Hacker Cinema
The Mandalorian
2019 · TV series · 3 seasons
Created by Jon Favreau
Science FictionFantasyActionAdventure
After the fall of the Galactic Empire, lawlessness has spread throughout the galaxy. A lone gunfighter makes his way through the outer reaches, earning his keep as a bounty hunter.
53 positive26 negative13 mixed88 neutralfrom 180 commenters
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213 comments on Hacker News
But Moana and the Mandalorian are family/children's films.
Just to be clear, the top grossing movie so far this year: Super Mario Galaxy. And #3: Toy Story 5
In 2025 all the top 10 films were either 3D animation or CGI-heavy action, with one exception: F1 used a lot of practical effects.
Maybe the problem with Moana and Mandalorian is that even lazy uninformed movie-goers recognized an empty cash-grab when they saw the trailer.
I don't think that cinephiles are a huge target market, though.
Major studios produce movies that most people want to see. The cinephiles don't like those films, but conveniently, they do like films that don't cost a quarter of a billion dollars to make.
The headline here is about a movie that took in $81 million. The Mandalorian took in about the same amount in its first weekend, and it's considered a financial disaster.
If people would start going to see more of those low-budget movies, they'd see a lot more interesting films. The cinephiles would be thrilled, because it would get those films into major theaters (over 2,000 for this film), rather than having to seek them out in tiny arthouse theaters for very few showings.
The Mandalorian and Andor shows are the best of the SW universe. As for movies, Rogue One also stands above the others.
I'd love to see a serious live-action show based on the idea of the Bad Batch (not copying the same story as the animated series, of course).
Well George Lucas did borrow a lot of stuff from samurai films (The Hidden Fortress being the main one), so that is a return to its roots. Personally, I think that Firefly did the cowboys in space a lot better, but maybe that's due to better writing. I did enjoy the Mandalorian, but it's a bit too shallow.
The Mandalorian TV series wasn't bad but the Star Wars franchise has been in reset/turnaround for ~7 YEARS (since the last movie). It's incomprehensible that Disney bet their relaunch on a spin-off streaming series based on a tertiary character miraculously swimming back upstream from online to cinema.
The two leads are a guy you never see and a small puppet (with the big reveal new character being a CGI alien). As great as they were, C3PO, Yoda and Chewbacca couldn't have carried Empire Strikes Back as the leads. What was Disney thinking?
Couldn't make it past the first few episodes of The Mandalorian, script was so dumb it made my brain hurt.
I saw RLM posted a video about The Mandalorian and Groku however, will definitely watch that.
the general problem with any technique that isnt just throw some vaugely green thing behind our actors is that setting up complicated tech like this on an actual film set is extremely expensive. both the time it would take and the risk of it not working. so you end up with a dedicated permanent stage install but now you need to get the actors and crew to that place. better keys isnt a bad enough problem to justify that effort/cost. even the highly touted "virtual production" mandalorian stuff where you just put a big led wall behind the actors has shown to be more expensive than traditional vfx unless you tightly control the creative or approach.
The quality difference between Andor and The Mandalorian is so stark that I don't even think they are comparable. The Convert is a fine episode I guess, but next to Andor it's amateur.
Andor is prestige TV. The Mandolorian feels like a childrens show by comparison.
If you think The Convert was good, please, please watch Andor.
I've heard Andor described as having the same vibe as The Mandalorian's episode "The Convert"; the one about the former Imperial scientist being rehabilitated and living in an apartment block with other former Imperials.
If so, I will like Andor. I really liked "The Convert".
It reminds me of the Star Wars content thats come out recently - before there was the Original Trilogy which we all watched many times and the lines became iconic. Since then it's all become a mismash and blur of mediocrity due to over-exposure.
(except The Mandalorian, and I can't believe I'm using the word "content" :/)
edit: Totally forgot about Andor & Rogue One sorry, great film and two seasons of top-notch storytelling.
> The decline in quality is obvious and measurable, just look at the reception of old disney productions versus their remaklers for "modern audiences".
This argument (in summary, wokeness makes modern Disney less enjoyable/profitable) doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Mainline Disney movies these days are, on average, more politically bland than the beloved “renaissance” classics. The latter tended to be extremely liberal, even by historical standards—some of them shocking to watch, now. Beauty and the Beast is a good example of this.
Andor is a notable counterexample, having a consistent and obvious politics, but it is also relatively loved. My evangelical Christian relations can’t get enough of it. They like it even more than The Mandalorian.
Oh yes. The Mandalorian is one of the first to use it extensively.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/20/how-the-mandalorian-and-ilm-invisibly-reinvented-film-and-tv-production/
I really appreciate the still images at the end of the Mandalorian episodes. I'm not sure if they were used for set design or created afterward, but they are really stunning and gives you more time to appreciate the world building, costumes, and creativity that goes into production.
Also a huge fan of that channel. I think he came back recently to do some more episodes. There's a new channel I found that offers similar reflections upon cinema - willbryanfilms - definitely worth checking out!
Don't limit your thinking to taking photos - video also works fine. It's how The Mandalorian is produced. Instead of green screens, the actors are in front of floor-to-ceiling LED screens with live rendered CGI.
In old movies, going back to the 1930s and 40s, back-projection is usually seen when characters are driving in a car, and you can usually spot it. These days, not so much.
> those screens will exist
It’s already possible. See the Stagecraft studio they built for the production of TV series The Mandalorian.
> shooting the series on a stage surrounded by massive LED walls displaying dynamic digital sets, with the ability to react to and manipulate this digital content in real time during live production
https://www.unrealengine.com/fr/blog/forging-new-paths-for-filmmakers-on-the-mandalorian
> The StageCraft process involves shooting live-action actors and sets surrounded by large, very high-definition LED video walls. These walls display computer-generated imagery backdrops, once traditionally composited primarily in post-production after shooting with chroma key screens. These facilities are known as "volumes". When shooting, the production team is able to realign the background instantly based on moving camera positions. The entire CGI background can be manipulated in real-time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StageCraft
> Anthem had been in development for like 6 years by the time the idea for the Mandalorian was even pitched by Favreau.
People have been wanting to make Mandalorian-focused videogames since essentially the Star Wars Holiday Special invented Boba Fett. (See also all the Mandalorian armored classes in SWTOR.) I'm not saying Anthem was influenced by what would come to be the TV show, I'm saying Anthem was timed with coincidence that if EA's executives had sold Anthem as a Mandalorian videogame it might have been lucky to come out when the TV show did and got a huge audience. It's a weird twist of fate.
Also, yes the live-service pivot also is a reason to expect some under-development of story so that it can come out in later expansions, but also Anthem never really had a clearly defined expansion roadmap, so I think it was more than just the live-service game pivot that damaged Anthem's attempts at storytelling.
> Anthem... man that game had potential but just was not ready to ship. Was a ton of fun to play and I loved the bits of story we got but it really was just a tease of a story sadly.
Anthem came across to me that it had most of its story "filed off" at the last minute. I can't prove it, but Bioware was said to have been working on a Mandalorian game for years and so much of Anthem from the KOTOR-like macguffin that gives the title of the game to the underutilized Cantina in the main hub to the fact that AT-ATs (under a slightly different name) just show up in the middle of plot like you should have already been expecting them feels like Bioware in the very last minute had to pull every Star Wars character and Star Wars reference out of a game that was designed to be a Star Wars Mandalorian simulator.
At least as a player of Anthem, I think it's a tale of weird timing that EA was afraid of losing access to the Star Wars license in the wrong week, and also didn't anticipate that Disney would heavily promote a Mandalorian themed TV show not soon after the expected release date. As an officially licensed Star Wars Mandalorian simulator, just as or just before the first couple of seasons of The Mandalorian were premiering could have been incredible. Anthem hints that it was almost that in such weird ways it's hard not to wonder if EA and Bioware just got Anthem's timing wrong.
(It's also not hard to blame Anthem's weird timing for messing up Andromeda by consequence. Andromeda's team got retasked away from story DLC to help Anthem in whatever its last weird rush was, which in my theory is the "removing Star Wars from it" and I still think Andromeda was only one good story DLC from being among the best of the series.)
> Andor succeeded despite the bureaucracy porn.
I am not sure what specifically you're referring to, but take this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKl0F640914
A master class in gripping tension, moreover one that--like Breaking Bad--puts you in the awkward position of rooting for the bad guy. Because, as you say, we care about the protagonists, and in a way she is one.
And then in Season 2 when Krennic is talking to Meero? (towards the end - I am deliberately keeping it vague for those who haven't watched yet)
Meanwhile I thought the beginning of Season 2 was by far the weakest.
But yeah. Book of Boba Fett was bottom of the barrel. It feels like in an alternate universe he would have been the main character of The Mandalorian, and BoBF would not have existed.
I'm not sure just why it was so bad, maybe like late Game of Thrones it's obviously lazy, but contrasting with the scene above, at some level you have to care about the character and start to identify with them, insomuch as you become invested in them succeeding in their task: their goals become your surrogate goals. What was Boba Fett's goal and why should we care?
Contrast with Meero the spy hunter. Meanwhile Boba Fett was a crime lord who didn't do crime and constantly changed his mind to whatever the other person suggested instead of his original thoughts and plans.
I think the main trick is that they set out to make the best and most impressive movie(s) they could with every tool available -- practical effects, old-school camera angle tricks to make the hobbits look small, hordes of extras and well-crafted props, as well as groundbreaking CGI.
Same with Jurassic Park, come to think about it -- there's famously more animatronic dinosaurs in that movie than CGI.
As opposed to relying on one shiny new tool to take care of everything. I think with The Hobbit they got over-enamoured with the notion that you can do anything with CGI.
More recently, Andor is a good example with its mix of CGI and massive sets; The Mandalorian is a bad example with its over-reliance on the "Volume" LED stage.
As far as I'm concerned, The Mandalorian started out silly (Manadalorian honor code / the fucking helmet!), disjointed and boring, then there was that garbage episode where he randomly defends a village from Bad Guys, then I gave up on it.
I watched two or three episodes of The Mandalorian and was very underwhelmed. Childishly simplistic plot, but much too violent to be a kid’s show. (Although now I say that, I guess the original movies are both childish and violent.)
There’s a bit where the main character very obviously levels up and gets to choose a power-up. Then he sees somebody else with a different power-up and goes “wow, I should get one of those”. That confirmed to me that it wanted to be a videogame rather than a serious drama.
I thought Mandalorian was trash, every episode a video game fetch quest. In general I hate modern Star Wars. Andor is in a different category and totally worth it.
> Should I really try Andor after all the bad stuff Disney made?
Andor (at least Season 1) is very slow, boring, suffers from "static heads talking at each other" cinematography of modern movies [1], main character is just not a great actor.
All that said, it's definitely worth a watch:
- most, if not all, major characters (apart from the protagonist) are very compelling, chew through every scene they are in, and are great matches for their parts
- Empire is finally shown as a proper huge, relentless, uncaring bureaucratic machine it must have been. Run mostly by efficient ruthless bureaucrats.
- Rebels are not angels, are not a single conformist mass of do-gooders
- The dialog is mostly great
It's a much better show than Mandalorian. It's arguably the best Star Wars after the original trilogy.
[1] Most modern productions are incapable of shooting "walking and talking at the same time". Most modern movies and TV shows have actors placed against each other rigidly, with not a hint of motion, as they say their lines at each other
Mandalorian started out strong and got progressively worse with each episode. Don't even bother with season 3.
I would recommend Skeleton Crew. Its def aimed at younger crows but if you have nieces/nephews or kids of your own its a delight.
Basically treasure Island/ goonies in space, it is campier than Andor but does what it aims for amazingly. Cause andor can get quite heavy on the fighting fascism and sometimes finding a treasure map is more the vibe than seeing holocaust planning meetings
I didnt watch anything mandalorian past season 2, never watched boba fet, obiwan or ahsoka because I thought it would be Dave Filoni getting action figures and bumping them together, and friends who watched them agree with my intuition. But yeah of the new star wars stuff Andor and Skeleton Crew are both amazing in very different ways
I'm on both sides of the fence with early Mandalorian. I need to watch it again until it jumps the shark because I don't know how early it did that.
The latter episodes were incredibly laboured, with the narrative being spelt out, as if to a child, by various characters. I think it may have always been like that, but the look and feel overwhelmed the ridiculous dialogue for a while.
If they were more clever with the body language of the main character, then the others wouldn't have had to carry the direction of the storyline so heavily verbally. Again, I think this was done well early, but kinda lost in the desperation for grogu storyline and screen time cuteness.
I'd have to watch it again, and right now it ain't worth the time.
Haven't seen Andor, but now it's "on the list".
> Should I really try Andor after all the bad stuff Disney made?
It's difficult to articulate Andor's quality to someone who hasn't seen it & is framing it in the context of things like Mandalorian. I can't stress enough that it's absolutely not just a "better" tv show than Mandalorian, &c. Not only is that an understatement, but it's also a fundamentally different beast to those shows. It's in a different category of quality.
Yeah, kind of what Lower Decks (the show, and for that matter also the episode "Lower Decks") is to Star Trek, but not comedy. Andor is indeed the closest I know of to that, though you see little touches of similar things in some episodes of The Mandalorian and the Clone Wars cartoon (though of course that one's also full of the "magical beings")
I see a lot of shade thrown at Kathleen Kennedy these days. Sure, some of the Star Wars movies under Disney haven't been great, but look at this resume. It's incredible. I'll save you the click and put some things she's been the executive producer of here: Poltergeist, E.T., IJ & Temple of Doom, Goonies, Back to the Future(I,II,III), Young Sherlock Holmes, The Money Pit, Empire of the Sun, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (jumping ahead to more recent stuff), Rogue One, Andor, Mandalorian, Ashoka, Skeleton Crew....
So yes, not everything has been a winner, but to say that having her name attached to something means it won't be good means that either A)you might not be informed about her resume or B)you have another reason you don't like her involvement with a project.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005086/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_1_tt_0_nm_8_in_0_q_kathleen%2520kenedy
For me the nadir was the prequel series although I also think The Phantom Menace poisoned the well for the other two which weren't terrible. The more recent films have been a mixed bag with them generally being better the further they are from the original story arc.
For me at least, there's also a certain fatigue factor. While I like The Mandalorian and Rogue One, I'm pretty much done with the franchise. See also Star Trek and MCU. That said, I know that there are a lot of fans who will take pretty much anything you throw out even if they like to belly-ache about it.
Yes, that is the question to which neither of us has an answer. Streaming deals happen as bundles, and my understanding is the opposite of yours: the old stuff gets thrown in as a piece of the bundle to help make the catalog bigger, while new content actually sells subscriptions. In other words, the back catalog has some marginal value to the streaming service (and the studio), but it's the new releases that actually sell subscriptions.
Releases of "The Mandalorian" got people subscribing to Disney+, and new seasons of "Game of Thrones" had the same effect for HBO, for example.
In other words, a bundle of 100 movies for $10 million could be attributed as "$100k per movie," but that's almost certainly wrong. More likely, that bundle is a combination of something like $5 million for one movie, $1 million for a few others, $100k for a bigger set, and all the way down to $1000 or less for the remainder of the catalog.
When I saw the teaser to Force Awakens I was generally excited. I honestly thought Disney might be doing a good job with this.
It comes out. After watching the first 10 minutes I realised its just a remake of new hope. I guess shuffling characters and renaming planets would fool us. Oh, but don't worry... the starkiller is LIKE the deathstar, but bigger!
Other than Force Awakens and Rogue One, I have not seen any other Star Wars from Disney. If I did I honestly cannot remember it! I only watched Rogue One because a friend came round with it one day. It was "ok" but certainly not deserving of any praise. When I hear people say Rogue One is the best Disney Star Wars... it really does not say much about the others.
As for the TV Series, I have no interest in them, either. While I hear Mandalorian is good, I just dont want Disney to claim my view count.
As for the Acolyte, the clips I saw on youtube look really poor.
For context, I am very fortunate to grow up with the original trilogy.
As for the prequel trilogy, I have a love/hate relationship with it.
As for the sequel trilogy, or anything that came out of Disney, is non canon in my eyes.
Reading the article this seems to stem from Supreme Court rulings, and they seem to be selling out citizens to corporations and politicians for at least the last 15 years.
> Movements often get a lot of momentum when they get a catchy slogan that sticks, and "If you watch an episode of The Mandalorian, Disney can murder your wife" is a great one.
Maybe there's a movement to start printing up these as posters and pasting them around cities. Make them look like a true advert but with that as a quote.
It might be too much to hope for, but I'd really love it if this was the spark that ignited a mass movement against binding arbitration, which is an affront to consumer rights and must be destroyed. Movements often get a lot of momentum when they get a catchy slogan that sticks, and "If you watch an episode of The Mandalorian, Disney can murder your wife" is a great one.
Mandalorian Season 2 spoilers below.
This article looks relevant: “How Star Wars Deepfake Seriously Improves Luke Skywalker Cameo in The Mandalorian” - the youtuber that did that eventually got hired by ILM. There is also an example with Tarkin.
https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/star-wars-deepfake-luke-skywalker-mandalorian/
I am glad the Wookieepedia exists, but every time I open it I feel like I am reading about some foreign sci-fi universe. I have watched every mainline Star Wars movie and the new popular shows (The Mandalorian, Andor), but feel like I only recognize maybe 20% of the characters and plotline referenced in the wiki.
Either this is my own ignorance, or the universe is super deep outside of the most popular content. Probably both.
> They are competing with other entertainment. They are competing with other TV and movies. The only thing they aren’t competing on is the exact show.
I.e. the only thing they aren't competing on is the one that matters.
Shows are not substitutable. If I want to watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, I won't be interested in watching Mandalorian or The Boys instead. Especially if I've already seen the other two.
It's true that 1990s pirated videos where someone snuck a handheld camera into the cinema were often very low quality.
But did you know large portions of The Mandalorian were produced with the actors acting in front of an enormous, high-resolution LED screen [1] instead of building a set, or using greenscreen?
It turns out pointing a camera at a screen can actually be pretty realistic, if you know what you're doing.
And I suspect the pr agencies interested in flooding the internet with images of Politician A kicking a puppy and Politician B rescuing flood victims do, in fact, know what they're doing.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/20/how-the-mandalorian-and-ilm-invisibly-reinvented-film-and-tv-production/
Think more about the backgrounds used in shows like Mandalorian. Think about the size of the stage/studio/set that Mandalorian filmed on. It's going to get smaller, and the backgrounds and other details used in music videos, tv shows, commercials and films will be far more virtual than even today.
All the components will still be needed, but the levels and origins of them all will change.
If you go back and look at how the median productions have changed at 5 year intervals (going in the past), it'd be a poor choice to commit $800M to something that's probably going to remain exceedingly fluid for a while.
The SFX industry is probably the most prepared to shift, as it's already screens, pixels, and servers. The days of green dots are already (mostly) over (see the ILM SFX reel for The Creator -- wholesale human detail replacements without tracking dots).
The change will affect everyone else more.
AFAIK Unreal was only used in the first season of the Mandalorian several years ago. Disney switched to using ILM's Stagecraft software, which is what they use for their films as well.
Epic Games is not just games anymore.
Take a look at how The Mandalorian (a Disney production) was filmed. Epic Games’ software played a large part.
It goes beyond just film & television. They offer solutions for the automotive industry, aviation simulation industry, mining sims, trucking sims, medical sims, architecture, live broadcast, …
Hmm, I think I might invest if I can!
Well, part 2:
"It grossed over $1.3 billion worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing film of 2017"
and part 3:
"grossed over $1.077 billion worldwide, making it the seventh-highest-grossing film of 2019 "
Cannot really be called flops either. And the Mandalorian is highly succesful as well. And probably some other movies, I don't know, I do not follow. My point is, that I share the criticism of how bad Star Wars became under Disney, I dropped out, after they seriously introduced yet another death star. But commercially they were highly succesful.
Do they still? They used Unreal for the virtual sets in The Mandalorian S1, but for S2 they switched over to a different solution.
https://www.ilm.com/vfx/the-mandalorian/
> For season one of the series ILM StageCraft utilized Unreal Engine to perform the real-time render
https://www.ilm.com/vfx/the-mandalorian-season-2/
> The real-time render engine called Helios was specifically developed by ILM engineers
> Ctrl-F "Unreal" - no results
Disney use Unreal Engine for their dynamic greenscreen LED wall which they film The Mandalorian and others against. That's got to be at least as important as Fortnite characters.
I agree with most you have to say, personally I think the only movie that really holds weight since Disney took over is rogue One. andor is a good watch too. the mandalorian is great as well.
I think the thing I really miss is that episodes still had to work on a standalone basis. If you look at an episode of Mad Men or Breaking Bad, they still had a structure to them with an arc and multiple storylines in an episode. You had to be satisfied with a single episode for a whole week.
A single episode of The Mandalorian may literally have nothing happening and no memorable moments and only exists to be consumed between two other episodes.
A lot of the shows you have listed were created by traditional networks (a lot of HBO and FX).
I haven't seen any of the Apple TV shows yet, but a lot of the other streaming ones I think prove my point. Mandalorian is okay. Loki is okay. (I Think You Should Leave is a good one though).
When talking about new, great content, parent mentioned only sci-fi and fantasy content: Marvel TV Shows, Wheel of Time, Foundation, House of the Dragon, the Mandalorian, Rings of Power, etc
So, it seemed that if you are into that stuff, you have some amazing content. But what if you are not?
I wish I had a way to quantify it, but it also seems like _investment_ has skyrocketed. 20 years ago HBO might make a high quality, high budget show. Now we have shows like the Marvel TV Shows, Wheel of Time, Foundation, House of the Dragon, the Mandalorian, Rings of Power, etc.. that all have MASSIVE budgets. A lot of that was funded by free money, but I think the quality and expectation of TV shows has gone up quite a bit.
> Entertainment is not a sector of the economy where prices come down over time relative to income, the way food and consumer products have
Not necessarily true. AI is poised to upend the industry entirely. You don't even need to wait that long though - have a look at how they've replaced green screen and on-location shooting in the mandalorian with computer generated sets and a gigantic curved monitor the actors stand in front of. That saves them a ton of money compared to taking a whole film crew out on location.
In reference to Luke not really knowing what the heck he is doing, see also The Mandalorian season 2.5 (BoBF) - (summarized) "Hey little green guy, you can either join my weird cult and never see your friends again, or you can go ahead and f*ck off"
I think the parent poster agrees with you, but wrote somewhat ambiguously. I think he meant something like “a movie that was visually very striking, [but] without any plot fundamentals[,] that [therefore] felt like a deep betrayal to the universe.”
For what it's worth, I agree with him. When I saw the movie and even just the promotional materials I thought it was visually striking and had very strong color themes. But wow, it was a train wreck in terms of plot, characters, faithfulness to the series, etc. I could go on for hours.
But to be fair, I also think The Force Awakens was terrible and painted the story into a dumb direction. Instead of “what if the Nazis came back to power in Argentina”, they should have moved the story into a direction more like “the alliance against a common enemy is fractured”, like what actually happened after World War 2, or “there are now many factions of ambitious warlords rising among the widely deployed and still incredibly powerful imperial military”, or some of both. The Mandalorian did the setting much better in that sense.
Nobody's saying no AI ever.
The union is just saying that if you want the rights to use an actor's likeness without actually employing the actor to act, you have to pay separately for that, and pay what it's worth.
Which makes perfect sense. In your example of a de-aged Luke Hammill in the Mandalorian, Luke Hammill was paid $$$ for that. They didn't get to cast him for free just because he was in previous Star Wars movies. Nor should they.
That's all this is about. Go ahead and use AI, but pay the actors for their likeness. Don't force them to give it away for free as a condition of doing a single episode.
VFX Walls and virtual sets like the ones in use @ Narwhal Studios [1] are pretty common now thanks to Unreal Engine 5. Used in productions of The Mandalorian, Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, etc. I think this, combined with outdoor sets like the OP posted about, are the future of movies. Instead of high CGI compositing, do the CGI compositing pre-production and film like you would a normal set.
[1] https://www.narwhalstudios.com
> What's to stop the actors or writers from simply making their own content?
1) access to capital to cover the cost of production. $/min of a Mandalorian episode or even a late night comedy show is way above self funding capacity of most of the people employed as writers or actors.
2) critical mass providing leverage in distribution. It is very very cheap for Netflix to market just one more show, as compared with the costs of a new subscription service to try to acquire new customers. On the feature side, studios pay a lot less to be in theaters (as percentage of box office revenue) than indie films.
> So you won't be on NBC or Netflix or whatever, so what, post it on Twitter and YouTube.
It's not like people haven't been trying. But take any successful show in the last few years, it simply could not have made nearly the same audience or revenue on these platforms. The stuff you see there is already hyper optimized for these platforms - it'd be a very poor business decision to take a show with the production cost of TV or subscription services, and monetize it purely on these platforms.
Honestly it’s easy because a directors job is harder to replace than an actors job. The studios weren’t losing much.
So far, in the last couple of years we’ve already seen what are basically CGI actors - current actors de-aged in three major movies - Samuel Jackson in Captain Marvel, Will Smith in Gemini Man and Harrison Ford in the latest Indiana Jones.
Not to mention Mark Hamil in the Mandalorian.
How are you going to replace Steven Spielberg, Kevin Feige, etc?
Rogue one was excellent movie wise. Mandalorian was ok, at least season 1 was downright good.
But yeah, it's no longer a guaranteed good time. But was it ever? It seems to me half of the first 6 movies stand up on their own. Then probably 1 out of the next 3 involving Ray.
The side plots are now better.
Any good animated entries?
> Andor ... severance all can achieve incredible results without hollywood budgets
Severance S2 reportedly costs $15–20 million per episode to make, and Apple+'s average original series budget is ~$10M/ep.: https://www.gq.com/story/severance-season-2-delayed-behind-the-scenes-drama
Andor S1's budget was reportedly $250M for 12 episodes ($20.8M/ep): https://www.ign.com/articles/andor-season-1-reported-budget-250-million
Which is more expensive than the combined budgets for The Mandalorian S1 and the upcoming Skeleton Crew S1. Tony Gilroy outright said:
“We got lucky making this during the gold rush a few years ago. A lot of people now have cold feet, and you can’t do this show inexpensively.”
https://fandomwire.com/we-got-lucky-you-cant-do-this-show-inexpensively-andor-beats-pedro-pascals-the-mandalorian-as-most-expensive-star-wars-show-ever-made-with-250m-budget/
Yes. In many cases, it is the ideology that forces the bad story.
In the last two movies, all the men had to fail, the ideological bent to the story required it. That's why we got Luke as a failure, Han Solo as a failure (he couldn't redeem his son, only Rey could through the power of ambiguity), and Finn as a failure.
Imagine if Finn had succeeded in his sacrifice. How powerful would that moment have been?
Instead the story we get is one where morality is an old fashioned idea. Hard work and merit (Jedi training) are "the old rules that are holding you back." We get the whole "there's no good and evil, there's just power." All of which fly in the face of the original world of Star Wars. Patience, self-control, and practice were virtues. Anger, impulsiveness, and fear led to hatred, evil, and suffering -- the Dark Side.
Rey can't be trained, because it would mean a man was training her. Leia can just develop Force powers on her own, because otherwise, she would have had to learn them from a man. Poe Dameron can't have a proper perspective on the battle or be trusted with any plans because the point of his character must be "toxic masculinity."
It made the stories of these movies suck. Contrast that with how Andor and The Mandalorian deliver female characters that are amazing. Leia is a true badass... as she was in the original movies, without the Force. Bo Katan's character goes through a deep understanding of what it really means to lead her people, and earns it. Strong women, that don't require a man to fail, in order to be strong on their own.
I think it can be. There still needs to be drama and adventure and action. The story just doesn't need to always revolve around saving the galaxy. I think this is why the Mandalorian has been so successful and interesting. He is a character that is never really trying to save the world. He gets sucked into it every now and then, but then again a lot of his episodes are just cool adventures of a person living an interesting life.
There is also the idea about why Disney and these other big companies are buying franchises in the first place. I read somewhere (probably here on HN) that these media companies realized that people like to get invested in a particular story universe. They don't want to have to keep getting used to new universes, they want to see the universe that they like from different angles. So in that regard I think this strategy makes strategic sense as well.
This time has a chance to be different. Perhaps not a large chance, but still quite a bit higher than sites like Voat had.
The problem with Voat and many of the others was that they either started in response to Reddit changes that most users didn't care about and that of those that did care the majority favored the changes, or if they already existed they were small enough that the people who left Reddit for them due to those Reddit change quickly became the overwhelming majority of their users.
Voat, for example either started because or got the majority of its users because Reddit got rid of /r/coontown and similar racist subreddits and got rid of a bunch of child sex subreddits. Those quickly reformed on Voat.
People did make Voat groups for mainstream things like movies and science, and some people tried to make those decent alternatives to say /r/movies and /r/science but it did't work. Any decent discussion on /v/movies or /v/science you could also find on /r/movies or /r/science. But on /v/movies or /v/science you'd also have a bunch of the racist and antisemite discussions too which weren't on /r/movies or /r/science.
For example see this Voat discussion of season 2 of The Mandalorian from /v/movies [1]. Here's an example from /v/science [2].
This time has a chance to be different because this time it won't be the dregs of Reddit leaving. It will mostly be decent people leaving. Those who remain might actually miss them instead of being happy they are gone, and so might consider actually following.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201225021055/https://voat.co/v/movies/4164913
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20201223123156/https://voat.co/v/science/4152241
I rarely watch any other streaming app! 95% to 98% of what I watch is YouTube. I've gotten so use to the short clips that I noticed I haven't had any interest in watching any Disney plus shows and I loved season one and two of The Mandalorian.
> The other thing that Netflix dropped the ball on was the Spotify-esque "1 site to rule them all". There's now Disney+, Paramount+, Hulu, HBO, in the UK, BBC, ITV, E4, Sky, and so on. Movie + TV companies have always fought each other in a way that record companies never did, but both their products are just bits down a wire in 2023
Netflix didn't drop the ball; it was clearly never going to happen. When Netflix launched their streaming service, I thought it was a dumb idea because I figured it was 10 years tops before all the major studios could run their own streaming services, at which point Netflix would have no content to stream (unlike mailing DVDs, you need permission from studios to stream their content).
Most of the movie studios jealously guard the rights to their movies; Netflix got a lot of its early streaming content by sublicensing from Starz, which pissed of the studios (most notably Disney, but there was murmuring from Sony as well). At this point, Netflix invested both in TV back-content as well as creating original content.
We are now entering an era in which Studios can potentially have complete control over legal distribution of their content, and they look likely to do so. I'll pause for a moment while you try to buy a copy of the (now 3.5 year old) Mandalorian season 1 on DVD or Bluray...
I'm not sure why music ended in the "(almost) 1 site to rule them all" while video did not, but a couple possibly contributing factors:
1. MP3s had a one-two punch of coming practically out of nowhere, and portable players that significantly improved on the walkman/discman experience. Napster wasn't even around that long (2 years, 80M users at peak) but planted pirated MP3s as a big deal. Then the iPod came around and being on iTunes was important to stay relevant. If you're on iTunes, why not be on all streaming and purchasing services at the same time?
2. There is a long history in the US of compulsory licensing of music for various purposes. It doesn't cover on-demand streaming, but does cover satellite, terrestrial radio and "internet radio" services.
3. Retail media sales have long been the public metric of success for music; for film studios it's been retail ticket sales. The music charts even have formulae for translating streams into equivalent purchases of physical media.
A friend of mine just does one service at a time, and it's low-key fairly brilliant. There's a bit of headache with installing / uninstalling apps on televisions and having to log into things once a month or quarter or however long it takes him, but the kernel of the idea is that there are generally only a few new, good shows worth watching for any given network, but all the good shows are roughly equally distributed between networks.
So instead of paying $10 a month to Disney for Mandalorian, Wandavision, Loki, an additional $10 for Peacock for Mrs. Davis, Bel Air, and Poker Face, plus however much else for HBOMax, Netflix, Hulu, etc., he could just pay one network $10 a month, binge the couple of good shows that they had, and then instead of waiting months for the next thing to come out, unsubscribe and switch to another network. Lather, rinse, repeat.
He isn't as current, and sometimes it's hard to chat about whatever the current new thing is, but society has effectively already given up on the concept of the whole nation tuning in to any one thing and it being the topic of watercooler conversations for a myriad of reasons.
Note: He has children, and I have no idea how he handles this other than to note that he also has a digital antenna, so some shows are "always available" (or at least as much as is allowed for)
I don't know about outside the US, but the impression I have is, Star Wars toys have mostly been a universal bust, especially of the items that are from new Star Wars and not the original. You can find a lot of info if you search about Rose Tico toys. The Tico toys aren't necessarily the worst (e.g. Admiral Holdo toys), but fans/critics like to use the Tico toy as demonstration of how badly Disney has miscalculated their Star Wars strategy.
Baby Yoda toys were an exception to the rule. But even Baby Yoda toys have their own story of missteps in this saga. Disney was caught completely flat-footed by the success of Baby Yoda and did not have any toys ready to go at the launch of The Mandalorian. Disney was overcompensating for the toy disaster after all the movies, (which also made their toy make partners very unhappy). (I think Hasbro is one of the main suppliers.) Then when Baby Yoda was a surprise hit, and fans were going to things like CafePress out of desperation for anything, Disney desperately scrambled to get anything out as fast as possible. If I recall, they had to bypass their normal partner Hasbro and go to Mattel just to get something to market fast. This is almost unheard of.
Baby Yoda is the only merch hit they have, but there are now retailer signs showing demand saturation. And for Star Wars fans who follow all the shows, like The Mandalorian, people are saying it looks like Baby Yoda was supposed to have left the show, completing his arc around the end of season 2 or The Book of Boba Fett. But rumors say, Disney desperate to keep Baby Yoda in the spotlight, forced him back into the show, with rumors Baby Yoda is going to appear in a bunch of other future Star Wars shows, like the new Rey Skywalker-Palpatine show.
I also forgot to mention the The Star Wars Galactic Cruiser experience. People also keep track of open bookings in that hotel and show it is mostly empty. There are lots of estimates of how much this cost to build and what the operating expenses are (all this is very expensive), and it once again indicates this is a massive money loser for Disney.
It's not just movies. There was an episode of The Mandalorian with cave scenes so dark that they were literally unwatchable for me with the shades open. You'd think people would have learned after the mess with Game of Thrones.
I really enjoyed Andor, perhaps more than the Mandalorian which has far too many callbacks to the original movies.
They have some good stuff. Spider Man: No way home.
Mandalorian is pretty good, Star wars: Andor was the best Star Wars I've seen in a while. I guess a lot of people missed out on Andor given that almost everything Star wars has been mostly crap.
I think part of the explanation for your list involves the fact that people don't like movies that much anymore.
Rogue One, and Seasons 1 and 2 of The Mandalorian are the only Post George Lucas Stars Wars worth watching
Hi!
So, it's been a while, but I'll try to add clarification from the best of my memory.
So, in this sequence, I think it is the case that K2-SO was only rendered from behind.
IIRC, the reasons for not using it on more shots, and specifically the front shots in the sequence were two-fold, Primarily, we only had one TD/Lighting Artist trained in our pipeline using Unreal, which was still a little clunky to fit into our pipeline, so we were time limited. Now, K2-SO was not rendered from the front in a close-up due to problems with complexities with his eyes. (Some details from Naty later in the talk) Specifically, K2's eyes require fully lit transparencies with the full lighting model, at-least at the time Unreal only supports their full lighting feature set in their deferred renderer, and their forward renderer, used for transparencies was a vastly simplified lighting model which isn't able to fully capture the effect of K2's eyes. We were building a capable Forward renderer inside of Unreal internally, but this was not finished in time for Rogue One.
As an aside, we had a parallel internal renderer we were building for use on Rogue One, that even at the time had advantages, but Unreal was chosen for what I saw as political reasons.
I do not know of more recent examples, but I'm not involved in this project anymore, I know they used Unreal for Season 1 of the Mandalorian, but moved to their internal real-time renderer for Season 2. The internal renderer has a few advantages, not having to deal with the complexity of merging significant changes with Epic's engine for example with the forward renderer was one major advantage, but my understanding is that the major win, is just being able to build a renderer that integrates much better in their existing pipeline. Unreal's renderer is pretty strongly integrated into the rest of their engine, and the engine itself is very opinionated regarding how content is managed. And as you can imagine, ILM has their own opinions going back to about 30+ years of history.
I agree with your dispute of the broad characterization, but thought the counter-example would be illustrative.
BTW, I'm starting a new project investigating real-time rendering for film, and always interested to new perspectives, hit me up if you want to chat real-time rendering sometime.
Just how out of touch is this guy? 50% inflation MoM within the next 90 days? Does he not understand the multiple system shocks that would need to take place for that to even come close to reality?
Balaji, please - get out of your bubble. Go talk to your neighbors. They're all concerned about where to go for their kids spring break, the next episode of Mandalorian, and whether or not their bracket is still in contention.
Let's game out what it would take for 50% inflation MoM -- you'd need severe supply issues up and down for every possible good, including goods created domestically. You'd need the Fed to fire up the printing presses in a way that surpasses even 2008, which, good luck on that one. You'd need interest rates to go negative. You'd need the real estate market to do a 180 from "nothing's really selling right now" to "people can't buy houses fast enough". You'd need a confluence of black swan events to happen globally in order to knock the dollar from being a reserve currency. How does that possibly happen?
Just dumb, all around.
You've definitely seen a TV or Movie that used Unreal.
Name a major-studio movie that rendered final camera-ready VFX in Unreal.
For TV, you can name The Mandalorian season one, sure, but even then, ILM switched The Volume to their own in-house real-time engine for season two.
It's the same for sci-fi. We have a million Star Wars series and movies, a billion Star Trek series and movies. But we can't get anything else that is out there that could be so much better. Dune was a good start, but really, each of those books is a series on its own.
The Culture series by Iain Banks would be amazing, especially considering that the world is way more accepting of race/ethnicity, sexuality, and gender issues than it has been historically (not even to mention that we could use some hope for the future in our media instead of dystopia constantly). But instead we get baby yoda series 3. (for reference, I do like The Mandalorian, I just felt like being snarky).
My gosh, I thought Andor was just a horrific bore. I literally couldn't stay awake for it. It felt like about four episodes worth of story stretched out to 12 episodes. I feel like with all the glowing reviews, people are watching it through the lens of being Star Wars universe fans, and not judging it objectively against other content.
I did enjoy the Mandalorian series because at least it had the comic relief of Grogu, if the rest was a bit of a slog.
Yeah I think there’s a big Marvel and Star Wars fatigue factor that isn’t talked about enough. Only the hardest of the hardcore fans can keep up with all that stuff. Regular people and casual fans pretty much only see the big blockbuster movies and maybe watch the Mandalorian to see what all the baby Yoda memes are all about.
> Disney has started to go this direction by building expensive technology they can reuse, like the set of Mandalorian. I just saw a trailer that the set has now been used in a new movie (but I don’t recall which).
It seems the official name is StageCraft[1]&[3], and they have evolved it since the first Mandalorian-Season[2], having now multiple of those sets around the world. This is pretty cool for production, but probably awful for tourism. No locations anymore which people can visit to support the local economy.
[1] https://www.ilm.com/stagecraft/ [2] https://www.comingsoon.net/movies/features/1225599-the-volume-star-wars-revolutionary [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StageCraft
What I suspect, and we’re starting to see a bit, is that they need to massively cut budgets. Hundred million dollar budgets per movie don’t seem like they make sense. Instead, I think we’ll see more movies made on a shoestring budget. Some good, some bad.
Disney has started to go this direction by building expensive technology they can reuse, like the set of Mandalorian. I just saw a trailer that the set has now been used in a new movie (but I don’t recall which). If you haven’t seen the set, go find it on YouTube. Pretty interesting tech. It’s expensive but will probably reduce budgets long term.
Anyway, I think cheaper productions is the only thing that will work with so many options today. Cheaper movies like The Blair Witch Project are what I expect to see more of.
I, personally, prefer paying for all the independent services I care to watch. I can pay for one or I can pay for 10 and have a cable like bill. But, I get to choose.
There is no possible way you're casting your net wide enough if you don't think there are tons of good films coming out in "The West" every year. Or maybe you only like a small set of genres?
Horror's doing wonderfully, there's a bounty of good stuff, US and Europe both (since you specified the West—Asia, broadly, also puts out a few good horror films per year). 10+ films I'm very glad I watched per year, probably, and I do not manage to watch all the good ones.
Mid-budget sci-fi usually has a couple solid ones per year, too (Moon, The High Life, Annihilation, et c.), plus the rare high-budget good sci-fi film (maybe one or so per year? Dune, Blade Runner 2049, that kind of thing).
Usually a couple good-to-great westerns per year, at least, though they may not be the ones with the largest marketing budgets.
The average is trash, sure, but there's plenty of good stuff and you can just ignore the trash and still have plenty to watch.
> So why is it there is so much bad quality tv/films produced in the west? Such great opportunities wasted? I had great hopes for the Mandalorian. I couldn't watch more than 2 episodes because the story was written for 10 year old. Etc.
I'm with you on this. I think the average quality in Star Wars land is just so bad that a show that could be considered a peer of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys seems amazing by comparison. (I did finish it—playing "spot the influence/rip-off" was entertaining and occasionally made me feel smart for being familiar with whatever better thing the writers had also watched, I suppose)
I know nothing about the business of making movies, but I have to say the quality of films/TV produced in the west has been in steady decline for quite some time. Sure there are odd creations that are really good (like Dune), but then the average is horrible. Same stories rehashed over an over with lots of clishe's, sex scenes squeezed in just because etc. But the worst is the dumbed down stories. It seems as if Western producers think the story has to be horribly simplified or there is no chance of "world success".
To see how it should be done look at South Korean(and some Japanese) dramas on Netflix. Not all are great, but the average is way better. It came to a point I think I just saw one western TV production last year I liked and there were probably 5 or more Korean ones. Why is it that they can make interesting and surprising stories into TV/films in places like Korea?. Similar for Japan, but I found many Japanese dramas seem to be too focused on picturing "internal struggles" of characters in a way that seems a bit overdone for a western audiences. For examples of what I mean see "Alice in Borderlands" (Japanese - suffers some previously mentioned issues, but overall very good). "Glory" (Korean - when you read the brief it sounds like something that would be horrible to watch, but they pulled it off great), "Train to Busan" (Korean film about freaking zombies that is actually good), D. P.(Korean,again brief seems completely cheesy "Military police searches for escaped draftees" in actuality it has great story, it shows some really hard realities of military draft, like abuse etc in a way that is really believable a normal person could end up in such situation etc.) And many more. The only western TV drama that was good was "1899" (German/UK production). This was really good too.
So why is it there is so much bad quality tv/films produced in the west? Such great opportunities wasted? I had great hopes for the Mandalorian. I couldn't watch more than 2 episodes because the story was written for 10 year old. Etc.
Mandalorian's pretty consistent about it, but it really stood out to me in the shootout when Breaking Bad's chicken man had besieged Our Heroes in the saloon. There's a crack to the impacts, and a speed to the bolts, that really makes you go "oh shit, those might hurt!" in a way that no Star Wars media I can think of (and I've seen/played/read just... way too much of it) had before.
And it was mediocre in the way that basically all the Mandalorian episodes were, but I really enjoyed the use of the AT-ST as a Robert E. Howard, Summoned from the Darkest Jungle by the Forest Savages and their Witch Doctors, primeval monster-beast, in that one episode. Really made the thing seem scary, at least at times. Absolutely perfect example of how to rip off genre media then paint it Star Wars to turn out an above-average Star Wars thing (not that that's a high bar) with minimal effort.
What's amazing is that most folks who get a crack at Star Wars can't even apply the dumbest version of its formula—mash up a few genre-things, apply Star Wars lipstick—competently. That is all The Mandalorian did, and that's all it took to put it well in the top half of all Star Wars media. It's simple, it's easy, yet most of the folks involved just don't seem to get it.
Agree with most of your take. The worst thing about Andor was that nearly every scene was too long. It's not slow in an "it's slow on purpose and is still making good use of its time" way like a lot of excellent film and television is, it's slow in a "the writers and/or editors weren't good enough, or weren't given enough time, to make it better" sort of way. I agree with the article that it's not clear the politics of Andor are in service of any kind of real message, but they sure are shocking to see in something Disney put out. It's not that they're shocking in an absolute sense, but I'd never have believed The Mouse would green light something like it.
Falcon and Winter Soldier actually had some similarly dark, realistic politics going on, and even got a little close to saying something with it at the end (before shying away and saying nothing at all, instead, because Disney's run by cowards) but didn't go nearly as far as Andor. The execs must have been really high when the Andor scripts passed their desks for approval.
Honestly I couldn't believe that they were able to pull this series off as they did when I saw it. Seeing the Marvel-ised new Star Wars movies, the new series that were mostly just going for the looks (even if they were not bad) like Mandalorian or Obi-Wan - and then we get a depiction of a world of almost documentaristic reality, with figures and costumes that could be of a gritty enactment of the Russian October revolution... Besides some names, uniforms, the idea of an empire, a few easter eggs here and there, this venture had nothing to do with Star Wars, but was still among the best adult entertainment in recent years.
How the showmakers of Chernobyl could pull this idea off from start to finish with Disney's management is beyond me. I understand that they saw the budget, and knew they could never tell such stories outside of such an established franchise nowadays, but Disney had much to lose with making an entry without any lightsaber fights or any semblance of humour, even if they wanted to target a different audience. It gives a pinch of hope for the declining western mass enternainment industry.
> I mean jesus christ, you'd have to be born under a rock to not know that Star Wars is a cross between a spaghetti western and a samurai flick.
And WWII movies (633 Squadron and The Dam Busters, most prominently) and a splash of sword-and-sorcery fiction (the "magic exists but is rare to the point of being near-mythical and not really thaaaaat powerful" thing is some straight Conan shit, as are some other elements and flavors in the setting—from the stories, that is, not the movies, which came too late to influence Star Wars, though, fittingly, James Earl Jones is in both).
Star Wars' greatest contribution to cinema—and it's a big one—is pioneering the multi-genre pastiche. That thing Tarantino does? Like, his whole career basically? Star Wars cleared the way for that. Proved it could work and result in a good film, proved it could make money. The most successful later entries understand that formula and lean hard into the genre-mashup and freely ripping off other works thing. Mandalorian's full of that, for instance (to the point that you can make a meta-game of watching it, playing "name what they ripped off")
I think we saw a little of this with The Mandalorian. In the episodes where we first meet Cara Dune, and she talks about being a "dropper" shock troop. It definitely gives you a much grittier, Machiavellian view of the rebellion, and it seems like the Imperials view droppers as savages whose conduct is beyond the pale.
Also, in the episode where she and Mando are (kidnapped/stowaway whatever, can't quite remember) on the Imperial shuttle. The Imperial pilot makes it clear that his hatred of the rebellion is deep, personal, and 'moral'. "Do you have any idea how many millions of people were on that battle station?" Not that he has exactly seized the moral high ground, working for the Empire, but I definitely saw that as a "rebellion ~ al Qaeda" moment.
>30 year open mouth beard consumers and wanted to 'blow their minds' with
No one said anything about blowing minds.
>But because it is planned to drag on
Unfortunately all shows are infected with this garbage. You end up grading this stuff relatively on a spectrum (“don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” etc) . This the “ads” of the streaming era. It is so ubiquitous people either build a tolerance, tune-out during the interval, or stop watching tv all together in protest.
>to make baby men feel more sophisticated while hooking them into consistently watching
A more sophisticated show with better writing and actors would indeed make people feel more sophisticated…yes. If, to take another example, somebody pitched me “Better Call Saul, but in space,” I’d probably watch that as well. Frankly, Dune is more a children’s movie than Andor, so you might as well say that 25-40 year olds have no business amusing themselves with science fantasy or sci-fi at all.
The litmus test for this seems to be: Make the exact same scifi show (space etc) but without the Star Wars branding. Will it be considered a children’s move? My answer in this case, no. Will it still be decent? Yes it would.
Mandalorian, Boba Fett, Obi-Wan are all magnitudes more juvenile than this attempt.
A quasi-spoiler perhaps, but I personally find it hilarious that a subplot involves a workers revolt in what could be a Tesla gigafactory 20 years from now…in a tv show produced by Disney.
Disney+'s marquee show is The Mandalorian which has been quite great so far but even that can't be stretched for too long. I don't see it going beyond a few more seasons. At least with its competitors like Netflix, it has a fantastic library of so many show like House of Cards, Stranger Things, Dark, Squid Game and a bunch of stuff for almost every demographic possible. HBO probably has an unparalleled library of shows and movies. Disney+ shows don't have the same kind of rewatchability. For example, they fumbled extremely hard with the Obi Wan show, which could have been another potential cultural zeitgeist like the Star Wars movies if they probably cut down the filler and did some more rewrites to improve the script and released it as a movie (either in theater or as a Disney+ exclusive)
Disney+'s marquee show is The Mandalorian which has been quite great so far but even that can't be stretched for too long. I don't see it going beyond a few more seasons. At least with its competitors like Netflix, it has a fantastic library of so many show like House of Cards, Stranger Things, Dark, Squid Game and a bunch of stuff for almost every demographic possible. HBO probably has an unparalleled library of shows and movies. Disney+ shows don't have the same kind of rewatchability.
Next focus on quality instead of quantity. Less She-Hulk and more Loki. Maybe every single Star Wars character doesn’t need a six or ten episode backstory. Maybe Cars doesn’t need four sequels. The Lone Ranger has kept his mask on since 1933, the Mandalorian couldn’t do it five episodes.
If I'm not mistaken, though, irc still works pretty well, and still provides what it always has, and could still function as the live chat aspect of a small community's technology stack. Moreover, in the event that the high-availability internet goes away, it will probably still work on a 90s-tech internet. If your packets are just conversational text, you really don't need a massive warp-speed pipe to make it work.
Likewise Usenet - yes, we abused it to get our alt.binaries (read: boobies), but that was strictly desperation. It still works fine on the fast internet, but again, will continue to work on a 90s internet, in the event that we lose the fast one.
Fast itself is really what's warping our perceptions of what is normal and acceptable. When was the last time you watched an old Connery Bond movie? My grandpa took me to see every Bond movie that existed at the time back in the 80s, the downtown cineplex threw a festival. I remember enjoying all of them at the time, nothing wrong with em.
I threw on Dr No a couple months ago and I swear, I could not get past about 30 minutes, the pacing was hellishly slow, to the point that wanted to climb into the screen and lob a bomb at his car myself out of sheer boredom. Had a similar experience trying to watch Three Days of the Condor.
Interestingly, I decided to rewatch the Lone Wolf and Cub movies after watching the Mandalorian, and they were just as fun as I remember. Some slow scenes, but good pacing with a decent body count:frame ratio.
I don't think we're so much yelling at clouds as wishing the clouds would slow down long enough for us to yell at em. I have my doubts that the pace can be maintained indefinitely, and they are not trying to bring it under control at all. What I expect next is a painful correction in which the laws of nature will come into play in a big way. Whee!
Westerns have been reincarnated a bit here and there. The Mandalorian is a really good western for instance. Firefly as well, some years back. Westworld too. Some of the other Star Wars stuff is pretty western too, the non-main Disney movies.
Nah, the best piece is The Mandalorian season 2. Not least because of Mark Hamill!
Absolutely, particularly if you see this as simply another tool in the belt, like how Jurassic Park's thirty year old special effects absolutely stand the test of time because of them being a convincing mix of early CGI and puppetry.
It's not hard to imagine that this kind of thing could end up doing a lot of the heavy lifting for things like background scenes in the future, opening up the kind of stuff we saw in The Mandalorian, Game of Thrones, and the LOTR film trilogy to increasingly lower and lower budget productions.
That seems to be changing, though, for many popular (expensive?) shows. Game of Thrones, Silicon Valley, all the recently-new Star Trek series, The Expanse, The Mandalorian, The Orville... They all have seasons in the ballpark of 10 episodes.
Kinda got the impression poster was trying to think beyond x > log(1)
With a compeling enough story / statics / and lucky enough to land an intership at Industrial Light and Magic, could use the virtual set room used to produce things like 'The Mandalorian' to do a big statimation motion picture. In keeping with the original post discussion, need to use Go programming language; include a van as prop (shoes or actual) as ad lib to getting swept up in ascii screen animations. A few things have to be out of character. ( https://www.vangoghgallery.com/painting/starry-night.html )
treeviw.net ideas mixed with 'massaged statistical graphs' from scatter plot matrix / excel / as 'flip disk' take on https://www.davidhuska.com/~grant/asciimation.html & https://experiments.withgoogle.com/asciimations
Although, massaging the data to fix what trying to present does seem to defeat the whole purpose of finding statistics data to use.
Risks looking like repackaging 'the maxtrix' gimics, even though asciimation was way before 'the matrix'.
Guess the 'ACE' thesis would be creating code structure representing the same visuals as when code file viewed/edited as output of running code to display movie'.
Would really be pushing 'curses' to the limit (sensored or unsensored)
There should be a frame of reference for extracting Lisp from the cons of ascii-izing 'The Cars' with other ascimation movies.
I did a rewatch marathon of sorts with the kids, Alien, Aliens, Terminator 1-3, stuff like that. Those new action flicks, especially the super hero movies, cannot compare against those. An opinuon my son shares, and he grew up with Marvel. He was glued to the screen when we watched Alien for the first time together, because it did build up astory ajd tension (his words, not mine). Compared to Marvel were the CGI orgy starts 2 minutes into the movie.
Heck, I'll take the Terminator 1 stop motion effects over any scene in the forst half of the last Dr. Strange "movie" (I couldn't bring myself to watch more than that, even Meg is more fun to watch...) any day of the week. Because T1 is still scary and conveys emotion (despair mostly for being chased by an unstoppable killet machine), while those Marvel effects are, well, boring by now. They have no wow effect (we see them in almost every single modern day movie), the convey no emotion (difficult to properly act, I think, when you are in front of a green screen and everything just plays out in your imagination) not do those effects actually drive the "story" forward.
As compared to, e.g., the Expense, a ton of sci-fi short films (Dust in a great channel for that on Youtube) or the Mandalorian. I think the over use of CGI is just an easy excuse for bad story telling, and people swallow it.
I guess at some point it looked like all content was just going to be sent to Netflix, like a giant modern Blockbuster. Every movie that was no longer in cinemas, every niche classic from times gone by.
It might have been a great business, if the owners of those movies had been happy to just get a small fee from Netflix.
Unfortunately that's not how it turned out, for instance Disney decided they could both make their own tech and their own content, esp for such things like Mandalorian which takes a modern long-story format that is suitable for streaming. Basically it turns out content is king, which Netflix also realized as they went and tried to make their own stuff with limited success.
What I don't get is why it's so hard to make the content. They've certainly thrown a lot of money at it, how come nothing sticks? By contrast everything Disney makes seems to be high quality.
Now it seems like Disney is doing the innovating with the way they film stuff for Disney+.
https://qz.com/1754288/disney-is-trying-to-revolutionize-filmmaking-with-the-mandalorian/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bErPsq5kPzE
Though how much of that is Disney and how much is the companies they worked with is unknown to me.
Disney got Star Wars for 4B, Star Wars merch is pretty much one of the most iconic and most sought out merch out there, the movies with some exceptions have been financial hits, they have had some good video games on console/PCs and they also have some mobile games that I believe would be raking in the sweet lootcrate money, the theme park attractions no doubt attract many, the Mandalorian was a critical and commercially sucessful show, and it seems despite the dip in quality in their other live action shows, the viewership has only increased.
https://collider.com/obi-wan-kenobi-finale-audience-disney-plus/#:~:text=When%20Obi%2DWan%20Kenobi%20premiered,million%20to%20the%20top%20spot.
Also, say, things coming out of the other end of Disney: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mandalorian#Episodes
Harry potter movie changed directors a few times right?
Amazon is getting a 160mil tax credit in NZ.
Regarding the team: "The team who will be creating the “LOTR” TV series includes: executive producers Lindsey Weber (“10 Cloverfield Lane”), Bruce Richmond (“Game of Thrones”), Gene Kelly (“Boardwalk Empire”) and Sharon Tal Yguado; writer/executive producer Gennifer Hutchison (“Breaking Bad”); writer/executive producer Jason Cahill (“The Sopranos”) writer/executive producer Justin Doble (“Stranger Things”); consulting producers Bryan Cogman (“Game of Thrones”) and Stephany Folsom (“Toy Story 4”); producer Ron Ames (“The Aviator”); writer/co-producer Helen Shang (“Hannibal”) and writing consultant Glenise Mullins."
So they have established people in the background and a well known franchise. As for not involving Peter Jackson maybe they just wanted to start fresh, no idea but George Lucas isn't involved of the Mandalorian
Objectively they've bungled Star Wars, it remains to be seen if they can get out of the woods with the amount of hostility they've created. Without the Mandalorian the situation would be dire.
Pixar literally didn't miss for the entire independent era, the occasional lackluster movie isn't going to alienate their core demographic, which is parents. Marvel is of course printing money with no end in sight, but this is a two out of three thing imho.
I've ranted at length about Netflix and how insanely useless their data analytics are. I quit Netflix earlier this year. It was obvious to me Netflix would falter when they started using that "Top 10" leaderboard as their primary recommendation engine. It was a tacit admission that they, having all the money, talent, and 20+ years of detailed subscriber data (that every studio would kill for) couldn't figure out how to use that data. I would not be surprised if Netflix pops the data analytics/ML bubble. The curtain has been pulled back and the wizard has been revealed to be nothing more than a simple list of the most watched shows.
> you need the right people involved
Even then it's tough. The Mandalorian was great. Then The Book of Boba Fett came out and was not only a disaster, but also made the entire two seasons of The Mandalorian pointless. Similar to season 8 of Game of Thrones killing the entire show, because who can recommend a show that sets up the central expectation in season one that is so horribly resolved in the very last season. It's now a show I'd recommend to my enemy rather than my friend. TV is tough. And I don't think streaming is kind to shows that don't nail every season. This is content that is part of a catalog. It's not something on NBC on a Thursday night. Syndication isn't just a nice windfall. It's the entire point now.
With rare exceptions like The Mandalorian, I can just no longer summon up enthusiasm or interest in franchises that date back to the 1960s or 70s--even when there's not really anything wrong with a given film or TV show. (Though there are plenty of examples where the latest film or TV show is not in fact very good.)
It borrows heavily from a number of sources. The main theme is a thinly modified reworking of Korngold's Kings Row.
It's why movie music is a relatively mediocre artform. It's mostly reheated 19th/early 20th century cliches and borrowings with none of the fluency or genius of the originals.
People forget that being able to write for an orchestra isn't proof of genius. The bar is higher than that.
Ravel, Wagner, Debussy, Stravinsky, and Rachmaninov - and others - absolutely kill all of the Hollywood guys.
More interesting are recent TV scores that have been all-electronic and abstract. Chernobyl seems to have broken the trend into the mainstream, but I'm hearing examples on shows like The Mandalorian and Dr Who. They sound a lot fresher than the orchestral blobbery that's more usual, because they're more about evocative sound design than trad synth/sampler sounds.
One of the many glories of The Mandalorian is Herzog's role.
And if you haven't seen Fitzcarraldo, put down your computing device and go watch that movie instead.
It's a poor approach for people like me. My main thing is video games, youtube, and reading. But I like really good TV series. I've enthusiastically watched Peaky Blinders as soon as it's available after I heard about it and picked it up after season 4. I didn't start watching Breaking Bad until Season 4 finished airing. Same with a bunch of other shows, Blacklist (S6), Game of Thrones (S4), Sherlock(S5), Mandalorian (S2), Ozarks (S3). That doesn't give a lot of shows time to catch my eye.
The ones I recall watching after S1 aired over the past decade are Fargo, Better Call Saul (because I saw BB), True Detective, House of Cards, Atlanta (because I'm from Atlanta), Lupin, because they got truly rave reviews. I'm even more conservative with Netflix shows now because it's pretty much a given that anything I even attempt to watch is going to get cancelled after a season or 2.
My prediction/hope is that NeRFs will totally revolutionize how the film/TV industry. I can imagine:
- Shooting a movie from a few cameras, creating a movie version of a NeRF using those angles, and then dynamically adding in other shots in post
- Using lighting and depth information embedded in NeRFs to assist in lighting/integrating CG elements
- Using NeRFs to generate virtual sets on LED walls (like those on The Mandalorian) from just a couple of photos of a location or a couple of renders of a scene (currently, the sets have to be built in a game engine and optimized for real time performance).
Tarantino's whole thing goes back to Star Wars, which cribbed heavily from films from ~4 genres—sci-fi serials, samurai films, war (mainly WWII) films, and westerns. Its great innovation and enduring legacy in film isn't just its groundbreaking special effects, but the assembly of a film almost entirely from pastiche.
[EDIT] Incidentally, when later Star Wars media gets this fundamental aspect of Star Wars and leans into it, is when it's at its best IMO. You could practically play "spot the rip-off" with The Mandalorian, it borrowed so heavily from other film and TV—and, though perhaps overrated, it's certainly one of the best Star Wars things since the original trilogy. The Last Jedi stood out to me among the Disney-era films for doing a lot more cribbing from sources of the kind that Star Wars used, rather than cribbing just from... Star Wars itself (though it also did that, heavily re-mixing Empire, especially).
You're not alone. Denis has a great technical eye but Sicario so far is his closest to a great film.
Speaking of technical merits slipping a Mickey to a parched audience, see: The Mandalorian.
Not to defend the practice of "CGI everything," but there's a new-ish technique which I first became aware of from the Mandalorian, where the actors actually see the rendered CGI on massive screens around them - think the holodeck from Star Trek TNG. The physical props exist between the characters and the huge display, and the projection is even bright enough to (partially) light the scene. You can see this technique in the "Making of the Mandalorian" documentary series.
I do think CGI is often overutilized, much to the detriment of many shows and films, especially in genres where practical effects get the job done (i.e. - not sci-fi). However, these techniques are evolving, and the actors can at least start to see visual cues and interact with the same digital elements that the viewer will ultimately be shown.
There's quite a bit CGI Grogu in The Mandalorian. You just don't notice it because it's done well.
And remember, the the prequels were literally the first movies to have CGI major characters. Basing the effectiveness of the technique on them would be like basing all of practical effects on the first movie to have puppets.
The Mandalorian filming approach is an interesting new hybrid of the CGI use & shooting with them live in a 360 screens. This gives interesting lighting also allowing more use of practical fx.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/20/how-the-mandalorian-and-ilm-invisibly-reinvented-film-and-tv-production/
> The mandalorian throws in droids that have machine like precision and just wipe the floor killing dozens of people in a firefight, taking no cover, and missing no shots, 360 no scope dual wielding. It broke a lot of unspoken rules about how the world worked.
The first IG assassin droid appeared in Empire Strikes Back the movie and was a boss on the train level of the N64 game. In canon, most of the IG series are unique one offs so they're not exactly mass produced droids found all over the galaxy like maintenance drones (with the exception of the IG-86?). They're very high value items that get reprogrammed and passed from organization to organization.
That was my biggest pet peeve with the mandalorian season 1. Star Wars is fairly clear that droids are at or below human level competence, and tend to behave as generally intelligent entities but maybe with some dorky code of laws they must obey.
The mandalorian throws in droids that have machine like precision and just wipe the floor killing dozens of people in a firefight, taking no cover, and missing no shots, 360 no scope dual wielding. It broke a lot of unspoken rules about how the world worked.
I cancelled Disney+ when they wanted to charge extra for a movie, on top of the subscription. I'll just buy the DVD cheaper than what they asked for on top of the sub.
Admittedly, I'm not automatically entitled to all the things they release but still feels wrong and wanted to vote with my wallet.
The Mandalorian was an amazing series though!
I really hope Netflix proves everyone wrong. HBO and Disney+ may have a huge advantage but neither seems interested in the tech side. Disney+ may be OK now (it's been a while since I checked) but HBO Max seems to be extremely inconsistent when it comes to streaming quality. Even new, popular shows like Euphoria on HBO Max are only 1080p with a bitrate so low that the frequent, dimly lit scenes are a blocky mess. At the same time, AAA movies like Dune stream in nearly Bluray quality. Meanwhile even dumb reality shows on Netflix still stream with suburb quality.
IMO assuming Netflix doubles down on original content which seems to be the assumed direction, they have two strategies. Strategy one is to produce/distribute content that is developed outside the US where production is much cheaper and existing production companies have less of an advantage. Partnering with local, smaller production outfits is probably a good strategy.
Strategy two is to use their tech advantage to lower the cost of content production. I'm quite surprised that we haven't seen Netflix create a Holodeck-esque production method. The Mandalorian (Disney+/Holodeck) and The Witcher Season 1(Netflix) have somewhat similar production costs per episode at ~$15M and ~$10M respectively but The Mandalorian had significantly more and better CG then The Witcher so clearly the Holodeck method has a lot of benefits and cost savings.
That said Squid Game only had a total budget of ~$21M, although a lot lighter on CG, strategy one offers a more cost savings.
TV shows are really pushing things too. Twenty years ago, a big budget show was a premium cable production like Deadwood ($4.5M/episode) or Rome ($8.5M/episode), but now you have mainline shows like The Crown, Stranger Things, and The Mandalorian, all costing $12M+/episode.
This is pretty cool however Disney has been filming this way for at least a few years using a tool called The Volume[0], so I’m not sure if it’s a revolutionary as they intend it to be. It’s a great way to film since the imagery can be changed and re-rendered on the fly and the screens provide accurate light reflection for surfaces.
[0] https://dorksideoftheforce.com/2020/06/24/the-mandalorian-volume/
Back in 1988, at the height of TV viewing, these scene on Star Trek TNG seemed massively futuristic. Imagine TV ending by 2040
DATA: Is there something wrong?
SONNY: Wrong? Only that your computer here fixed about the best martini I have ever had. I just might get to like this place. Let's see if the Braves are on. How do you turn on this teevee?
RIKER: TV?
SONNY: Yeah, the boob tube. I'd like to see how the Braves are doing after all this time. Probably still finding ways to lose.
DATA: I believe he means television, sir. That particular form of entertainment did not last much beyond the year two thousand forty.
Yet here we are, 24 years on, with just 18 years to go to that 2040 date, and it looks like it may well work out about right - as in TV as a passive viewing habit (rather than actively seeking out an episode of the Mandalorian or Tom Scott or what-have-you)
I lament this fact often. We no longer have a shared cultural experience around media. Very occasionally something pops up that everyone seems to know about, like Squid Game or The Mandalorian. But it isn't like the old days, when anyone would talked to saw the latest episode of I Love Lucy or Friends or Seinfeld.
There are so many choices and it's so fractured that there are no "big winners" anymore. But that's also a good thing, because the big winners weren't winners because they were good, they were winners because a network executive decided they would be winners.
I visited voat on occasion to see how it was working out, mostly checking out the groups that were not inherently political, such as /v/science and /v/movies.
Here is a description of such a visit shortly before they shut down [1].
I generally saw a lot more anti-Jew stuff than anti-Black stuff, but when a Black person came up there was a good chance someone would use the N word.
They could usually even make their anti-Black stuff be about Jews too. For example in /v/movies there was a discussion of the 2020 "Call of the Wild" movie. People were upset that one of the sled dog team drivers was played by a Black actor. They believed this was part of some nefarious plot by the Jews that control Hollywood.
I remember also seeing quite a bit of outrage over Asian and Black actors in The Mandalorian. I think I only saw one post that specifically complained about how absurd it was to have "<N-word>s in space" but a whole lot of agreement with the idea that all the actors in space shows should be white.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25502118
Books as art take on the order of 10-100 hours, that is 1-2 orders of magnitude longer than the movies.
This is why longer series are so popular, see: the Mandalorian
It’s possible that as digital tools make it easier to make hundreds of hours of high quality content the ‘metaverse’ experience will become on par with the books.
And what about all those poor government contractors, installing toilets for stormtroopers, blown to hell by some left-wing radical in the name of some mysticist religion... /s
I think there is a lot of revisionism around, about how "good" the original StarWars movies were. Yes they were fun, did worldbuilding very well and all that, but they weren't exactly particularly clever cinematic masterpieces. What followed them in many cases was much worse (the prequels are atrocious), but still, I don't see them as particularly better than stuff like The Mandalorian.
There are some objective-ish criteria we can apply: plot structure, themes, language and dialog complexity etc.
There are also more subjective criteria which can nonetheless employed like character development and character complexity in general, plot lines and plot wholes, number of literary and narrative devices employed etc.
Mandalorian is a simple linear narrative with an episodic structure with a rather thin plot, little to no character development, and the only "arc" serving as the single motivation for the plot to advance.
This especially evident in Season 2 Episode 7, where they tried to cram a series worth of a character's redemption arc and world building into a single episode.
This doesn't make Mandalorian bad. It's a very enjoyable well executed show with surprisingly few really weak points. This also doesn't make Mandalorian great, or amazing.
In 14 episodes Firefly had more character development, better dialog, working jokes and better acting than 16 episodes of Mandalorian.
As to boring drivel, that's my view of Rogue One: thin plot full of plot holes. The only narrative structure in the entire film is "15 minutes of static talking heads followed by rather uninspired and badly edited CGI action"
> The Mandalorian ... using almost no CGI
Um....
Edit: Just to elaborate, I'll note that when the first JJ film came out a lot of people's take was "thank God it's not an awful VFX fest like the prequels", despite it actually being vastly more VFX heavy. It's funny seeing this repeated.
One of the examples making that point is Star Wars. JJ's CGI heavy films almost killed the franchise, The Mandalorian, focusing on good story telling, using almost no CGI and having exactly the right amount of nostalgic moments (Clone Wars, the old extended universe) saved it. IMHO CGI is simply making film makers lazy, getting "epic" fight scenes is easy now, getting good story telling still is hard.
I too am an adult. One of those that saw Star Wars New Hope in the cinema. I gave up on Mandalorian after 4 episodes. Cancelling Gina Carano will make it hard for me return for whatever else they do.
Star Wars is my biggest cinematic disappointment. Empire will always rate as one of the best movies I've ever seen. But making I to III look like a Lego set and making 7, 8 and 9 rehashes of 3, 4 and 5 was... disaster.
Clone Wars was 7 series of 10 to 22 episodes each - 133 episodes, many of them barely watchable by anyone over 10 years of age. The good ones are really good, but there is a lot of dreck too, particularly the first 3-4 seasons. Take 16 random CW episodes and I don't think you'll find a better level of sophistication in it than in The Mandalorian.
And the original Death Star had an unprotected exhaust tunnel going all the way to the critical core... It's StarWars, some suspension of disbelief is necessary. "Mando" is a guy who simply struggles with anything that is not bounty-hunting, and acting as a parent clearly sends him in complete confusion more often than not.
I know there are weak episodes, some almost on purpose (like the village defense, a homage to samurai films from a simpler era), but I don't agree about The Mandalorian being bad overall because it just isn't. It delivers worldbuilding, ambience, and characters (ironically, the ones under helmets end up being more memorable than the others...); the soundtrack is insanely good, the production art alone is fantastic, and it's a miracle that it's a tv-series at all. My kids just love it in a way they've not loved any other SW material.
The only thing I would change is Gina Carano (bad actor, bad casting, and turns out she's a bad person too), but that's it.
> The Mandalorian episodes that Jon Favreau directed are definitely top tier Star Wars. Great writing, great acting, great storylines.
> But there are so many lower-quality episodes in that series from less experienced directors with bad acting and weaker storylines.
I feel the same way with “pre-Disney Star Wars films” in place of “Mandalorian” and “Irvin Kershner” in place of “Jon Favreau”.
the writing on mandalorian is ultra bad. The characters are caricatures, the dialog stunted. Their ultra advanced production techniques just look like props with some CG. Rather than a show that would appeal to kids but have depth for adults, you get a mostly simple main character who does inexplicable things. Find the baby using locator, fly off with baby, forget about locator? Leave the baby every bounty hunter is looking for on the space truck with the local dockwoman and go do something else, etc.
It was unbearable to watch from a story perspective so I stopped about 3/4 of the way through season 1. being "ok star wars" seems to be the very best it can aspire to.
It's just a pastiche of star wars with some mixed in memberberries.
The Mandalorian episodes that Jon Favreau directed are definitely top tier Star Wars. Great writing, great acting, great storylines.
But there are so many lower-quality episodes in that series from less experienced directors with bad acting and weaker storylines. I believe things like bringing back Ahsoka Tano weakens the storyline of the Star Wars original trilogy as much as bringing back Palpatine in the sequel trilogy did. It reduces the impact of sacrifices that were made and raises questions that may never be answered.
I agree the new technique of using "virtual sets" with Unreal Engine rather than green screen [1] is great innovation that helps make way more immersive TV shows with less budget (the first time I saw reflections of CGI characters on Mando's metallic helmet I was awestruck).
I just hope Mandalorian and the other Star Wars series maintain a high quality that we've seen brief flashes of. I'm disappointed when the franchise doesn't live up to my high expectations. Many episodes of Mandalorian are not quite there for me. Some definitely are "perfect Star Wars" though.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpUI8uOsKTM
The real secret sauce: Kevin Feige of Marvel Studios, and his team including the top-tier casting director Sarah Halley Finn.
Kevin Feige prevented Marvel movies from getting stale by completely switching the genre every single movie: eg, Winter Soldier (political thriller), Ant-Man (heist movie), Spider-Man Homecoming (high-school drama movie), Thor Ragnarok (Australia/New Zealand comedy), Shang-Chi (mythical Chinese martial arts movie).
Feige has said if a character is ever successful enough to have a third movie, they will always take a very different approach from the prior two movies. Thor Ragnarok is the best example of this: a soft reboot of the personality of a previously dull Shakespearean character into a fan favorite. The success of that soft reboot was enough to give that C-level character his fourth solo movie -- something Marvel has not done before.
None of Marvel's competitors have any producer of Kevin Feige's caliber. Not Warner Bros (DC comics), not Sony (Spiderman-villains universe) and not even Disney's LucasFilm (Star Wars).
Kevin Feige is 48 years old and it's not clear whether he'll retire after the X-Men and Fantastic Four are integrated in the MCU.
His magic touch and keen understanding of the characters have been a key part of the Marvel Studio's success, and it's not at all clear whether it will survive when he leaves.
Marvel Studios could become like LucasFilm after George Lucas sold it. It's a shell of its former self that can barely produce anything passable: Mandalorian and Rogue One just make the cut as being acceptable Star Wars, but very little else.
> I mean the stakes were incredibly high, billions in revenue for the foreseeable future.
That's exactly why the first sequel movie (EpVII: TFA) was so timid; I'm sure it was the most de-risked thing the writers and execs could think of—just a re-skin of the original.
> cheapening the force and the ability to wield it… It's telling that the secondary things - Rogue One, Mandalorian - are fan favorites instead.
Star Wars suffers from power and stakes creep: Death Star I is a planet-killer; DS2 kills planets and ships: Starkiller Base is a multi-planet killer; every ship in the Exegol fleet is a planet-killer. Force abilities are another example.
The Force co-opts any story it touches into one about destiny. And sometimes that's not appropriate, as in tales about rebel troopers or backwater mercenaries. As much as I adored The Child and was excited about Luke's cameo, I'm really glad those two things exited the show, hopefully resetting the stakes at a lower level.
It takes away from the other films as well by cheapening the force and the ability to wield it. Luke barely manages to lift some rocks after a lot of training montage, Rei lifts heaps of rocks without formal training. I don't think there's many people that liked the sequels. I can't believe they went in with those gung-ho, without the story fleshed out already. I mean the stakes were incredibly high, billions in revenue for the foreseeable future.
It's telling that the secondary things - Rogue One, Mandalorian - are fan favorites instead.
Ah yes, Habbagock Froink. One of the sadly unheralded characters briefly spotted in Jabba's Throne Room in Return of the Jedi. Rumors continue to circulate about a possible return in season three of The Mandalorian.
I'm in the same boat. Every now and then I'll dip into an episode or two of an old series I liked whether on DVD or streaming. But I don't watch a lot of video generally and really can't imagine sitting back through the 100+ hours of video that made up a typical network drama series.
And I get tired of universes too. I've enjoyed some of the newer Star Wars material (esp. Rogue One and the Mandalorian) but, for the most part, I'm pretty done with it even if individual stories are interesting. You can only be so fresh within an existing universe.
That said, I understand if not fully appreciate that some/many people are perfectly happy to rewatch familiar settings and characters whether literally or in new plots.
The best results I've seen are analogous to a modern version of rotoscoping. It involves creating a fully animated 3d model of a person and then using a well trained deep fake of the actor's face in combination.
Youtuber Shamook did just that with the finale of the Mandalorian season 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrHXA2cSpNU
He actually got a job with ILM out of it. The future of CGI actors will probably involve a fusion of techniques like this in order to get it right.
Thank you for ruining the mandalorian. I just started season 2.
If you think this stuff is neat, there's a neat improvement on this using what are essentially video walls. Replacing the greenscreen removes the problems with green or white, and gives presentors/actors better idea of their space.
Tom Scott did a quiz series showing off the technology, linked to timestamps where he explains things:
https://youtu.be/zV14G-Sxu7M?t=781
https://youtu.be/Odq0ggVVRyM?t=545
https://youtu.be/RDsRFpVp0kk?t=597
https://youtu.be/xIDr5n9UIR4?t=479
See also roughly the same technique being used in the Mandalorian TV show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUnxzVOs3rk
> This progress is also why new films look so badly lit.
I'm pretty sure it's the exact opposite.
Watch old films and the nighttime scenes are... almost cartoonishly lit. Like there are hidden floodlights everywhere, or just filmed in straight-out daytime but underexposed.
Whereas modern film and TV looks far closer to reality. I don't know what you mean at all that the "state of the art is still stuck with habits and techniques". If you've been on the set of a modern film or TV production, the state of the art is, well, state of the art. The lighting would be unrecognizable to someone from 30 years ago.
Can you give an example of a scene in a new movie you consider to be badly lit because of old "habits and techniques"?
Green-screen is a totally different situation, because it didn't exist before. But even there I think you're making a mistake with comparison to Star Wars. Have you watched The Mandalorian? Because that's current state of the art, and it's stunning. The environmental lighting is real, and the technology they use to achieve it is utterly amazing.
> now that we have streaming its not bound to time limits or irrelevant commercial pacing
The Mandalorian is a perfect example of this. The episodes varied from 25 minutes(!) to 47 minutes. Just take the time the plot needs, no more.
The thing that makes me sad is that IMO the best Star Wars film that came out since the Disney acquisition was Rogue One (even though it trampled all over the expanded universe novel Rebel Dawn, which I loved). Likely Disney views that movie as their second-worst Star Wars outing (after Solo), while I enjoyed it far more than episodes 7, 8, or 9.
On the optimistic side, I absolutely love The Mandalorian (which I didn't expect, and resisted watching until after season 2 was complete), and I'm looking forward to The Book of Boba Fett as well.
But I absolutely agree with you on the failure of "corporate written-by-committee". I think The Mandalorian is so great in no small part because it's run by a small number of people who really love Star Wars and have been fortunate enough to be granted near-complete creative control.
> Apple TV is the only service that has its unique style of content i.e. movie quality production values.
Am I missing something? What about Disney+ and (some) Netflix shows? The Mandalorian and the Marvel shows have movie budgets.
> When I got to Uni in Oct 2000, I could use BitchX/IRC on the lab irix machine to use a massive 10 MEGA bit connection to get voyager episodes. Compared with downloading on a 33.6kbit connection over a phone line that cost at least £2.40 (about $5-6 in today's money) that was an amazing experience.
There was some way cheaper ISP offerings about in that time/era. Most ISP's used a local 0845 call charge number, so wasn't that bad, however there was also some 0800 ones.
Was one that in the late 90's offered an 0800 to share holders and could get shares for sub £20 mark, unsure how they did it and indeed didn't last long, was also able to use two accounts to do a bonded line (ISDN). Only downside was it would drop the line every 2 hours, but with me OpenBSD firewall/gateway I setup, easy scripted around. That was my favourite of the dialup era as paid total of sub £40 for unlimited 128kbit internet and oh did I abuse that.
Then in 2000 the cable companies arrived and the start of what I would call real internet, no dialup messing about or charges - if you was lucky to be in the catchment area that is and inside the M25 helped there, though even today there are parts of London inside the M25 that the cable companies don't cover (I know as I found such an address not in there coverage due to cost of laying a cable across the road).
> I do remember one site that allowed me to do download SG1 episodes (about 128kbit, and this was probably cinepak or some form of mpeg1 compression) over a modem, and that was a lifeline.
I know exactly what you mean about TV shows back then and delays. For me southpark was the one that got that ball rolling, initially was realmedia encoded and ironically I watched every single episode almost religiously within an hour of it premiaring in America. Ironic as in 2003 I was in America when a new episode was out and fell asleep just before it came on and with that the first southpark episode I didn't watch within an hour or so of it airing was the only time I could of watched it live.
These days, it's mostly dip into some streaming subscription for a month or two every now and then, flitting around the offerings, munching thru their offerings in that period and comming back to subbing them a year or so later once new things are there to make it worthwhile.
But I'm not sure if it's age or my tastes, the enthusiasm and offerings just don't have me eagerly sitting in anticipation for the next episode or series these days as they did back then. Sure there are the odd gems that do that, but far less so than in the early days and a bit of choice/saturation overload perhaps, though mostly it's a case of many offerings just install a sense of ennui. With that, I would say the only TV show that has had me at the same enthusiasm level, would be the Mandalorian. beyond that, nothing jumps out at me really today and even South Park, I've become apathetic and not seen the last season (or maybe two).
One change though, that I do approve of that many streaming serious releases do. Which is, they release the entire season at once, and that I love as you can keep your momentum going. Albeit you shift you wait from weekly episode releases towards yearly season releases, though that was always been the case.
SW pivoting away from Movies to TV is a really good move in my opinion. The last 5 movies were fine. But on the TV has been great. Clone Wars, Rebels, Mandalorian have told the stories that have let me escape to the far far away galaxy.
Well they have a lot to live up to ... i really liked Rogue One and of course The Mandalorian.
Overall and personally am happy they are making new Star Wars content yet they probably should continue making films and shows that are outside of the beloved characters and use those characters sparely in other films and shows.
The Force Awakens was a repeat of the first two or three initial films. I liked it though The Last Jedi made me stop watching The series outside of The Mandalorian.
We will definitely have digitally-created stars as a separate medium. We have for a long time had animated characters who don't speak. They still involve intensive human direction to create them, but they don't have human form or human voice. They're still plenty entertaining.
They get to do things that humans can't do. They can entertain in entirely novel ways. Using them as a substitute for human actors is kinda the faster-horses-not-cars of movies.
We use CGI characters for inhuman effects, but I think it's often not very effective. I don't care for most superhero movies because I don't really care about watching CGIs punch CGIs harder than human actors could do. There aren't any stakes; there's no dramatic risk. I'd rather watch a martial arts movie, which is limited by what humans are capable of.
That's still something we're learning. Part of what made the Lord of the Rings films more interesting than the Hobbit follow-ons was that the latter used more practical effects. New Zealand was a big star in LotR; Hobbit used more CGI backgrounds. Audiences felt the sense of place.
We'll improve the tech so that it seems even more realistic. The new technology used in The Mandalorian is really exciting (though I'd be curious to see how it played on a big screen). But it was at its best when it made up very real-world seeming worlds, while animation uses digital worlds in totally unrealistic and even more exciting ways.
So I'm expecting that we'll continue to have practical effects in the best movies starring humans, and continue to have human stars. But we're still waiting for the first mega-hit CGI star who can do whatever magic it is Robert Downey Jr. does. When they can catch that, RDJ may well be out of a job -- not replaced, but the entire enterprise gone.
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TL;DR: We make world-leading VFX & Animation, you’ll have seen our work in any of the Star Wars movies, or The Mandalorian.
Working closely with filmmakers to assure their vision is realized on screen, ILM’s departments handle end to end virtual production, research and development, concept art, creature design, fully articulated animatics, a mixture of computer graphics effects, models and miniatures, digital matte paintings, and state-of-the-art animation procedures. The artists that staff these departments represent the true brain trust at ILM, and their creativity has driven new technologies into the movie moments that continue to thrill and transport audiences globally.
Industrial Light & Magic is a Lucasfilm Ltd. company serving the digital needs of the entertainment industry for visual effects. ILM has been awarded 3 Emmy Awards, 15 Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects, and received 33 Academy Awards for Scientific and Technical Achievements that have had an indelible impact on the art of filmmaking.
There's a missing term: "How much of our potential budget are we spending trying to fill in the other estimates?"
SETI is incredibly poorly funded compared to other science. For a long time it was barely funded at all. There's been an uptick recently, but a project like Breakthrough Listen runs on $10m/yr and gets ridiculously constrained access to telescope time.
The remaining SETI projects get by on less than $5m/yr. So SETI as a whole gets about as much funding as one episode of The Mandalorian.
No wonder we haven't found anything. We're barely even looking.
My experience is the same. Used to pirate music, then spotify was good enough not to bother anymore. Used to pirate movies and TV, now I only do it occasionally for titles I want to watch, but aren't being streamed on any service I'm subscribed to.
I'm still pissed at Disney for canceling Gina Carano, so I might pirate the next season of the mandalorian if I still care by then.
> Unreal is now used a lot in specialized domains like film-making (globe fly-bys in the news and documentaries?)
It goes further than that now. For The Mandalorian, they famously set up a "20-foot high, 270-degree semicircular LED video wall"[0] to use as a backdrop for the shots, and that wall was rendering the desired environment using Unreal Engine. No need to chroma key an alien planet in post, when you can make it a part of the scene (and now the actors can see it too as they play!). More at [1].
--
[0] - https://www.polygon.com/tv/2020/2/20/21146152/the-mandalorian-making-of-video-unreal-engine-projection-screen
[1] - https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/forging-new-paths-for-filmmakers-on-the-mandalorian
you think that's high? I usually binge at least 2-3 seasons of a new-to-me show a month on netflix, prime, hulu, if I'm really busy -- my wife makes up for the time I miss watching new-to-her shows, or the kids watch new-to-them shows or disney launches a new movie... I mean.. Wandavision, Falcon+Winter Soldier, Mandalorian, New Mighty Ducks are top notch and that's just disney...
Netflix has the Witcher which I still need to watch, just finished two different ones on figure skating Zero Chill (Hockey+Figure skating) and Spinning out. Both really good shows that weren't on my radar. Recently finished Queen's gambit too--also great and not on radar...
Lots of back-burner shows too (waiting for the next season).
7-11pm is usually dinner, tv with family put kids to bed, watch 1-2 shows with wife, then go to bed. Sometimes I watch old movies that are new to me just cause I heard they're good but haven't seen them yet. Grew up in 80's and just recently finished Fast Times at Ridgemont High for example.
120 hours of screen time's easy... weekends are probably a lot more.. maybe 8 hour sessions, definitely enough to watch 1 whole new-to-us series... esp. with lockdowns and covid.
You do know Kathleen Kennedy has worked on many successful, beloved movies and was hired for that reason by George Lucas, right? Whatever imaginary version of Kennedy lives in your head strikes me as not particularly plausible.
It doesn't even matter if the characters in Star Wars are white or black or brown- they appear to live in a society with no human concept of race- so I don't even know why you keep bring up the topic of diversity? Human races have zero to do with the plot of any Star Wars ever.
From what i've seen of it Mandalorian depicts a color blind, gender blind social world just like the sequal trilogy, they are sort of the same, so why go on about it?
I don't know why you keep bringing up diversity? It has nothing to do with the characters or why Mandorian is different from the movies so who cares?
The fact you enjoy Mandolorian but not the films just suggests you like one thing and don't like another. It says nothing about gender, diversity, artistic intent (artists tend to try to make good art even if they fail at it. Business people tend to try to make money.) so I don't know how else to explain your posts other than reactionary.
It's cool you like the Mandalorian but you don't actually know the motives of anyone involved, you just know you like the art they made.
You might be projecting a bit here. I'm neither angry nor upset. Nobody told me to feel any which way. I also don't think you can point to anything I've actually said and honestly categorize it as "reactionary", unless to you "reactionary" just means... reacting to the behavior and words of others. And if you want to talk about facts, I'm the only one that has presented any in this conversation: box office results and Kathleen Kennedy's own words. What have you provided?
And no, I don't think hiring a diverse group of people and making good product are opposites or at all mutually exclusive. I never said that, so please don't misrepresent me (as you seem very keen to do). What I do think is that people have priorities and if your priorities are out of whack then that is going to have an effect on your outcomes.
If Apple says that their goal is to have phones be made with as (racial and gender, not neuro) diverse a group as possible, rather than "we want to make the best phones", then yes, I absolutely would be concerned about the future quality of their phones. I don't care who designs/makes my iPhone, and so my priorities and Apple's priorities would be misaligned. In fact, probably the best signal for the future of Apple design recently (for me) was when they parted ways with Jony Ive, a white man. But that was not a good signal to me because of his race or gender, but rather because I think Jony Ive without Steve Jobs to curb his worst impulses was bad for Apple products.
Likewise, I don't care if Star Wars is directed by a straight white man or a pansexual black woman (my two favorite episodes of The Mandalorian S2 were directed by a woman and a black man) – I just want the focus to be on quality storytelling, which is clearly not Kathleen Kennedy's primary concern, if you (again) look at any of her public comments on the subject. Luckily it is Jon Favreau's concern, which is why with The Mandalorian we got both: compelling storytelling with strong characters (of all types), directed by a diverse set of directors.
This is what Kathleen Kennedy had to say about the production of the Mandalorian, of which (thankfully) she played very little part in:
> In March 2018. Kennedy added that the series was an opportunity for a diverse group of writers and directors to be hired to create Star Wars stories, after the franchise's films had been criticized for being written and directed by only white men.
You don't need closed-room meeting comments to just look at her public comments and infer the motivations from there. Literally, go and look at any public comments she has made.
Yes, but the question is why didn't they have a coherent story?
Is it really just "some movies have coherent stories, and some don't ¯\_(ツ)_/¯".
I think if you listen to Kathleen Kennedy talk about her vision for Star Wars, it becomes pretty clear that her goal was not "make good cinema", it was "push (racial and gender) diversity-for-the-sake-of-diversity agenda".
I mean, her contribution to The Mandalorian (which luckily was entirely conceived outside of her influence) was:
> In March 2018. Kennedy added that the series was an opportunity for a diverse group of writers and directors to be hired to create Star Wars stories, after the franchise's films had been criticized for being written and directed by only white men.
I think the claim here though is that part of the reason the story is incoherent and that you have a lot of the other problems is because they weren't focused on making a good Star Wars trilogy. If you listen to basically anything the head honcho for these films (Kathleen Kennedy) has said, you get the distinct feeling that she had a different objective than "make good cinema".
As noted, this also seemed to be Rian Johnson's goal as well. It was not "make a compelling story within the Star Wars universe", it was "subvert expectations". Which in the end basically meant turning all the male characters into whinging losers / arrogant assholes while turning all the women into wise sages / over-powered wunderkinds who need no training and make no mistakes, even when they literally do: Leia and Holdo were the ones in charge when literally the entire rebel fleet was destroyed except for one ship with like 10 people on it, and the script gives them zero flack for this. And then of course you have the script letting said terrible leader become an awesome and amazing martyr by single-handedly destroying the huge and menacing enemy flagship in a way that was visually stunning (loved it in the cinema) but broke Star Wars canon in honestly a pretty staggering way (realized once my brain caught up with my eyes).
This actually seems to rhyme a bit with the OP – you can't point out what terrible leaders they were in VIII because the leaders in question happened to be women (I say "happened to be", but it is also clear that the decision to put leadership of the good guys in the hands of women while leaving the leadership of the bad guys in the hands of men was a pretty deliberate move).
Contrast this with The Mandalorian, which has strong and compelling female characters and is adored by audiences of all genders. Why? Because the agenda was not "subvert expectations", it was "make a good Star Wars story".
Yes, and him being in Disney movie earning money for Disney would only tarnish his image. But one can dream, that in an alternate universe, where pop culture is not wholly owned by reptiloid corporations, there could be the Mandalorian where RMS could play a droid technician muttering about damn proprietary code... and that'd be awesome.
are they paying for more than basic cable?
I know with my family we aren't My parent may for netflix My sister pays for HBO My wife and I pay for Disney/Hulu (also espn came in the bundle but none of us watch sports but there wasn't a option to not get it) we all share accounts and each have our profile. We each have our own amazon prime account but that's more for shipping, with the streaming as a nice bonus.
I will get a free trail to other services and cancel them after i finish what ever show i wanted i couldn't get on the other pay services. which reminds me i need to sign up for a free paramount+ trial for the next batch of star trek seasons.
then there are all of the free streaming services that are ad supported (pluto IMDBtv etc...)
Honestly though other than a few prestige shows (Witcher, Mandalorian, Wandvision, Picard) and reruns of 90 and 00 sitcoms (scrubs frazer freinds) when i cant sleep, or star trek binge when my wife pulls a weekend evening shift at work I don't watch that much tv.
Mostly I just listen to audible or watch youtube
> I dunno... The Mandalorian has achieved everything that the prequels and episodes 7-9 were unable to; it did exactly the things folks said were impossible.
That's a good way to put it. Entirely agree.
I dunno... The Mandalorian has achieved everything that the prequels and episodes 7-9 were unable to; it did exactly the things folks said were impossible.
While I've been a fan of Discovery for the most part, and it occasionally shows glimpses of promise, it's largely not "Star Trek." The story telling is simply just not rooted same soul that Trek has been built upon. I'm okay with change, but not so much with creating flashy spectacles at the expense of meaningful story telling.
>I never read that blog and don’t read the NYT but I will say in response only to your comment that racists and sexists don’t seem to enjoy Star Wars like they used to.
Most of the ire is directly at the sequel trilogy, notably the last two movies thereof. So if one of your coworkers says they hated The Last Jedi but loved The Mandalorian, then you can reasonably report them to HR for engaging in discomforting behavior.
Ethics? I don't care too much if mouse company gets more money for their empire from me or not. Lets be real, that money more less goes to people that have nothing to do with people that create shows/content etc.
But thats beside the point, I don't care much about it. I am adult, I earn money and at this point in my life my time IS worth money.
If the effort/cost of watching a show it greater than firing up torrents, I will fire up torrents.
Its not like pirating a show is free, there are hidden 'costs' involved (time == money). You have to manually track episodes you watch, and if interrupted, where you stopped mid episode. You have to get the right version/quality etc etc... All of it is some effort that you have to put in.
When you are young or dont have much spare cash, that cost feels much smaller.
Watching via Netflix et al. have none of those inconvenience 'costs'.
Start netflix -> continue watching. Done. I am now watch it.
However the moment that actual subscription costs and hassle of managing subscriptions exceedes 'cost of inconvinience' of piracy. I will pirate it. If I want to watch show X and netfix have only season 1-5 in EU and 1-7 in US, i will pirate it. I pay for netflix and I pirate its shows cuz for some reason even tho EU pays more for Netflix subscriptions we get reduced catalog!
I am not sure why this seems so hard for business people to understand. You will never get all people to pay for the 'digital goods'. And thats ok.
But the moment that you start throwing obstacles in the way of people willing to pay... well, thats just pushing your customers into BitTorrent arms.
I myself only use Netflix at the moment, I am not going to buy disney+ just to watch mandalorian.
Ethical/lawful or not, I don't care. I am a customer, you make an effort.
The work at ILM for virtual production of films is pretty incredible, you can google how The Mandalorian was made and read a bit about stagecraft (their software) online
> I mean, if you count all the content they own and you already saw before on cinema or other medias then you're right.
If you don't count that then Disney+ probably isn't for you. It's ideal for parents who want a bunch of good kids movies and shows. Mandalorian, although it was the "killer app" is an outlier. The rest of the original content I've watched on there is almost literally advertisements for Disneyland. Just buy a membership for a month and watch Mando.
I thought Mandalorian was the definition of low quality fluff personally. Only saw season 1. Weakly designed fight scenes, several filler episodes with pretty poor plots (most egregiously the prison one), and my personal least favorite, the super ai droid that 360 no scopes everybody, dual wielding pistols. I've asked a few times why people thought it was good and most often the answer is Baby Yoda (on HN).
shrug. ymmv
The Mandalorian is far from perfect, but it has some excellent episodes and is based in a robust understanding of Star Wars.
I have many qualms about The Mandalorian, but compared to the dumpster fire called the "sequel trilogy" it's very good content.
> Once in game graphics become literally indistinguishable from real life then we'll start to plateau in terms of complexity of "tricks" and raw computing power will be able to catch up.
Maybe. Alternatively games won't actually want to render photorealistic and will want to render with varying types of stylized graphics. Is that easier or harder? Probably a little bit of both.
We actually are at a point where we can real-time render photorealistic scenes... for certain types of objects. Primarily static environments. Photogrammetry is basically cheating, but it is highly effective! Mandalorian is famously filmed on a virtual set and it's cool as fuck.
Graphics is moving rapidly into physics. We might be soon be able to render photorealistic scene descriptions. However simulating the virtual world we still have a long, long ways to go. By simulation I mean everything from the environment (ocean, snow, etc) to characters. We most definitely can not synthesize arbitrary virtual humans.
Will we someday see a movie that _looks_ like a live action movie but is completely virtual? Oof. Maybe? But even if we could, would we want to? I'm not sure.
My favorite scene in all three original trilogy is the opening when luke does the somersault flip as r2d2 launches the light saber at him...
That said, as an adult, after being let down immensely by eps 1-3, and finding mediocre/nostalgic entertainment in 7-9, rogue one actually feels better to me than all other movies.
I can't really compare it with Mandalorian though, except that they compliment each other nicely. I like RO because of it's dark, everybody dies in the end, that is totally NOT something you'd expect from ANY disney movie.
The Mandalorian Season 2 Last Episode: the best ending to a season finale ever! Totally lived up to the Hype!
Rogue 1 is my favorite star wars film overall.
Incredibly well executed and fantastic characters.
Disney dropped the ball on every single thing other than R1 and Mandalorian.
I was watching The Mandalorian last night and thinking about what it would have been like to have a new Star Wars movie on broadcast TV each week as a kid back in the 80s.
I think most of my actual exposure was through toys and advertising. The movies were only on TV every couple of years. I remember listening to Star Wars on the radio
I just got Disney+ to enjoy while I’m off and as someone who had to try 3 times to get through the latest Star Wars movie: the mandalorian is good.
The Mandalorian has restored the faith in the future of the franchise in millions of fans. Most of us thought Star Wars was over considering how mediocre the last six movies have been but along comes this well-written, fun adventure that manages to tie together the previous movies, animated series and books. Imagine a new trilogy made by Filoni and Favreau - they would absolutely kill it.
They actually might... think of it like gym memberships. Sure you need a hook, but as Mandalorian showed, that can be a single exclusive tv show that doesn’t require much broadband cost. Maybe not the best solution long term but since when has that been the shareholders goal?
Setting obvious privacy implications aside, I'm surprised how good the animations look. I wonder if this could be developed further to enable cheap motion capture solutions for film/game studios. If it works in real-time then coupled with a game engine it could give you a direct in-camera look on what a cgi heavy scene might look like, without requiring (too) fancy hardware and also not adding distracting jump suits and reflective tennis balls and dot makeup all over the place.
The Mandalorian production comes to mind, they've been pushing this kind of direction hard.
Very cool stuff, thanks for sharing!
I’m not sure if it’s hatred towards sex workers they aren’t likely going to have the Reavers either at least not in the same manner as the show yet alone the film.
Firefly was really dark with a lot of gore compared to most network shows of the time.
Serenity was probably closer to the level of “dark” JW wanted to have in the show mixed with a FU of some sorts to fans by killing so many of the main cast and basically killing any sequel possibility on either screen.
The issue Disney has is that Disney+ has no room for anything that isn’t kids friendly because it’s a babysitting as a service first.
The Mandalorian goes out it’s way to avoid graphic violence if it wasn’t such a money maker to Disney I don’t think they would’ve it slip into the TV-14 realm for the recent episodes before that it was pretty much TV-PG.
Under these circumstances it’s going to be very hard to have Inara on the show.
In fact I’m not sure how Fox even got away with a TV-14 rating for FF initially, Germany, Australia, NZ and quite a few other countries have rated it 16/18+.
My guess is that Fox got the show rated on the based on the pilot and with how the season progressed they would’ve definitely have had to re-rate the show if it wasn’t canceled.
Disney has a real problem on their hands right now they are in possession of so many IPs that they no longer can be kids only or even kids first across the board and they’ll likely have to segregate their streaming services to support that.
I would not be surprised if Disney would launch a spin-off brand for their more mature properties sort of like Fox and FX.
History/Context:
How Green Screen Worked Before Computers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msPCQgRPPjI
Hollywood's History of Faking It | The Evolution of Greenscreen Compositing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8aoUXjSfsI
Zoran Perisic's 'Zoptic' front-projection system used in Superman: The Movie
https://www.fxphd.com/fxblog/effects-of-days-past-making-superman-fly/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbXC16p8tNc
The technology that’s replacing the green screen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yNkBic7GfI
Mandalorian 'Stagecraft' technology
https://www.slashfilm.com/the-mandalorian-stagecraft-photos/
RARBG has 4K rips of the newest Mandalorian episode, which was released today. DRM doesn't work.
I don’t know. I really liked the Boys on Amazon Prime. Except they now release one episode at a time. And Disney did the same thing with the Mandalorian. So yeah - I can’t binge watch new series. Watch anytime is more like a DVR feature.
Netflix has other problems. If there’s one or two seasons of a show, you don’t know if the show had a proper ending or if it was just cancelled.
In terms of production The Mandalorian is pretty amazing. In terms of script it is predictable, fairly boring and drowning in various "the plot needs to happen" moments.
For some reason I cannot phantom, Netflix and others seem to have tons of money to throw at the production, but don't seem to want to spend more than a few pennies on script.
I tried watching Cursed on Netflix, and had to force myself past the first episode due to the horrible writing. It never got better. The pieces were there for a fairly interesting show but it clearly needed more work on the writing side. Instead they pushed it into production and made another predictable flop.
The prequel and new generation Star Wars movies are SW content and are mediocre to downright criminally awful. I’d given up on SW completely. Yet The Mandalorian delighted me and I’m craving for more. So no, clearly being content isn’t enough by a long shot.
> Would people like it if it didn't have the star wars backdrop? Does the star wars backdrop even make that much sense?
The bulk of the plot would work fine if it were space-bounty-hunter-with-angry-people-after-him, plus friends and a macguffin. Star Wars flavoring seems like the main way that this differentiates it from Cowboy Bebop (space bounty hunter in the solar system, hops between planets...).
A big part of why the show is good is the mysterious "what's under the mask" aspect. We've had Boba/Jango Fett for decades, but it's really neat to see the expansion of this lore about the mandalorian culture -- why they always stay masked, etc. SW nerds like me often find lore tidbits delicious.
The Mandalorian also happens to have ridiculously good production values compared to most shows -- I'm watching a movie in serial form. (See also Altered Carbon.) It also has interesting characters that I am curious about (both heroes and villains), with backstories I'd like to hear more about. THAT part doesn't need to be Star Wars. It could be samurai, or space privateers, or drama on a space station (DS9), and as long as it's done well, I'll want to watch it.
there are a lot of visually/technically impressive movies and tv shows that are (subjectively) awful-mediocre in terms of their substance (see: Avatar)
i don't see how the OP's take on the mandalorian is at odds with the idea that the people who make it are probably pretty good at their jobs
Plenty of shows can be good with just one or two seasons, and more is worse. Freaks & Geeks: 1 season, amazing. Ditto UK The Office. Fleabag: 2 short seasons, amazing. The OA: AMAZING first season with a complete coherent ending, then they had to make a bizarre, scattershot second season. Ditto Killing Eve (how many damn times can she get killed lol). Downton Abbey: PLANNED for 3 seasons (pre, during, & post wwI) but it was so popular they just rambled on for ages until it looked like the scripts were being pulled directly from tumblr ("beloved character came back from america! for a wedding episode! plus: PUPPIES!!" literally).
So I don't totally get the "cancelled too soon" argument. The OA should have not run to even 2 seasons.
There's a trend of not producing art or even something original, but producing "content." For example someone asked me if The Mandalorian is good. "It's star wars Content" I replied. "If you like star wars, and want Content, you'll like it." Is the plot novel? Is it original or compelling? No, but boy it's fun to see yoda puppet and more Content from the SW universe you've come to know and love!
A lot of these series may have run their creative course & while megafans want more "Content" it's the same thing as something being cancelled too soon, and most people aren't megafans.
I agree that increased integration and dominance can lead to higher prices (as you mention with cable), but is this a "traditional" rental?
I was under the impression that it was intended to make up for the fact that many theaters are closed or people don't want to go out to them. Pricing is more in line with a set of first run movie tickets for an adult and a couple of kids or a pay-per-view event.
Still, I wouldn't be surprised if it's also a way to gauge what people are willing to pay for new, high profile Disney material via streaming services and might signal similar high-cost rentals in the future. How much would people pay to watch (for example) the next season of "Mandalorian" a month before it shows up in the normal Disney+ listing?
At what point have people become so entitled that they think they should be able to consume all the content they want for free because they are slightly inconvenienced by price or availability.
If you don't feel like paying, don't watch it.
If you don't feel like finding out what service a show is on, don't watch it.
If you don't like the fact that you need to subscribe to multiple streaming networks to watch the shows you want to, don't subscribe and don't watch the shows. Having 5 streaming services to subscribe to is still infinitely better than cable.
If you think piracy "sticks it to the man", you'd do a better job by not watching a show and not talking about it. Pirating the Mandalorian and gushing about it to friends, family, and the internet just helps Disney.
Edit: Please downvote me, I enjoy finding out how many people consider media consumption a fundamental human right instead of the luxury good that it is.
Regardless, ask yourself how you'd feel if the film, video game, or book you pirate was made by a close friend. Would you tell them you pirated their product? And if so, why?
As a video game creator whose digital games cost nothing to copy and distribute, I can assure you that piracy directly affects my ability to continue making games.
Effective CEOs very often micromanage details of their company's core product. The most famous was of course Steve Jobs. Here is a quote from former Disney CEO Bob Iger showing that he gives creative feedback on their flagship properties: “I’ve probably seen each episode of The Mandalorian three times,” Iger says. “First, to give some notes. Second, to see the rough cut and the impact of the notes. And now, just recently, I watched all the final cuts so that I could be blown away by how it looks.”
Agreed, I think Unreal Engine is much more suitable for VFX than Unity. Most people here on hn probably already seen the Mandalorian use of the engine.
I have also recently watched this video [0] of an independent film maker using some of it's features for virtual production which I found truly mind boggling.
[0] https://youtu.be/cOI-cjdULmk
I think with every engine- or console generation people will go "this is photorealistic!", but in practice / real games it doesn't look / feel that way, or (maybe more likely) you get used to it until you run into the next best thing.
That said, The Mandalorian has used the Unreal engine to render real-time backgrounds for scenes, so it's good enough for that at least.
And in films they don't need to do real-time, they can take their time to render a scene.
I think they are bound to. You don’t think as soon as Disney can they aren’t going to start showing ads for everything Disney related?
The worst step back to me from TV -> streaming -> streaming becoming more TV like is content release schedules. The Mandalorian on Disney Plus was a great example, you have all the episodes ready and there isn’t a good reason to keep them sitting behind a time gate. I would be much more likely to subscribe for a month to watch a show in a week than I would be to subscribe for a few months to few one show. Instead you get none of my money
Financially it's been fine, but the last movie was disliked by critics, the audience reviews were mixed at best, and the fanbase has been at each other throats.
Hollywood tends to pay a lot of attention to CinemaScore (very roughly: exit polls of people seeing it on the opening night), and The Rise of Skywalker got the lowest CinemaScore (B+) of any live-action Star Wars movie - lower than Solo and the prequels. "They audience liked it ALMOST as much as the one with Jar-Jar!" is not what Disney wanted to hear, especially since that sort of thing will have huge flow on effects to the ongoing revenue stream (toys, theme park rides, merchandising). For example, I believe the newest Star Wars ride has sharply underperformed, and Disney leadership will probably believe (correctly) that the poor reception the latest movies got was a driving factor.
And the box office take, while still very substantial, was underwhelming for what was meant to be the crowning glory of a 40 year franchise, and compares poorly to other end movies for big franchises.
The "point" of buying Lucasarts from Disnye's point of view was to apply a lot of money and some of the magic they've used on the Marvel franchise to make a truly vast amount of money, get a bunch of critical acclaim, and set up the franchise as a money spinning machine that will keep filling theatres for spinoff movies every year forever. Instead they merely made a very large amount of money, the critics said the last movie stunk, and the fanbase seems deeply disinterested in more movies, which had led to them cancelling a bunch of planned movies.
It's not that bad, and I'm sure it's fixable, and the Mandalorian is doing great, but MAN is it less than what they were hoping for.
(And persistent rumours have it that Iger intervened directly into the creative process of The Rise of Skywalker late in the cycle. If true, that makes the disappointing TRoS results reflect on him...but I obviously have no idea if that's true.)
That being said....I don't think Star Wars was bad enough to trigger this. CEOs typically can do much worse for much longer, and as others have noted, the choice of replacement (and the speed of the replacement) is mystifying. I would guess ill health, or maybe some sex scandal rather than poor performance being a factor.
As a former Disney employee and someone who's kept up with internal politics, even though his contract was up at the end of next year this feels sudden and not in line with how Disney tends to do things. Disney has quite a number of disparate businesses, from theme parks to streaming services to movies. Chapek is a business guy that has done consumer products and parks (parts of the business that aren't huge growth areas), and hasn't even been president of parks for that long. He has no experience on the creative side. Usually the future CEO is appointed to a COO/President role in order to help them learn the parts of the business they don't have experience in. It also helps vet if they'll be capable of leading all those business heads, which is how they determined not to go with Tom Staggs after he was made COO. Not doing this is pretty irregular, especially with all the shakeup that occurred with Fox. They're still working through a lot of that.
Similarly, I don't buy the story that Iger is moving into a creative leadership role. It's true there's been a vacuum there since Lasseter left, but unless there's long term tenure planned, Iger won't be very influential. Anyone who's worked at a large company knows that no one listens to the guy whose only responsibility is to have creative ideas if they have no other real responsibility and will be out in a few months. Iger put himself into a meaningless, insignificant role, and no one has satisfactorily explained why.
I don't think there's a scandal. If there was, the narrative around his departure would be different and he wouldn't be sticking out to the end of his contract. He wouldn't still be chairman of the board. I've heard a rumor the board is upset about Star Wars, but Q1 2020 was pretty solid and Mandalorian was well received. I'm actually worried he's sick, though I hope not because I admire him a lot. Regardless, I do feel like there's another shoe. I guess we'll have to wait to find out what it is.
One of the details from the article is that using anamorphic lenses essentially treats the camera sensor as if it is larger than it actually is, which reduces the effective depth of field.
If you look carefully at the backgrounds in Mandalorian scenes, a lot of the time, they are slightly soft (out of focus)--which hides the pitch of the LED wall by expanding each LED point into larger, overlapping circles of confusion. To be clear, that softness is a physical effect of the camera lens, not a digital effect on the wall, so it can be captured by the camera sensor up to any resolution you want.
> Also, how do they cope with the scan rate of the background video being played back to sync with the camera recording the footage?
In the article they say the latency is about half a frame, which they handled by using slow camera moves--which conveniently is similar to how the original Star Wars films were shot.
If you're talking about the refresh rate of the LEDs, I believe those can be cranked up way higher than the frame rate of the camera, which was likely 24 or maybe 30 frames per second to give that cinematic feel.
https://outline.com/https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/20/how-the-mandalorian-and-ilm-invisibly-reinvented-film-and-tv-production/
I watched the original trilogy in the theaters when they were released. (Admittedly I was a bit young for the first one.)
I've seen all the follow-ups/addons/sequels/rewrites that exist. Rogue One is the movie that I waited 30 years to see another story in the SW universe. It wasn't perfect but it was damn good enough.
The Mandalorian gives me hope that 'Grownups' are in charge and can create something worth looking at.
I am holding out hope that a story and plot will emerge. I really hate "baby yoda", but if that's what it takes to move a real story along I am willing to tolerate it.
#1 It looks incredible. Must win Emmy for best cinematography! #2 It feels real. It feels right.
I'm sorry you didn't like Rogue One.
This is super interesting stuff and I've been following it for some time. I just wrote it up with a bit more context:
https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/20/how-the-mandalorian-and-ilm-invisibly-reinvented-film-and-tv-production/
It's not just ILM and Disney either, this is going to be everywhere. It's complex to set up and run in some ways but the benefits are enormous for pretty much everyone involved. I doubt there will be a major TV or film production that doesn't use LED walls 5 years from now.
6 million pages! A quick look at their distribution:
3.6M of these pages got less than 10 views during December. 4.3M pages got less than 100 views each. 2.3M got less than 1000 views. That's the long tail. On the other side 680K pages got more than 1,000 views, 111K pages got more than 10k views, only 6k pages got more than 100k views, and 90 pages were able to gather more than 1M views (Star Wars, The Mandalorian, The Witcher...).
In summary: The top 7.2% of Wikipedia pages earn 87% of all the monthly views.
Yesterday I posted a deeper analysis on how these pages get their daily views:
- https://towardsdatascience.com/interactive-the-top-2019-wikipedia-pages-d3b96335b6ae
Apparently the most popular pages are all related to movies (Avengers, Joker, ...), series (Ted Bundy, Chernobyl, Game of Thrones), and deaths.
One of my favorite little nuances in the original GITS anime is a scene in the middle that immerses the viewer in the world. This video[0] goes into detail about this and how it relates to aspect-to-aspect transitions in comics.
Comparing this element alone with the nature of the 2017 Hollywood film really has helped me identify so many other similar events in media where I previously would have struggled to pinpoint why I felt certain responses to something I watched.
The most recent example being the comparison of the pacing of The Mandalorian with The Rise of Skywalker.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXTnl1FVFBw
But The Mandalorian runs entirely on brand. It's the franchise that survived "Episode One". The Mandalorian could be the worst TV since the Ewok Christmas Special and still yield almost exactly the same numbers, in the present. From what I hear it's quite the opposite (personally I have stopped tracking Star Wars two films ago), but all that quality is only important for the long term outlook of the franchise.
>is the most streamed television show in recent history Where did you find those numbers ? All I could find was:
'The Mandalorian earned nearly 40 million “demand expressions” during the week of Nov. 10-16, according to data provided to Observer by research firm Parrot Analytics. The firm tracks video streaming, social media activity, photo sharing, blogging, fan and critic rating platforms and other consumer demand sources to put together a composite of viewership and growth. Demand expressions represent the total audience demand being expressed for a title within a market and not specific viewership statistics.'
Which sounds like a bunch of mumbo jumbo presented by a 'research firm' wanting to get customers.
> What is the hit rate of Hollywood?
Look at Disney.
> It’s difficult not to look at Disney’s record-breaking year, securing eight of the top 10 highest-grossing films of 2019 domestically
https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/23/21034937/disney-star-wars-box-office-2019-marvel-pixar-star-wars-avengers-lion-king-frozen
It seems to be a well oiled machine.
Their streaming service is no exception. The Mandalorian show, run by Jon Favreau (director of Iron Man and The Lion King) is the most streamed television show in recent history, eclipsing the popularity of Game of Thrones and Netflix's darling, Stranger Things—and that's their first at bat.
https://observer.com/2019/12/the-mandalorian-episode-5-disney-plus-ratings-viewership/
The only media sector where Disney's dominance isn't currently felt is video games—the biggest sector of entertainment by total revenue—where Disney's strategy seems to have been lacking for decades, and where it has not been able to acquire itself out of muddling performance. They were able to outsource a hit with the recent Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order game however, so maybe that will change.
> But in sci-fi specifically, I'm so sick of the trope of "there's a thing that threatens the very fabric of the universe", and literally everything the main characters do between learning about it and resolving it are related.
This made me think of “The Mandalorian”. An 8 episode “season”, and a good half of the episodes were unrelated to the main story arc. Is this a good thing or not? It’s hard to say. I don’t feel terribly attached to the show, frankly.
The vast amount of Mandalorian memes seems to directly reflect Disney was correct to return to a weekly release schedule and away from the Netflix model of binge watching. Netflix shows often generate memes for a weekend or a week if Netflix is lucky, then dissipate quickly. With new Mandalorian episode each week, social media has been inundated with weekly fresh memes like clockwork.
It could also just be a Star Wars effect and that this is the first Star Wars TV series of any kind so that's also going to balance in its favor, or that it struck a nerve.
Ironically, Disney's lawyers actually tried to shut down some of the memes with DMCA takedowns in an instinctive bit of trying to control their copyrights. I'm not sure Disney quite expected the social media firestorm they created with The Mandalorian either.
About a tenth of 1% is totally new content. There's really a couple of documentaries, two features and the Mandalorian. And that's it.
They couldn't launch the service with just that - Apple are struggling a lot and basically giving away their service and they still have more than that.
I can't speak for Vizio Smartcast, but both the mobile app and desktop website both support Chromecast. I watched the first few episodes of The Mandalorian on my Chromecast last night. I started casting from my Linux desktop no less.
Does anyone else still torrent?
I rarely watch a tv show or a movie, but when I do I just torrent it. I've been doing this since Limewire (which was a lot of really shitty porn at the time).
Showed my boys Princess Mononoke the other day - will show them the Mandalorian tonight, a buddy told me its pretty good
Managed to download the Apple TV app and watch the first episode of The Mandalorian last night when it released early. Watching that episode was completely smooth at the time. But later while just browsing I found several issues. Some content curation related, like one or two shows only having a single season listed, but multiple seasons' worth of episodes assigned to that single season. Also, the queuing system (adding shows/movies to the watchlist or w/e they call it) didn't seem to work; the check mark showed after selecting it for each item, but nothing would actually come up on the queue page.
>> “I’ve probably seen each episode of The Mandalorian three times,” Iger says. “First, to give some notes. Second, to see the rough cut and the impact of the notes. And now, just recently, I watched all the final cuts so that I could be blown away by how it looks.”
You see this sometimes in large B2B projects. As soon as v senior management are involved in "tweaking" products you know you are likely screwed given their disconnect and lack of ability for people further down to say "no". And thats for software, cant imagine the impact it would have on something as creative as movies/TV.
arent Friends and The Office some of the most streamed shows?
I have to think Disneys back catalog of shows and movies will be a bigger draw short term than their new content. Are people buying it to watch The Mandalorian and the new Lady and the Tramp, or are they buying it so their kids can watch every disney movie ever made? Dont get me wrong, having a bunch of Marvel mini-series as their launch content is a brilliant move to make it not "just the old stuff."