[rwhitman]

Hollywood is an industry that should be very vulnerable to disruption. Even if we ignore the whole digital distribution aspect, there's so much bloat in the overhead cost of producing a film. Everything about the industry is based around croneyism, various inside deals made between established independent contractors on short term contracts with all sorts of padding. Plus overhead for safety & insurance, lots of manual union labor w/ exhausting overtime hours that cost $$, and big egos demanding everything under the sun.

The thing is that when the level of CGI realism gets to the point that most blockbuster movies don't really need to shoot on location at all, there's no need for Hollywood production anymore. The Pixar office campus model starts to become the norm. You can produce movies from anywhere you can fit a server rack. The only films that will need Hollywood will be the ones that wouldn't work as CG - comedies, documentaries and dramas which don't make much money and will need to get cheaper and cheaper to be viable.

Basically Hollywood as we know it will collapse eventually. The companies that will win at the filmmaking game are the ones with their fingers in digital distribution, a global marketing apparatus, cheap compute resources, and cheaper human talent. AKA Google / YouTube. So the MPAA needs to knock out Google for any hope of survival. Tactics like this will only accelerate the process. So Google wins.

[thenomad]

Having made films for quite some time, aiming to outdo Hollywood rather than work within it - there's a lot less bloat than it may initially appear, and they're better at this stuff than they look from the outside.

Films are hugely labour-intensive, particularly to produce to the standards that the public demand. There are a variety of interesting avenues to pursue if you are interested in disrupting Hollywood - I blog about many of them when I'm not actively pursuing them - but none of them are trivial.

As for CGI realism: ish. I actually moved away from CGI to live-action quite recently, after nearly 20 years of making low-budget animated movies, because IMO live-action is actually far more promising right now. CGI is extremely useful as a backup and emabler in conjunction with live-action, but not so much on its own. I wrote more about that here - http://www.strangecompany.org/why-the-guy-who-coined-machini... .

[olavk]

Your point about "shooting on location" versus CGI seem absurd to me. A Hollywood production is so much more that just the logistics to shoot on location. It is actors, directors, casting, production design, production management, music, manuscripts, editing etc. All of these things requires a specialized skillset. None of these can be replaces with a server rack. Animation is somewhat different production-wise, but still need the same kind of talent, just not as many trucks.

Hollywood accounting is infamous, but it seems Hollywood actually know what they are doing business-wise. They pay stars a lot of money because it translates into ticket sales, not because they are idiots.

Many movies are made outside of Hollywood (so-called independent movies) with cheaper talent (sometimes working for free), but only rarely are they as financially successful as Hollywood movies.

[thenomad]

"Many movies are made outside of Hollywood (so-called independent movies) with cheaper talent (sometimes working for free), but only rarely are they as financially successful as Hollywood movies."

There are one or two individual producers who crack the code to making movies that are financially successful AND outside the Hollywood model, but they're rare.

Right now, Jason Blum (Paranormal Activity, The Purge, Insidious) and Mark Duplass (The Puffy Chair, Safety Not Guaranteed, Creep) are the two names to watch in the indie-but-also-profitable space.

[rwhitman]

Those roles can be outsourced offshore to cheaper labor markets or handed to cheaper (aka non-union) domestic talent markets, which is what I was hinting at. Wasn't really implying that computers can replace creatives. Basically the argument is when you level the geographic playing field, quality creative talent is a cheaper commodity.

[olavk]

Lots of movies (and especially TV) are made on the cheap outside of Hollywood and around the world. There still seem to be a significant demand for Hollywood-style grand productions and movie stars.

[nemothekid]

I've thought about this a lot - I work in mediatech and have also thought about PG's RFS when it was posted some years ago.

Ultimately, I've come to the conclusion that thinking about Hollywood as "production & distribution" is naive - if that were really the case YouTube and Netflix would have long replaced Hollywood by now. And I don't think "CGI" realism will disrupt them either.

What Hollywood has, to an overwhelming degree, and which is really hard to "automate" is talent. From writers, singers and to actors and directors, Hollywood is really effective at finding and growing talent and the rest of the world hasn't really figured out how to write great content other than "throw millions of dollars at it" (like Netflix with House of Cards).

Simply put, you can have the best distribution channels or the cheapest platform but the top tier talent is expensive - but also has the best returns. And couple that with the fact that media production is very hit or miss (you can spend 150MM on a movie and have no one watch it, or make 1B), you are faced with something you can seemingly only "disrupt" by spending as much as everyone else.

[gmarx]

No need to shoot on location? This is how it was done in the studio system from the early days through about the 1970s. The studios were more dominant then.

I agree some aspects of film are ripe for disruption but many aspects have already been disrupted multiple times over the years.

I'm in the medical industry, which is another field that tech newbies think will be fixed real soon now as hackers turn their attention to it. In both cases there is a lot of hard earned insider knowledge that outsiders (arrogantly) discount.

[lloyd-christmas]

Rarely to random people say: "Hey, that looks like a good industry to disrupt!" It usually comes from the people that actually work in the industry and have experienced the inefficiencies first-hand. They then work with outsiders to actually implement solutions.

I work in med-tech on the tech side. Every CEO of the small companies I deal with have 15+ years in medicine. Almost all of them have experience in both the practitioner and administrator roles. From my experience, these arrogant outsiders you speak of either don't exist or make such an insignificant impact that you'd have to put effort into actually finding them.

[gmarx]

I agree they tend to have insignificant impact but they definitely exist and try. Look for a late 1990s article (I think it was in Wired, maybe rolling stone) about the founding of Healtheon. In it James Clark (My memory anyway) explains that healthcare IT sucks because only dipshits have worked on it so far. Now that a genius like him was getting into, everything would be great.

[rwhitman]

The opinion that I wrote here was formulated several years ago after a long conversation with an accountant I met on the set of a major film, who was sent by the studio to audit the production. The inefficiencies and borderline corrupt nature of hollywood's film production spending habits are mind blowing. I would get into detail but it’s a bit long of a yarn for a HN comment.

Healthcare has some systemic similarities I suppose, but the case I'll make is that there's a historic precedent for digital disruption of creative media with books, increasingly TV, and particularly music. We think of online piracy as the main disruptor of the record business, but the record industry also lost a lot of power when artists no longer needed a major label's advance check or marketing to record & distribute a successful album. Advances in home recording technology and social media are decentralizing the music business, and if similar leaps come along in filmmaking tech it isn't a stretch to guess it would decentralize the film industry in a similar fashion

[gmarx]

The technology is already there to create movies and and distribute them digitally. You could probably, as an outsider, even send your movie to a theater as long as they have digital projection. A talented, hardworking team of outsiders could produce a variety of films just as good as anything out of hollywood. But that remains rare. I believe the bottleneck is talent and experience. There is no market for a competent movie. Even what you would consider a bad hollywood movie is a top 1% kind of thing. Consider the similar field of music. Lot's of people play music. But if you were given the choice between listening to a good local band and a top world famous band, almost everyone chooses the latter. This is partially the result of technology especially distribution technology. Our media appetites are so set to expect the best of the best that 90% of the best of the best seems mediocre to us. That is the problem you need to solve to disrupt the movie business.

[eplanit]

PG has posted on this topic a few times, in fact.

http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_bet/2014/02/netfl...

http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#hollywood

Yes, they're ripe for it. The consumers are ready for it, too. More power to those who pursue it!

[sandworm101]

Hollywood does have a very important role that isn't subject to disruption by technology. Hollywood is the home of the "star" system. Stars sell movies these days. Be them writers, directors, models, or guys with funny voices, the market want to see famous people on screen.

Whether it is Paris Hilton or Bill Maher, stars are the people who rise to the top of the system and become household names. The various media wings need a place with a critical mass of famous people. That happens in LA, and to a lesser extent in New York. Look at Vancouver. Lots of films, lots of money, but none of the media associated with LA's star system. The physicality of this system means it is resistant to disruption by technology. Hollywood will be king for a long time.

[timjahn]

You could say the same about television. I don't buy it. I don't see us all watching cartoons only in the future.

[bediger4000]

Whadda ya mean "in the future"?

After documentaries on Netflix and Hulu, cartoons are already all that I watch, except maybe local news.

[shkkmo]

I learned recently that one the big reasons why Hollywood because synonymous with movies (besides the weather) was movie studios moving west to avoid Thomas Edison's ability to enforce his patents on the east coast.

I thought that was poetically ironic.

[bediger4000]

My question is how much damage to society will Hollywood do before collapsing? Putting a "Strong IP Enforcement" regime in place could cripple the USA for decades, for example.

[sirseal]

Nope.