Comment by shermanyo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shermanyo | Hacker News Reader

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> Not everything can be made on a small budget with innovative story. Some products can, but not majority.

Honest question, have there ever been any attempts to vary the price of content based on cost to produce?

If a studio wants to pump out high quality, low budget teen slasher flicks, why cant they sell at half the price of a CGI blockbuster?

Would those straight-to-dvd or midday movies do better if their value wasn't directly compared to AAA titles? Sure, it may not have been The Godfather, but it was a quarter of the price to see, so I don't feel ripped off.

If a movie uses unknown actors (which to me always feels more immersive than trying to imagine a star as yet another persona...), why does it have to cost me the same as a movie with individual actors paid an order of magnitude more than the previous film's entire budget?

Why do foreign films have to compete with American films at an equal price point (for local tickets)? Would more people choose a random Bollywood flick over the generic rom-com on date night if tickets were half the price at the same theater?

Maybe that's what we're seeing with original programming on things like Netflix?

Low budget made-for-tv films look better than 30 years ago.

With those budgets you can't hire top crew talent, and without A list cast you can't attract audience. So you will have a film that doesn't look like A budget film and you won't sell tickets. A list cast costs that much because they have brand value. With a product like that you're destined for TV and rental market. It exists and it works, but it can't fight in the same arena for viewer tickets.

There's also a feedback loop. New actors are introduced along established ones. That's how they become established themselves. And the cycle repeats. Doing a movie with whole unknown cast is extremely risky. Because you lose any brand value coming from actors. Two questions when considering watching a movie are: What is it about? Who's in it?

True. They say producing movies is extremely expensive, but only because they force blockbusters upon us and because they use stars from an extremely reduced pool of actors. Example: There are thousands of muscular guys worldwide who beg to act in better movies, why always require the same few US actors? Example: The French movie industry makes money, although they focus on a romantic/comedy market with much lower production costs and much reduced (French) market. Movies don't necessarily have to be worldwide-reaching to be pleasant. I'm confident it's possible to build action movies or thrillers without 3D, with much fewer battle scenes, with a much better scenario (Jason Bourne I'm looking at you), with younger actors and in other countries than USA without harming the audience's pleasure too much. But that requires not having the existing marketing-pumped blockbusters as competitors.

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