09.20.05
Movies
I was going to write some fun stuff about how things are now I’m back in Pittsburgh after my week in LA, but really there’s not much fun stuff happening. I’m madly trying to level Dd in EQ2 (though whether I’m taking tradeskills or levels is an interesting question), and also trying to get spare time to look through all the stuff I discovered at PDC. Tough conflicting requirements on my time there! Oh well, sleep was never necessary and it’s not like tradeskilling takes a huge amount of concentration.
Instead, I found this interesting quote on Slashdot:
“If Coca-Cola accidentally created 100 million cans of faulty Coke, you know for sure the entire 100 million cans would be dropped in the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, without a second thought and irrespective of what that did to the year’s profits. What do we do with a crappy movie? We double its advertising budget and hope for a big opening weekend. What have we done for the audience as they walk out of the cinema? We’ve alienated them. We’ve sold audiences a piece of junk; we just took twelve dollars away from a couple and we think we’ve done ourselves no long-term damage.” — David Puttnam, movie producer (from GQ magazine, April 1987)
I have barely been to see any movies since I’ve been in the US. It’s just not worth my money or time to go out for what has largely been a bunch of sub-par movies. Why not just stay home and play interactive games, where you get to be active instead of passive in your entertainment? I think I’ve spent orders of magnitude more cash on the games industry than I have on the movie industry.
So, what’s this all about? The movie industry has become complacent. The video game industry is going to kill their profits and unless they find a way to produce more movies that are actually interesting there’s really nothing to do but sell your stock in movie companies that don’t own gaming franchises as well.