie and felt legitimately underwhelmed.

Post the fucking article faggot.

>Sequels have been the lifeblood of the movie business for more than a decade.In 2011, the seven top films were all sequels, includingFast 5and the finalHarry Potter installment. Last year, the eight biggest opening weekends were all sequels, includingFurious 7and the latestStar Warsinstallment.

>But in the last six months, the sequel strategy seems to be deflating. Several follow-ups—includingTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows,Zoolander 2,The Huntsman: Winter’s War,Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising,The Divergent Series: Allegiant,Barbershop: The Next Cut, andAlice Through the Looking Glass—have “disappointed or flopped outright,”The New York Times reported.

>Perhaps Hollywood’s funk is even worse than a sequel slump. In 2016, the film industry ison pace to sellthe fewest U.S. tickets per person of any year sinceperhaps before the 1920sand the fewest total tickets in two decades. This is an extrapolation based on previous years’ sales progressions, and a strong summer or fall could boost the final figures. But this year might even weaker than it looks. The sixth and seventh highest-grossing films of 2016—Star Wars Ep. VIIandThe Revenant—were actually released in 2015. Box office analysts are grim. “Hollywood is in a creative funk,” Jeff Bock, an analyst, toldThe Hollywood Reporter.

>Hollywood become overrun with sequels, and why does it suddenly seems as if nobody wants to see them? The short answer is that the movie industry has over-learned the lesson that sequels perform well at the box office and has tried to sequelize every marginally successful movie. The deeper answer is that, on top of long-term structural declines in movie attendance, Hollywood is losing its grip on young people.

>The construction of the“Sequel Machine,” as my colleague David Sims called it, has been a deliberate Hollywood strategy to control the risk inherent in making an expensive product for tens of millions of people whom studios don’t know and will never meet. Film used to be the dominant visual medium in the U.S. In the first half of the twentieth century, going to the movies was like going to church: Americans did it almost every week. Today, buying a movie ticket is more like going to the doctor—something many Americans never do and most Americansdo only four or five times a yearfor routine cultural check-ups. (Domestic box office is growing mostly because average ticket prices are rising.)

>In this environment, where Americans buy only four movie tickets a year, it’s more expensive to create an audience for a film. In 1980, Hollywood spent less than 20 cents on advertising for every $1 it earned at the box office. Now it spends60 centsto get that buck. In a market where it costs $60 million just to earn $100 million, movie makers are spending an enormous amount of money on fewer blockbusters and advertising the bejesus out of them. (This strategy will also inevitably yield historic flops, since the cost of getting the American moviegoers’ attention is just so high.)

>At the same time that movies’ domestic audience flatlined, its worldwide audience bloomed. In the last five years, the Eastern Asian and Latin American markets have grown by$6 billion, while the U.S. and Canadian markets have grown by less than $1 billion. The necessity to create a single product for a global crowd encourages studios to produce the artistic equivalent of Rosetta Stones, interpretable for many tongues. There is no language in the world more universal than heroes destroying bad guys with explosions.

Hollywood has a problem pumping too much money into crap films.

Also has a severe problem comprehending that you can't fight technological advancement, and technology changes the way people consume.

>When the market for sequels was sparser, a film could draw attention to itself by the mere fact that it was a sequel. But now every major studio has come to understand that the centerpiece of the movie business is to produce several iterations of fantasy and hero franchises. But the commercial appeal of sequels is so obvious to so many people that movie studios are pumping out sibling after sibling for films that, 10 years ago, would have remained only children. ANeighborssequel? ARide Alongsequel?Snow White II: The One Where We Sorta Kinda Fired Snow White?

>The sequel machine has, in the last few years, merged with another strategy to deliberately roll out new episodes of comic and fantasy universes, like Marvel,Star Wars, andX-Men. Twenty years ago, in 1996, none of the 10 biggest films were sequels or superhero movies. Films based on comics accounted for just 0.69 percent of the box office. The top-grossing movies included original stories likeTwister,The Rock,Ransom, andThe First Wives Club. The top-grossing film in 1996 wasIndependence Day, an original screenplayby director Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin. (One of the most highly anticipated movies of 2016 isIndependence Day: Resurgence, its sequel.) This year, out of the 371 movies released, 4 superhero films—Captain America: Civil War,Deadpool,Batman vs. Superman, andX-Men: Apocalypse—accounted for 29 percent of the total box office. In the biggest picture, Hollywood is in the business of telling stories that people want to see, and when people go to the movies, by and large they want to see sequels of their favorite heroes.

>It's easy to cherry-pick the sequels that have flopped in the last six months. It’s far harder to argue that sequels, as a strategy, are finished. In 2015, six of the top 10 (and 11 of the top 20) films were sequels. In 2016 so far, it’s the exact same story: Six of the top 10 (and 11 of the top 20) films are sequels.

>The problem for Hollywood isn’t that audiences are ignoring sequels. The problem for Hollywood is that audiences are ignoringeverything that isn’t a sequel, adaptation, or reboot. The market for films based on stories that aren’t already famous is threadbare. These sort of stories exist in entertainment, but consumers, and particularly young consumers, are looking for them outside of darkened theaters.

>Every year, the MPAA produces adetailed report on the North American moviegoing audience. There are two data points in the latest survey that should scare Hollywood.

>First, Hollywood, like every media industry, relies on its power users. Ten percent of monthly filmgoers buy half of all movie tickets. The celluloid loyalists are young, heavilyconcentrated among people between 18and 39. (This group is especially valuable because they’re more likely to buy expensive tickets to 3-D and large-screen-format films.)

>But Hollywood’s young fanatics are getting less fanatical by the year. The good news is that Americans younger than 18 and older than 40 are actually watching more movies than they were five years ago. But the most important demographic to Hollywood, 18-to-24-year-olds, is also abandoning movies faster than any other group.

>What are these young people watching if they’re not going to the movies? Well, they’re not watching more pay-TV television. They’re not reading more newspapers. Their attention is pouring into mobile devices and apps, like Netflix and premium cable apps (where many Hollywood auteurs have decamped), YouTube, Facebook, and Snapchat. In the last five years, as young people have trickled away from movies, mobile has taken attention share from every other major category.

>Everything in the attention economy is connected: The rise of mobile and the fragmentation of young audiences will continue to drive ablockbuster strategy in Hollywoodwhere the movies get bigger and the franchises get longer. The more young people’s attention is fragmented, the more expensive it is to create an audience for each film, the more desperate studios are to find franchises that birth many fruitful sequels, the more it makes sense to create fewer films and conserve production and advertising budgets for a handful of them.

>Let’s strike a final note of optimism. It is customary for writers to conclude that a product category is “dead” or “dying” once it stops growing. But if Hollywood is dying, it is an enviable death. Americans and Canadians buy 1.3 billion tickets to the movies each year. That is ten times more than the number of tickets purchased to attend sports games to all four of the major sports—MLB (74 million), NBA (22 million), NHL, (22 million), and NFL (17 million)—combined. And that’s the stagnant domestic market.

>Movies are not dead in any meaningful sense of the word, particularly now that they can be richly monetized through television deals, theme parks, and merchandise. But they are caught in an increasingly expensive arms race to mint new franchises for a domestic audience that is seeking out original stuff beyond the cineplex.

>americans used to go to movies every weekend
>now they only do it like 4 times a year
wait what?

Average person here goes like twice a year I think

how many times does Sup Forums go to see movies?

>be Hollywood
>make shit movies
>"why does no one go to the movies any more?"
they did this to them self's. the film bubble has pop'd

I only watch stuff that gets good reviews so it depends.

3 times a day

>be Hollywood
>take chances
>plebs don't go see your movies, end up losing millions
>market research says plebs like splosions and capeshit
>make shitty movies
>plebs rejoice
>retards on a television and film board complain

wew lad

Just let the boomers die already

You have to remember, screeners are a thing too.

You know that image you posted isn't from a video game right?

Is it actually commonplace for Americans to clap in cinemas or is that just a meme? I'm from NZ and I've seen it happen twice at some first screenings, but is kinda to be expected from diehard fans

Don't remind me, user.

We need more movies that aren't about cis white people.

Only happened once when I was a kid.

Other than that no, no one has ever clapped after a movie.

About once once a month and a half

literally a meme.

CUTE

not American but about 10 times a year

Most new movies are shit so I only on Thanksgiving.

>watching movies

this is correct

OY VEY GOLDSTEIN YOUNG PEOPLE ARENT WATCHING OUR FRANCHISE SEQUALS BASED ON A REMAKE BASED ON A COMIC BOOK DUMMBED DOWN IN ORDER TO SELL TO THE CHINESE MARKET HOW DID THIS HAPPEN

>I KNOW LETS BLAME MILLENNIALS AND DO NOTHING TO FIX IT

it happened to me when i went to see Inglorious basterds the opening week
the theater was full of Tarantino fanboys

Hollywood has a greedy jew problem.

>The problem for Hollywood isn’t that audiences are ignoring sequels. The problem for Hollywood is that audiences are ignoring everything that isn’t a sequel, adaptation, or reboot.

It's the audience they want. Now deal with it.

I haven't paid for going to cinema for so long now. They and others in my city give out free tickets like crazy (so I guess someone pays for them), feels good man. Especially since cinema costs like $18 where I live.

Here's the solution.

All creativity flows from God and is a gift from our loving creator.

Unfortunately many people in Hollywood are aligned with dark forces. It doesn't matter what they call it, satanism, kabbalah, new age religions, witch craft, scientology, etc. It's all the same. It all serves Satan.

These people will never have true creative genius unless they reject the mantle of Satan. For the devil cannot create. He can only corrupt and destroy.

In before mockery.

...

>pours a bunch of money into stupid capeshit, shitty sequels and feminist propaganda movies
>surprised people don't want to see them

...

...

This

ov vey why no shekels for muh culturally enriched movies and females casts

unions were a mistake

American here
Everyone claps along to the dialogue
There's a motion detector at the front of the cinema to find anyone not clapping for more than a certain amount of time, and they are removed
Statistics say that if you're not clapping, you're reaching for a gun. Clapping has made cinema going safer than it's been in years

>take chances

Studios stopped taking chances in the 1970s/early 1980s

How exactly are unions to blame for the stupidty of Hollywood executives that dumb everything down?

Ahh... Sure whatever!!!!

I'd argue they stifle creativity, by muscling out smaller directors and force you to suck the dicks of major studios / weinsteins.

Any production is dead in the water if they don't have union approval. At least in terms of success / profitability.

I'm 38. Used to every 2 weeks. Stopped around 2002, now i'll see average of 1-2 per year. 2002-2007 i saw nothing.

Exactly this.

>thinking millenials are the problem
There they go blaming the victim again.
Typical hollywood.

Eh. One or more studios will sign a deal to stream movies first or second week of their cinema release at some point and then the younguns will find it hip again.

I really think you're blaming the wrong people for this.
You do realize that TV writers and directors have unions too, right? Yet their quality is better than ever compared to movies.

I'm not that guy, just a conceivable reason to dislike Sup Forums Unions. Hardly the sole cause like the original guy says, but still a cancer on the industry imo.

Fuck millennials right in the ear.

There, problem solved.

>Movies are not dead in any meaningful sense of the word
I believe he's wrong. Blockbusters are going to bust because they're competing with free entertainment.