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10 minutes ago, MrGlass2 said:

No, of course not - obviously. The reign of sequels/spin-offs monopolizing the top of the box office only began 20 years ago, and now with remakes and "franchises" it is getting ever worse.

It obviously wasn't always this way but I'd say where we are today has more to do with changing tastes and eras.

 

For example, the star-driven prestige drama is rarely a thing anymore because of the fact the "old school" type of movie star (see: Tom Hanks at his peak throughout the 90s to early 2000s) is a thing of the past. I remember Entertainment Weekly ran a big cover story in 2004 called "Why Hollywood Can't Find the Next Julia Roberts" and here we are 15 years later and they still haven't found someone capable of bringing in people movie after movie like she did in her prime (safe to say we're never gonna see the return of that kind of starpower at this point).

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1 hour ago, filmlover said:

It obviously wasn't always this way but I'd say where we are today has more to do with changing tastes and eras.

 

For example, the star-driven prestige drama is rarely a thing anymore because of the fact the "old school" type of movie star (see: Tom Hanks at his peak throughout the 90s to early 2000s) is a thing of the past. I remember Entertainment Weekly ran a big cover story in 2004 called "Why Hollywood Can't Find the Next Julia Roberts" and here we are 15 years later and they still haven't found someone capable of bringing in people movie after movie like she did in her prime (safe to say we're never gonna see the return of that kind of starpower at this point).

 

If we table, for the moment, the discussion over "taste", stars, and what kinds of movies studios should green light, don't we all agree that the theatrical experience should be a special one, and that standards should be upheld? It's not just Norton... you have people like Nolan and Cameron (and others) begging theaters to show stuff correctly.

 

(It's a similar, but different mess at home, where TV manufacturers and retailers (inadvertently?) go out of their way to make and showcase a shitty image.)

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10 minutes ago, Plain Old Tele said:

 

If we table, for the moment, the discussion over "taste", stars, and what kinds of movies studios should green light, don't we all agree that the theatrical experience should be a special one, and that standards should be upheld? It's not just Norton... you have people like Nolan and Cameron (and others) begging theaters to show stuff correctly.

 

(It's a similar, but different mess at home, where TV manufacturers and retailers (inadvertently?) go out of their way to make and showcase a shitty image.)

Remember all the complaints about how dark Solo was?  Lot of that was sub-standard projectors.  Other films have been hit with that as well.

 

Sure, cinematographers have probably gotten a bit too lax at times with how they handle dark scenes (see that famous quote about the Battle of Helms Deep as the counterexample about how to light dark scenes "correctly"), but some theaters sure aren't helping matters. 

Edited by Porthos
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7 minutes ago, Plain Old Tele said:

begging theaters to show stuff correctly

We are almost getting use to theater not even making any effort to mask the screen to the correct aspect ratio anymore (if it is not even already the case ?) that is how low the standards are.

 

I imagine everything is in place, but the teenager staff do not do it.

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6 minutes ago, Plain Old Tele said:

 

If we table, for the moment, the discussion over "taste", stars, and what kinds of movies studios should green light, don't we all agree that the theatrical experience should be a special one, and that standards should be upheld? It's not just Norton... you have people like Nolan and Cameron (and others) begging theaters to show stuff correctly.

 

(It's a similar, but different mess at home, where TV manufacturers and retailers (inadvertently?) go out of their way to make and showcase a shitty image.)

Sure, but Norton is directly saying that image problems are the reason why attendance is going down and not because streaming is taking over or anything else, when that's obviously not the answer given that it's an individual, isolated theater problem.

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1 hour ago, filmlover said:

I mean, hasn't it always been this way? Except there's a lot more entertainment options to choose from now with the multiplex just being one of them.

That was domestic box office top 20 in even has recently than 2000, not that it was better but it was not just franchise wannabe and a bunch of oscar hopeful:

 

1 How the Grinch Stole Christmas Uni. $260,044,825 3,256 $55,082,330 3,127 11/17
2 Cast Away Fox $233,632,142 3,061 $28,883,406 2,774 12/22
3 Mission: Impossible II Par. $215,409,889 3,669 $57,845,297 3,653 5/24
4 Gladiator DW $187,705,427 3,188 $34,819,017 2,938 5/5
5 What Women Want Par. $182,811,707 3,092 $33,614,543 3,012 12/15
6 The Perfect Storm WB $182,618,434 3,407 $41,325,042 3,407 6/30
7 Meet the Parents Uni. $166,244,045 2,697 $28,623,300 2,614 10/6
8 X-Men Fox $157,299,717 3,112 $54,471,475 3,025 7/14
9 Scary Movie Mira. $157,019,771 3,301 $42,346,669 2,912 7/7
10 What Lies Beneath DW $155,464,351 2,925 $29,702,959 2,813 7/21
11 Dinosaur BV $137,748,063 3,319 $38,854,851 3,257 5/19
12 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon SPC $128,078,872 2,027 $663,205 16 12/8
13 Erin Brockovich Uni. $125,595,205 3,070 $28,138,465 2,848 3/17
14 Charlie's Angels Sony $125,305,545 3,037 $40,128,550 3,037 11/3
15 Traffic USA $124,115,725 1,755 $184,725 4 12/27
16 The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps Uni. $123,309,890 3,251 $42,518,830 3,242 7/28
17 Big Momma's House Fox $117,559,438 2,854 $25,661,041 2,802 6/2
18 Remember the Titans BV $115,654,751 2,803 $20,905,831 1,865 9/29
19 The Patriot Sony $113,330,342 3,061 $22,413,710 3,061 6/28
20 Chicken Run DW $106,834,564 2,953 $17,506,162 2,491 6/23

 

 

 

The biggest rumored budget of the giant franchise movie like MI-2 was 125m the big original movie like Perfect Storm, Patriot, Cast Away and Gladiator compete with similar budget.

 

Now the giant movie have 300-400M budget and the Cast Away of today try to compete with 60-80m budget when they are lucky or the 120m if they are able to sell China and some other big market in advance.

 

Erin Brockovich budget was more than 33% of the biggest movie of the year and released in almost has many theater than X-Men.

 

The MPAA studio in 2000 released 184 movies, in 2018 it was 143.

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24 minutes ago, Plain Old Tele said:

(It's a similar, but different mess at home, where TV manufacturers and retailers (inadvertently?) go out of their way to make and showcase a shitty image.)

I remember when all the TVs at Sam's Club shows High Frame Rate Harry Potter.

Edited by cannastop
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6 minutes ago, Barnack said:

That was domestic box office top 20 in even has recently than 2000, not that it was better but it was not just franchise wannabe and a bunch of oscar hopeful:

 

1 How the Grinch Stole Christmas Uni. $260,044,825 3,256 $55,082,330 3,127 11/17
2 Cast Away Fox $233,632,142 3,061 $28,883,406 2,774 12/22
3 Mission: Impossible II Par. $215,409,889 3,669 $57,845,297 3,653 5/24
4 Gladiator DW $187,705,427 3,188 $34,819,017 2,938 5/5
5 What Women Want Par. $182,811,707 3,092 $33,614,543 3,012 12/15
6 The Perfect Storm WB $182,618,434 3,407 $41,325,042 3,407 6/30
7 Meet the Parents Uni. $166,244,045 2,697 $28,623,300 2,614 10/6
8 X-Men Fox $157,299,717 3,112 $54,471,475 3,025 7/14
9 Scary Movie Mira. $157,019,771 3,301 $42,346,669 2,912 7/7
10 What Lies Beneath DW $155,464,351 2,925 $29,702,959 2,813 7/21
11 Dinosaur BV $137,748,063 3,319 $38,854,851 3,257 5/19
12 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon SPC $128,078,872 2,027 $663,205 16 12/8
13 Erin Brockovich Uni. $125,595,205 3,070 $28,138,465 2,848 3/17
14 Charlie's Angels Sony $125,305,545 3,037 $40,128,550 3,037 11/3
15 Traffic USA $124,115,725 1,755 $184,725 4 12/27
16 The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps Uni. $123,309,890 3,251 $42,518,830 3,242 7/28
17 Big Momma's House Fox $117,559,438 2,854 $25,661,041 2,802 6/2
18 Remember the Titans BV $115,654,751 2,803 $20,905,831 1,865 9/29
19 The Patriot Sony $113,330,342 3,061 $22,413,710 3,061 6/28
20 Chicken Run DW $106,834,564 2,953 $17,506,162 2,491 6/23

 

 

 

The biggest rumored budget of the giant franchise movie like MI-2 was 125m the big original movie like Perfect Storm, Patriot, Cast Away and Gladiator compete with similar budget.

 

Now the giant movie have 300-400M budget and the Cast Away of today try to compete with 60-80m budget when they are lucky or the 120m if they are able to sell China and some other big market in advance.

 

Erin Brockovich budget was more than 33% of the biggest movie of the year and released in almost has many theater than X-Men.

 

The MPAA studio in 2000 released 184 movies, in 2018 it was 143.

Lot of those movies were basically sold as star vehicles back when starpower was still a major thing in the industry. Wasn't until a few years later when we officially began to see the decline there with the people who were draws were starting to see diminishing returns and nobody new replaced them.

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33 minutes ago, Porthos said:

Remember all the complaints about how dark Solo was?  Lot of that was sub-standard projectors.  Other films have been hit with that as well.

 

Sure, cinematographers have probably gotten a bit too lax at times with how they handle dark scenes (see that famous quote about the Battle of Helms Deep as the counterexample about how to light dark scenes "correctly"), but some theaters sure aren't helping matters. 

 

No no no no no, man. C'mon. It's not the DP's fault a movie is shown shittily. That's, like, victim-blaming.

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6 minutes ago, Plain Old Tele said:

 

No no no no no, man. C'mon. It's not the DP's fault a movie is shown shittily. That's, like, victim-blaming.

I'm saying they're two different issues that can both result in a poor viewing experience.  That's not victim-blaming, that's saying there's two different perps.

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13 minutes ago, Porthos said:

I'm saying they're two different issues that can both result in a poor viewing experience.  That's not victim-blaming, that's saying there's two different perps.

IMO, it's the same thing: many theaters don't show movies correctly, in the way intended. It's exacerbated by the fact we don't really have projectionists anymore. It's Austerity for Theaters, but they're slowly killing the experience. 

 

edit: I guess I should explain more. The point was to make the theatrical experience different and unique and special, right? So here you have filmmakers doing just that: some do it with stylistic lighting choices, some do it with 3D and/or HFR, some do it shooting natively in IMAX, etc etc. But if these choices -- all of which can be cool and neat and different and definitely something unique to the movie theater -- aren't presented well, they can look bad. (And of course even a movie that isn't trying to do any of that can look bad). Stripping down the content to be viewable in a lowest-common-denominator way doesn't do anything except make people think they might as well just watch at home.

Edited by Plain Old Tele
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5 minutes ago, filmlover said:

I can't say I've ever had projection problems at the movies. Usually when I have problems with the lighting it's entirely related to the movie/filmmaking choices itself (looking at you as a recent example, Godzilla: King of the Monsters).

 

You're fortunate to have a theater (or theaters) that bother to present things well. That's good!

 

I wasn't around for the KOTM discussion, so I missed whatever you said (sorry). Whatever problems I had with the movie, though, I thought it looked pretty great, for the most part.

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Just now, Plain Old Tele said:

IMO, it's the same thing: many theaters don't show movies correctly, in the way intended. It's exacerbated by the fact we don't really have projectionists anymore. It's Austerity for Theaters, but they're slowly killing the experience. 

Let me switch tracks to the most egregious recent example, though it's TV not film.  There was a lot of complaining over the how the Battle of Winterfell for Game of Thrones was presented.  Many of the responses to the complaints rightly pointed out compression issues on delivery.  But even when taking that into account, it was just a really dark scene where it was exceedingly hard to make out what was going on even when presented in the best possible way as folks who had optimal TV sets and content delivery with very little compression still had a very hard time watching the scene.  

 

It might be by design... But just because it is doesn't make it a good choice.  A DP can choose to light scenes in certain ways as an artistic choice.  That doesn't mean that artistic choice will lead to a good viewing experience even under optimal conditions.

 

====

 

But I feel this is a side point (though an important one).  On the whole, I do agree with you that theaters are cutting corners far too much.  I think it is degrading the theater experience.   And I certainly think theaters should be doing a better job on this front, though with cost pressure mounting on them, don't ask me what's the best way for them to actually do it.

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2 hours ago, MrPink said:


fuck your 27 championships.

Yanks in 6. -_-

1 hour ago, Plain Old Tele said:

 

Isn't Ed a Mets fan? :ph34r: 

I barely watch baseball anymore. I grew up a Yankee fan.

 

The season is ridiculously long. Not much time. Football, however...

 

J-E-T-S 

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^^ Imma agree and disagree too. :lol: Sometimes the point is to present confusion. We all have our own definitions of how much is too much, but audiences are accustomed to everything being presented with clarity -- when that may not be the intent.

 

With regards to theaters: yes, I know it's razor-thin margins. I don't think there's one obvious solution, but I think there might be several ways to help. Unfortunately, some might include the studios subsidizing the theatrical experience to some degree and they don't wanna spend the money either. Like, I wish they'd make it cheaper and easier license their library titles while allowing theaters to play those and first-run titles too. I wish studios wouldn't front-load their titles and encourage theaters to run them for a few weeks longer towards the end. Both of those would help theaters somewhat. Regardless, while theatrical bulbs are expensive, deliberately mis-using them to extend their life seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

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