The thing that I think makes this letter great, and the reason I upvoted it on a tech site, that I haven't seen anybody else mention yet is this: it's a universal point.
Movies aside, I think his point applies to a lot of other industries, "If I worked at a donut stand, and I kept fucking up donuts, I'd be fired. Even if I made a tiny decent one every now and then, it doesn't matter. I'm gonna get fired." I have found this myself in tech, that often those held as icons of genius are often held to lower standards and have the potential to do much more damage than those at the bottom.
For example, a startup may have an awful product yet the pressure always trickles down to engineers to make it 10% faster or get in trouble. Yet so often it seems not to be that 10% delivery rate that separates a unicorn from a failure. It's a truly novel idea, a great design, and architects who can implement that vision in a stable and smooth way.
My experience made me identify with this letter very closely-- in broad generalized terms, you often have "management" which is a bunch of "business" people who are directing "creatives" (whether software engineers or movie artists) based on the management's perception of the state of the market.
Unfortunately, there is always a tendency to believe your own PR, believe you know more about things than you do, and to believe that, because you're on top and they are on bottom, you know better.
You see this in startups also when the "management" is a 20 year old CEO who just graduated business school, as much as when he is a 60 year old who has worked in the industry (but whose background is not in actually making things).
This is the big gulf between the makers and the managers.
And I think the correct response is, as makers, to make sure we are managed by other makers.
An engineer in the CEO role can manage a VP of marketing, or a VP of sales or a VP of engineering fine. Find a VP of marketing who wants to do customer discovery, find a VP of sales who can close (and incentivize him to do so, if he's not hungry don't hire him) and you'll do better, in my experience, than a CEO who doesn't understand how software is made (and subsequently keeps inadvertently undermining his own products as a result.)
Apologies if this seems like a bit of a rant- this is a comment on a letter that is a rant, though-- but I've seen this over and over and over in the past 30 years working for technology startups.
I would say having a technical CEO has a positive order of magnitude improvement on the outcome, and liklihood of a liquidity event and the size of that liquidity event, in my experience.
It lowers risks many ways, including increasing retention of your most valuable employees. (One of the key things that business people can't seem to get over is the idea that commoditizing employees leads to hiring what Paul Graham calls "blub" programmers, but that if you hire great programmers you can't treat them like cogs or they will leave.)
The problem is that (general intelligence aside) management skills are orthogonal to engineering/art/other creative work. This means that it takes a lot of work to find and train creators to be managers. On top of that (at least in engineering), a large fraction of the quality engineers I know actively do not want to be managers.
If we haven't seen as many screw-ups due to lack of managerial skills among engineer-managers as we've seen screw-ups due to lack of engineering savvy among MBA-managers, it's at least partly due to the fact that there are a lot more of the latter than the former.
Not in my experience. Or put another way, if you take someone with an MBA or a masters in engineering, neither of them intrinsically has more management skills or training. (IF colleges are teaching "management skills" they are not doing a good job of it.)
Yes, many engineers do not want to be managers, and unfortunately, too many non-engineers want the power. This is a good thing about engineers and a bad thing about those non-engineers.
I've seen lots of good engineers who manage, but almost no business people who are good managers of engineering.
I know that what you're saying is a popular perspective, but so is the idea that we should let wall street manage our retirements and real estate is always a good investment. Some of this perspective is self serving.
"I would say having a technical CEO has a positive order of magnitude improvement on the outcome, and liklihood of a liquidity event and the size of that liquidity event, in my experience."
Interesting assertion. Lucky for us, there are plenty of statistics available. So instead of going with gut feeling, do you have any sources to back this up? (Genuine question - I'd love to find out whether this is actually true).
"Unfortunately, there is always a tendency to believe your own PR, believe you know more about things than you do[...]".
While you make this point about CEOs, how do you know you're not talking about yourself as a maker?
Note: I'm not against your point, but I think the hubris of "makers" vs "everyone else" is just another example of people thinking their ingroup is the "right" and "successful" one.
I'm not aware of any statistics that qualify the CEOs of startups based on their background. Maybe you could do a rough pass based on degree program. My assertion is purely based on my experience, but it's not just anecdote- I've worked for 2 dozen startups and have visibility in to 3-4 times that.
> how do you know you're not talking about yourself as a maker?
This is a good point, and it gets to what my real point is: Culture. The issue is not lack of skills or integrity it's a different culture.
The culture of making things is different from the culture of running a 1950s era light manufactory. The latter is the "management" that most business people are taught. IT's woefully out of date. And it's predicated on the idea that you're stamping out the same parts over and over again. Tech is cutting edge and thus more of a craft than a manufacturing enterprise.
Engineers know this and so they know what to optimize for. Business people it seems can't or won't accept this.
They always want to know the date. IT's like its the only thing they care about. IF you ask an engineer to estimate something where the spec is a vague two sentence description they won't over-estimate themselves and think they can predict the time. Business guys, for instance, never seem to understand why you won't give them an estimate (which becomes a deadline, they don't seem to understand that estimates are %50 wrong if the are given correctly.)
this is because their culture is coming from a land where it takes exactly the same amount of time to stamp out a widget and predicting how long it will take to make 50 widgets is a no-brianer.
I am not an insider but wow, this really resonated with me.
> We pursued a potentially great summer movie like Edge of Tomorrow and completely botched its release.
Edge of Tomorrow was a pretty solid movie. I would absolutely have gone to it in the theater, but the marketing just did not connect with me. I've run into this with a number of movies now.
It didn't help that they changed the name to Live Die Repeat for its home release. My wife doesn't like action movies or Tom Cruise but loved Edge of Tomorrow. That movie was definitely a missed opportunity.
Oh, weird. Even though the movie didn't do great, it seems implausible that renaming it and throwing away all that marketing investment would help the DVD release. I wonder if that plan has ever been successful.
So the creatives delivered, but Marketing botched it? This point negates the theme OP is running with in most of the letter, implying rank and file office plebs are doing a great job, but the filmmakers are letting them down.
I suppose it's up to interpretation; I got more of an "upper executive mismanagement" vibe, with which Edge of Tomorrow is consistent, than "crew vs filmmakers".
> I think this is a symptom that the movie industry is on its way out, in much the same way as has happened to music.
If that were true, other movies studios would be in trouble: but look at Disney, who are doing gangbusters with Marvel and Lucasfilm. Warners are in this situation because they got complacent: they had one major cash cow (Harry Potter), and they failed to find other franchises that could offer equal returns - unlike Disney.
That's the weird thing. Is Disney Studios printing money because they're so incredibly excellent at making movies or because their competitors are doing so poorly at competing?
I'd say somewhere in the middle. Disney has gone through some _really_ rough periods both in the '90s and '00s but now they seem to be on a pretty good upswing. Interestingly, it seems like a significant part of that upswing is through acquisitions (aforementioned Marvel and DC, also Pixar), though they still have an amazing breadth of talent and style.
I know nothing about how Disney works internally, but it seems that they've done cross-pollination with their acquisitions as well (I've seen John Lasseter credited on more than one non-pixar film, for example).
At the same time their movie are starting to wear on me, being that the arc is always so similar. If star wars 8 fails to be a novel movie, I think things will not go well for ep 9. Same goes for althe marvel movies.
But what's interesting is that TV is having such a different trajectory (TV as in video packaged as episodes, the lines have blurred). Netflix and the like.
I often wonder if TV is winning because it has built-in sequels. If a series doesn't stick, whatever, money lost. If a new series does well, you can milk it for many many more seasons. TV vs Movies, the risk in cost is the same but the upside is much higher for TV.
That's because instead of trying to fill 3 movies, TV can just flow naturally until it's done. Yes, for some shows they end up with filler either because they want to drag it out, or they don't have quite enough to fill an entire last season... but for the most part it feels like TV shows don't have that pressure to fit into a very tight box.
for the most part it feels like TV shows don't have
that pressure to fit into a very tight box.
Don't they? I feel like TV is a lot more constrained than movies. The forced "last time on XYZ" cadence means that it's very difficult to have natural story-lines when things need to be wrapped up in a suitable emotional resolution and/or cliffhanger every 22 or 45 minutes. Especially when the writers are working with 25% of the screen time being commercials (thankfully much less of a problem with Digital-first TV from Netflix, HBO etc.).
I think it's a lot easier to write and produce a quality movie about just about anything. Yes the mass-produced sequel machines look pretty cookie cutter, but you also get some extremely well-told stories like In Bruges or Wes Anderson's stuff. There's anything-goes stuff like Swiss Army Man. I feel like this kind of thing couldn't realistically be produced for TV. The acting, writing, and production value falls off a cliff very quickly as soon as you leave the mainstream. Even a single season of a TV show means 6-10x as much content as a movie, and consistently conforming to the structure of a serial TV show means the content feels inevitably more repetitious.
Firefly+Serenity could be a pretty great ~20 episode series.
If it followed TV success, it would have 50-100 forgettable episodes to go with 20 good ones.
I think this applies to an awful lot of stuff on TV. The economics of it mean that buying season 5 is a better choice than taking a risk on something new. I think better stories would get told if series were generally shorter.
I disagree with the opinion that "TV vs Movies, the risk in cost is the same but the upside is much higher for TV". Popular movies are almost always made into sequels/reboots/remakes.
Out of the top 20 movies of domestic grosses[0], only 4 are not sequels or reboots(Zootopia, Secrete Life of Pets, Central Intelligence, The Angry Birds Movie).
Yeah, that's actually kinda my point. A sequel is kinda the same as additional seasons (or episodes) of a TV show. With a TV show, additional seasons are basically assumed unless it doesn't do well with the target market. But movies are sometimes prepared for sequels, and sometimes not. But apparently, sequels (or additional seasons of a show) are the best way to make money. So movie studios have an inherent handicap in that they tend to create episodes (movies) that have to stand alone, whereas TV, if good, will just gain viewership as they create more seasons.
I'm curious too with your number. How often does it take a series until the second or third season to gain notoriety and a large following. I feel like "Breaking Bad" took into the second season to really get a following. There must be other examples.
It's still a golden age for movies, it's going to take a long time for them to fall, no matter their mistakes. The growth of the developed world and the advent of the digital age has meant that global blockbusters make more than ever, with their non-US revenue eclipsing US revenue. So far this has generally favored easily digestible action movies, which is why they've been dominating the film industry for the last decade or so. That's not going to go away anytime soon. And as long as the RoI for such films looks like "spend $250 million, make $500 million, a billion, or more" then they're going to keep pressing that button as often as possible, because making a profit of $250 to $700 million dollars on a 1-2 year project is still "a big deal".
> What makes you think something happened to the music industry? It's still alive and well.
Honestly I am more excited by music now than I've ever been. People often cite the 90s and early 2000s as these halcyon days, but I feel like interesting music is way more accessible now than it has ever been. I can queue up tunes from virtually any independent label at the press of a button, I can order vinyl and have it on my front stoop within 24 hours... and that's just from the consumer side. From the artist side, genres are colliding left and right at a neck breaking pace, musicians are spanning scenes that wouldn't have held shows in the same city 10 years ago, and we are seeing crazy creative musical output. If you aren't having a god damn certified blast in music right now, well, I dunno what to tell you.
I think that's the point though. The music industry is thriving, because a lot of the dinosaurs passed away, and the newer businesses took it into a new direction. It was a bad business to be in for a while.
Now is the start of the bad time to be in major movies. Independent and niche movies are getting more time than ever, because bigger studios can't figure out how to cope with companies like Netflix.
Taken as a whole, sure, but the recording industry is a shadow of its 90s self. The analogy here may be that the studio system is floundering while upstarts with fresh business models flourish.
To throw things in a greek setting, Marvel is traditionally comedy and DC is tragedy. Iron Man is a drunken, womanizing asshole. Robert Downey Jr was is brilliant because he's still likeable. Sure, he's rich, but his life is a mess. You can look down on him. He's a fun guy, you want him to make it, but he's still kind of a scumbag. Christopher Nolan's Batman is the opposite. Sure, he's rich, but he's facing some big demons. There's a note of sadness, because in spite of his advantages, he faces some terrible challenges. You feel for the guy, because he suffers so much. Marvel is relatable, at least i'm handling my life better than that guy. DC is aspirational, i wish i was strong enough to handle what they handle. This is a sweeping generalization, but i think it's generally true.
I've seen most of the movies the author called out, and i enjoyed them. I can't say i enjoyed them enough to see in a theater, but they're fun. I think of them as Saturday afternoon matinee movies. I like movies. I don't mind flaws, but those popcorn movies are something i'll wait to watch on a Tuesday night with a couple of beers.
I think warner's big problem is they're spending 100+ million dollars to produce something that's in the 20-60 million range. I'll watch them, independent of production value, because i like movies. But i'm going to get the $2.99 SD itunes version, i'm not going to spend the 12 bucks to see that in the theater. (i did see suicide squad opening night, but the ticket was free)
I hope they figure it out. WB made some great stuff, and some fun stuff. They're just not quite calibrated right. If you're going to blow 100M+ on a movie, you really need the details right. Calling back to Suicide squad, it was fun. I really enjoyed it, and i'd be happy to pay 3-5 dollars on a weeknight to watch it. If i had to pay $12 for the ticket, and another $10 for the popcorn and soda (how can you not get popcorn and soda?!? it completes the experience!) I'd be annoyed.
Iron man is a jerk. He is the embodiment of all that is wrong with our economy. But that is why the Marvel movies work. That's what I like about them. The characters are human enough for me to actually care. Superman? He is too flat for me to have any opinion.
For all the bluster, the MCU is full of metaphor and leveled humor. My favorite is the 1-minute WWII skit in Avengers (The old jewish man about to be killed by the german, saved by the soldier who then needs the scientist to force a surrender ... that's the american story of WWII.) It isn't historically accurate, but it's fun. You don't see stuff like that in the DC movies. They have no metaphor, no depth. That requires writers and crews who both care about the work and aren't afraid for their jobs.
> Superman? He is too flat for me to have any opinion.
IMHO, Superman is ethical. He'll stop a nuclear launch and get a cat out of a tree, because he's the ultimate boy scout. Every problem is important to solve, and he has the power to, at least try, to solve them all. Violate ethics for the greater good? Never.
I don't think the Superman point has really come across since Christopher Reeve. I really liked the Nolan Batman movies. He was able to really capture the spirit of that character. It's a shame WB couldn't put that together for Superman.
That he is ethical is part of the problem. He is the perpetual rescuer. He doesn't initiate action, only reacts to situations forced upon him. IronMan does things because he wants to. He has an internal personality. Thor has an internal life. Even Hulk makes decisions on his own occasionally. Superman's role, like Captain America, is to apply ethics to a situation created by someone else. They are perpetually innocent, perpetually perfect, and therefore perpetually boring.
My favorite characters are probably Colson and Fury, both dynamic people who take action on their own. The make mistakes because they make mistakes, not because they are forced or tricked into doing so by evil guy. We don't always know what they are thinking, or by which ethical rules they operate. That's interesting. That's worth watching. Batman and Superman are empty shells in comparison.
One of my favorite Iron Man scenes is after he almost kills the US pilot and then giggles with his best friend about the new thing he just used to murder a bunch of terrorists. It makes it so clear that you aren't really supposed to think about what is happening.
Killing multiple terrorists to escape probably isn't murder. An individual spending vast amounts of money to build a weapon, flying half way across the world and killing a bunch of people is obviously murder.
Great letter especially mixing in love of the material, and company vs. poor leadership and execution. It's a shame, since this is an amazing time for comics/fantasy fans around the world. So many old properties being mashed up, brought to the screen, and a younger generation eager to watch them.
I wonder if it has stolen a large part of the Western anime market?
Edge of Tomorrow was a sneaky surprise. I've seen it several times, and my children loved it. A lot of fun for such a simple premise. I wasn't aware it didn't do well fiscally, since everyone I know loved it. I guess it might be doing better on DVD/digital release?
I grew up in the late 60s early 70s, and it was always DC vs. Marvel. As much as I appreciated Batman and Superman back then, even though Batman wasn't a thing for me until Frank Miller in 1986, I was a Marvel fan. Spiderman, because he was a local boy, the underdog, and kids in my neighborhood could relate.
I guess I will wait for Suicide Squad on DVD/digital, and not waste the theater ticket.
Sunk cost fallacy. A director shoots bad material, they don't go back and start over. They make due with what they have because of what they've already spent on it.
Disney does the opposite. Look at what we've heard about the Rogue One -- the studio felt that it was good but not great and sent them back for a whole bunch of (expensive) reshoots. Pixar does the same. If they don't like the final product they'll rip it apart and do it again.
> If they don't like the final product they'll rip it apart and do it again.
WB dies that too, but they can't seem to do it right. In the aftermath of Batman v Superman flopping, WB panicked and asked Ayer to "punch up" Suicide Squad adding more humor and faster pacing - this included reshoots. SS wasn't originally meant to be a blockbuster, but an end of summer fun movie
FWIW according to the Rogue One filmmakers, the reshoots were planned for and fit in with the already planned shots. Nothing like what happened with Toy Story 2.
There are so many moving parts that it's so easy to screw up. An amazing script can get ruined by a bad director, actors, editor, executives with bad notes, etc.
Also, I'm sure with so much money involved, people are more likely to meddle in the director's vision so you get too many cooks in the kitchen.
And there's many a slip between the cup and the lip. There's too many moving parts - Huston shot "Sierra Madre" on something approximating 16MM on tripods with only tequila for accessories. When digital gets to the "16MM" phase, but with people who learned the agonizing details in the studio system 'we'll have it again.
In the 1990s, when I was working on animation software, I was told something like that by a major Hollywood director. He'd directed some of the early films that had both animation and live acting. The costs were high. What he really wanted was to get the overhead down, so he could make first-rate films for about $20M.
At the time, "Reboot", the first all 3D cartoon, was being cranked out at one episode per week by 30 people. He was hoping the technology would let him produce feature films with a similar sized staff. The idea was to pull in set models from a "digital back lot", green-screen in the actors, and go.
The technology didn't deliver that. Instead of a cast of thousands of actors, we now need thousands of animators. Look at the credits for any action movie today. There's just too much custom modeling, artwork, move matching, and manual editing of the edges of clipping paths. (The last two are outsourced grunt work and likely to be automated soon.) Viewers wanted photorealism, and that requires as much detail work as set-building.
People have tried to do CG action features on the cheap. "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" was supposed to be one. But that cost $70 million, and only made $54 million. (The semi-noir look didn't help. Done better, it might have been a franchise like Captain America.) Iron Sky (budget $10M, box office $8.1M) almost a decade later had much better effects; the CG isn't as obvious.
Other than low-budget horror features, most notably "Paranormal Activity", there haven't been many successful low-budget action movies in recent years.
I might suggest that Wave and Vista are obvious projects Google and Microsoft wrote and below a standard of quality, and akin to a bad movie from WB. Google+ and Windows 8 could be considered bad sequels.
I don't think either Wave nor Vista were poor quality products, same way I don't think Glass nor Phone were poor products. The engineering on all of these is fine for the most part. Sure, there are bugs, but not really any more than usual. The real problem is that nobody really wanted these products in the first place.
For Wave, most users didn't seem to figure out what Wave was actually useful for (and it didn't help that Google wasn't sure either). For Vista, people liked XP and dragging them kicking and screaming into a software upgrade turned out to be really hard. Vista set the architectural foundation for future Windows releases, and Microsoft had an obligation to take people off of what was then a 5-year-old operating system - much like OS X 10.0 attempted to do. Nobody seems to pay much attention to the fact that 10.0 was incredibly buggy and took quite some time to bring up to a usable state.
Vista was just bad marketing. After that whole fiasco Microsoft did market tests where they presented consumers with a "new version" of Windows that was actually just Vista, and they got a positive response. And even if you don't believe that story completely, the fact that Windows 7 wasn't all that different from Vista and yet got just as popular as XP was says a lot.
>the fact that Windows 7 wasn't all that different from Vista
Say what now? I don't know if you remember but Vista had really high hardware requirements. When Vista came out, it was fundamentally unusable for me. Hardware requirements is literally the first section of criticism in Vista's Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista#Hardware_require...):
>For example, Mike Nash (Corporate Vice President, Windows Product Management) commented, "I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine" because his laptop's lack of an appropriate graphics chip so hobbled Vista.
Windows 7 made substantial performance improvements in comparison to the widespread hardware incompatibilities that Vista had.
Hollywood. What does that even mean anymore ? They've run out of good ideas along that ago and with all the writing talent in the world to boot. And its's not by accident. You've got MBA execs with not a atom in their soul about art or creativity calling the shots.
Suicide Squad was very entertaining sure it had a few missteps but it's not that bad. I mean was anybody expecting Inception? It was far more enjoyable than Man of Steel or BVS or Pan or many of the other bombs WB has made recently.
It was a fun movie, but it was weak in a lot of the same ways that Batman vs Superman were weak. So, I see the criticism.
Well and poorly executed movies both can connect with the audience, but the author of the letter presumably believes that well executed movies are more likely to do so.
> I love that studio, and you're allowing it to sink. It's not about making movies for 'the fans' and not 'the critics.' It's not even about 'ruining childhoods.' It's about protecting livelihoods.
Companies do not exist to make their employees happy and employed forever. The fact that they do is because it goes with their interest for a given amount of time, but that does not mean it always do. Pretending it's the company goal to "protect livelihoods" is just wrong. Companies are not welfare agents.
This misses the point of the article entirely. The point was that when leadership screws up, the lower level employees suffer. No accountability at the top.
> This misses the point of the article entirely. The point was that when leadership screws up, the lower level employees suffer. No accountability at the top.
I thought it was the point of the article, but the end note finishes on a complete different point which is why I commented.
The top has to have the ability and leeway for things to go wrong so that they can take risks. To make sure they take the right risks they are stakeing a % of their pay if its in options or bonuses as well as in their reputation.
> To make sure they take the right risks they are stakeing a % of their pay if its in options or bonuses as well as in their reputation.
Did you manage to hold a straight face while you wrote that? The people at the top still walk away with millions or more when they screw up. The people at the bottom walk away with very little. Whether the risks are worth taking is a good question, but certainly the people at the top don't feel the bulk of the pain if the risks don't pay off.
Fuck around or fuck up, and your compensation is only hit with a pillow. And people make excuses for how you failed at your responsibilities. Sounds nice.
If CEOs are afraid to take necessary risks because of consequences, they suck at their jobs as leaders and should be fired. CEOs need to know what they're doing, they shouldn't be given a lower bar to clear than everyone else. That they do is mindboggling.
I don't believe its the right system and the way it should be done but thats how accountability is viewed within the current system (which I think should change).
Movies aside, I think his point applies to a lot of other industries, "If I worked at a donut stand, and I kept fucking up donuts, I'd be fired. Even if I made a tiny decent one every now and then, it doesn't matter. I'm gonna get fired." I have found this myself in tech, that often those held as icons of genius are often held to lower standards and have the potential to do much more damage than those at the bottom.
For example, a startup may have an awful product yet the pressure always trickles down to engineers to make it 10% faster or get in trouble. Yet so often it seems not to be that 10% delivery rate that separates a unicorn from a failure. It's a truly novel idea, a great design, and architects who can implement that vision in a stable and smooth way.