Tom Cruise (who made $75,000 for “Risky Business”), Cameron Diaz (who made $2 million for “There’s Something About Mary”), Tom Hanks (who made $70,000 for “Splash”), Jim Carrey (who made $350,000 for “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective”), Mike Myers (who got $1 million for “Wayne’s World”), and even Adam Sandler (who made $1.7 million for “Billy Madison”) all now ask $25 million–or for as much as 25% of the gross–to star in a new movie.
Nice jobs, if you can get them.
Baris recently wrote an intriguing post about machinima, or the production of computer generated imagery using low end software (typically video games) and hardware rather than complex 3D engines and render farms. The idea is that machinima enables almost anyone to easily create reasonably good quality video.
Here’s an example, created using “Halo” and “Halo 2″:
The show, called “Red vs Blue,” is a parody of “FPS games, military life, and other science fiction movies.” Red vs Blue started in 2003 and is now in its 4th season (check out their web site). There are many other creative machinima examples (including some based on the Broadway show Avenue Q).
What happens in 5 or 10 years, after graphical rendering and audio technology advance to a point far beyond where they are today?
Take a look at these images–all computer generated. Next, give this text-to-speech demonstration a try (sorry, works only with IE). It doesn’t take much imagination to understand that the production of media entertainment is bound to change fundamentally–and soon.
All this notwithstanding, A-list stars still have real value, and it’s unlikely that machinima will be able to perfectly duplicate a recognized actor’s particular gestures and intonations soon, if ever. Plus, quality movies have a lot more than star power (eg good writing, direction, etc); in fact, there are many examples of movies that would likely have been far better had they relied less on technology.
Still, looks like the movie business is ready to be exploded.
Dan,
Red vs. Blue is awesome.
It’s coming. One day our kids will ask “They used studios where actual people did the acting?”
What will rock the movie business is the video games business. Already bigger, it will get more realistic looking and most importantly, more interactive.
I wonder why anybody will want to watch a shoot’em up movie when they can play in one, that looks just as realistic, and is interactive.
Great post.
Left by Baris Karadogan on February 3rd, 2006