Well, the reign of the stars is over. That’s not spec­u­la­tion on my part but a sim­ple fact every­body can see. Just take a look at the top 20 movies (box office) on IMDB. What do we have there? There are quite a few ani­mated movies there as well as films which wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for the con­sid­er­able amount of spe­cial effects in them. And that’s where the trend is going: CGI. The need for overly expen­sive actors is rapidly declin­ing and that is a good thing. I could never stand this my-smile-is-worth-20-million-bucks-attitude.

Unfor­tu­nately, there’s a dark side too. Isn’t there always? Well, the suc­cess of a movie isn’t deter­mined by it’s playa­bil­ity but rather by it’s mar­ketabil­ity. In other words: It is more impor­tant to get the peo­ple into the the­aters on the open­ing week­end rather than secur­ing a steady stream of movie-goers. In short: The open­ing week­end is the sig­nif­i­cant fac­tor that decides the fate of a film. That’s before the major­ity of the movie-goers pick up the gos­sip about the movie.

That’s a prob­lem because a lot of movies are planned based on lots and lots of sta­tis­tics on the likes and dis­likes of the movie-goers. All that in a world there the­ater tick­ets gen­er­ate only about 20 per­cent of the earn­ings in total. There’s the DVD and mobile video devices like the iPod, for instance. Even though I am tech­no­log­i­cally inter­ested, this devel­op­ment sucks. I never under­stood why peo­ple would pre­fer to watch a movie on a very small screen when they can watch it in the movie theater.

Mod­ern movies pride them­selves on spe­cial effects. Today’s action block­buster resem­bles a non-stop roller-coaster ride con­sist­ing of lots of spe­cial effects and lit­er­ally thou­sands of cuts. One word comes to mind: stro­bo­scopic. That’s the point where witty con­ver­sa­tions doesn’t mat­ter any­more because all that the watcher sees is the body lan­guage. It is absurd that the pow­ers that be should judge a script based on the amount of wham­mies in it. Dude, where’s my story?

We live in a time where local­ized movies are pro­duced. Peo­ple in Europe get to see other end­ings than peo­ple in the States. There are stud­ies on the likes and dis­likes of movie-goers for every region and movies are based on that infor­ma­tion. Accord­ing to some reports that’s the right thing to do if you want to max­i­mize your prof­its. Well, I don’t think that’s right. I don’t want fancy explo­sions, high-speed chases, highly styl­ized mar­tial arts fights and sim­i­lar stuff to make up for a non-existent/weak story or witty conversations.

So, it’s a good thing that there’s a par­a­digm shift on the way, that actors aren’t con­sid­ered being worth lots of mil­lions of dol­lars for one movie. At the same time Hol­ly­wood is focus­ing on the dig­i­tal world by using dig­i­tal back­lots and explor­ing means of dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion. They’re doing the lat­ter one with a grudge, of course, but they know no other way to counter piracy. But then, there are stan­dards like BD-Live aka Blu-ray Disc Pro­file 2.0 which is a fea­ture that allows addi­tional, down­load­able con­tent. There are rumor on the net regard­ing pos­si­ble future fea­tures for online movies like mul­ti­track­ing sto­ries where the viewer decides from which point of view he is going to watch the movie.

I would like to see the fruits of this dig­i­tal con­ver­gence. Still, that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t only want visual effects. I want more. I want to con­nect with a movie and not only watch the lat­est break­through in computer-generated imagery. This busi­ness may be fast-paced and one may have to act fast to seize the moment. But one thing has become painfully clear over the last years: Peo­ple are stu­pid. The masses even more so. Through crappy, stu­pid tele­vi­sion they are cre­at­ing mind­less zom­bies with very short atten­tion spans and now they don’t have a choice but to cre­ate movies that are alike.