Anyone not familiar with Kane - who was 16 when he started making his "found footage" films in Blender - the guy is a truly brilliant mind. Listening to him talk... you can close your eyes and he speaks like someone middle aged. It's almost uncanny.
Anyhow, in addition to his genuinely excellent Backrooms videos, I highly recommend you turn off the lights and take in his The Oldest View series as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjY897CCu4g&list=PLVAh-MgDVq...
He painstakingly recreated a random demolished suburban Texas mall from archival footage. It's wild how good he is at this.
Major studios were too afraid to produce something fresh instead of numberless sequels and reboots in the last decade or so.
I think calculus somewhere has changed that is allowing these small/mid sized movies to be made again.
> 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 suddenly a massive gamble in a way that it wasn't in the 1990s when they were making all those kind of movies - the kind of movies that I loved and the kind of movies that were my bread and butter.
Probably because the Linux market is too small to support an iTunes for Linux.
By my understanding, the Linux market prefers free, open source, community effort. So essentially the real question is: why aren't you making movies yourself and sharing them free with your Linux peers?
Cost ranges from $5-30. Fewer dirt cheap sales than Steam, but the standard price point at launch is lower, in exchange.
(Having to explain “buying movies” makes me feel old!)
DVDs and even video tape are relatively recent.
Hollywood was a lot less risk averse before DVDs and video tape. Heck, Hollywood was less risk averse before TV became mainstream.
Hollywood has also completely failed to cultivate a new generation of celebrities. God, we had a few years of nothing but Pedro Pascal to the point we have memes inside memes.
And the cost of production has gone way down, you don't need a specialized studio to put in CGI these days when some guys Blender can do better.
So Hollywood is busy being in a downward spiral eating itself while so much room has opened for "indie" to eat their lunch and dinner.
Last year it was basically F1 and Minecraft (and while not sequels, both are arguably well known "franchises" outside of movies - but I guess MJ and Wuthering Heights are too ;-)).
Not to say that it isn't an improvement, but we're still pretty far from seeing American cinema catching up to the world stage in originality, let alone to the golden Hollywood era.
Backrooms was a quite successful web series on YT which in turn originated in 4chan boards.
Only the medium being sourced from is changing from successful Broadway shows, popular novels or comic books in the years past. The calculus remains the same - properties with name recognition even from other formats tend to be green-light.
In general, there is sooo much free money on the ground for large, hierarchical American corporations to do the following
1. Give young talented people resources and freedom
2. Don't put them through endless bullshit internal status games
The reason why the tech industry in the US thrives so much is partially due to the fact that it is one of the few industries that gives people high salaries and agency in their roles without a huge amount of experience.
Almost everywhere else is just an artifically gated series of internal politics, nepotism and pointless rituals in too-big-to-fail industries, which attract people who prefer these games over actual results.
It looked a lot more polished than what I'd expect from an indie producer, though.
I liked it, and it's a shame that it was killed. Kind of a "slow burn," though, so I think I know why it was killed.
Yeah it's pretty good. I am in my late 30. Excited for Backrooms which isnt yet available
The movie was great but it's not a stand-alone movie, it is a small piece of the full story so don't go in thinking that everything will be explained and tied up in a neat little bow.
The movie takes place in Kane Pixel (the movie director's) youtube series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVAh-MgDVqvDUEq6qDXqO...
It makes a lot more sense if you watch the full youtube series first.
Probably worth a watch if you enjoy the genre. If you’re someone who just enjoys a good story, this is a pretty easy skip.
Liminal spaces I get. Reminds of Severance. And anyways, how is this worth going to a theater for? <Shrug> A24 has done well. Is 81M considered breaching 'mainstream'? Because these niche horror things being portrayed as part of the greater 'culture' is tiring.
If you can get over your preconceived notions, I'd bet that you'd really enjoy this movie. It's extremely well executed and genuinely unsettling without ever getting gory, comedic or stupid.
Give me comedy. Oh how I miss the 90 minute comedy movie.
That said I do like your description of “falling through the skin of the world.” A+.