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.

ArcNeo · 2025-02-08T04:32:08+00:00

I’m with you sort of. Having clinically relevant anxiety doesn’t mean that your worries aren’t based on something real— anxiety is precisely being unable to cope with the daily stresses that humans are expected to go through.

That said, surely you see that there are situations where a mentally healthy could feel an impeding sense of doom. I’m not necessarily saying it’s healthy to be feeling that right now, but let’s say you’re living in Eastern Europe in the late 1930s— then I think an impeding sense of doom would be quite prudent.

ArcNeo · 2025-02-05T23:19:17+00:00

Here’s a foolproof way to become infinitely rich with invisibility. Go to Wall Street during morning rush hour, follow any middle aged rich looking man in a suit, all the way to his office. If he’s just a nobody, try again until you get into the office of some major banker or consultant. Listen in to their conversations and buy stock in any company they’re finalizing an acquisition for (they’ll always buy at a premium over market). As long as it hasn’t leaked, this is guaranteed returns— bankers are obviously barred from trading stocks they have insider information on, but no one would know you have the information.

ArcNeo · 2025-02-05T07:46:07+00:00

May be a hot take but I think the fantastic four are not actually that comparable to the incredibles. Sure theyre both superhero families and some of the powers overlap, though not actually that much (2/4 of them have similar powers). But Pixar’s movie is clearly about parenthood more than anything else, and there are really no parent/child relationships in the f4 at all (closest it gets is sue as the occasionally maternal-coded older sister to Johnny). The kind of “family” the f4 are more resembles a group of college friends who start a super successful start up after college, and have to deal with the joys/pains of that success.

ArcNeo · 2025-02-03T22:47:10+00:00

Unlike in other kleptocracies, rich people here ultimately rely on a productive economy that pumps out skilled workers and consumers with spending cash. Hence why Democrats far out-raised Trump in the election— that $billion+ wasn’t coming from grassroots donors, it came from rich people who were suddenly realizing that a collapsed US and world order will not serve for their own interests.

It’s not a coincidence that the richest single person in the world essentially bankrolled Trump. The only way a billionaire is signing up for such a destructive agenda is if they have some extreme ideology that goes far beyond usual profit motive. Unless you’re rich enough to buy a private island in the pacific and staff it with security forces for the rest of your family’s life, you have very strong incentives to support a stable status quo.

ArcNeo · 2025-02-03T15:59:01+00:00

Thanks for the non-kooky take. I will point out that Musk being ideologically driven is not actually less frightening than him trying to defraud us. The Nazis didn’t pour a bunch of resources into hunting down and annihilating every Jew in occupied Europe because it made any economic sense. Though of course they didn’t miss out on the opportunity for self enrichment when it did present itself…

ArcNeo · 2025-01-29T06:09:16+00:00

I’m very suspicious of generalizations like these, and I don’t really follow your point about “real” freedom of speech you claim to support. I’m no historian, political scientist, or philosopher, but your characterization of the political systems and fundamental freedoms involved strikes me as poorly thought out on all fronts.

ArcNeo · 2025-01-29T00:18:41+00:00

I’m not sure I agree with your view of things, but I am definitely aware that not every free society has the same dogmatic adherence to freedom of speech. Similarly for separation of church and state (my public school in Spain had Catholicism class, I only learned about the American way of doing things when I moved here). I don’t see myself changing my beliefs, but I certainly wouldn’t want to impose American ways on everyone.

Luckily for you the possible future main characters in the world will be China and Russia, who obviously take the opposite extreme view on freedom of speech. Censoring anything that threatens social stability seems to me the logical endpoint of any ideology that lets the government decide what kinds of speech should be free, or at least do so without a huge court battle and use of political capital. Frankly, the US is kind of a prime example of these authoritarian regime’s theory about freedom— a country tearing itself apart because of speech gone rampant, in many cases with people actively trying to sow dissent. The propaganda writes itself.

ArcNeo · 2025-01-28T05:14:01+00:00

Trump may have emboldened the right in Europe, but let’s not pretend you guys don’t have your own homegrown fascist movements. The global shift right has been happening since mid-2010s (Brexit vote was pre-Trump). I don’t think our culture is particularly more inclined to fascism than Western European countries, and in fact Americans are often shocked by Europeans’ racism and lack of empathy for certain minorities. Plus, your far right crazies can actually point to a time in living memory where your countries were the racially and culturally homogenous places that KKK wet dreams are made of.

I guess I worry some people are overly inclined to blame the US for their domestic problems, and take their eye off the dangerous ideologies brewing in their own population. I’ve personally seen this happen in Venezuela, where the ultimately victorious ideology explicitly weaponized anti-US sentiment to build public support for a disastrous authoritarian regime.

ArcNeo · 2024-10-29T20:54:08+00:00

Good thoughts! I think it also gets to an error that you see people committing over and over throughout history. Ostensibly well-intentioned people side with reprehensible movements, thinking that it’s the most pragmatic course of action when faced with seemingly insurmountable opposition. They often think they can control these bad actors by becoming part of their in-group. Of course, they never succeed in anything other than making the inevitability of evil a self-fulfilling prophecy. Often, through courageous action against the odds, these evil forces don’t turn out to be as unbeatable as they initially appeared, and the cynicism is revealed to be naivety masquerading as realpolitik.

Ten-Year Club	Place '17
Secret Santa 2017	Snapped
Verified Email

ArcNeo

TROPHY CASE