Spielberg-Lucas Fearless Forecast: Movie Industry Will Implode!

I have been constantly saying that the information age will reconfigure almost every aspect of our lives. And much of the social frictions I have been posting here signifies as the angst of the transition from the legacy of the industrial age dynamics of top down, centralized and mass production, mass media and mass market forces to the decentralized, bottom up, highly specialized, niche production, niche media and niche based market forces of the information age.

Movie moguls Steven Spielberg and George Lucas predicts that the movie industry will suffer a disorderly evolution. Hollywood may suffer a meltdown!

Here is David Cohen from the Variety.com (bold mine)

Looking into their crystal ball, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg predicted the imminent arrival of a radically different entertainment landscape, including pricey movie tickets, a vast migration of content to video-on-demand and even programmable dreams.

Speaking on a panel at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, Spielberg and Lucas took a grim view of the future of the majors and predicted theatrical motion pictures will become a niche market.

“They’re  going for the gold,” said Lucas of the studios. “But that isn’t going to work forever. And as a result they’re getting narrower and narrower in their focus. People are going to get tired of it. They’re not going to know how to do anything else.”

Spielberg noted that because so many forms of entertainment are competing for attention, they would rather spend $250 million on a single film than make several personal, quirky projects.

“There’s eventually going to be a big meltdown,” Spielberg said. “There’s going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen of these mega-budgeted movies go crashing into the ground and that’s going to change the paradigm again.”

This would be the forces of creative destruction at work, which should benefit the movie consumers as well as the industry, who will have to compete to reformat or restructure to suit the desires of the consumers, overtime.

Harry Potter and the evolving Film Franchise Model

In today's digital (information) economy, even the movie business model has been changing

The Economist observes,

WHEN the final instalment in the saga of Harry Potter's education is released in cinemas on July 15th the franchise is likely to become the second biggest ever, measured by box-office revenue. Hollywood has fallen for the franchise model which, like the child or spouse of a famous politician, starts with the advantage of name recognition. It has also become keen on what the studios call "pre-sold" films—stories based on a book (like Harry Potter) or a toy (like Transformers). People familiar with these things can often be persuaded to sit in a dark room and eat popcorn for 90 minutes while they are brought to life on screen. This has helped to solve an old problem in the industry: how to prevent a franchise from fizzling out after the first couple of films.

For a crispier view pls click here to redirect link to the Economist

My guess is that audiences today prefer sequels to box office hits which is probably why Film Franchising seems to be a blossoming model. Maybe the film industry got a clue from telenovelas or serial dramatic programming.

This only demonstrates how the marketplace has been in a constantly evolving process.