New Golden Age of Cinema
I was on Rotten Tomatoes today and I saw this.
Could we be seeing a new golden age in cinema? Its remarkable how many movies have such high scores. Almost every week a movie goer could see at least one movie, if not more, that scores close to 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. I have no doubt part of the reason we are seeing such great movies is because technology has done a fine job of reducing the cost of movie making. All aspects of producing a film like shooting, editing, and distributing have seen drastic reductions in cost thanks chiefly to computers. This means more people can compete, and when their is competition their is excellence. Free markets playing a role in better cinema? You better believe it.
August 14th, 2007 at 9:50 am
Yeah, yeah, yeah… Say what you want about rotten tomatoes. I say it’s just a bunch of “experts” telling the population what to think about the movies.
August 14th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
Wait, competition is good? I thought monolithic, market-dominating corporations were good?
August 14th, 2007 at 1:41 pm
heheh, and rush hour 3 wins at the boxoffice… where’s the market driven excellence there?
August 14th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
If there are several corporations batting each other out than thats all we need to benefit from free market competition. Reminds me of the mid nineties when several cheaply made independent films became financially successfully, like the Blair Witch Project. Several years after that all the ‘monolithic, market-dominating’ production companies began to acquire independent production companies. The fruits of that are no doubt in part the topic of this particular post.
August 15th, 2007 at 10:57 am
You are going crazy here with mixing up your points: You say, the more technical advancement, the less the production costs, the more competition, the better the movies? I cannot follow the causality chain, here. Furthermore, you ought to differenitate between “low-budget” productions, and cheap movies. I doubt that the quality of the latter has to do anything with excellence.
August 15th, 2007 at 11:38 am
Technology has reduced the upfront costs for producing a movie. This has eliminated the advantage of big production companies who by their sheer size was able to manage those upfront costs by developing infrastructure. Small production companies no longer need the resources of the big production company to make their movie. Thus, more movie makers are able to make their films. This increases competition as the pool of potential movie goers stays the same while the amount of movie producers increases. The more producers compete for the consumer the more EVERYONE benefits. In the case of this post that benefit manifests itself in higher quality films.
August 15th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
so, in other words, you think it’ll be beneficiary to the movie-watchers-world if I started to make my own little movie tomorrow? It’ll be called the “Black Widow striking back”.
You’re being rather hypothetical here (and still have not established a direct causation between budget costs and quality - if at all, it is an arbitray assumption). I don’t buy this.