Matt Damon Sweats From His Scalp While Eating Spicy Wings | Hot Ones

It's the decline of DVD sales. Big budget Hollywood films are designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Why did the mid-budget sector (the one that can take risks with creativity) drop out leaving us with either indie films or big budget films? According to Matt Damon[1], it's the obsolescence of the DVD market that changed the calculus of mid-budget films. When a structural change affects the economics of content, it's difficult to localize the problem and envision a remedy. Unfortunately, these economic systemic problems tend to shut down our capabilities to affect change rather than enhance them. In some ways it's more convenient to envision the problem as being a problem of movie studio executives and their choices, than a media economy problem with a change in financial relations. 1. Matt Damon | Hot Ones [this video]

This is from the interview on Hot Ones (released August 5, 2021): [this video] > Sean Evans: > I think a scenario lots of viewers can relate to is sitting on the couch on a Friday night, going through the streaming services, cycling through the movies and thinking to themselves "they're not making movies for me anymore". As somebody who's been intimately involved in movie making for 30 years, what are the macro Hollywood conditions behind that sentiment? > Matt Damon: > Well, so what happened was the DVD was a huge part of our business - of our revenue stream - and technology has just made that obsolete. And so, the movies that that we used to make: you could afford to not make all of your money when it played in the theater because you knew you had the DVD coming behind the release and 6 months later you'd get a whole other chunk - it would be like reopening the movie almost. > And when that went away, that changed the type of movies that we could make. I did this movie "Behind the Candelabra" and I talked to a studio executive who explained: it was a $25 million movie. I would have to put that much into print and advertising to market it - what we call P&A - so now I'm in $50 million. I have to split everything I get with the exhibitor, the people who own the movie theaters, so I would have to make $100 million before I got into profit. The idea of making $100 million on a story about this love affair between these two people... Yeah, love everyone in the movie, but that's sudde