How To Fix Hollywood's Movie Problem

Humble Advice from an Ordinary Consumer

Dear reader, do you go to the movie theater anymore? How often do you watch a movie anymore?

Over at Ted Gioia’s Substack, we find his downer article about Hollywood’s Movie Problem, titled, doomsday-like, “The Movie Business is Over?” This one quotes Jerry Seinfeld as saying just that, with ominous graphs playing up tanking box-office receipts and plummeting movie-studio stock prices.

The normies I know — I say that lovingly, for I am one — have stopped going to theaters.

One guy I know, who is possibly reading this, used to sneak off to the movie theater every week. About three years ago, he just stopped. COVID didn’t help, but for him it was the quality of the offerings. He’s a middle-aged guy. Over in our small-town theater, three-quarters of the offerings are for children, either the real kind or the grown-up kind. Yet not many of them are going. They’ve got phones, duh!

Mr. Gioia’s solution to the vast problems affecting the movie industry are entirely humanistic. From my perspective as a cinephile, they look awesome: “embrace human creativity, quirky filmmakers, charismatic actors, bold screenplays, rule-breaking stories.”

However, as a self-confessed normie with somewhat of a capitalistic mindset — at least I try to think about how to put people in seats, even if I disagree strongly with greed and hedonism — some of Gioia’s wonderful humanistic solutions sound too cinephilic, meaning too elite or upper-crust.

If you are running a movie studio, you want the entire world going to your movies, hopefully multiple times. And today you can in fact do that.

But you have a big problem. You have forgotten what it’s like to be a typical consumer whose hedonistic opportunities are off the charts.

That is why I am here. I will offer you a few solutions, dear movie studio executive, to your problem. Because you need to think like a typical teenager in China, a middle-aged man in America, and a classy female in Europe. That should cover most people most places, although I would try to strategize around India, too.

Therefore, what you need to try to do is . . .

1. Bring back movie stars.

Nothing could be more obvious. The real reason people have gone to movies since about 1900 was to, excuse me, see hot people up close.

No cinephile wants to sound this vain, but I must admit it. It’s true.

Let’s modify this for propriety’s sake: the real reason people have gone to movies since 1900 was to see fascinating-looking people who are charismatic in front of the camera.

That’s who we want to see, “we” being the average person that makes up about 6 billion people or so. We want to know their names, we want to be like them, we want to be their friends, we want to live vicariously through them.

At the moment, nobody knows any movie stars, with the possible exception of old ones, Leonardo DiCaprio included. The current problem is one striking every American institution: the really old oldsters just won’t give up. Hollywood keeps promoting the geriatic movie stars.

Meanwhile, how many movie stars under 30 do you know? Not even Taylor Swift counts in this category.

How many female movie stars does anybody know? Go around today and ask normies on the street. Crickets will ensue. This strikes me as *really* bad, because great female movie stars mean that men in general are attracted to them, and women in general feel relationally warm and friendly to them.

It *always* used to be that everybody knew many movie stars, including the young hot ones. There are countless songs lamenting the phenomena of the “New Kid in Town” — cue The Eagles — in which the cute young new thing beats out the mid-tier star just by virtue of being the cute young new thing.

Why oh why has Hollywood completely abandoned the star system that was its cultural engine for 110 years? It beats me.

Look, I go to movies in part because of who is in the movie. Is Tom Cruise in a movie? I will watch! So will my wife.

Except Tom Cruise is 60, his prostate is growing ever larger, and the wonders of cosmetics and cosmetic surgery can only do so much for again stars.

Where is this generation’s James Dean? The Brat Pack? The young SNL comedians? Charlie Chaplin? Errol Flynn? Mary Pickford? Marilyn Monroe?

Et cetera!

2. Cater to Streaming

This one is quite controversial. A number of moviemakers absolutely hate this idea, so much so that they complain about streaming services not doing a full movie-theater release of their movie.

Now, I do understand this. Their movie is made for the *big screen*. This is the other big attraction of movies for 110 years: seeing that hot person’s face on the SILVER SCREEN.

However, this point, unlike the star-system named above, has long faded away. That “silver screen” idea was based on economic circumstances: the scarcity of the big screen. People, with no instant access to good screens or to films themselves, therefore would travel to a movie theater to consume this ultra-scarce item that they didn’t have readily available.

Nowadays, no. There is no scarcity for either on-demand content or for good-looking pictures on screen.

Right now I am sitting in front of a 43” inch monitor that looks quite huge up close. I love it so much that I didn’t go to “The Fall Guy,” the new movie in the theater last weekend, but opted instead for a playoff basketball game. I truly didn’t want to leave my house, to make a bunch of effort to go to a movie that I didn’t know was any good or not.

Had it been available for streaming, I might’ve actually watched it.

Remember that middle-aged reader I mentioned above, the one who used to attend movies at theaters every week but no longer does? Well he built a 120” projector system in his basement. He has no need to go to the local theater, where he may encounter bad social behavior anyway.

And all of the kiddos out there are, sad but true to say, are content with their devices in their pockets, on which they can stream anything at anytime in any place.

So, I am sorry, traditionalists. The big screen is no longer a scarce, precious resource.

That means that Hollywood must embrace the streaming experience entirely and fully.

If we accept this sad-but-truism, we can deliver our content to consumers wherever whenever. You may not know this, dear aging Hollywood executive, but the Internet is now capable of sending your movies to any device anywhere!

It was capable of doing this back in 1998, when we were pirating movies in our college dorm room with the new T1 lines. I saw a bunch of classics back then *before* they came out in the movie theater.

Now that was — checking the calendar and opening the calculator app — 26 years ago. How in the unholiest hell has Hollywood not comprehended what that means over the last 26 years? I believe that should be put on the epitaph of movies if they nearly die out: “They wouldn’t change even though they had 26 years to. They were too conservative for their own good.”

Just yesterday, our household had three different HD videos streaming to different devices. And we have a modest connection out in the middle of nowhere.

Imagine, dear executive, that two people are watching a family movie, two others are watching an edgy action-adventure, and the others are watching an interview with one of your cute new young thing stars. That and more is now possible.

Market the heck out of your charismatic stars, put the QR code in your movie commercials, and let us open your new film to watch right now.

I may not like that, in fact I might hate it, but this is what the normies really want.

3. Take Some Risks

I feel like an idiot saying this, as #3 is the tenet of all robust businesses, and yet here we are with too many movies, maybe a majority of them, based on algorithm-created scripts derived from warehouses of data.

None of that matters, because any work of art created based on quantitative assumptions about human behavior is so badly flawed that it’s more likely to fail than risk-taking ventures.

Why? Because it’s making a first-grade error about human behavior. That error is: you cannot predict human wants into the future.

You have heard the phrase “past performance does not guarantee future success.” This directly applies to any creative venture such as making art. That’s because you have heard another phrase: “times change.”

That means that people’s particular wants aren’t as predictable as your algorithms assume they are. Humans, too complex to be measured exactly and predictably by humans, do change, and often tastes change so fast you won’t notice them until long after they do.

Now some general truisms about human stories abide. We do like romances that seem genuine. We like heroes’ journeys. We like serious tragedies where great people struggle against nature or the gods.

But that does not mean we want to watch the same formulaic three-act script of superheroes quarreling with each other, making snarky comments in spots where the plot tensions are amped up, and then saving the multiverse after dying several times, cue the exact same orchestral music with the same chord changes as the previous seventeen franchise “epics.”

Right now, dear executive, you have done the worst job we have ever seen. This year, 2024, is chockful of more remakes and franchise bait to be released than any movie year ever. Why?

I assume you think that branding means loyalty, and that the predictability of consumers based on your data means that certain demographics will show up in sufficient numbers to give you a decent return.

I am going to guarantee the movie-business one thing. They are not going to see epic, awesome returns ever again if they stick to algorithms.

Would you like to have a 4000% return ever? Well, you will never get that. And you need it right now, because all of your formulaic fare has your stock price in the toilet.

I posted this the other day on X. Nearly none of the movies that made a 1000% return or better made sense to make in their day. There are at least hundreds of such examples in movie history. Such as “Napoleon Dynamite,” “Star Wars,” and really about a third of the movies on the AFI top-100.

But when I say 1000% returns, that doesn’t tell the entire story. It only tells the first chapter.

Because those kind of movies beget more movies that make money.

And they generate movie stars.

And they bring audiences back to movies with those stars in them.

The return on investment for “Star Wars,” just based on the movies it influenced and the stars it made, may well be 100,000%! Or a lot more. (I’ll let the data guys do the math.)

Here, on point #3, I suppose I agree with Gioia somewhat. “Take more risks” means give opportunities to good artists to try out new possibilities.

It’s just that I think #1 is the most important of all — make movie stars great again, if you want to survive.

And #2 is one of those technological moments that Hollywood used to embrace instantly, and yet now they are stuck in a rather conservative mindset.