I saw it in imax at the insistence of an acquaintance. While watching I kept thinking: "ok, so this is the results when you have a massive budget, access to lots of designers and top-of-the-line tools".

I'm totally thunderstruck to learn it was all done in Blender pipeline. Bravo for making this possible.

The budget of ~60 million is huge by Indian standard not by Hollywood where >200 million is now increasingly common.

My favorite comparison now is to look at what the Indian Mars Orbiter Mission cost.

It cost $73 million (according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Orbiter_Mission) RRR's budget was $72 million (according to Wikipedia: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RRR_(film))

Seems a bit crazy with that comparison.

Funnier still was a comparison between Indian Mars Orbital Mission ($73 M) and the budgets for Gravity ($100M), The Martian ($108M), Interstellar ($165M). ISRO (India's space agency) engineers missions to Mars for the price it takes Hollywood to make movies with Mars, space etc.

And all they had to do was have their scientists work 20-hour days!

I have worked there early in my career. Never did I see anyone stay a minute after 5 in office.

I actually felt stagnated and left after an year

Can you point to the source of truth of your statement?

If not, kindly delete your comment.

Just a note, but you can’t delete a comment if it receives a child comment.

A good chunk of that goes to actor pay. For instance, in the $200m budgeted Gray Man, Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans took home $20m each. Even net those two salaries, Gray Man was twice the budget of RRR and visually pales in comparison to it. Huge budgets mean nothing.

Americans are paid a higher wage.

Dollar goes further with exchanges

VFX is also the one hollywood industry that is notorious for massive exploitation of the VFX artist. And also the only non unionized part.

Its tech based. And people in tech are unfortunately somewhat union agnostic or lean anti-union. The pay is so good on an individual/self basis they are happy without looking at the bigger picture of their contributions to the content.

There was also a huge illegal wage fixing scheme (and later settlement) between George Lucas, Steve Jobs, and other big tech industry moguls to kill any kind of VFX or Tech union. Super illegal.

> Americans are paid a higher wage.

For now. The rest of the world is rapidly catching up in pretty much every sphere.

But take movies:

America has but a paltry 330 M people. The appetite for "American" media will wane as India, China, and other vastly more populous Asian countries begin to produce Hollywood-caliber films. American box office increasingly relies on non-domestic consumption. Chinese films are doing bigger revenues, and soon Indian films will too.

Korea is starting to sweep the Oscars, Emmy's, and Golden Globes.

Hollywood is going to be washed out by the vast talent, capital, and differing tastes beyond American borders.

The age of the "American" film has already peaked. (It's not just the market growing up. Kids today no longer want to be Hollywood stars - they want to be famous on YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch.)

The same trend is observable in other fields. Science, technology, fashion, etc.

edit for downvotes: Do not confuse this post for anti-American sentiment. It's an honest current and forward-looking assessment.

> Korea is starting to sweep the Oscars, Emmy's, and Golden Globes.

I don’t think Korea won a single award at the Oscars this year. They won a single golden globe and two Emmys. It’s just parasite and squid game, so far. They are very far from sweeping the award ceremonies.

Korea is the dominant movie producing country of the last decade. Not much of this boom arrived in western cinemas, but festival goers do know.

And sooner or later the superior quality will sweep over to the mainstream. Parasite is just a relatively minor movie compared to the really big ones. https://koreanfilm.org/ might give a good overview.

I was referring to Parasite, which won six Oscars, including the coveted Best Picture and Best Director nods. That was two years ago, but it speaks to the new high water mark Korea is now hitting at.

>The age of the "American" film has already peaked.

>edit for downvotes: Do not confuse this post for anti-American sentiment. It's an honest current and forward-looking assessment.

I don't think it's "anti-American sentiment" as much as unsubstantiated claims.

Parasite was an excellent film I thought deserves all its praise. But "Korea is starting to sweep the Oscars" is a very different statement than "Bong Joon-ho and the Parasite team swept the 2019 Oscars".

What you're claiming is that American cinema has peaked, and "Hollywood is going to be washed out". A more reasonable statement is "The age of exclusively USA/Hollywood filmmaking awards is over".

> The age of the "American" film has already peaked.

I kinda sorta agree with this sentiment. I am a huge film buff, and most of the movies I remember fondly are from the 90s (can't blame this on nostalgia since I wasn't even alive then)

Isn’t that a bit like saying that Australians are great at playing piano and singing songs and cracking jokes about religion because Tim Minchin exists?

No, it's more like observing that a region with 30%+ of the world's population is rising (economically, influence, cultural appeal wise, and so in) and another with a paltry 350M one appears to have had its heyday...

The US had a couple of Tim Minchins back in the 18th century too, and even up to the early 20th century it wasn't that much of a deal in terms of global cultural cachet.

As for GDP terms it only surpassed Great Britain around 1880 and then had its global share peak in 1960. It's been downhill since.

>As for GDP terms it only surpassed Great Britain around 1880 and then had its global share peak in 1960. It's been downhill since.

If you have a bizarre, adversarial world where someone else's gain is your loss, then sure. In nominal terms it's been uphill since.

Ah! I see. Have a wonderful day.

> The age of the "American" film has already peaked. (It's not just the market growing up. Kids today no longer want to be Hollywood stars - they want to be famous on YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch.)

Currently a big next step for TikTok stars is moving into Hollywood stuff - Addison Rae, the D'Amelios - just like it was for the Kardashians a couple decades ago.

Even as you talk about American films doing less at the box office, Hollywood itself is rapidly adapting to produce more content for serialized US-market TV (primarily streaming, but this actually started in the cable era).

Many people argue that this stuff is actually better than the "blockbuster films" that are still trying to have global appeal, because of the ability to make more niche content of varying sorts.

It's hard to see Hollywood or a domestic US media market fed by US productions going anywhere. Thinking that the average US media consumption will turn into non-American stuff is the same fallacy as thinking that everywhere else in the world would have just consumed American stuff forever instead of creating their own local markets.

>Currently a big next step for TikTok stars is moving into Hollywood stuff - Addison Rae, the D'Amelios - just like it was for the Kardashians a couple decades ago.

Waning once-huge markets still attract up and comers because of the residual prestige and money - but same newcomers get their popularity from outside those markets, and people wanting to be like them are from the outside too...

But it's not about the actual values but about the momentum...

Those 330 million have highest spending capacity in the world so that makes big difference.

Are those Chinese movies making big revenues outside China? Until that happens they are just catering local market. So far Chinese movies successful in China or Chinese speaking population. I think it is just logical thing not world changing.

One can also read about Indian movie economics where movies with massive budgets sank like giant turds. Clueless directors in India are shocked that their successful formula of movies is failing so badly.

Kids today also do not want to be doctors, should I be worried that no one will be there to treat my old ass very soon?

As long as the Chinese government controls/censors scripts, they won't move beyond Chinese borders much.

In fact, there is more control in this regard lately.

Hong Kong had a nice international movie market, especially for action flicks, but that's dead now.

I agree with your broad assessment that the glory days of Hollywood are over, but am not quite as optimistic on the future of Asian cinema.

Chinese media is crippled for the foreseeable future by heavy state censorship, including micromanagement of plotlines: can't do anything that lets the bad guys win or shows the state in a bad light.

I also note you don't include Japan, which is rich and has a population of 100M+, but with the arguable exception of anime has not produced any global blockbusters in decades.

China's movies have peaked in the 90s. Take a director like Zhang Yimou, he hasn't made any decent movies in the las 15 years because of state censorship. None of his best movies could be directed today: To live, Ju Dou, The Story of Qiu Ju or Raise the Red Lantern. The same with Chen Kaige or any of the great directors in Mainland China. Even a relatively recent movie like Beijing bicycle would not be possible today.

Even if a lot of those movies were banned in China on release, there were much less consequences for a director of a banned movie than nowadays.

I miss the Zhang Yimou that directed Hero and House of Flying Daggers. Those were some of my favorite films of that time.

Yes, these were his sellouts, the real bad ones.

Lol yes, I'd say the release of Heroes is precisely when I date Zhang Yimou's fall. The photography and use of colours is great for sure but it's his first movie with a mostly empty story that tries not to ruffle anyone.

thats a ridiculous extrapolation. china makes movies for China that nobody virtually cares about outside because they are so bad and so nationalistic. The same with Bollywood movies thats as much about dancing than the movie themselves.

the exception is Korea but here too they make movies for themselves that also happen to resonate well with western audiences.

nobody is going to take over the place of hollywood anytime soon.

> thats a ridiculous extrapolation

This person also said that AI porn will destroy all the current porn companies in 10 years and that small groups of people will soon be able to make entire movies, so I wouldn't take their extrapolations too seriously.

> This person also said that AI porn will destroy all the current porn companies in 10 years and that small groups of people will soon be able to make entire movies,

Here's the thread in question [1] where I made that claim.

> so I wouldn't take their extrapolations too seriously.

Long bets 10 years $10,000. Let's go. I'm serious.

Not that this is my thing (it isn't), and not to yuck anyone's yum, but my field has a ton of adjacent, quickly growing developments in "generated porn" that I would be remiss to not know about. Each and every one of them could shape up to be a "Pornhub killer", which is what we were originally debating :

- Unstable Diffusion

- Lewdtubers (look on Twitter)

- AI waifu, waifu engine

- Whatever this is: https://m.twitch.tv/nenoko_official [2]

Just as these technologies and democratization threaten Hollywood, so too do they threaten the porn industry.

(My earlier comments in this thread were about the global playing field becoming equal in terms of production and consumption. This post concerns the technologies that will disrupt the existing products. Both trends are happening concurrently.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32711614

[2] One of my colleagues just recently pointed out this 100% autonomous, audience driven content. No humans are involved.

> do they threaten the porn industry.

In which world do you think the porn industry is just going to wait around doing nothing instead of exploiting these tools and resources for their own benefit?

It's typically new players that disrupt legacy incumbents.

There are exceptions, such as monopolistic conglomerates with multiple industry-spanning revenue streams to draw down.

But by and large, new tech cycles bring new blood and fresh perspectives that grow fast free of accumulated baggage.

Would existing players be willing to invest 90% of their energy in pursuing these new methods (that are risky), potentially firing the staff that maintain the existing systems? Unlikely. And so it's unlikely that they could grow as fast against a 100% agile new upstart. One that attracts talent and capital and has a promising growth narrative.

Innovator's Dilemma.

Every other day I see some new machine learning post here about how you can make a computer generate all sorts of content. A few days ago I saw an article about AI generated art winning first prize in some contest, people lost their minds when it was revealed the art was generated by AI.

I don't think holodeck style content generation technology is too far off. Maybe one day they'll generate computer code too.

Art and especially art competitions are nothing objective.

And the worst part was that a lot of the action in the Gray Man was incomprehensible nonsense.

how much of those 200+ are going to actual VFX though? Isn't most of it being used to buy A-list actors ?

Same. The movie was very fun and it was plainly obvious to me that they had a giant budget for crowds, visual effects, etc. Gobsmacked that this was an all-Blender operation.

I'm confused. What does budget have to do with using Blender? I thought a big movie budget is needed mainly for the labor and artistry, and comparatively little goes into software licensing. Is that not the case?

Plenty of good films have been made with very small budgets. If you are shooting on a consumer DSLR or even phones then Blender is a godsend.

If you have RRR's budget you can easily waste more money explaining to the lawyers and accountants that something is free. The decisions is purly on which software is better.

You should be confused. My thinking was unclear and you are quite right.

i have a designer friend who, after years of me prodding him to try blender recently said "i should give blender a try". this is the same guy who lives on adobe, and all that shizz...

"industry tools" he calls them. "why should i invest my time to learn a software when no one else in the industry is using them"...

glad the industry is changing behind the scenes to a point people like my friend would have to put blender in their workflow and maybe, just maybe one day work entirely off of FOSS tools.

Speaking of "lots of designers": while everything else looks very realistic to me, that tram (I think it's a tram) in the motorbike chase scene (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbuZQTud7YE&t=85s) looks very odd. A low floor tram in the 1920s? Is that based on any real model? Also, the overhead wire seems to be just hanging there in mid air while the poles that are actually supposed to support it are off to the side...

Haha, good catch. Would be nice to have floating tram lines.

In this other shot (https://youtu.be/wbuZQTud7YE?t=94) you can see there are actually support lines, but they have been "eaten" by the post-processing.

This movie looks EPIC where can we stream it??

Netflix