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Comment by beoberha | Hacker News Reader

I think at the end of the day the economics of streaming just aren’t there. Rights holders saw how much Netflix was making off their content and realized they could get way more if they cut out the middle man. But the cost of creating quality content requires selling it for way more than a monthly subscription that people are willing to pay (or else you get ads). There’s a reason movies cost 5 bucks to rent on Amazon or 15 bucks to buy outright.

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What natural law mandates that DiCaprio has a 50-100 million salary per movie? You think if the amount of money is reduced actors won’t act anymore?

I don’t understand your point. The natural progression of things is how we got to this point. You’d need some massive shock to the system (like a legislative law) to change it at this point.

Or a crash in market. Where they simply run out of the big money. So the big ticket items like stars simply do not get hired and everything is done with less people and less VFX.

Stars are hired because they make the studios money (as a marketing vehicle), not on some money-wasting whim.

They’d still do it for less money if there’s less total money in the market. It’s not like a bridge where a pound of steel costs X and not much you can do about it

Argument is that making these things is inherently very expensive, but the actor salaries tell me there’s plenty of left over once production ends. There’s static costs and there’s more fluid ones

If DiCaprio asked for such a price and the companies didn't think they could make it back, he wouldn't get it. He is able to set that price due to demand for DiCaprio specifically. I don't necessarily agree with it either but they do consider these things, and they wouldn't pay him that much otherwise.

If a movie with famous actor makes 100M more than without them, why shouldn't they get a significant portion of that?

Is that DiCaprio number salary, or profit/revenue sharing as a producer? Looking at [0] it seems like his highest salary was $30M. He made more on Inception and Titanic, but that was total income, not salary.

Anyway, when thinking about it as cost and value, then it makes sense in our economic model.

I never understood why Hollywood insists on using A list actors to do voice acting for animated features. Most of the time it's not even apparent who's performing and I hardly find it a draw that some big name is listed on the billboard.

Dis we really need Chris Pratt and Jack Black to do the voices for the Super Mario movie? Especially when Chris Pratt is basically using his regular voice the whole time?

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