Item — HN Reader

> Are cinemas now second behind streaming?

It feels like a race to the bottom. Movie and TV content quality has taken a nose dive in the past decade.

Yes, there are exceptions, but it’s hard to find these days.

Maybe it’s because producing movies/TV is so much easier and cheaper that there is now so much low quality noise, that it makes finding the high quality signal so difficult.

But it seems like you used to be able to go to the theater and you’d have to decide between several great options.

Now, I almost never care to go because it’s only about 2-3 times a year that anything comes out worth seeing.

2 comments

> it’s only about 2-3 times a year that anything comes out worth seeing.

This was probably always true, with some randomly amazing years every now and again, like 1972 (The Godfather, Cabaret, Deliverance, What's Up Doc?,...).

IMDB listing shows 470 films released US in 1972. Google says there are ~3,900 IMDB entries for 1972 (why the 4X discrepancy?). The hit ratio was veeeery small even in killer years.

the kind of person who watches a LOT of television and movies likes slop, it's not complicated.

still different than media people PAY for. for example substack sells empty opinions that agree with you. it is totally wrong to say that slop sells. it is merely the highest engagement for an audience that DOESN'T pay.

you could say, "engagement is the wrong metric," but if that were really true, tech jobs would contract like 50%. the alternative becomes, "would you like fries with that?"