Independent NDM case study: Media Magazine research

Notes and quotes

Media magazine 40:

-Games being turned into movies

-video game developers have stolen many a great tale from under Hollywood’s nose, and every effort made to adapt one, the recent Max Payne (Moore, 2008), for example, has been a royal stuff-up. It’s true that games have always strived for the feel of cinema. I remember playing Chase The Express as an eager pre-teen and thinking how cool it was to control the lone soldier caught amid a train siege. Even at their crudest, games have sought to replicate the thrills of a cinematic adventure like Die Hard (McTiernan, 1988), but personally, don’t see them attempting to become movies . They’re trying to fill in the narrative gaps that movies just don’t have time to consider. 

-Particularly of Far Cry 2, which pits the player into the middle of an African nation consumed by civil war. In cinema the protagonist would be tasked with bringing down the oppressive regime, and within a 120-minute timeframe they would do so and the focus must always be on action, as within this constrained timeframe there is little room for politics or character development. The game features a real-time day/night cycle, genuine weapon degradation and no HUD (Heads-Up Display) to guide the player, instead demanding a crinkly old paper map be used to get from Point A to Point B. In so many action movies we see the character outnumbered and outgunned, forced to improvise in impossible scenarios. We know they’ll always make it.

-This would be talking about the movie industry running out of narrative ideas that they change it to the point of changing games into movies. From the media magazine it gives the information that movies don't have the uniqueness and this would be showing that its all about the money with the industry because all new narrative is hard to find. 

Media magazine 44:

-Is hollywood out of ideas

-Hollywood is a business made up of profit-driven studios; small subsidiaries of multinational conglomerates that care little for the art of film. Their purpose is to succeed in a capitalist marketplace; survival, growth and competition.Box office sales are the key to big profits.They spend big money to ensure they will deliver the biggest spectacles: cutting-edge special effects, globally recognisable stars,and locations that span the world and promise the biggest sets money can buy.

-The recent Avengers film appeared to be the pinnacle, with numerous characters already set up in their own films teaming up in one mega-movie, but now Marvel are working on their second phase, with new films for all the individual characters, led by the darker looking Iron Man 3 out this year.

Twilight is a teen literature adaptation, again showing Hollywood’s love of taking properties with an existing fan base (see also Harry Potter and The Hunger Games). Horror has most recently replayed found-footage films on an endless loop ever since the success of Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity.

-lack of imagination and desperation to jump on the bandwagon are vampire films spurned on by the

success of the Twilight saga. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Stake Land,Let Me In (itself a remake) and, of course,an inevitable parody, Vampires Suck,all emerged recently, cashing in on the

renewed popularity of the creatures of the night (or just Hollywood’s desperation to suck every last 

drop of cash from them).

- Hollywood executives analyse the market to see what works, what sells and what they can imitate, steal or build on to capitalise on current market trends. Genres, cycles and trends can all overlap. For example, in the wake of Scream in the late 90s, a revived cycle of similar self-aware slasher films was produced. Trends that are clearly popular at the moment and currently exploited by Hollywood are the superhero cycle of films, and particularly since Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, the tendency for superhero films to get darker in theme and tone. Three of the Top Ten films of 2012 are superhero movies. The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises took the top spots and the rebooted The 

Amazing Spiderman also made the Top Ten.The Dark Knight Rises and its seriously dark themes and subject matter that reflect post 9/11 terrorism anxiety (see page 37) seems to have fed into the production of 2013’s Man of Steel Superman update, judging by the teaser trailer.

-Not only does Hollywood appear to be out of ideas and looking to other mediums for sources of inspiration but they are also determined to milk every last good idea for the maximum profit.

-Hollywood has begun plundering its own back catalogue in earnest, as well as seeking out popular world cinema films which, because of subtitling, will not make money at the US box office. So though the French film The Intouchables did great business around the world, Hollywood is already

preparing a remake to cash in on the American audience. The Dark Knight trilogy is itself a reboot of an already successful Batman franchise that lasted four films and, as mentioned earlier, it took Spiderman only five years to be rebooted after the original trilogy finished in 2007. The Star Trek franchise was recently rebooted to great success, and horror classic Evil Dead is being remade this year, the latest in a long line of classic horrors being remade for amodern audience by an industry short on fresh ideas.

- Foreign language favourites are continually remade by Hollywood withrespected directors like Martin Scorsese  (The Departed) and David Fincher (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) becoming

involved. Korean revenge flick Oldboy is also being remade this year by Spike Lee,suggesting that even successful directors are looking to previously produced scripts to make a buck. It is as sure a sign as any that Hollywood has nothing left to offer the world but exploitation of its past glories and

the success of original international ideas. Hollywood even celebrates its complete lack of originality by awarding Scorsese a Best Director Oscar for his remake of Hong Kong’s Infernal Affairs.

- Television series, books, fairytales and video-games. With the video-games industry over taking Hollywood in income recently, Hollywood is keen to capitalise on this. Resident Evil: Retribution is the fifth film in a franchise based on the popular video-games. Every new entry in the series gets consistently panned by the critics, yet they continue to be extremely profitable with fans of the games. 21 Jump  Street made the Top Fifty of 2012 with its adaptation of an 80s television show starring Johnny Depp, while the first of what Paramount was no doubt hoping would become an extremely lucrative franchise, Jack Reacher, under-performed, suggesting this time there may not be a sequel. Not only does Hollywood appear to be out of ideas and looking to other mediums for sources of inspiration but they are also determined to milk every last good idea for the maximum profit. The Hobbit, a children’s book, has been adapted into a trilogy of films, to ensure revenue will pour in from this one idea for some time to come.

Media Magazine 45:

-In a film culture built on the online experience of accessing films (and other media such as books, games, music etc.) is that sense of having exchanged a limited sense of ‘coming attractions’, as listed in the cinema foyer, for a much wider range of recommendations of similar kinds of films, possibly all related to our own preferences. 

-Films were like novels and that we would choose carefully what we wanted to see, and would ‘read’ a film in the same way we would read a novel.

-There are many ways to access films on-line, ranging from the big brands like iTunes, Love Film and Netflix, with both fixed prices and subscription rates for rental or download, through to the pirate operations that offer bit-torrent downloads. The latter are, of course, illegal, which we can’t condone but we must consider whether the thrill of watching something illegally acquired actually becomes part of the reading experience. This is also linked to the sense of superiority we tend to feel if we see something before everyone else, or our smugness when we get to see something for free that we know many people have paid to watch.

Media magazine 47:

-The anti-piracy groups, is the loss of revenue. From their perspective every view of a stream equals a lost cinema ticket, Blu-ray sale or subscription to a legitimate source such as Netflix or Amazon. We can see how this might pan out with a specific example If we take one of 2012’s most illegally downloaded films, Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol (reportedly 8.5 million torrent file downloads) and search for it on Primewire, it produces a list of 26 file hosting sites and presents a total view count of about 305,000. Small potatoes compared with the downloads. But if we assume that each of those 305,000 views is a lost cinema ticket or Blu-ray sale, we can estimate the loss of revenue to the industry to be somewhere between £2 million and £4.5 million, which is somewhat less insignificant.

-With UK cinema admissions steadily rising, it seems difficult to argue that the UK film exhibition industry is suffering from the impact of piracy.

-The prime motivator for audiences to access unauthorised streams of content is immediacy. For example, in the UK the only way to watch The Walking Dead is on Fox HD, which requires a subscription to Sky. The problem for UK audiences is that this runs about one whole season behind the US schedule. In this way the programme is a victim of its own success; audiences just can’t get it fast enough.

-Marvel universe  first time in cinematic history,fans know what films they will be getting from a studio six or seven years into the future, and are being prepared for it long in advance where studies dont have a time table. having this time table makes fans of the marvel universe spend their money more on the studio as to knowing the movies coming out.