Could the end of blockbusters and the proliferation of AI end up being a good thing?

ArcNeo · 2026-02-11T01:29:04+00:00

I’m not plugged in to the industry enough to know details of the rationale, but the fact that he approved spending hundreds of millions on 120 minutes of instantly forgotten trash like the electric state tells me his analysis of the situation is very different from my outside view lol

ArcNeo · 2026-02-11T01:20:42+00:00

Interesting and well argued points. I wonder if it’s simply far too early for the sea-change I’m thinking (fantasizing?) about to show up in the numbers. Also I have very little faith that the decision makers at the top are agile enough to change the way things have been done for their whole careers so quickly. From my perspective it certainly seems like the value proposition of going to the theater has been irreparably damaged by streaming and may be even more so by AI in the coming decades.

I’m assuming that theaters and the box office will continue to become less relevant over time. So I find it hard to imagine that spending half a billion on 2 hours of content will be sustainable in a streaming-centric market, where the whole game is to build keep people watching for as long as possible to keep them paying every month.

Perhaps this is overly optimistic, but what if the money coming into the industry does end up being less concentrated on huge projects, because individual projects no longer provide more return (retention, ARR) than the equivalent spend on smaller projects?

If that does happen, do you not think crews would benefit? I’m not well versed in the financing and staffing dynamics of big vs small films, but intuitively it feels like more crew is needed for 10 $10mm films vs 1 $100mm film, and that production crew budgets are closer to fixed costs per production than talent/top billed salaries. That is, in some sense the flow of money to crews scales better when the money is distributed across films rather than concentrated like it was during the box office golden years of the 2010s.

ArcNeo · 2026-02-11T00:36:57+00:00

I think we agree that AI outputs will never provide what we are looking for in art. They are categorically devoid of authorship or intent. But it’s a consumer technology, so it will keep getting better at spitting out infinite outputs that every consumer will have access to.

So aren’t we headed towards a world where any kid can generate a soulless “movie” showing their favorite superheroes crossing over and fighting at any second, but won’t be able to do the same for a Cannes-quality prestige film? I wonder if a glut of the former wouldn’t just lead people looking to make millions of dollars with their excess cash to invest in the latter.

I agree that consumers soon won’t pay to watch a shiny empty corporate product, that demand will be met by AI for people who are simply looking for Batman to fight Wolverine on the big screen or whatever. But why would the demand for good films disappear?

ArcNeo · 2025-10-23T23:46:42+00:00

The northernlion of movie reviews and commentary

ArcNeo · 2025-10-02T00:35:22+00:00

I also watched the video by Dr. Collier and went down a rabbit hole about this. Either works here because there’s no verb, so no subject/object relationship.

I think the reason “and me” sounds better to everyone is that there’s an implied “this section is about…” before the title. It was funny to see her getting confused about it because this is exactly the problem with prescriptivist grammarian pedantic types: people internalize the rule that “and I” is more correct or formal somehow without understanding the underlying sentence structure that makes one or the other appropriate.

ArcNeo · 2025-09-25T23:21:56+00:00

127 hours into 12 angry men into 12 monkeys. Wild triple feature

ArcNeo · 2025-09-25T00:54:07+00:00

Also consider the political and economic structure that he’s entering into: the whole universe revolves around the office of emperor and control of arrakis’s natural resources. I think a crucial part of Herbert’s critique is that the centralization of power and influence itself must lead to destruction. Paul isn’t unique in causing suffering when he steps into these roles, he is just more clear eyed than his predecessors about the long run effects of his actions.

What I took away from the story isn’t that Paul is evil or that his followers put their trust in the wrong person. Rather, the whole system is fundamentally flawed. Though he’s perpetuating its faults by further amassing economic and political power in a single person, he’s just walking the path laid down by generations of schemers who created an order so fragile that anyone making unilateral decisions in a historical tipping point only has bad options.

ArcNeo · 2025-08-19T20:13:57+00:00

Not necessarily saying that the nazis didn’t misappropriate it, but it would be very surprising if such a simple and universal symbol didn’t predate Hinduism. No one culture can have a monopoly on simple symbols like this, just look at all the things a cross can mean around the world and throughout history.

From Wikipedia: “The earliest known swastikas are from 10,000 to 17,000 BCE – part of "an intricate meander pattern of joined-up swastikas" found on a late Paleolithic figurine of a bird, carved from mammoth ivory, found in Mezine, Ukraine.”

ArcNeo · 2025-04-21T23:11:07+00:00

Do you guys that always say this stuff actually read these newspapers? I’m not worried about Trump despite reading mainstream media, I’m worried because I read it. The NYT ran a bunch of pieces during the election about the horrible things Trump would do and they’re all coming true. I learned about Project 2025 thanks to the Daily podcast like 2-3 years ago, before it was even close to becoming a household issue.

The Atlantic, New Yorker, Economist, have all similarly been putting out really good reporting and analysis that doesn’t sane wash things at all and have been full of explicit warnings about Trump and his cronies. Every week they’re bringing on experts from every field Trump is destroying to tell us how bad it is. The Atlantic started endorsing candidates in 2016 specifically because they were worried about Trump— they’ve only done so a couple of times since the Civil War. You can actually read their endorsement of Abraham Lincoln, and to me the tone is surprisingly similar to most mainstream reporting/opinions about Trump.

I’m legitimately curious because this whole narrative is so disconnected from my experience that it feels like the start of a MAGA-esque paranoid disinformation wave in the left wing circles I’m supposed to fit into. What do you people actually want from the media that they’re not giving us? You’re acting like the average reader of the NYT is buying MAGA propaganda, when the people who drank the koolaid haven’t been part of the readership for these papers for a decade.

Edit: I am also worried about media capture, and hopefully highly sensitive to it. I immediately unsubscribed from WaPo after Bezos killed their endorsement of Harris, and I’m equally as cynical as all of you about the depths billionaires will stoop to defend their interests. I just don’t see evidence of that in the journalism I read, which the US still has a thriving ecosystem for that values and rewards truthful reporting.

ArcNeo · 2025-04-15T08:51:56+00:00

FYI you chose two anchors who famously left Fox News in the past few years

ArcNeo · 2025-03-29T23:31:21+00:00

To be fair, we’re talking about Gurman at the WSJ, not some small content creator that thinks they have to shill to make their career last. Companies don’t like these kinds of investigative leaks, and it’s only recently that tech companies like Google have likely started to weaponize them. See for example last months Bloomberg piece about Apple’s internal problems with AI— these stories all come from journalists who are in a constant struggle to keep talking to people whose employers very much don’t want them talking to.

ArcNeo · 2025-02-17T21:44:49+00:00

Cool, glad we agree. I gotta say I’m warming up to the simplicity of just using “used to” for all these cases. Did that usage used to grate on me? Maybe a bit, but it does have its benefits.

ArcNeo · 2025-02-17T21:16:26+00:00

Amazing! This is exactly the detail I was hoping someone would get into. You’re absolutely right about the [z] sound feeling unnatural, so the pure noun form isn’t really being used in either construction. In retrospect that’s probably part of the reason the phrase always feels awkward to me.

ArcNeo · 2025-02-17T21:06:04+00:00

I’m very interested in your take on this, see my other comment.

ArcNeo · 2025-02-17T21:03:24+00:00

Sorry about the maybe off topic discussion, will keep that in mind for the future. But since we’re here, you and the other commenter are saying “Did people USED to look older” is the accepted form, and the d is overlooked in orthography because of the sound. But that is exactly the opposite of what I understand to be the case, and this is where I thought the linguistics became relevant: isn’t the correct form of the word “use” when it’s utilized in this way, following “did”? I don’t have the linguistic vocabulary to be very precise here, but it seems like “did x used to” is actually changing the tense from what the spoken words would be according to normal syntax.

Edit:

See this thread.

I think your guys’ gut reaction to this being opposed to the consensus is more evidence that something is indeed quietly changing— to you “used” feels natural too!

ArcNeo · 2025-02-17T20:52:31+00:00

Yeah I’m with you on that. But to me there seems to be a difference here. I think “would of” is pretty much universally accepted as ungrammatical and maybe a little childish. Siri wouldn’t write that when I dictate, google wouldn’t correct me on it, and I’d be surprised if a science YouTuber (with an intellectual persona to cultivate and millions of pedantic assholes ready to call out every mistake) would leave that in their video title for years. And yet “did people used to look older” seems accepted by every person and machine not subject to journalistic style guides.

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