Will smartphone games cause the tent pole franchises of movie studios to collapse?
Maybe chronic fatigue of computer generated image is what’s ailing the movie box office. Most of Hollywood fare resemble video games, but at least in a game, the player controls the action.
“It’s not show friends. It’s show business.”
That expression shows how the business in show business inevitably dominates and oppresses the entertainment and art. The technology that was supposed to improve story telling in cinemas and homes, or help open up China’s markets, has turned into an industry.
In the fifty years since the release of the sensational and ground breaking movie Bonnie and Clyde in August 1967, the art and business of movie making have been changed in ways that are still evolving today.
The vanguard of films from that period constituted a “New Hollywood,” filling screens with artistic and moral ambiguity and nihilism.
Over the coming years, movie critics will be celebrating that revolutionary age when the writer/director dominated the studio executive/producer.
Arguably, Midnight Cowboy, The Godfather, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Taxi Driver represent some of the most memorable examples of masterful story telling ever made. But, they were an aberration in the economic nature and course of show business.