[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.