A couple of thoughts (including some commentary on the article itself- sorry I couldn't help it).
The central idea of this article, which is that slowing DVD sales due to the explosion of streaming options are slashing profit margins, is fascinating to me primarily due to the relative absence of blame-shifting onto 'piracy.' There was a mention of it, but it seems Hollywood has finally moved past the 'Piracy is causing all our woes, DMCADMCADMCA' delusions of the late 90s/early 2000s. As a Slashdotter from back in the day that saw such scolding played out on the front page I find it strange (yet optimistic) that they finally saw the real writing on the wall.
However, even though the central conceit of the article is interesting to me I find the language just goddamned terrible. I guess if you're looking for properly-flavored industry news then sentences like "[h]is first picture was the tentpole smash Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and he already had three television shows on the air" and "[m]ore recently, he released the smash Identity Thief, with Melissa McCarthy and Jason Bateman" are right up your alley. I'm suprised the author didn't describe some upcoming SMASH deal as BOFFO.
It's funny that she was an editor for the New York Times. I'm guessing she decided to edit her own book, so she had no one to tell her that her breathless and gossipy over-wrought writing style would be laughable if it weren't so painful to read.
It's an excerpt, so the style might fit better in the book, where hopefully the reader isn't thrown right into it and bombarded with it constantly.
Even as an excerpted article, however, it needed to be edited much more. I skimmed the last half because I found the style unbearable. If you're going to explain why movies suck now, then start talking about facts, ideas, and their connections. Why bother with so much character development when those characters don't matter in such a short piece?
When will they admit that they killed DVDs themselves due to their fear of piracy? The more copy protection they put on them, the less likely any given DVD was likely to work. In the 90's we rented a lot of DVDs. By the time Netflix came along, we finally gave up even trying DVDs from the video store, instead watching whatever drivel was on Netflix only because we had a reasonable expectation that it would work all the way through without a microscratch triggering the anti-piracy circuitry.
Huh? I bought in to DVDs very early and I've either owned or used many DVD players over the last decade, and I've never, not once, had an issue with DRM preventing me from using the disc in a dedicated player.
The only situation I can think of is that you bought or moved your DVDs from a different "region." And the number of people actually dealing with that is so small it's not even worth mentioning.
Perhaps you meant Blu-Ray? While issues are perhaps more common, they're not common enough to drive people away. BR's sales problems are due to high cost and poor timing to market.
>By the time Netflix came along, we finally gave up even trying DVDs from the video store...
I think this is a bigger deal than efforts to curtail piracy. If nothing else it's just more convenient to stream a video than to go to the store and buy/rent it.
In theory they could make up the difference by charging the streaming services enough to make up the difference, but I don't think the market supports a higher price.
man that article was a pain to read for sure. One of those that couldve done with a TL;DR - "so this producer thinks that loss of DVDs killed hollywood" .. but still leaving a lot of questions for such a link-baity article completely unanswered.
Based on the comments here, a key point of the article was missed. The quality of movies right now is crappy because it is being entirely driven by the international market, where they base things entirely on historical returns of specific actors and/or narrow genres. This shift to focus on international is due to the the loss of the DVD market. It's a lesson in how changing economics can impact the core quality of a product, not just "we're getting disrupted - damn the technology".
Well, call me a.... whatever... but reads to me like they want to blame everything other than their rubbish movies that are not worth having a permanent DVD copy of, and the stupid amount of money they insist on spending to make a movie.
These days, it seems the best movies are low budget, and worth buying a DVD of to keep. The big expensive "block buster" movies are very often watch once, enjoy for the moment, and forget. That can be cinema, netflix, torrents, who cares? The movie isn't actually worth caring about.
I actually disagree. I am more likely to go to the theater or buy a legitimate copy of a big budget movie than a low budget one, since I'll pay a bit extra for the highest quality experience of the effects. I still love going to the theater, so I see more movies there than by any other method, but for small movies like The King's Speech (not an example of a classic "low budget" movie, but hopefully you get the idea, the scale is small), I'm way more likely to wait for a way I can see it for free (or in one of the streams I already pay for: HBO, Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc.)
It may also be your movie tastes differ from his too. Right now I am noticing basically two groups of people (not correlated to age): one group which enjoys the effects, 3D, epicness... and the other which is disillusioned with today's movies (ie yay another movie where I watch CGI dudes shoot around and then get a 3D fly-over the battle-field every 5 seconds).
I think there is something to be said for the funneling of movie budgets into a few MASSIVELY costing movies (ie per the Spielberg interview that was posted on HN last week). I, myself, enjoy a good "Dark Knight", but also something like the King's Speech or The Tree of Life. The question is whether both can keep being made for their respective budgets, and both in film vs other media.
I actually enjoy both quite a bit, and am likely too see both types in theaters. My point was simply given enough money to pay for the highest quality experience of one movie, I'll pay for the big budget action film over the small scale but still high quality movie. I feel I can enjoy the smaller movies just as much on a TV at home. Seeing The Dark Knight in IMAX is a hugely different experience than at home.
> their rubbish movies that are not worth having a permanent DVD copy of,
You seem to think that making awful movies is something new? it is not. These guys do a lot of testing to make sure their movies are wanted. As much as anyone can.
That was an interesting read. Strangely it would make a good movie. But the really telling bit was the inaction. That is classically how disruptions happen. You see you get people who have been in "the business" (any business) their whole life and they have learned the ins and outs and "how its done" which is as much lore as it is practical advice. Now you change the rules and an outsider can see the new path but the person who "knows how it is done" is beset by doubt. None of their hard won information and learning applies (or nearly none of it) and they are being asked to make Important Decisions. Complete lockup. Lots of folks in the dot com world had the same experience when suddenly "no profit" / "no investment" became the required thing and all their slide ware and pitches were junk.
This is why the stuff we learn from Netflix's experiments with funding shows, which changes the pipeline, will do. Soon we'll have the Netflix funded movie production and it will be another shift in the bedrock of whose ass you have to kiss to get a movie made.
I feel sorry for the folks who were revered for their expertise before and are now worthless. But it is the way of these things. What the folks in the studios realize is that movies are still going to get made, but how they get made is going to change. And until the 'new' way has run a few movies through the pipeline and the new makers have figured out what it takes, its going to be scary.
First, we're dealing with people who are LOADED. Why should I care if they can't afford to pay Tom Cruise, the director, the producer, and a bunch of other people 20 million dollars each? Oh darn, they'll only get paid 4 million dollars each.
This is a classic case of old, technologically-inept white men whose business model was predicated on gouging the public for decades. The internet is killing DVD sales because of convenience and theatre revenues are down because the public is getting tired of superhero remakes and don't feel that the price of admission is worth 2 hours of watching 3 actors standing in front of a green screen and interacting with a bunch of CG extras, so they download it instead. All of a sudden Hollywood can't continue their price-gouging, and because they're basically Luddites, they fear change and can't adapt.
So they'll inevitably turn to the courts instead of letting their business adapt to the free market that they all espouse to love.
It's basically the situation that the American car companies found themselves in a few years ago. People are getting tired of their shitty products and aren't buying them any more. Instead of making better products that people would be willing to pay for, they curl up in the fetal position and cry.
> the public is getting tired of superhero remakes and don't feel that the price of admission is worth 2 hours of watching 3 actors standing in front of a green screen and interacting with a bunch of CG extras, so they download it instead
Does not compute - why do they download it if they are tired watching it?
If you had read the article, you'd know that they make uninspired sequels because they are the only movies that make predictable profits.
"Does not compute - why do they download it if they are tired watching it?"
Because it is worth it if it is free of charge. However, it is not paying up front for.
So take something like Battleships. Would I pay to see it? No way. If I'm bored one evening and its there for free? Yeah, I'd give it a go. If it turned out to be a damn good movie I'd want to watch repeatedly (I wish I chosen a better example...), I'd buy a DVD, Or pay for a legal down load a copy I could burn and keep.
> “They said to me, ‘We don’t even know how to run a P&L right now.’” The look on his face expressed the sheer madness of that statement. “ ‘We don’t know what our P&L looks like because we don’t know what the DVD number is!’ The DVD number used to be half of the entire P&L!”
> “What are the implications of that?”
> He looked at me incredulously, as if to say, Haven’t you run a studio? Then he said very emphatically, “The implications are— you’re seeing the implications—the implications are, those studios are frozen. The big implication is that those studios are—not necessarily inappropriately—terrified to do anything because they don’t know what the numbers look like.”
What does this actually mean?
Is there simply high uncertainties in P&L predictions, due to the difficulty in predicting international sales? There's a hard limit to the number of foreign movies some countries, notably China, allows so there could be massive fluctuations depending on whether it's good enough to send to China; and international tastes might be hard to predict. Or is it because the profit forecasts for every movie they do a P&L for falls short of what they can accept, and they put a magic "international sales" estimate in to push it over the line?
From what I understand, that they don't know what part of the Plan will be the one actually getting the most profit. And so they need to multiply their offers (and that increases the whole cost of the movie).
But to me, the important part is that this exact part is why we have yet another Spiderman and yet another Avengers movie on screens. Because as they are terrified, they are going to publish known beasts (movies), where they know the financial ratios.
Since cutting the cord and going pure Netflix, I haven't seen a trailer since like, ever.
This has a profound impact. I know longer know or even care what's coming out, or what's impending on DVD release. I know there's a new Star Trek movie, and the Hobbit came out a bit back, but I'm no longer edge-of-my-seat excited to see this because I haven't been being bashed about by promos for months. I'll wait for it to appear on Netflix, or maybe the Redbox thing. I saw Iron Man 2 on Netflix, so I figure I'll get to see part 3 there too.
Sounds like netflix could make some money by adding a trailers area.
People could go there and watch whatever trailers they like (and I think netflix could even suggest what they might like), and netflix would get some advertising dollars.
I think the basic problem is that contemporary movie studios are publicly traded companies whose goal is to grow by 10% a year (or at least hit market growth rates). In some businesses, that's just not possible because of limits to the size of the market; book publishers, for example, have only rarely grown at market or above-market rates.
Books are an interesting example for a couple reasons: book publishers have been real businesses far longer than movie studios. In addition, studios for a long time set up businesses that relied on people repeatedly re-buying the same movie on different formats. Books have never really gotten away with that (although we might be seeing some re-buying like behavior in the shift from paper to digital). Now there's not an obvious successor to DVDs, and movie studios might become, or be becoming, more like book publishers.
* Further background reading: Edward Jay Epstein, The Hollywood Economist.
I guess this article is aimed at film industry people, but still it is an example of very obtuse writing. I could not understand it all as a consequence of the many terms and jargon often used in it. The writer could do well to expand their audience by writing more accessible prose.
This is just awesome. They blame the lack of DVD revenues yet refuse to license content such that full service stream services can set up in other markets (like my own New Zealand). Well, believe it or not, we've got brains and technology here too. As someone else said in this thread: Fuck 'em.
Just for a comparison, I've pirated one album since I subscribed to spotify (yeezus to check it out when it leaked).
1) That the golden age for DVDs only lasted about 10 years. I think the golden age of cinema lasted from late 1920 to early 1960's. Acceleration in technology results in accelerated culture change and accelerated market changes. We're use to it in tech, but I didn't think much of other industries.
2) Along those lines, I was surprised this was such as revelation to the author. As soon as I saw Netflix go streaming, I knew this was the way I wanted my movies delivered. And the attitude in the OP seemed to be, "Hey, we can't make great movies and take risks on movies because you guys aren't buying DVDs." Innovative films never seemed to be big-budget anyway. And for an industry that's not use to change like technology is, they seem to fail to see that with new technology comes new business models, and new opportunities. I wonder how tech can educate hollywood on this.
Tech isn't much better at this than Hollywood, which has gone through the VCR age, censorship, and the end of the studio system, as well as the DVD age. Microsoft and Sony fought a format war over the successor to DVDs that hurt both of them (recall that Sony "won"). 20/20 hindsight is awesome.
And, by the way, the point is that innovative indie movies don't make their money at the box office. They play in small numbers of art house cinemas, and then they used to sell DVDs. A lot of cancelled TV shows became phenomena on DVD. You can become a cult show on streaming and not make much money.
I wonder how much profit Blu-Ray has actually made in aggregate, given the initial format war and the quickly-following demise of the DVD itself with the advent of streaming/on-demand viewing.
Given the debacle that was my experience with DVDs, I vowed I would never buy a Blu-Ray disk and I never have.
"Innovative films never seemed to be big-budget anyway."
One interesting hidden assumption deeply embedded in the biz is that big budgets are only for special effects and certain stars, and sometimes costume/makeup/sets although thats all getting adsorbed into "special effects". Obviously big budget never means the writers or any part of the creative team that doesn't involve makeup or blood spatters. Unfortunately that shows pretty strongly.
I would wager this budgeting anomaly is, in the long run, going to be a bigger disruptor to the biz than tech.
Directors, and even writers, on big budget films are paid very well. Even certain key behind-the-scenes people can easily make a million+ on a big film.
I think the difference between good and great writers and directors (and such) is pretty big, but I doubt the difference within the great is all that large, and I bet there are plenty enough to keep the studio dollars busy.
No different that any other big industry.
The "real problem" is their product is no good compared to the expanding competition for consumers (shrinking) entertainment budget.
If the disposable entertainment cash budget of the median consumer is dropping fast enough, and it seems it is, then they could create the worlds best movie and no one would spend money on it. So if there's no money to get, just go thru the motions and collect the paycheck until it stops, the output is going to be a crop of shovelware, which is a pretty accurate summary of the current situation.
Could the reason DVD sales have dropped so much simply be that Hollywood has released the back catalog of films?
My guess is when DVDs first became the craze there were only a handful of titles, as more titles were added people bought more - often going out to buy their favorites and classics for the sake of nostalgia. In this way Hollywood was making money by just re-releasing a lot of old content.
Now that all that 'catching up' has occurred and customers have already gone out and bought their favorite films, only new releases remain - and those are either a. underwhelming or b. not yet 'classic' status enough to bother owning.
I stopped buying movies and going to the movies for the same three reasons:
1. The often unskippable advertisements, anti-piracy warnings and FBI warnings on Blurays.
2. Most movies now have 30 mins of advertisements before them in theatres.
3. Hollywood isn't making good films anymore.
In other words, Hollywood is making shit products. They're just surprised that we're not buying them anymore.
I think it's quite obvious that the DVD market declined due to a combination of low perceived value, unreasonable inconvenience, and extremely fragile media.
Assuming people are like me and rarely watch a movie more than once unless it's exceptionally good, why pay $20-$30 or more for a DVD when you can rent it at RedBox for a buck or watch it on demand or on Netflix.
OK I bought the disk, but I can't make a backup copy or skip the ads and previews?
Oops, I dropped it or my kids got ahold of it, and now there is a little scratch on the disk, and it's entirely unplayable. Tapes were far more rugged, if slightly bulkier.
> I think it's quite obvious that the DVD market declined due to a combination of low perceived value, unreasonable inconvenience, and extremely fragile media.
Why would you say DVDs are fragile? Disk media replaced tapes, which were much more so.
Markets don't decline due to negative reasons. People are generally willing to put up with a subjectively poor experience if its absence would be worse. Instead they die when something else offers something better.
In this case, Netflix. It is not poor DVD quality that stopped people from buying them, it's Netflix and competitors. If DVDs sucked, they never would have replaced video tapes.
VHS tapes, being entirely enclosed in the cassette, are far more protected from accidental damage than are DVDs which are naked platters and will be rendered unplayable by minor scratches.
Yes anecdotal evidence is useless, but you consider not agreeing to sit through 30 mins of ads before you see something that you already paid €10 for is 'unreasonable' !?
In that case I am far more unreasonable. I dont support MPAA, RIAA, etc. involved companies at all.
My reasoning is that by supporting them you are supporting their lobbyists who will then introduce crazy laws like ACTA and SOPA.
I'm just patiently waiting for them to die off.
> Yes anecdotal evidence is useless, but you consider not agreeing to sit through 30 mins of ads before you see something that you already paid €10 for is 'unreasonable' !?
Yes, I do. Ads are a cheap way to make something profitable that would otherwise not be. You should be thankful we even have theaters these days.
If you think it is unreasonable, why don't you find something better to do with your time and money? You could make a nice dinner for two with €10 and have a much better time than you would being angry at ads and those rich assholes in Hollywood. Nobody's forcing you to watch films.
>If you think it is unreasonable, why don't you find something better to do with your time and money? You could make a nice dinner for two with €10 and have a much better time than you would being angry at ads and those rich assholes in Hollywood. Nobody's forcing you to watch films.
You realize that's EXACTLY I and millions of others are doing right? That in fact that exact phenomenon which you suggest is what caused this article to be written?
People pay for cable and it has ads. So do magazines, newspapers. EVERY form of media is ad-driven, whether you're paying out of pocket for it or not. Video games often contain ads for other games. Sorry to burst your bubble.
Well, I dont. As I said above "I dont support MPAA, RIAA, etc. involved companies at all"
However I think yer man above who does goto the cinema is not being unreasonable. Though I do agree he would be better of doing as I do as u suggested and give it all a miss.
Current sociological research pretty heavily points to consumer disillusion and annoyance with the behavior of studios as the reason that they decide to pirate, to not go to theaters, and to pursue alternative forms of entertainment.
Most people are just as "unreasonable" as the grandparent, which is to say that they are highly reasonable and you are the unreasonable one.
I don't know if you remember a film from about forty years ago, where the general public was exhorted to admit that they were, in fact, "mad as hell," and as result, "not gonna take it any more." People are currently mad as hell, and now we're seeing them decide (unsurprisingly) to not take it any more.
Bluray (and HD-DVD) came out just a couple years before the big decline this article discusses, which is about the time they would have needed to get past the early-adopter stage and start making a significant market impact. These were the premium formats that were supposed to draw in people with their superior quality and command a premium price with a correspondingly premium net profit. These formats have not flopped, but neither have they given Hollywood the boost they were looking for. In fact, I'd be surprised if Hollywood execs aren't rather disappointed with Bluray sales.
The problem now is that DVD's are widely seen as an inferior format. Superficially, they have all the disadvantages of Bluray with inferior quality even to online streaming. Sure, they're pretty cheap, but not cheap enough to justify the lack of both convenience and quality. If online streaming killed DVD sales, Bluray was certainly an accomplice.
The reason Bluray hasn't gained as much traction as Hollywood hoped is that, in practice, its even more inconvenient for users than DVD's were. Bluray's are saddled with DRM so onerous that movies can take minutes to load and only a player with an internet connection to obtain updates has a chance to play the newest titles. Bluray discs almost universally have inferior user interfaces to DVD's, and the consistency is awful. BD-J discs often break basic player functionality such as auto-resume. On top of it all, Hollywood has continued to pile on more and more warning screens and advertisements. One of the selling features of the Bluray format, according to Hollywood, is that Bluray discs can download fresh new trailers online and show them to users instead of simply playing old trailers loaded on the disk. Yes, only Hollywood would call a program that downloads ads and makes you watch them a feature!
Compare this to online video. The quality is still inferior to Bluray, but it won't be that way forever, or even much longer. Arguably, the quality edge Bluray has is already pretty slim on the majority of display's people are using.
Hollywood should be serious about keeping Bluray competitive with online video. They make a lot more when you buy a movie on Bluray than they do if you watch it on iTunes. However, they clearly aren't. How do we know? They keep updating the encryption on Bluray discs, forcing people to keep up with updates to their players even though the updated encryption is frequently broken before the Bluray's using it officially go on sale. Every time a user has even slight difficulty playing a movie they just paid good money for, you drive another nail into the coffin of the Bluray format. They keep piling on trailers and warning screens. It still takes minutes to get to the movie with many Bluray's. Onerous anti-piracy ads are still being shown to the very people who have just paid for their content! Bluray menu interfaces remain inferior to those of DVD's, and consistency has not improved.
The obvious answer for Hollywood is to treat their best (i.e. most profitable) customers like their best customers, but this is simply not being done. Instead, they're looking for the next big thing to fix everything. 3D Bluray's! 4K video! 3D fatigue has already had an impact on cinema sales, but it'll be great in the home! (Disclosure: I own a 3D projector and have yet to watch more than 10 minutes of 3D to verify that it works). Yes, 1080p isn't good enough! 4K will be the savior of Hollywood, nevermind that the average viewer can't tell 720p from 1080p! The number is bigger, so they will come.
It's pretty hard to feel much sympathy for Hollywood these days.
>“The DVD business represented fifty percent of their profits,” he went on. “Fifty percent. The decline of that business means their entire profit could come down between forty and fifty percent for new movies.”
>If a studio’s margin of profit was only 10 percent in the Old Abnormal, now with the collapsing DVD market that profit margin was hovering around 6 percent. The loss of profit on those little silver discs had nearly halved our profit margin.
This actually explains a lot about the studios' rabid antipiracy campaigns and their unwillingness to make everything available streaming. DVDs aren't a huge slice of the pie, but as a percentage of profit, it becomes a huge deal.
Well, maybe if they didn't swear blind that they never made a profit on any film ever and that actually they made a loss so there won't be any taxes, I'd have some sympathy.
Is it me, or is this story impossible to read on an iPhone? I get about 1/3 of the way in, and the text gets covered with a dark gray overlay approx 9000px tall with a photo of Neil Patrick Harris in the middle.
That's the thing with disruptions. The new business models can't support the old cost structures, but they can support the new cost structures from new businesses built around the disruptions.
Hollywood would have to adapt, which means doing things in a very different way than they've done it so far, and that's not something they'd like to do. They'd rather try and hold on to what they have now for as long as possible.
Especially since they're so big it's a continual temptation to force legislation to preserve what they have now. If they were smaller, so that this weren't even an option, they'd have adapted.
> The new business models can't support the old cost structures, but they can support the new cost structures from new businesses built around the disruptions.
"Disruption" , the new Start-Up LEITMOTIV , Ad Nauseam ... Except there is nothing to disrupt in Hollywood because Hollywood is not broken. It works as intended. Read the latest box office?
It's striking how little they learned from the music industry. Substitute "CD" for "DVD" and lower the budgets a few orders of magnitude and this could've been about the 90's/00's music industry.
And the author doesn't seem to internalize what's become common knowledge in the music industry: the shiny savior disc (CD/DVD) was really masking the deeper disruptions in consumer behavior.
In retrospect, CDs and DVDs seem like a complete scam. They didn't offer any significant benefits over vinyl and tape. They were still a physical thing that you had to handle and store, and taking more than a few with you when you went somewhere was a major hassle. And they were far more fragile.
Are you kidding? CDs were miles better than vinyl and tape and were the dominant format for a very long period of time. Until the rise of mp3, there was no way to get high quality sound in a compact form. Have fun trying play vinyl in your car or on an airplane. CDs were a revolution and an amazing piece of technology, especially when you consider that they were created in the 70s.
you can listen to a CD more than once in quick succession without permanently distorting it
you can play a particular track on demand
you can reproduce a disc without quality loss
rewinding a DVD is pretty quick
DVDs include subtitles; tapes didn't
CDs and DVDs are significantly smaller and easier to store than records and VHS tapes - I have a pocket-sized container that will safely hold a couple dozen CDs, but that would be fairly difficult with records.
In summary, CDs and DVDs are both vast technological improvements over vinyl and tape. And I have no idea what you're talking about with "And they were far more fragile."
Many people still subscribe to cable. I don't, but on some months I spend upwards of $100+ on movie tickets and Blu-Ray disks (Yes, I buy them.) Other months I realize I can do a zillion other things (go to a zoo or play golf) for what movie tickets cost.
Things are going to change, but the unique concentration of talent and intellectual property based around L.A. will be a force to be reckoned with for years.
Studios have never made so much money. Every trash superhero film is clearing a billion dollars in foreign box office. Chinese had zero interest in Hollywood until recently now they are the #1 film market.
Film, as an artform, will survive. The current studio system, hoisting this crap into the theaters will not. The faster we can end the current paradigm, the faster we can move to the new order.
The Innovator's Dilema: The studios should have started the streaming services. Instead they were busy continuimg to optimize their existing business model. It makes you wonder if any of those people even heard of the book.
> "....He looked at me incredulously, as if to say, Haven’t you run a studio? Then he said very emphatically, “The implications are— you’re seeing the implications—the implications are, those studios are frozen. The big implication is that those studios are—not necessarily inappropriately—terrified to do anything because they don’t know what the numbers look like.”
Regarding tech advance crushing DVD sales, 50% of profit.
The central idea of this article, which is that slowing DVD sales due to the explosion of streaming options are slashing profit margins, is fascinating to me primarily due to the relative absence of blame-shifting onto 'piracy.' There was a mention of it, but it seems Hollywood has finally moved past the 'Piracy is causing all our woes, DMCADMCADMCA' delusions of the late 90s/early 2000s. As a Slashdotter from back in the day that saw such scolding played out on the front page I find it strange (yet optimistic) that they finally saw the real writing on the wall.
However, even though the central conceit of the article is interesting to me I find the language just goddamned terrible. I guess if you're looking for properly-flavored industry news then sentences like "[h]is first picture was the tentpole smash Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and he already had three television shows on the air" and "[m]ore recently, he released the smash Identity Thief, with Melissa McCarthy and Jason Bateman" are right up your alley. I'm suprised the author didn't describe some upcoming SMASH deal as BOFFO.