Lights, Camera, No Thanks

Speaker 2

Other things to do. ⁓ you know, going to the the the movie theater, it it takes an exceptional experience to really want to to justify that. You know, paying twenty dollars for ⁓ popcorn and a drink and a ⁓ an overpriced ticket just to see something on a big screen. ⁓ I'd rather wait to see it come out on streaming service and sit there in the cupboard of my living room.

Speaker 1

Well, it seems like you are exercising a choice as a consumer. Indeed. And there are endless choices we can make in lieu of going to the movie theater. ⁓ is there an issue with kind of oversaturation? It just seems like it's everywhere. There are animated series, there are spin-offs, there's, you know, d ⁓ Disney Plus, you can go and you can watch all that stuff. It's just kinda ro relentless and it's just there's so much out there. Too much maybe.

Speaker 2

You could watch Star Wars twenty four seven for the next month and still not see it all. Yeah. ⁓ so i it's you know, it's one of the most storied franchises of history. Goes back all the way to the nineteen seventies and had some really break through the original three from the first set of the trilogy. Those are considered classic movies for a good reason. ⁓ now the the the nineteen nineties, two thousands versions of it, it it has different mixed results on ⁓ I know people like to Make fun of the prequels. And then there's the Disney era that follows. And the Disney era is ⁓ at least for the classic Star Wars fans, it's when a lot of people think it jumped the shark. Couple good products in there, but the last three major films of the main series, ⁓ the sequels to ⁓ the original, the plots were bad. The prequels are bad enough, but then and then then the sequels are even worse. It's kind of the it's like a ⁓ a downhill trajectory. But it was still enough of a franchise that had a lot of people, ⁓ you know, you go see it. But I remember on the on one of the sequels, I think it was the second sequel I referred to it as the the slow motion woke space chase. It it's the one where the the ⁓ the engines or something break on the spaceship and they're just kind of drifting for the whole movie. ⁓ and you're like, wait, th this is actually kind of boring. And it it was so bad that I decided, you know, I'm I'm just not gonna go to the theater to see the the third, the final of the ⁓ the series and ⁓ I eventually got around to watching it, but it was like on an airplane on a transatlantic flight.

Speaker 1

Yeah, I'm one of those weirdos. I might be the only one who saw the prequels before the originals.

Speaker 2

Really? She had a deprived childhood.

Speaker 1

I am a unicorn of the worst, worst order. I saw all of them in the theater and then I saw the originals and I really love the originals. And as an actual ⁓ subscriber to Disney Plus, I I actually pay. I don't use other people's, you know, passwords and all that. I I was looking forward to showing my kids the originals with Luke and Han Solo and something that I realized is at some point George Lucas did another cut of his film where he added all of this additional footage that is totally not just unnecessary. But ruins things from a a narrative standpoint and then ⁓ and also just like scenic work where I'm watching that I'm like, wait a minute, I remember this being really good. What what is going on here? And I can't track down the originals on streaming services. So you would need to have like a physical copy of the originals in order to watch them. Yeah. They're oversaturating and they're and they're ruining, you know, canon, but they're also ruining the originals. They took

Speaker 2

On a VHS. the old part of the series off of the market and replaced it with this like CGI enhanced extra scene weirdness. Yeah. And consumers judge that. ⁓ I think what the Star Wars franchise arc or the story tells us, especially over the past twenty, twenty-five years, when it's moved into this less than authentic phase, ⁓ I I don't know what we could describe it as, but consumers don't like it. The original market for Star Wars was wrapped up in ⁓ everything from ⁓ the authenticity of the original series to some of the kitsch that was attached to it. ⁓ you know, kids that grew up on that also bought action figures in the nineteen eighties. ⁓ they also watched the campy cartoon and and ⁓ Christmas special spin-offs and things like that that are, you know, generally of low quality, but Compared to the original movies, the that that was what was sustaining the series. And ever since then, it's been kind of like a march in the direction of the Ewok Christmas special version of Star Wars. It's just saturate the market with everything. And this cuts to an economic concept. And that concept's consumer sovereignty. ⁓ the consumer is sovereign. The consumer votes with his or her feet to move to or away from a product as a signal of approval. And you know, this is a fundamental of the business world. If you start ignoring the sovereign consumer signal and just plow ahead and do things anyway, you flood the market with saturation and slop. ⁓ the consumers go elsewhere. They move to different franchises. ⁓ some do what I did after that second of the sequel movies. I decided, you know, that I'm not gonna see these in theaters anymore. And maybe some other Star Wars release. That is absolutely brilliant and great came out after that, but I was already soured on the experience of I think 12 number seven in the ⁓ the original trilogy series. ⁓ that I didn't want to see eight, ⁓ I didn't want to see nine, I didn't want to see ⁓ any of these spin off Mandalorians or Han Solo prequel stories or any of these other things that ⁓ that they came out. And that means that, yeah, I'm not gonna go to the ⁓ movie theater. And you overlay that. It's also happening in an era when streaming is the new innovation in movies. So it's not just the Star Wars franchise at the box office that's ⁓ taking a hit, it's the box office in general. It's ⁓ if I wait a couple of weeks, I can click a button and purchase this for basically the same price on my home streaming service, but I can pop the popcorn myself for like a dollar. from a packet from the grocery store versus twenty dollars for a bucket that's coming out of the concession stand.

Speaker 1

Yeah, I actually did that math a few weeks back. It was a rainy, dreary day in my ⁓ my neck of the woods. And we were gonna go to the local movie theater to to see a ⁓ a children's movie, Sheep Detectives, which we we haven't seen yet, in part, because I started doing the math and I was like, okay, it's gonna be me and my two kids. We have to buy tickets, they're gonna want popcorn, they're gonna want candy. And I started adding it up, and then I was like, ⁓ it's gonna be like 80 bucks. And then I looked at a movie that we had previously seen Hoppers. And I looked and it was like, ooh, it's like $25, close to $30. But then we own it and we could watch it all the time. And the way my kids are, they watch the same movie all the time. So we traded $30 of movie watching comfort in our living room. We did that instead of going $80 a plus, because you know, if we're really getting into the minutia gas prices and and stuff like that. But yeah, we made that choice because ⁓ we are sovereign. Yeah.

Speaker 2

That ⁓ that that's exactly it. You gotta recognize that there there are substitutions that occur in this type of a market. One is go to a movie theater, stand in line, pay overpriced popcorn concessions. But the benefit is you see a a really high-tech forty or fifty foot tall screen with ⁓ gigantic speakers. Okay, that's part of an experience. And maybe space battles are really good on that. But if the quality of the space battles has diminished, ⁓ as we see in the Star Wars franchise. And you can get that at home on your regular flat screen TV. A lot of people are choosing the latter. And it's recognizing that, you know, there are niches associated with each of these. One's the comfort at home, the other is the experience of a giant movie screen. And if the experience of the giant movie screen isn't enough in itself to draw people, the margin flips over and most people start choosing, Hey, I'm gonna stream it at home.

Speaker 1

Yeah, and I don't know if if I've just gotten older and a little bit more curmudgeon or commudgeon Lee. Is that how we ⁓ we say it? But ⁓ there's something about the movie going experience that I think has just changed over the years. And what I've found is that I have a big problem with other people. So I don't I don't know if it was it was was it Satra who said, you know, hell is other people. But I just feel like ⁓ all the pet peeves that I have, you could basically check all the boxes when you go to a movie theater, like people talking. during a movie. People talking on their phones during the movie, or people just scrolling on their phones during a movie. It's really tough to be a part of a society where anything goes in a way and there's really no kind of concern for the time that other people are having ⁓ around you.

Speaker 2

Say that ⁓ theater etiquette has been in decline in recent decades.

Speaker 1

So you're annoyed ⁓

Speaker 2

But in the flip side, suppose you were the annoying person who sits there and talks on the phone in the entire movie. If you could do that from the comfort of your home, then you don't have everyone around you shushing you and staring at you. Yeah. It's like a win-win. The ⁓ people that are annoyed by other people. Hey, I can do that in the comfort of my home, or if I have bad ⁓ theater habits, could do that in my living room and ⁓ sit there and shout on my phone while the movie's playing in the background.

Speaker 1

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And it's not it's not only with ⁓ kind of popular entertainment that people are rude and annoying. But ⁓ some years back I went to a ⁓ I went to a dance performance ⁓ with my wife and and a friend of hers and both my wife and her friend were former dancers and ⁓ I got I got seated kind of by myself. They ended up s sitting together and I was by myself. And during the performance it's pitch black except for A guy one row ahead of me on his phone. And it's just that one phone is igniting the entire theater. And it got to the point where I actually took my playbill and threw it at him. ⁓ and ⁓ I I I want to say that night, Lou Perez was the toughest guy in that theater because he did not He didn't want any part of me. I'm not that tough of a guy in regular life, but occasionally, you know, if you go to if there's a dance performance, I might be the ⁓ the alpha there.

Speaker 2

Toughest guy the dancer show, yeah.

Speaker 1

Exactly. You know, some something I wanted to talk about too, like that I that I noticed, you know, talking about kind of, you know, oversaturation. So one of my favorite movie series ⁓ is the Toy Story series. Yep. They're coming out, number five is coming out. And I I tend to agree with ⁓ Quentin Tarantino on his ⁓ opinion of Toy Story. Now a lot of people might be saying, Whoa, quinton Tarantino has a opinion about Toy Story. It's like, yeah, he's a brilliant film director and and he knows great stuff when he sees it. And I agree that the first three films of Toy Story are flawless. And they could have ended there and we would all be happy. And if there's one movie that I have seen so many times, it's definitely Toy Story. But they did a fourth. And then they have this fifth one coming out. And we hit the the thirty year anniversary of Toy Story. And they were playing it back in ⁓ I don't know if it was all the AMC theaters, but that's where we saw at the AMC theater. And I took my kids there, we and we got there early. We got there before the trailers ⁓ for the new movies coming out were playing. And before that, this weird thing happened where they were playing commercials on the big screen. ⁓ yeah. So it's like wait a minute, I'm not in my living room, but I am experiencing commercials being played.

Speaker 2

Not just like 30-second commercials, like 10 minutes straight of commercials before they even get to the previews.

Speaker 1

Commercial after commercial. And what was so jarring was almost every commercial that played before Toy Story was for a pharmaceutical drug. You know, how to treat depression. It was one after the other being inundated. And I'm looking around, I'm like, you know, everyone here is like a parent with their kids. I don't know if if the ad wizards are seeing something in us that we don't see in ourselves, but this should be a really happy time. Rather than me being, you know, sort of confronted with these pharmaceuticals and all the side effects, which may may include, you know, suicidal ideation. It's like, what's going on here?

Speaker 2

Right, watching toy Toy Story. Maybe they something. It's like, does your kid suffer from tension deficit disorder? See your doctor today. Side effects may include.

Speaker 1

Well, I think it really says something about, you know, the the economics and the financials of movies in that, you know, there was a time where you wouldn't see a commercial before a movie.

Speaker 2

The commercial was the preview for the movie that's coming out in three months. Yeah. It's a very movie centric. And they still have the previews, but they're after ten or twenty minutes of this other stuff. So it's it's interesting. I think part of where that comes from is, you know, there's downtime in between shows when people are filtering out of the theater and then they come and clean back up and then ⁓ the new group arrives. Some people get there early because they want to get the best seat and everything. So the natural inclination about a movie theater is Hey, if we got them sitting there holding their seat because they got there 30 minutes early to get the best seat, well, let's start putting things on the screen that they can look at. And what do we do? Well, it's Joe's used car dealership ⁓ is running an ad or the personal injury law firm. So you start getting that, and the ads get more and more and more sophisticated. And next thing you know, you're just basically running full time commercials for the startup of the movie. And then you start thinking, all right, well, we got everyone in their seat for the full-time commercial because we started bombarding them before the movie officially started. Well, what if we say the start time is at 830, but the real start time is at 850? And ⁓ we use that first 20 minutes to do commercials and then previews, and it all blares together. So it's an attempt of the theaters to capitalize on ad revenue. ⁓ it's another margin that they can get money coming in, which you know, kudos to them for seeing that opportunity. But now it's also moved into an area where it's kind of an annoyance because it's ad revenue extracted after the movie starts. And people are saying, Well, hey, I can do that at home, or I can pay the extra premium on Hulu and get it without that at

Speaker 1

What I'm waiting for is an advertisement to pop up for a drug I can take so that I don't mind watching twenty minutes of commercials before the trailers, before Toy Story. No. It's ⁓ movie theaters in particular are a business that ⁓ I'm I've never run a movie theater. I've just ⁓ experienced it as a consumer. So there's a good chance that what I like

Speaker 2

And then you're a sudden well

Speaker 1

And what I want to experience when I'm at a movie theater isn't necessarily going to pay the bills. So so people are finding new ways. I for example, there's a a great chain of movie theaters called Alamo Draft House. And what I love a what I love about Alamo Draft House is it's a big screen. They make it very clear that if you speak during the movie, you will be asked to leave. Right. So it's a ⁓ I believe it's a much more mature, movie going audience, which which I love. Yep. And they serve a beer. They Serve beer. Exactly. They serve beer. They serve food. Happy hour econ. It would be great actually if we did a happy hour econ at an Alamo Draft House. ⁓ and they also do a really cool thing where if there's a movie that's playing, they will have a lot of shorter films play before it that are either on theme or will feature one of the characters and it they do like montages and stuff like that. And years back there was a movie called Logan, obviously about about Wolverine that was playing it out in the LMO draft house. And I got the ⁓ call from a ⁓ from a rep there asking if they could play an old sketch comedy video that I had made ⁓ with my comedy duo Greg and Lou and the video is called Wolverine's Claws Suck. And you all can check it out right now on YouTube and it's a a viral hit, a sense conversation that that has pleased generations of people have watched it. And they played it before Logan. So I got to sit there with my beer, with my food, and watch my short video on the big screen before seeing a great movie that I I really enjoyed with Logan. I enjoyed it, I loved it, but you know what, there's a good chance that that's not gonna work for every movie theater. Sorry Lou, but you're just one man. Yeah.

Speaker 2

Yeah, yeah, you know, they're hitting a niche audience when you do some of these things. Part of it, it ⁓ it's interesting that some of these like specialty theaters are going back to an earlier model of the cinema from like the 1930s and 40s. And this is ⁓ it predates when people didn't have a TV in their ⁓ in their house. So what did you do? You go see Gone with the Wind or something, but before the movie starts, they have newsreels. And these are the Film clips of major events happening around the world with a commentator on and we still see these. We all know recognize the newsreels. These were not broadcast on TV because TV didn't exist at the time. They'd show them before the feature film. You see a little bit of a specialty going back to that and people seem to like it if it's that rather than being bombarded by diabetes drugs or whatever the pharmaceutical happens to be.

Speaker 1

So it seems like we've been in some dark times when it comes to movies and and movie going public. But some good news, I think, on the horizon is with ⁓ these two low budget horror films that are beating, you know, franchises like Star Wars. And and the two movies are Backrooms and Obsession. And what's really interesting is that Obsession cost seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars to make. and has earned back, I think it's nearly two hundred times its budget. And backrooms cost around ten million, so obviously more, but both of them are pretty low budget. And, you know, it's like, ⁓ are we about to see ⁓ a rebirth of film? Yeah.

Speaker 2

And you see this, this is like an area where creative destruction happens in the film industry. ⁓ Hollywood's often cast as if it's like a as behemoth and the major studios are essentially that. It's like, how do you go up against a multi-billion dollar franchise like Star Wars? Well, there's your answer. ⁓ how do you go up against the Lord of the Rings or how do you go up against any of these major multi-billion dollar industry productions? Well, your answer is, yeah, low budget, but doing something niche, doing something new that people have not seen before. You know, you're in the industry of keeping people's attention and giving them something to think about, getting them hooked on it. And part of the formula, it doesn't require billions of dollars of CGI to do it. ⁓ CGI is one way. ⁓ high end productions are one way. And if they they really hit and establish a ⁓ much favored franchise, yes, people will keep coming back to that franchise. But at the same time, there are areas where you can do a low budget film that explores something new and it takes off and it brings in two or three hundred times as much of its budget and and returns and revenue. And yeah, we see these from time to time. Like some of the cult classics of the 1960s have this reputation. Or there was one about twenty, twenty-five years ago called The Room that was this awful low budget film and it was so bad it was comedic, and it becomes like this major cultural phenomenon. I'm sure that the guy that that did that has more than made his money back on on it in the twenty-five years that it's been playing and people have been watching the cult class.

Speaker 1

in general, at least with ⁓ when it comes to obsession and backrooms, people enjoy horror over horrible. So if the if the choice is if the choice is there, I get to see a g you know, well y you did bring up the room. ⁓ Right, exactly. As a creator ⁓ who's been, you know, producing stuff, I mean I I think since two thousand nine.

Speaker 2

Because it's so bad that it's funny. Right. Unintentionally funny.

Speaker 1

is when I ⁓ started putting stuff on YouTube. I mean, one of the things they could chalk up to being able to make something for seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars a feature length film is the tech that we have, ⁓ which I think has changed things dramatically. It it's definitely gotten rid of a lot of gatekeepers ⁓ when it comes to content creation. But I think something we're we're sort of seeing now with those examples of obsession and back rooms, I mean, they're both directed by directors who built their audiences on YouTube. You know, they so in a way they kind of the new creator economy is a real competitor and and even a yeah a talent funnel to what could be, you know, mainstream.

Speaker 2

Well, it's because those data centers giving you access to AI, you can do better CGI than existed from a major studio in the nineteen nineties and early two thousands. And you can do that in a a matter of minutes. Now it may have an extra finger on the hand, but ⁓ there are hallucinations and things that come out of it. But but the point is that things you can do on your laptop today are better than the best studios could do twenty or twenty-five years ago.

Speaker 1

With the creators, you know, both of the ⁓ the directors were really popular on YouTube, and that acts as a signal. Say, whoo, wait a minute. They have an audience here. And if the audience is willing to stay with them for all these years and watch their content over here on YouTube, perhaps we can get that audience to come to watch them in the theater. And of course, there are a lot of people over over the years that have failed to make that leap. Right. You'll see sometimes where you have like someone who's a popular TikTok artist who can get their fans into a comedy club to watch them perform, but they don't have the chops to do stand ups. They're able to do the other stuff that's but it seems like with these guys in particular when it comes to being able to direct and tell a story that people want to see, they're they're nailing it. So I'm I'm hoping that that leads to more opportunities ⁓ for me. Just just for me. I don't care if anyone else I don't care about this rising tide. I I hope it just uplifts my boat.

Speaker 2

You get those data centers and we can get RAI, CGI to back you up and then then you've got a major feature production.

Speaker 1

I'm thinking if anyone out there wants to see Happy Hour Econ produce their own feature-length horror film, it could be so bad it's good, or it could be so great that it's also good. So this is Lou Perez and Phil Magnus, and we'll see you at the movies, which I think we might actually get a cease and desist for using that. We'll see you on the next episode of Happy Hour Econ.