A hit-or-miss global landscape for movies, and yet small pix abound
Monday, December 28, 2009 at 10:28PM BRIEFING: "Media: A world of hits; Ever-increasing choice was supposed to mean the end of the blockbuster. It has had the opposite effect," The Economist, 28 November 2009.
Starts off promisingly by noting that last year 610 films released in the U.S., up from 471 in 1999. Cable and sat TV exploding around planet, with all of subscribers now in Asia-Pac (assume that includes us?), and online video is going great guns (20 hours added to YouTube every second--and all of it Kubrickian in quality!).
And then the mag whines about how "the ever-increasing supply of content tailored to every taste seems not to have dented the appeal of the blockbuster. Quite the opposite."
Then we realize, in the next para, that this boo-hoo is directed at Chris Anderson's "Long Tail" thesis (Anderson used to work at The Economist, so some personal payback may be at work here!).
But the truth is that both the big hits and the tail enders are doing well, killing--yet again--that old shibboleth about globalization homogenizing along with the opposing one suggested by Anderson: that unifying cultural events (Can't we all still love Lucy?!?!) were a thing of the past.
Stupid humans! Failing to conform to our extreme predictions!
Turns out that people still want to share culture--by definition!
Turns out that lotsa people still want hits--again, by definition!
I am not making this stuff up.
Oh yeah, and huge American action movies loaded with FX and minimal dialogue sell better abroad than at home.
I can't even begin to theorize why that is true . . ..
The Economist should leave this stuff to Variety, which is light years ahead on the subject.
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