Lucas and Spielberg predict film industry "implosion".

I really doubt that we'll see a Hollywood implosion any time soon. With growing international markets, it seems that many action movies are almost guaranteed to do good business. A few years ago, a film earning a billion in worldwide gross was a big thing. Now, films like Alice in Wonderland, James Bond films, and Iron Man (who used to be a 2nd-tier superhero a few years ago) cross the billion dollar mark all the time, and foreign audiences just keep growing.

Now their argument that thoughtful films are getting harder and harder to finance seems much more legitimate. Films that, you know, have people pausing to talk for a few minutes don't do that well internationallly. To be honest, I actually thought it was really weird that they opened the best picture category at the Oscars to 10 entries right at a time when it seems hard for them to find 5 legitimate English-speaking films that really seem deserving of a nomination.

Another ironic thing about this is that Spielberg's and Lucas's early successes are the films that first sent movie-making in this direction. "Jaws" along with maybe "The Exorcist" were the first huge blockbusters after a decade and a half of the more dominant "serious," "gritty," adult-oriented auteur-films of the 60's and 70's, and even though "Jaws" and "The Exorcist" were blockbusters, they were aimed more at adults. Then, with "Star Wars," we had the first blockbuster since the days of Disney feature cartoons that was aimed more at younger people. That's been the key demographic ever since. Before "Star Wars," kids mostly got crap like "Freaky Friday" and "The Shaggy DA," and I have no idea what teenagers got back then after the crappy beach movies died out in the late 60s.

Not saying that Lucas and Spielberg are to blame, but I'm sure their successes made that switch in target demos occur much more quickly than it otherwise would have.

 

Depends on the type of action too. People go to cinemas for the big eartshaking stuff not for the smaller scale but well shot action movies.

 

I would watch a an History Channel style docu about the background stuff.

 

There was an article at GigaOM lately asking whether the era of mass media, as we've known it during the last century or two, was a historical blip whose time came and is quickly going; something formed by a certain nexus of historical forces that are now spent and and technological forces that are now obsolete. Mostly, the article is referring to news-style media. I wonder if it will increasingly be true of entertainment media, as well. Not immediately, but over the course of time I think the idea of entertainment as a big-dollar business centralized on a Hollywood/New York axis is a doomed idea. This has already happened to a fair degree in music, radio (via streaming and podcasting), publishing, news reporting, and television (I wonder what ratings YouTube would get if it was counted as a TV channel). Because of the barriers to entry, movies will be the last to go. But it will. I don't argue that the movie business will become a completely amateur business; more that it will eventually become, for the most part, a smaller-dollar, more decentralized field, with lots more distribution through electronic channels.

 

That's true to a certain extent, but what's often forgotten is that the early success of these 'high-concept' films coincided with a number of significant failures which illustrated the increasing self-indulgence and excess of the auteur-centric New Hollywood of the 1970s - Peter Bogdanovich's At Long Last Love, William Friedkin's Sorcerer, Scorsese's New York, New York, and most notoriously of all, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate.

They're the bad ones, but unfortunately, several brilliant films of the era - Nashville, Raging Bull, The Right Stuff - also bombed somewhat and helped push the studios towards the blockbuster mentality and the likes of Top Gun.