The rise of Netflix and the decline of Blockbuster has decimated the secondary market for movies, further pushing the industry towards conservatism. It's much harder to convince people to pay to see a quirky indie picture or a sleeper hit at home, so movies that don't do well in the opening weekend are pretty much a dead loss. As with Spotify and the music industry, $12/mo subscriptions can't make up for the loss of $9 cinema tickets, $4 rentals and $15 DVD sales.

Cinema isn't in a healthy place right now, much to the benefit of television - the economics for broadcast and streaming TV are much more favourable and there's an influx of talent.

Any cites for this? I am very curious to read more about this.

When a new movie comes out, I say either “that looks like it would be a good movie to watch in theatre”, or (far more often) “I think I’ll wait for that to come out on iTunes/Netflix/etc.” When I’m making that decision, the bar is high. But that’s because watching-at-home really is good enough for the vast majority of movies—it doesn’t remove anything from the experience.

I'd like to see evidence of assertions to the contrary, because to me they don't jibe with reality.

For me, seeing a movie in a theatre vs. watching at home is a bit like going to a restaurant vs. eating at home. I used to “go to restaurants” to try specific things I’d heard about, when I was single. Now, though, I mostly only go to a restaurant to go to a restaurant, because that’s a nice thing I can do with my wife. With restaurants, this is the difference between choosing by word-of-mouth (“they have great X!”) vs. choosing by reviews (“this restaurant seems like they’d have something we’d enjoy, let’s go and find out.”) Movie theatres don’t really have the same element of diversity (unless you’re going to independent cinemas), so it’s more just a choice of whether to go to “the movies” at all.

On the other hand, everything I said about restaurants applies exactly to the other kind of theatre. There’s a Shakespeare troupe here (Vancouver) that, each year, puts on three of the bard’s plays (several showings apiece.) You can certainly want to “see The Tempest”, and therefore go watch them perform it; but what I hear much more often is people wanting to “go to Bard on the Beach” (the troupe), and so then they look at what they’re putting on this year to see if it’s anything they could stand to watch. In this context, the theatre troupe is exactly like a restaurant: they want to go to it, as long as it has something they’d be okay trying.

I think you’d have to be comfortable seeing big budget mediocre films if that’s one of your hobbies. There's a ton of bad movies out at any one time. Or rather a ton of mediocre (at best) ones.

Interested in others thoughts. I think the sibling commenter may have got it right with the fact people make a conscious decision to go see a movie beforehand as an outing, rather than turn up at the cinema and see what's on.

You say this because of something 20th C Fox is doing?!

May I suggest not watching any movies from the US for a year or 2, at least. There's a whole world out there. e.g. France, Spain, Argentina, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, Korea, Brazil, Iran, India, Denmark, Norway, Mexico...

(A page on my website listing outstanding movies/series I've seen recently from each of those countries and others, I don't know a better place to point you to jump straight in: http://www.adamponting.com/movies/ )

Can I ask two things:

- Where do you get your movies?

- Do you watch a new one daily to have seen so many?

Hehe yeah, does look like a lot. But 2012-now is..~2800 days, probably there's less than 1000 movies/episodes on there, I haven't counted. Recently watching a lot of series...I like the longer form. I moved into a house in 2012 where they introduced me to torrents - before then I'd hardly seen any great movies, so that was really amazing watching all the great movies and directors I'd always heard of but never checked out. (Had only downloaded books and music before that I guess!) Used to often watch 2 or 3 movies on weekend days. Lately a couple of episodes of a series (or more if bingeing) each night, or a movie. I did put a lot of hours into researching, reading reviews, finding good things to watch, so that we didn't see many that weren't good.

Finding obscure movies online is sometimes tricky (i.e. can take hours), also tracking down good subtitles can be hard, and often have to resync/shift them and/or fix them up. Being able to adjust audio and subtitles while watching with VLC is a must. I get them from:

1. torrents. Usually only works for popular/recent/famous stuff. Sno's torrents with hardcoded English subs are great, have watched a lot of those - mostly series, some movies.

2. movie and/or series sites like primewire, the now-defunct alluc, (which was amazing, finding obscure tv series episodes is much harder now), zocine.com, megashare.bz, www1.swatchseries.to that have links to online files. These come and go over the years. Adding "watch online" to google searches finds sites that the links to movie files can extracted from, either manually from the HTML or using TubeOffline-type downloader sites.

3. video sites. Google the movie/series name - often movies/episodes are on youtube/vimeo/dailymotion, especially when I forget to look for them there! Archive.org has a lot of stuff. (e.g. recently watched White Zombie (1932), the first zombie movie, and The Best Years of our Lives from there)

Not uncommonly an obscure movie will seemingly only be online in one hard-to-find place. (e.g. The only place I could find one classic Australian movie was on someone's page on vk, russian facebook!) I have a startpage with searches each of those sites one click away, so I only have to type the name (& mostly year) once. Whenever I get something from a site I add the site to my start page to easily search it in future. Also my computer is a Mac from 2005 which doesn't make it any easier! Good luck.

I'll dive into your list over the weekend, and if I find some missing movies I enjoyed, I'll send you an email with a few suggestions for you to watch :)

I think cinema as an artform is thriving, just outside of the mainstream Hollywood, etc studios.

Studios have had a major vested interest in proclaiming their product is “Glamorous,” and “Unachievable in lessee glory.” Which in turn justifies the high budgets and higher ticket fares.

But they are a pipeline, that pump 10-300 million dollars into a project that they won’t see a return on for 3 years at the shortest; starting from the time you pay a scriptwriter following through the Opening weekend.

It’s in their best interest to tell people it is Once in a lifetime experience and then put out something that is going to me market accepted.

On the occasional times, it is TRULY once in a life time (Mad Max: Fury Road for me), it hits us in the soul, and draws us back in.

Worth it, to me.

Hopefully these big companies wasting millions on this mostly mediocre returns will find some gold for the future. Eventually it will be very useful in a more general sense, but it’s going to take time to get there.

All we can hope for now are mainly niche wins for an ever expanding set of problems. Who knows if big budget films will be one. I’m not yet convinced by this article but at least they are trying and have the R&D budgets to fail a few times.medieval

A boring movie is something that I genuinely felt wasted my time. I got nothing out of it, and I couldn't even get a lot of enjoyment out of making fun of it. The perfect example of a movie in this category is the 2009 movie "9" (sorry if that's your favorite movie).

I appreciate the sentiment but in this case, wouldn't that make boring movies bad and interesting movies good? (Assuming, of course, you don't want to be bored...)

Birdemic is a bad movie, in that none of the individual components are good and they don't complement each other well at all.

I'd argue that both are interesting

The irony of it is that if they had tried to make those moves "bad" on purpose, they wouldn't be interesting at all (at least not to me), and they would just be "bad" on every level for me.

In fact, even when there is sincerity, it's not a truly deterministic system. I think that the first Troll movie is technically objectively worse than Troll 2, but I find Troll 1 to be pretty boring, in addition to being incompetent, while Troll 2 is silly and an utter blast to watch.

Just like with music, the technical barriers to entry to make a film or a song are much lower than before, and the market is very saturated as a result. The issue is no longer "is there enough content that I would enjoy" but rather "how the heck to do I make a choice what to watch?".

Compared to other mainstream art forms, movies have a higher barrier of entry and that translates in to smaller influx of new and interesting concepts.

Which is to say, you are victim to assuming the mega complex Movie Theater, powered by the mega complex of Studios pumping out advertisements are the only option available to you.

If cinema is a desirable experience to you, seek out film colleges, independent theaters, movie rental spots, and YouTube/Vimeo/reddit. You’ll find a bunch of crap, for sure, but it will be new and interesting crap. You’ll explore your own mind trying to define why you don’t like it. Eventually you’ll see something truly moving and that will be amazing!

Or, If you justly say “I don’t have time or energy for something I’m not that passionate about,” continue to go to the AMCs. Just recognize, much like McDonald’s they (and the studios) have massive overhead and massive interest in not losing money. No one takes the person complaining that McD’s isn’t gourmet very seriously.

(The most moving zombie movie I ever saw was 15mins on YouTube and had 3 zombies in it..)

Nobody remembers the boring movies from their childhood.

We are watching a random sample of present films.

A lot of the older film noir stuff I watch is definitely filtered by time: but you can pick any random garbage from between 65 and 75 and it's likely to be decent.