BahRamYou
3d ago
Well yeah I wasn't trying to just pick one at random. But I didn't pick the very largest either.
We could also look at wall street as a whole: 198 income against 856 billion last year.
But of course Hollywood has huge propaganda/marketing value that might be hard to measure.
BahRamYou
3d ago
Yeah, and think about how garbled the movie is going to be after it's been translated and subbed/dubbed into a hundred different languages with all different cultural contexts. There's just no way to make a tightly-written plot under that kind of limitation.
BahRamYou
3d ago
One thing to consider is that the movie industry as a whole is... not all that profitable.
It peaked at $11 billion total domestic gross in 2018: https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/ and has gone down since then. Granted that's just domestic gross, so there's also international, subscription fees, merchandise, hollywood accounting, etc... but that also doesn't take into account the cost of actually making the movies. Anyway it's a ballpark figure to show the size. Not chump change, but not a gigantic industry either.
Meanwhile you could compare that to any large corporation. let's say, Citigroup: https://companiesmarketcap.com/citigroup/revenue/ averaging around 80 billion a year. That's one corporation, not even the largest, vs all of Hollywood. In other words, there's a lot of money floating around out there that can finance flops and not care too much about maximizing revenue.
The other point I'd like to make is that, well, we've all seen movies before. Lots of them. Half the audience is barely paying attention to the movie anyway, they're watching it while distracted with their phone or something. So you don't actually need to explain all the detailed plot points of a movie. Especially when it's a typical Hero's Journey type thing, the audience will get the emotional beats regardless of plot holes. It would just be boring to stop the action and explain to the camera like "as you know, there's a special magical place that we discovered by doing long detailed research in the library..." or whatever.
I agree with you about games, and to some extent TV and books- games take so long to play, and there's so many old good ones, that we just don't have time to keep up with all the new released games. Even if you buy them all to test them out, it's only scratching the surface, which really doesn't do them justice.
Movies are a bit different since they really don't take much time or effort to watch. Especially if you just focus on the big mainstream Hollywood movies, you can just see 1 or 2 a month and pretty much keep up with all of them. But admittedly I don't even do that much anymore... it's just so rare to find a new movie that interests me.
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