

Die, Hollywood, die - benwerd
http://benwerd.com/blog/2012/01/22/die-hollywood-die/

======
ryanjmo
The most innovation and the largest growth in distribution for video in the
modern world has been in the many professional YouTube channels that exist.
EpicMealTime, FreddieW, RealAnnoyingOrange, have literally millions or fans
that watch every single one of their videos and they are currently making
millions of dollars.

In fact FreddieW has raised over $270K on kick-starter for to create a movie,
all donated from his fans [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/freddiew/video-
game-high...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/freddiew/video-game-high-
school).

Now, beyond just the individual YouTube channel owners, there are currently
(start-up) studios that professionally manage and assist YouTube channels (for
a cut of course). Some of these start-ups are <http://machinima.com/>,
<http://makerstudios.com/>, cloudmedia, <http://fullscreen.net/>
<http://www.thecollective-la.com/> <http://break.com/>

All of these companies, either have millions of dollars or have raised
millions of dollars. Now they are currently in a land grab for all the top
YouTube channels, because if you control the top YouTube channels you control
distribution. And currently top YouTubers are some of the only people on the
web, that can effectively and consistently distribute to millions of fans.

My point is this, innovative people are already challenging hollywood and are
off to a great start. In my opinion, if someone is serious about killing
Hollywood they need to first study whats already out there and figure out how
to work with the people who have already made some serious progress!

~~~
jonnathanson
If you want to kill Hollywood, you need to kill its revenue streams. In the
case of TV, that would be advertising. The examples you've raised are off to a
good start there. Once brands and marketers see that these folks can reach
bigger and more dedicated audiences each week than a typical TV show can,
dollars will be taken away from TV spend and placed on YouTube instead. It'll
be a slow process, but we're already seeing some really big brands and
companies placing big bets on YouTube, Facebook, etc. There are plenty of
cases where spending on a YouTube star makes more sense than spending on a TV
show (when reaching a targeted audience or youth demographics, say). That
said, YouTube -- and its associated studios -- have a ways to go before
theyr'e taking serious bucks away from TV network advertising.

As for the movie business, that one's a bit tougher to kill. The barriers to
entry for Hollywood-quality movies are fairly high. But there are some levers
to pull. In recent years, hedge funds have quietly emerged as one of the
biggest sources of film financing in the business -- bankrolling everyone from
production companies to studios themselves. Independent producers looking to
work outside the Hollywood system should find a) distribution paths that make
sense, and b) court this sort of money, which will be agnostic as to who's
making the content if the content is good enough.

------
jacquesm
If you think you can't make a minimally viable movie check out 'Primer'.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_%28film%29> ($7K)

Another one would be 'The man from Earth'

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_Earth> ($200K)

Both are (I believe) awesome movies, especially taken into account the very
limited budgets.

~~~
evantahler
Cheap doesn't mean minimally viable. The story which the Director was telling
was able to be told in a 'present day' simple way. There's no way you can tell
the story of "Star Wars" without scale models, expensive cameras, good actors,
and special effects.

However, even though Primer only cost a few $K to make, there was nothing
"minimal" about it. The entire story needed to be told, and the process of
filmmaking already includes editing and pairing down the story. I think that
the notion of thinking of products and movies as both things which have unique
and compartmentalizable "features" (which lead to the notion of MVP) is a
flawed analogy for this reason.

I think that we agree the process of MAKING movies is OK, but the process of
distribution and consumption is what needs the change.

Oh, and these movies are awesome.

~~~
contextfree
I would think a minimal-viable Star Wars would be something like a comic book
- that seems to be the path taken by many fantasy/SF/"necessarily
set/prop/effects-heavy" films recently.

~~~
mminer
Before some productions start the studio will put together what's called an
animatic (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storyboard#Animatics>), where the
storyboard frames are cut together with rough dialog to give an idea of the
final product. It's similar to what you're suggesting -- a comic book that
moves and talks. It's essentially a film's MVP.

~~~
contextfree
Unlike a comic book an animatic isn't actually a _product_ with end-customers,
though, and I thought getting end-customers quickly was the most important
part of the MVP doctrine.

~~~
bigiain
I guess that depends a bit of your view of the market. If you think the
"customers" are the "bums on seats in cinemas", then perhaps it's not a
product. If you're thinking more B2B and view the movie distributors as the
"customers" perhaps it is.

------
IgorPartola
Making a movie requires a very special set of circumstances and people.
Consider all the involved:

\- Director, actors, writers and crew. The creative team behind the movie.

\- The producer: the business side.

\- The movie studio: the financial, marketing and distribution side.

When YC asks for startups to think of ways to "Kill Hollywood", they are
talking about the last category. So far I have not seen a single comment
talking about cutting out directors or producers. The problem is the movie
studios, and their Walmart-like hold on the industry.

Now that that's established, what can we do about this? How to we break up the
relationships between the creative team and the movie studios? I see several
ways:

1\. We need a simple and cheap distribution channel. In 20 years there will be
no movie theaters. They might remain as a novelty, but 90% of them will be
gone. They are already not making much money and as home theater setups get
better, there is no way that people will want to go to a theater and overpay
for the soda and popcorn. Platforms like Roku and iTunes or "networks" like
Hulu and Netflix are the future. Allowing people to publish directly to these
channels and making it transparent how much return there is "per view" is key
here.

2\. We need independent marketing for movies. A director who, for the sake of
the argument, self-financed a movie needs a way to market it. This is
analogous to a web app developer marketing her app via Google AdWords. Once
again content platforms like Roku and iTunes can help greatly here since they
already have access to lots of people and are common places to seek movie
trailers, etc.

3\. We need a new source of finance. The problem is that a successful
blockbuster movie takes many millions of dollars and someone has to front the
money before any return is made. This problem has some technical solutions.
For one, we could create a web app that matches the creative team with
potential investors. The investors get to read the script, watch the castings,
even interact with the team if they for example are looking to invest >$10k,
etc. Then if the movie meets its budget (the interface would be similar to
Donors Choose), production starts. Investors wait, watch and pray, potentially
even trading their investments in these movies (this is risk sharing after
all). Once the movie is made it goes into marketing and distribution and the
returns come in, where they get split up between the investors.

The above are not business plans, just a quick brainstorm of different
approaches to disrupting or evolving the industry. I have no experience making
movies beyond taking videos with my phone so this is a bunch of hogwash with
99.5% probability.

~~~
evantahler
Agree with all of this.

Another angle is the advertisers' participation. Fox doesn't put some of their
shows on Hulu not because it's hard, but because they won't make the same $
per impression that they make on TV.

There's work to be done to convince the advertisers (ad agencies?) that
placements on digital screens are just as valuable (hopefully more valuable)
as TV. Remember that Movie studios are also TV studios, and you can't fight
one without the other.

~~~
evantahler
Oh, and this is the kind of thing which increases piracy, and then SOPA
[http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/22/delay-on-hulu-
availability-...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/22/delay-on-hulu-availability-
more-than-doubles-piracy-of-fox-shows/)

------
timdellinger
I might rephrase Point #3 as "You can't make a minimally viable blockbuster."

The biggest hits that drive the most people into theaters and make the most
money are the biggest budget movies that require massive coordination of
people and require skillsets that don't scale down to small budgets. You don't
build an NFL stadium based on what you learned at a high school stadium, and
you don't build a Busch Gardens style theme park based on what you learned
doing county fairs.

~~~
frankydp
Isn't a movie MVP in the funding process of movies a script with storyboards?

Producers don't film a movie and then get funding.

------
braco_alva
The post is right about distribution being the biggest challenge, it is not
about how movies are being made, is about how can you shift the industry model
into another distribution channel.

~~~
vibrunazo
I personally believe in the exact opposite. Alternative channels exist today
and are already used by alternative producers. But the problem, as I
understand, is that Hollywood producers are somewhat tied to traditional
channels. Because making a movie is so expensive, and _today_ only traditional
distribution returns your investment. Then after you spend a few million
dollar making a movie, you'll find it a bit risky to try a new unproven
distribution model.

It's naive to say that today anyone can make a movie, because cameras are
cheaper. The average guy is still far from being able to produce anything
remotely near a Hollywood production level. If that was true, if anyone (or
any reasonably sized studio) could make a near Hollywood level movie. Then the
competition would have killed them already. But that's a point where
technology is specially important in fixing. The tools are still not cheap
enough, but are getting cheaper. We can make them better.

Distribution is already here. But there's not enough content to distribute.
I'd argue that the distribution problem is "reasonably well" solved today. The
last piece of the puzzle is to solve content creation. We need to focus on
building content, and tools that will democratize content creation. Not
distribution.

~~~
braco_alva
I feel it's a balance between both, yes, you're right the distribution
channels are already there, but the quality of the productions that use those
channels are not even close to the quality Hollywood productions have.

We need to find a way to give independent studios a way to develop quality
content that can be easily distributed and develop technology that lowers the
production cost, because probably Hollywood studios won't shift until they see
there's a market, where independent studios are actually making profits.

------
scj
I agree with the entertainment point. For example, I think that video games
offer a higher entertainment/dollar value. They are probably a greater long
term threat to movies than infringement is.

Especially as time goes on. Eventually everybody will have grown up playing
video games.

But the real competitor in my mind is television. With reduced costs for
special effects, television has pretty much all the same tools as movies.
Although on average television shows are not as compelling as movies, I think
that the problem is currently cultural (an example of the limitations of
television is that in many shows (not all) main characters will not be killed,
despite constantly going into dangerous situations, the negative aspect is
that it makes shows predictable).

I've derived more enjoyment from television than movies for years now. My
question is, can technology assist in producing television at a lower cost?

But I just want to point out the distribution problem... It really isn't one,
because if all people were truly adverse to seeing movies on a computer screen
then infringement wouldn't be a problem in the first place.

------
Lagged2Death
I think the "You can't make a minimally viable movie" point immediately
contradicts itself by pointing out that so many movies are predictable
commodity pablum. Hollywood has been producing mainly minimally viable movies
since forever. And people keep going to see them. So "can't?" I don't
understand.

Distribution issues should disappear as digital projection edges toward
ubiquity, no? I thought industry observers considered the 3D resurgence to be
a long-term distribution strategy: Modern digital 3D processes give the
theaters the incentive to invest in the digital equipment that will eventually
eliminate the distribution issues.

~~~
benwerd
Fair points :) I've updated my post to reference the MVP discussion - and the
idea about 3D processes hadn't occurred to me. Presumably those films also
come through the standard distribution companies though?

------
icebraining
_You can’t make a minimally viable movie_

Of course you can. It's just that the script (and "vision") has to be part of
it. But there's plenty of extras that can be added only later: getting a
professional actor instead of your cousin to do a secondary role, adding that
CGI touch to improve ambiance, paying a good compositor to create some custom
music, etc.

And tweaking based on research is done all the time: it's called "test
screenings".

~~~
evantahler
I would like to hear more on this thought!

To me, I would say that when you compare the effort needed to create the
"final" print of the film (the one with the CG and professional actors) vs an
early test take made with your family, the delta between the cost of the two
would be very high.

I feel that a closer metaphor would be that a good treatment and a demo are
the "pitch deck" for the real film you want to make, not first versions of it.

------
lv0
Cool, let's also push a DIE MSM (mainsteam media) as a whole movement. News
can be crowdsourced, we just need to get on the boob tube. This republican
primary race, case in point. America needs our help

------
mildavw
Just last week I watched a demo day for a local incubator (PiePDX). Here's
someone trying disrupt distribution, but it doesn't sound like they have
theaters in the mix:

[http://m.youtube.com/?rdm=4pauejn01&reload=3#/profile?us...](http://m.youtube.com/?rdm=4pauejn01&reload=3#/profile?user=piepdx&v=7JbGAYveOCw&view=videos)

------
jebblue
Die, Hollywood, die...? I never, ever thought I'd find myself in this
position. It's ... surreal. "radioactive mega-worms", Raiders Of The Last Ark
references...ok. bla. But, John Cusack sux.

------
aaronmoodie
Funding a film like a start-up is a good short term solution. Sure, PG asked
for a model for the future, but that isn't going to happen overnight.
Something like this actually could.

------
GigabyteCoin
Some theme music for reading:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6MlwT1lBk0&feature=youtu...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6MlwT1lBk0&feature=youtu.be&t=25s)

 _Sorry 'HN Etiquette', I couldn't resist._

