I am blown away by how in Japan somebody can write a "web novel", get a contract for a light novel, then there is a manga, and an anime, and video games and a billion dollar media franchise. Sure there are a lot of trash light novels that don't go very far, but there really is a pipeline by which quirky individuals can get make it big -- but the path just doesn't exist in the US, the door is closed, the market is completely uncompetitive.
Hollywood knows it is not doing well financially but it is incapable of facing up to this fact. It hopes that its problems are cyclical because to some extent they are but the very idea of giving up control to creators [1] and doubles down on remakes of big franchises and crappy indy films that follow in the footsteps of Woody Allen.
There is an Emoji Corporation [1], which as far as I can tell exists to try and trick people into thinking they've got to pay them to use emojis. Looks like they got some Danegeld out of Sony Pictures for the Emoji movie.
Yeah. I thought I seen something before that Hollywood had some exemption, so movies could have paid placement without disclosing it. Like I think the Emoji movie could be an example, never watched it but remember seeing posts saying it was nothing but a big advertising. The first Jurassic World had a bunch of product placement too, people didn't like. Maybe it's mentioned in the credits somewhere though? I liked the movie and kinda felt the brands added realism. Like real brands sponsor stuff at Disney, so makes sense for a fictional theme park around dinosaurs but I know some feel it takes away from the movie.
Then there's another show about entertainment and news, and the woman on their sometimes gets dresses provided to wear. I noticed that's mentioned in a text overlay at the very end... However guides for YouTubers say you should mention say it on audio too, don't just put in the text description or on the screen as text.
Then Apple gives TV shows and movies free iPhone's and Macbooks for promotion... I seen it mentioned in the end screen but don't remember ever hearing a voice over saying products provided by Apple, but if you are a YouTuber you are supposed to mention you got a free Macbook every time you mention it according to one guide. So seems unequal and some confusion out there too. I know some tech channels, rving, camping, etc will accept free products to review, but if you use or mention them in any future videos or blog posts, people might of not seen your first post where you reviewed and disclosed you got it for free to review... So I guess you have to repeat a bunch of legal jargon in every video then.
I doubt many people get free Apple products as vloggers, but one of the examples was if you got a free knife as a hunting channel, you should disclose it in future mentions. So that's a more realistic example probably, but wouldn't surprise me if someone even forgets who sent them a knife if they collect them after the initial review. Then recently the FTC set more rules for videos targeted at kids on YouTube, and some lawyer mentioned he spoke with the FTC and some of these people don't even own phones or really understand what YouTube even is. Also not sure if I remember if the Price is Right mentioning products they are giving away, I think they just show the car yet as far as I know GM or KIA is giving it to them for free for the product placement, I bet if a YouTuber gave away cars they'd have to disclose it much more. I guess the old media probably can afford more people in DC than the independent vloggers can.
Then if you got paid to go to a conference, and wanted to live tweet about it, you have to mention it in every single Tweet some how from my understanding. Not sure how you'd do it with the space limit. Maybe when I read these things, I'm taking it more literally than most do. I bet a lot of businesses are out of compliance with many things if you look for it. I was reading up on PCI recently for credit card processing, and I helped a lady once years ago with her shopping site and if I remember right she just gave people a generic admin login shared between people, but I guess that's a major no no as everyone should have their own separate account. Then some web hosts market their servers as being PCI compliance too, but wonder if it's really true. Just seems like a lot out there, but I do remember hearing once that the average citizen commits 3 felonies a day.
I think it'd be fun to be a travel vlogger some day, so I think my personal policy would be not to accept free stuff to review, but I know some companies just send people stuff in general if they post a PO Box without asking, so wonder if they feel pressured to review items... but I think the whole idea of fans sending you random stuff is creepy, there's some vloggers who do mail vlogs and people send them candy and stuff... Mommy and daddy says not to take candy from strangers, yet you let random people from around the world mail you candy... I rather just use things I paid for myself, and if I liked it enough mention it on my own. Don't want to feel obligated to some brand.
I do think the general idea of the FTC is good though, don't want companies lying and scamming people. There's probably selective enforcement too, for like the most outrages cases.
I remember when Netflix started automatically playing trailers (or their own version of one) whenever you rested on a title for longer than a few seconds. And I remember looking up how to disable this feature but you can't. I'm sure there will be "well actually"'s for this but when I checked, you couldn't and I don't bother every day checking to see if it's there.
I noticed the Netflix app on some older smart televisions don't have this feature which I can only speculate why but it's like an upgrade watching on those old versions.
I think it's clever, it gets the content they paid for playing on television sets sooner. Trailers can draw people in to watch something they might not have the same way the beginning of a book can suck you in sometimes. And for users that don't like this feature, it keeps them scrolling. Cause every time you scroll over to the next title, the trailer stops and you reliably get about 2 seconds before the next trailer starts playing.
So I started scrolling faster. I think what happened next was that I realized there was nothing interesting to watch much sooner than I would if I wasn't scrolling as fast to avoid the automatically playing trailers.
Their original content comes out so fast and different people in my social circles are so excited about completely different ones and recommending them to me all the time that they just all seem the "same". Something about not having months of hype and advertisements, big reveals, franchises, etc. makes the Netflix originals feel like the product of an assembly line than legitimate inspiration. Like they're doing sprints for creative work. There was a thread a while back on HN about "Bright" when it came out. I remember there was a comment suggesting that the plot/setting/actors/world seems like it was generated with neural nets or something. That's how they all feel to me.
Also the recommendation algorithm gets some things right about me. Most things probably. But it's noticeably more exciting to use when scrolling through someone else's profile. Because it's all new stuff. It's completely tailored for someone else. You're likely to find titles you wouldn't bother to search for specifically (typing in the title) but you're surprised it's on their and you want to watch it immediately. I like The Incredibles but I don't want to watch the Emoji Movie.
So I think they're getting eaten from a couple of angles. original programming is soylent green, other media companies are taking their balls home, the interface is designed in a way that reveals the lack of interesting stuff quicker, their price went up.
On a similar note, the amount of resources wasted on replicating the same research in multiple different places because of trade secrecy (driven by profit), and the amount of resources that artists need to use to create original material when they'd rather re-use something under copyright for the same or better effect, and the artistic abilities of highly talented people needing to be spent on marketing and producing mass-consumption crap (example: I'm sure there were a great many highly intelligent and skilled people working on The Emoji Movie) and the human potential for genuine thought, art and science being squandered by all those who cannot afford the education and finally (but certainly not least) all the enjoyment people are losing out on by feeling compelled by the market to pursue one line of education when they'd much rather another.
I think it's important to look at these qualitative issues especially given how the quantitative effects of measures to reduce poverty are almost universally agreed upon to be very impressive.
The real problem here is that consumers don't want culture. The emoji movie made over $200mm at the box office while having a budget one quarter of that. Survivor got so many seasons because it did well with viewers. Studios don't care if they have to put out crap as long as it makes them money.
If Amazon prime becomes a household good, meaning it sees wide adoption by a large viewing segment which doesn't care about seeing high quality content, that puts Amazon in a great position to churn out bad shows with popular appeal.
So you're telling me that the producers of The Emoji Movie and the 20+ seasons of Survivor get culture, and realize that content is about quality?
US movie studios and television production are more costly than they need to be, because they need to pay for the barnacles and rent-seeking cruft that attached themselves to the industry when they were operating for a half century with an oligopoly on distribution.
When challenged by upstarts, they reduced costs by making crap reality shows and squeezing established franchises to death theaters. They are a business, and at this point, they will be squeezed by Amazon & Netflix.
I think that can backfire. For a while, my "Top Pick For You" was the Emoji Movie. That just makes me assume that I've ran out of good (or even mediocre) things to watch on Netflix.
I imagine we'll see self-driving car horror movies soon.
We've had them in the past (Christine, Trucks, Herbie the Love Bug), but the only thing Hollywood loves more than latching on to a trend (Emoji Movie) is blowing something out of proportion.
But even a cursory look at recent Rotten Tomato ratings shows a tenuous relationship between the site’s ratings and actual box office. It has assigned a rotten rating to movies that have done well (The Hitmans’ Bodyguard, The Emoji Movie), and it affixes an overwhelmingly positive rating to a film that fared poorly (Logan Lucky).
> "Sony set a review embargo of opening day for “The Emoji Movie,” which left the Tomatometer blank until after many advance tickets had been sold and families had made weekend plans."
So studios do know that the movie sucks in advance, but still blame RT for poor performance? I don't see them putting an embargo on Spider-Man...
Middling scores are not super important. The value is on the very low scores.
I see a lot of movies in the theater. Movies like Baywatch and Emoji Movie were awful on any scale, and rotten tomato ratings will keep you away.
This whole discussion is a distraction from the larger problem -- studios are slinging out shit sandwiches as feature films. I should be getting a better film experience in a theater than on a made for Netflix movie, but I frequently don't.
The primary KPI of any movie by a major studio is box office revenue. Making the movie good is a correlation but not causation. (Especially for children's movies.)
Case in point, the Emoji Movie made way more than its budget. ($150M)
People just go to the movies for the sake of going to the movies. When there are no good options, they choose one of the bad options. The ultimate result is that they go to the movies a lot less frequently, because as much as they like the "movie theater" experience, most of what comes out is boring.
What we're seeing is a cinematic environment where there's very little passion for movies. Once all the passionate cinema-goers have tuned out (because there's nothing that excites them anymore), all that's left is reflexively going to the movies for the sake of killing time. And if you're only there to kill time, you'd might as well see the Emoji Movie, or Pirates of the Caribbean 11 or whatever.
I found the fact "The Emoji Movie" getting 74% 1-star reviews in their ranked chart to be a more interesting fact. Climate change and Al Gore being controversial and highly politicized is nothing new. South Park has been satirizing Gore's hyperbolic approach for years. An approach which tends to draw tribalistic audiences who have opinions formed well before hearing the arguments.
But the fact Hollywood spent $50 million on such a disaster as T.J. Miller's big feature film is what is somewhat shocking. Especially given it had some big names like Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation behind it.
You'd think with the data-driven cookie-cutter focused-grouped-to-death process that is the modern film industry would be able to avoid producing one of the worst rated films in the history of online film reviews. I thought modern Hollywood was extra careful? Or are those resources only limited to hedging their financial performance rather than producing enjoyable content?
In a sense, we expect there to be actual products in movies. This sort of thing makes movies and shows more realistic. And sometimes they aren't getting paid for it.
Honestly, I am personally less worried about this sort of advertising than I am with certain children's films, whose sole purpose seems to be selling children a new line of crap. It has happened since I was young, with "Care Bears". It seems the most recent example is probably "The Emoji Movie".
Hacker Cinema
22 comments on Hacker News
I will Github it soon.
The most interesting "don't know that they are dead" case is the culture industry in the US. Note a comment I made
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46604338
I am blown away by how in Japan somebody can write a "web novel", get a contract for a light novel, then there is a manga, and an anime, and video games and a billion dollar media franchise. Sure there are a lot of trash light novels that don't go very far, but there really is a pipeline by which quirky individuals can get make it big -- but the path just doesn't exist in the US, the door is closed, the market is completely uncompetitive.
Hollywood knows it is not doing well financially but it is incapable of facing up to this fact. It hopes that its problems are cyclical because to some extent they are but the very idea of giving up control to creators [1] and doubles down on remakes of big franchises and crappy indy films that follow in the footsteps of Woody Allen.
[1] it can't absorb the energy of Youtubers and other "creator economy" stars and the best it can do with the internet and new media is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Angry_Birds_Movie and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emoji_Movie
Ah, I'm not definitely not todsacerdoti , who automated reposting all of lobste.rs to HN.
My pithy comment was actually inspired by Sir Patrick Stewart's interview about his role in the Emoji movie: https://youtu.be/CgAIqP6hNlQ?t=215
Native English speaker here. It’s an extremely common expression in some regions. The main character of the Emoji movie is named “meh”.
> Unicode Corporation
There is an Emoji Corporation [1], which as far as I can tell exists to try and trick people into thinking they've got to pay them to use emojis. Looks like they got some Danegeld out of Sony Pictures for the Emoji movie.
[1] https://www.emoji.com/
Yeah. I thought I seen something before that Hollywood had some exemption, so movies could have paid placement without disclosing it. Like I think the Emoji movie could be an example, never watched it but remember seeing posts saying it was nothing but a big advertising. The first Jurassic World had a bunch of product placement too, people didn't like. Maybe it's mentioned in the credits somewhere though? I liked the movie and kinda felt the brands added realism. Like real brands sponsor stuff at Disney, so makes sense for a fictional theme park around dinosaurs but I know some feel it takes away from the movie.
Then there's another show about entertainment and news, and the woman on their sometimes gets dresses provided to wear. I noticed that's mentioned in a text overlay at the very end... However guides for YouTubers say you should mention say it on audio too, don't just put in the text description or on the screen as text.
Then Apple gives TV shows and movies free iPhone's and Macbooks for promotion... I seen it mentioned in the end screen but don't remember ever hearing a voice over saying products provided by Apple, but if you are a YouTuber you are supposed to mention you got a free Macbook every time you mention it according to one guide. So seems unequal and some confusion out there too. I know some tech channels, rving, camping, etc will accept free products to review, but if you use or mention them in any future videos or blog posts, people might of not seen your first post where you reviewed and disclosed you got it for free to review... So I guess you have to repeat a bunch of legal jargon in every video then.
I doubt many people get free Apple products as vloggers, but one of the examples was if you got a free knife as a hunting channel, you should disclose it in future mentions. So that's a more realistic example probably, but wouldn't surprise me if someone even forgets who sent them a knife if they collect them after the initial review. Then recently the FTC set more rules for videos targeted at kids on YouTube, and some lawyer mentioned he spoke with the FTC and some of these people don't even own phones or really understand what YouTube even is. Also not sure if I remember if the Price is Right mentioning products they are giving away, I think they just show the car yet as far as I know GM or KIA is giving it to them for free for the product placement, I bet if a YouTuber gave away cars they'd have to disclose it much more. I guess the old media probably can afford more people in DC than the independent vloggers can.
Then if you got paid to go to a conference, and wanted to live tweet about it, you have to mention it in every single Tweet some how from my understanding. Not sure how you'd do it with the space limit. Maybe when I read these things, I'm taking it more literally than most do. I bet a lot of businesses are out of compliance with many things if you look for it. I was reading up on PCI recently for credit card processing, and I helped a lady once years ago with her shopping site and if I remember right she just gave people a generic admin login shared between people, but I guess that's a major no no as everyone should have their own separate account. Then some web hosts market their servers as being PCI compliance too, but wonder if it's really true. Just seems like a lot out there, but I do remember hearing once that the average citizen commits 3 felonies a day.
I think it'd be fun to be a travel vlogger some day, so I think my personal policy would be not to accept free stuff to review, but I know some companies just send people stuff in general if they post a PO Box without asking, so wonder if they feel pressured to review items... but I think the whole idea of fans sending you random stuff is creepy, there's some vloggers who do mail vlogs and people send them candy and stuff... Mommy and daddy says not to take candy from strangers, yet you let random people from around the world mail you candy... I rather just use things I paid for myself, and if I liked it enough mention it on my own. Don't want to feel obligated to some brand.
I do think the general idea of the FTC is good though, don't want companies lying and scamming people. There's probably selective enforcement too, for like the most outrages cases.
I remember when Netflix started automatically playing trailers (or their own version of one) whenever you rested on a title for longer than a few seconds. And I remember looking up how to disable this feature but you can't. I'm sure there will be "well actually"'s for this but when I checked, you couldn't and I don't bother every day checking to see if it's there.
I noticed the Netflix app on some older smart televisions don't have this feature which I can only speculate why but it's like an upgrade watching on those old versions.
I think it's clever, it gets the content they paid for playing on television sets sooner. Trailers can draw people in to watch something they might not have the same way the beginning of a book can suck you in sometimes. And for users that don't like this feature, it keeps them scrolling. Cause every time you scroll over to the next title, the trailer stops and you reliably get about 2 seconds before the next trailer starts playing.
So I started scrolling faster. I think what happened next was that I realized there was nothing interesting to watch much sooner than I would if I wasn't scrolling as fast to avoid the automatically playing trailers.
Their original content comes out so fast and different people in my social circles are so excited about completely different ones and recommending them to me all the time that they just all seem the "same". Something about not having months of hype and advertisements, big reveals, franchises, etc. makes the Netflix originals feel like the product of an assembly line than legitimate inspiration. Like they're doing sprints for creative work. There was a thread a while back on HN about "Bright" when it came out. I remember there was a comment suggesting that the plot/setting/actors/world seems like it was generated with neural nets or something. That's how they all feel to me.
Also the recommendation algorithm gets some things right about me. Most things probably. But it's noticeably more exciting to use when scrolling through someone else's profile. Because it's all new stuff. It's completely tailored for someone else. You're likely to find titles you wouldn't bother to search for specifically (typing in the title) but you're surprised it's on their and you want to watch it immediately. I like The Incredibles but I don't want to watch the Emoji Movie.
So I think they're getting eaten from a couple of angles. original programming is soylent green, other media companies are taking their balls home, the interface is designed in a way that reveals the lack of interesting stuff quicker, their price went up.
Great content for the Emoji Movie sequel :)
On a similar note, the amount of resources wasted on replicating the same research in multiple different places because of trade secrecy (driven by profit), and the amount of resources that artists need to use to create original material when they'd rather re-use something under copyright for the same or better effect, and the artistic abilities of highly talented people needing to be spent on marketing and producing mass-consumption crap (example: I'm sure there were a great many highly intelligent and skilled people working on The Emoji Movie) and the human potential for genuine thought, art and science being squandered by all those who cannot afford the education and finally (but certainly not least) all the enjoyment people are losing out on by feeling compelled by the market to pursue one line of education when they'd much rather another.
I think it's important to look at these qualitative issues especially given how the quantitative effects of measures to reduce poverty are almost universally agreed upon to be very impressive.
Emoji movie is culture, whether we like it or not. There's no rule that culture has to be highbrow.
The real problem here is that consumers don't want culture. The emoji movie made over $200mm at the box office while having a budget one quarter of that. Survivor got so many seasons because it did well with viewers. Studios don't care if they have to put out crap as long as it makes them money.
If Amazon prime becomes a household good, meaning it sees wide adoption by a large viewing segment which doesn't care about seeing high quality content, that puts Amazon in a great position to churn out bad shows with popular appeal.
So you're telling me that the producers of The Emoji Movie and the 20+ seasons of Survivor get culture, and realize that content is about quality?
US movie studios and television production are more costly than they need to be, because they need to pay for the barnacles and rent-seeking cruft that attached themselves to the industry when they were operating for a half century with an oligopoly on distribution.
When challenged by upstarts, they reduced costs by making crap reality shows and squeezing established franchises to death theaters. They are a business, and at this point, they will be squeezed by Amazon & Netflix.
I think that can backfire. For a while, my "Top Pick For You" was the Emoji Movie. That just makes me assume that I've ran out of good (or even mediocre) things to watch on Netflix.
Maybe holidwood should hire they creator of emoji movie. That peice of shit stood out.
I imagine we'll see self-driving car horror movies soon.
We've had them in the past (Christine, Trucks, Herbie the Love Bug), but the only thing Hollywood loves more than latching on to a trend (Emoji Movie) is blowing something out of proportion.
Don't think so, reading to the end:
But even a cursory look at recent Rotten Tomato ratings shows a tenuous relationship between the site’s ratings and actual box office. It has assigned a rotten rating to movies that have done well (The Hitmans’ Bodyguard, The Emoji Movie), and it affixes an overwhelmingly positive rating to a film that fared poorly (Logan Lucky).
> "Sony set a review embargo of opening day for “The Emoji Movie,” which left the Tomatometer blank until after many advance tickets had been sold and families had made weekend plans."
So studios do know that the movie sucks in advance, but still blame RT for poor performance? I don't see them putting an embargo on Spider-Man...
Middling scores are not super important. The value is on the very low scores.
I see a lot of movies in the theater. Movies like Baywatch and Emoji Movie were awful on any scale, and rotten tomato ratings will keep you away.
This whole discussion is a distraction from the larger problem -- studios are slinging out shit sandwiches as feature films. I should be getting a better film experience in a theater than on a made for Netflix movie, but I frequently don't.
The primary KPI of any movie by a major studio is box office revenue. Making the movie good is a correlation but not causation. (Especially for children's movies.)
Case in point, the Emoji Movie made way more than its budget. ($150M)
People just go to the movies for the sake of going to the movies. When there are no good options, they choose one of the bad options. The ultimate result is that they go to the movies a lot less frequently, because as much as they like the "movie theater" experience, most of what comes out is boring.
What we're seeing is a cinematic environment where there's very little passion for movies. Once all the passionate cinema-goers have tuned out (because there's nothing that excites them anymore), all that's left is reflexively going to the movies for the sake of killing time. And if you're only there to kill time, you'd might as well see the Emoji Movie, or Pirates of the Caribbean 11 or whatever.
I found the fact "The Emoji Movie" getting 74% 1-star reviews in their ranked chart to be a more interesting fact. Climate change and Al Gore being controversial and highly politicized is nothing new. South Park has been satirizing Gore's hyperbolic approach for years. An approach which tends to draw tribalistic audiences who have opinions formed well before hearing the arguments.
But the fact Hollywood spent $50 million on such a disaster as T.J. Miller's big feature film is what is somewhat shocking. Especially given it had some big names like Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation behind it.
You'd think with the data-driven cookie-cutter focused-grouped-to-death process that is the modern film industry would be able to avoid producing one of the worst rated films in the history of online film reviews. I thought modern Hollywood was extra careful? Or are those resources only limited to hedging their financial performance rather than producing enjoyable content?
In a sense, we expect there to be actual products in movies. This sort of thing makes movies and shows more realistic. And sometimes they aren't getting paid for it.
But when they are, there are laws (sometimes bad ones): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_placement#United_States
Honestly, I am personally less worried about this sort of advertising than I am with certain children's films, whose sole purpose seems to be selling children a new line of crap. It has happened since I was young, with "Care Bears". It seems the most recent example is probably "The Emoji Movie".
That's how the Emoji Movie was created.