Chairman and CEO of Paramount Pictures and what was then 20th Century Fox says the movie industry is dead. “The movie business is over,” said Barry Diller in an interview with NPR at a media and technology conference in Idaho.
“The movie business as before is finished and will never come back,” said Diller who made his way in the film industry in two of Hollywood’s top movie-producing studios. “There used to be a whole run-up,” said Diller about the time, money and investment studios put into distribution and publicity campaigns.
Generating excitement and anticipation for a movie to be released is now “finished” he said. Not only has streaming services altered the industry substantially, but so has the way companies measure the success of a film.
“I used to be in the movie business where you made something really because you cared about it” he said. But today’s multibillion-dollar streaming industry has created competition, and therefore incentives in the entertainment business have also changed.
“The system is not necessarily to please anybody” which NPR reports is Diller suggesting Prime Video’s primary purpose is to get more customers on Amazon Prime. “It is to buy more Amazon stuff. That’s not a terrible thing. It just doesn’t interest me” he added.
Diller says streaming services have also diminished the quality of production. “These streaming services have been making something that they call ‘movies.’ They ain’t movies. They are some weird algorithmic process that has created things that last 100 minutes or so” he said.
The definition of “movie…is in such transition that it doesn’t mean anything right now” lamented Diller.
