Generational Change

Posted on LinkedIn this morning...

It feels like there’s a generational turnover happening in entertainment. The old stuff isn’t connecting. Movie stars don’t mean anything. Young people (my tweener kids) don’t watch movies or television. 

“All this has happened before, and will happen again”—thanks BSG! And Bill Goldman: “Nobody knows anything.” Remember those 1960s studio musicals that bombed, and then Easy Rider cleaned up? (I do, because I know history.)

A.I. isn’t the answer. A.I. reminds me of early synthesizer days: “Wow, my synthesizer sounds just like an orchestra!” Well, no it doesn’t, it’s cringe. Synth music is cool—but if you want an orchestra, get an orchestra. 

The VFX revolution already happened between T2 and, let’s say, Avatar 1. A.I. is just a dirt-cheap, shittier version of it.

The hits will come, yet they will drive movie people nuts because they will be so unpredictable. They will be DIFFERENT. In a “light” kind of movie, the bad guy will win. In a “dark” movie, everything will be treated as farce.

The commonality will be characters whose journeys connect to the cultural moment. 

Because they’re so new and non-repeatable, they will come from weird creators in strange places. They’ll probably be inexpensive to produce, but not necessarily. Their bold, audacious choices will be hard if not impossible to repeat—not to say studios won’t try.

It’s fantasy to think you can engineer them. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you can identify them early—if you’re lucky enough to spot them. But it’s needle-in-a-haystack stuff.

The ONLY thing you can do is trust your own heart and soul when you read or see something new and it actually stirs something in you—even if it’s completely unorthodox. But the catch: you have to still have a soul.