Blade Runner 2049

I have long thought - and probably mentioned it here more than once - that the entire movie production biz needs one common You Tube like site (with additional marketing via YouTube itself), with the actual expense confined to advertising the site itself from the common pool. Now, let's take something like the Rotten Tomatoes. It gets ~ 15 million unique visitors monthly from the US alone (~26M globally) without any advertising. Fifteen million visitors is more than an average film will entertain.

How big would a "Hollyoodmoviesdotcom" site be, with pretty much every household in the US possessing either a mobile or home based internet device, and often several for the various family members? And I'll even go further. "Hollywoodmoviesdotcom" would barely need to be advertised either, as free promotional/BTS material would be dsitributed for free to the news based sites, with the corresponding linkage to the mother source.

But, let's take it even further. For those of you old enough to remember "I want my MTV" ads - MTV was born for playing commercials, aka music videos, and not did it not need additional post-launch funding. It was a gigantic financial success in and of itself. It turned out that playing commercials was immensely profitable. And that means that Movie, rather than Music, Television could be profitable in and of itself as well.

Which would bring profits to the movie studios and render advertising almost meaningless.

Of course, the other part of it is not Hollywood movies but Hollywood accounting and it can hide a lot of dollars in these advertising budgets. Both incoming and outgoing. Which is probably why they' exist. For the benefits of the insiders and the detriment of the stockholders.

PS. With the stipulated $165M P&A, BR2049 is about $200M in the hole.

Part nostalgia trip, part commercial lesson.

 
Those MTV promos are just as noisy and annoying as I remember them from back in the day! (And all the worse seeing them one right after another like that.) I was the programming director at the local cable TV company when we launched the channel back in 1983, and have never experienced a more hyped and high volume marketing event. A memory I would just as soon lose ...

- Greg
 
I remember Keith Richards saying (c. 1983?) ~ "In the old days, if you stayed up all night, you could always find some old horror movie to watch. Now, it's wall-to-wall video. It's disgusting to be flipping through the channels only to see your own mug on the screen".

We signed up for cable in 1984 right before the LA Olympics but I recall watching a bunch of late night videos shows. There was one with Bob Welch called "Hollywood Heartbeat", Casey Kasem's "Ametica's Top 10" (from which Letterman stole his "Top 10" list) and NBC's "Friday Night Videos". And, when when we got cable, we got USA's "Night Flight" too. Gubnabit, Keith was right.
 
DLD said:
It's disgusting to be flipping through the channels only to see your own mug on the screen
Click to expand...

I know, right?

There was one with Bob Welch called "Hollywood Heartbeat", Casey Kasem's "Ametica's Top 10" (from which Letterman stole his "Top 10" list) and NBC's "Friday Night Videos". And, when when we got cable, we got USA's "Night Flight" too.
Click to expand...

Some neurons in my brain just lit up for the first time in 30 years.
 
USA's Night Flight would sometimes play the wildest musical selections. That was a real crazy free-form art experiment of a show. In the early days there really wasn't a lot of content from which to choose. I recall some video artists / computer engineers creating one hell of an acid trip computer graphics video for a Philip Glass track that I first discovered on Night Flight. Frankly it fit right into the asthetic somewhere between Blade Runner and the slitscan sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Anyone recall this?
 
Night Flight also included a music video show called "Radio 1990", with Kathryn Kinley and Lisa Robinson. Robinson was fairly understated in front of a camera but KK was a quintessential 80's girl, with big hair and broad shoulder pads.

Also, and this was before Fox's purchase of SportsChannel America, with USA carrying a lot of sports.

In any case, studios of the free world unite and hope the DOJ give you an exemption.
 
You're blowing my mind pulling out Radio 1990 and Kathryn Kinley. Didn't she used to date Pierce Brosnan? Anyone remember when MTV had real "VJs" who actually knew something about the music scene, like J.J. Jackson and Nina Jackson? Even Martha Quinn knew a bit about music, and she was basically a cute kid they hired to be on screen.
 
Nina Blackwood, who's still doing some work for Sirius. I looked up Kathryn Kinley on Linked-in. She's working for ABC Digital and, since Pierce Brosnan is off the market ...

PS. A note on the marketing and promotion expenses, one has to assume that it is minimal for the paid streamers (Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc.), so even if the production costs are high, there is not much additional P&A outlay.
 
lisa_robinson.1.jpg kathryn_kinley.1.jpg vj.1.jpg

PS. A note on the marketing and promotion expenses, one has to assume that it is minimal for the paid streamers (Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc.), so even if the production costs are high, there is not much additional P&A outlay.
Click to expand...

That's a good point. They have the efficiency of old Hollywood, where studios owned theaters, without risk of government break-up.
 
Last edited:
combatentropy said:
... They have the efficiency of old Hollywood, where studios owned theaters, without risk of government break-up.
Click to expand...
And they have global distribution (at least, wherever they are licensed to stream), so they don't have to split their revenues with the "foreign powers". China, as I had read, keeps 75% of the gross ... and you got nowhere to complain.

PS. Not to take this into the banned discussions but I was perusing through my Facebook news feed yesterday where an AEI headline was about Murray Rothbard predicting the pay-per-view/pay-per-program system going back to the 1980's. To some extent, VCR/video rentals was the early version of that - of course, here, one can go way back to the early pre-vinyl recording media - but now the tchnology makes it feasible vs. the old OTA radio/TV delivery system. Satellite radio isn't quite "on demand" but the next generation wireless such as G5 should make that a breeze as well.
 
Last edited:
Christopher Barry said:
Click to expand...

Thank You!!

As mesmerizing as I remembered it. When you think back to what the technology of the day was like in 1983, this really is a stunning artistic work. I recall Night Flight also showing a Making Of piece with the two guys behind this video, and them showing how some the effects were as low tech as sticking a big magnet next to a CRT to mess with the image. Seeing this work in the same era of Blade Runner, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (with the Genesis CGI sequence), Brainstorm (all the "graphics" in the Brainstorm sequences faked as practical effects), 2010, etc., it really shows how on the cusp of a new visual era we were. There's even rudimentary motion tracking in here when the spinning graphic orbs float behind a city skyline. A few years later when Die Hard needed to motion track a tllt down from a miniature burning Nakatomi Plaza building to a shot of the front of the real building, BossFilms did the motion tracking BY HAND, projecting each frame onto a wall and tracing elements in pencil to extrapolate the move.
This video was so ahead of its time.
 
That wasn't racist. In its early market penetration, cable in the US was getting a stronghold in affluent suburbs first, the inner city last. MTV was simply following its market research. In any case, once "Thriller" came out at the end of 1982, MTV and every other music video program became completely infatuated with Michael Jackson. Bowie can be forgiven for not knowing the American cable industry.

PS. As I had mentioned before in this thread, we signed up for cable TV in the summer of 1984 just in time and specifically for the LA Olympics. We were very much behind the curve there, as most of our friends had it from around 1982. But it cost a bit of money and not everyone was willing to pay for it, especially because major metropolitan areas already had 6-8 free OTA channels.
 
Last edited:
I am still debating whether I should shell out the $ to see BL2049 on the big screen. The thing is, I cannot stand Villeneuve as a director (based on Sicario and Prisoners), and am loathe to give any money to support his work, but on the other hand I am a big fan of the original BR. I could wait until it's out on DVD and watch it at my friend's (he already said he's buying it), but I do appreciate that it was meant to be seen on the large screen. It's still playing at the ArcLight here in Hollywood. But I'm unconvinced that a film that's bad will become good by seeing it on the large screen. In the end, I think I'll wait until my friend gets it on DVD. Complication - he's offered to pay for my ticket to the ArcLight (he wants to see it again); but even if he pays for it, that's more money in Villeneuve's pocket, even if it doesn't come from my pocket. Further complication - many people whose opinion I respect on this board, seem to like the film. But even though I respect their opinion, I often disagree anyway (see: Wind River), so that guarantees nothing. Maybe out of respect for Deakins I should see it on the large screen after all. But I don't like the work of many other people involved, like Hans Zimmer for music. What to do, what to do?

Anyway, I don't think the film losing money will affect Villeneuve's career. He's had several big box office and critical successes, so I think he's set for life as far as making films, same as Night Shyamalan he'll always be given more chances no matter how much money he loses from time to time.

EDIT: I realize that V does not personally profit from ticket sales, I'm talking the bigger picture (pun intended) :)
 
Last edited:
OldCorpse said:
I am still debating whether I should shell out the $ to see BL2049 on the big screen. The thing is, I cannot stand Villeneuve as a director (based on Sicario and Prisoners), and am loathe to give any money to support his work, but on the other hand I am a big fan of the original BR.
Click to expand...

I'm pretty much in the same boat, though I saw BR2049 the first day it came out. ( Not a big Villeneuve fan. He's a competent film maker, but he is definitely no Ridley Scott. Did not like Sicario or Arrival. )

Overall I did not like BR2049, but it's worth seeing at least once. I plan on seeing it again before it leaves the theaters, so maybe I'll like it better the 2nd time around...
 
Villeneuve isn't likely to get a penny more above of what he has already received due to the film being deep in red. Even those with gross points - and I doubt he had any of note - have various stipulations on where those points kick in.
 
DLD said:
That wasn't racist. In its early market penetration, cable in the US was getting a stronghold in affluent suburbs first, the inner city last. MTV was simply following its market research. In any case, once "Thriller" came out at the end of 1982, MTV and every other music video program became completely infatuated with Michael Jackson. Bowie can be forgiven for not knowing the American cable industry.

PS. As I had mentioned before in this thread, we signed up for cable TV in the summer of 1984 just in time and specifically for the LA Olympics. We were very much behind the curve there, as most of our friends had it from around 1982. But it cost a bit of money and not everyone was willing to pay for it, especially because major metropolitan areas already had 6-8 free OTA channels.
Click to expand...

Oh, it was pretty racist. Institutionally racist. And note that Michael Jackson's Billie Jean was a HUGE hit and MTV was still refusing to show his videos. In fact CBS had to threaten to pull ALL of its artists from MTV unless Michael Jackson's videos were put into rotation. MTV relented and the rest is history.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top