Steven Spielberg and George Lucas on Hollywood's Impending Doom

As the old saying goes, "All good things come to an end." Right now Hollywood studios are doing very well for themselves. They are making big budget films that are paying off for them in spades. People are making a lot of money. Marvel is a perfect example of this with films like The Avengers and Iron Man 3. It doesn't hurt the studios to charge people more money to see their movies either. It seems like the are already forcing us to pay an extra $5 to see their movies in 3D and if you want to see the film in IMAX, well it's another extra $5. It's crazy that I find myself paying $21.50 to see a movie sometimes these days. It's kind of sad, especially since the economy isn't really getting any better.

During a panel at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas discuss all of these issues and how it's leading to Hollywood's inevitable meltdown. Lucas starts off by saying,

They’re going for the gold. But that isn’t going to work forever. And as a result they’re getting narrower and narrower in their focus. People are going to get tired of it. They’re not going to know how to do anything else.

Makes me wonder if he realizes that he's talking about himself in that statement. But that's beside the point. I understand what he's saying, but I also think there are going to be filmmakers out there that will help steer the industry in the right direction. Some filmmakers will fight the accountants, because lets face it, the bean counters run Hollywood.

Spielberg went on to explain that a lot of different forms of entertainment are competing for attention, "they would rather spend $250 million on a single film than make several personal, quirky projects." I've noticed that as well, and I hate that, lower budget films can still be really cool. There are studios that do make low budget movies, but I'd say the majority of them are horror movies. Spielberg goes on to talk about an implosion saying,

There’s eventually going to be a big meltdown. There’s going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen of these mega-budgeted movies go crashing into the ground and that’s going to change the paradigm again.

We've seen some of these big budget movies already crash and burn like John Carter and Battleship (sorry Taylor Kitsch), and those won't be the last. I hope I'm wrong, because I'm excited for the movie, but I have a feeling that Disney's The Lone Ranger might be next. Lucas went on to predict,

You’re going to end up with fewer theaters, bigger theaters with a lot of nice things. Going to the movies will cost 50 bucks or 100 or 150 bucks, like what Broadway costs today, or a football game. It’ll be an expensive thing. … (The movies) will sit in the theaters for a year, like a Broadway show does. That will be called the ‘movie’ business.

There’ll be big movies on a big screen, and it’ll cost them a lot of money. Everything else will be on a small screen. It’s almost that way now. ‘Lincoln’ and ‘Red Tails’ barely got into theaters. You’re talking about Steven Spielberg and George Lucas can’t get their movies into theaters.

We are seeing that happen now on a small scale. A lot of the great films that are being made that go to film festivals like Sundance and Fantastic Fest never make it to the big screen. Maybe they end up in arthouse theaters, but they are all being released through VOD now. So I can definitely see that trend spilling over into other studio films in the future. At one point Spielberg took a joing jab at Lucas, saying, "I got more people into Lincoln than you got into Red Tails." Lucas goes on to say,

What used to be the movie business, in which I include television and movies … will be Internet television. The question will be: Do you want people to see it, or do you want people to see it on a big screen?

It's hard not to agree with all this because they're right. As I've pointed out, this is stuff we're all starting to see happen. They go on to discuss the future of video games saying,

The big game of the next five years will be a game where you empathize very strongly with the characters and it’s aimed at women and girls. They like empathetic games. That will be a huge hit and as a result that will be the ‘Titanic’ of the game industry, where suddenly you’ve done an actual love story or something and everybody will be like ‘where did that come from?’ Because you’ve got actual relationships instead of shooting people.

That would be interesting. Games are constantly evolving, so it will be interesting to see where developers take storytelling from here. Spielberg then thinks ahead into the future of gaming in which he explained that the "real shift will come when game controllers are obsolete and games are controlled by Kinect-like devices that completely immerse the player in the story.

I believe need to get rid of the proscenium. We’re never going to be totally immersive as long as we’re looking at a square, whether it’s a movie screen or whether it’s a computer screen. We’ve got to get rid of that and we’ve got to put the player inside the experience, where no matter where you look you’re surrounded by a three-dimensional experience. That’s the future.

Lucas builds on that and takes it to the next level by suggesting brain implants are the future. He noted that such implants "are already being used to control artificial limbs; they just haven’t been used for entertainment yet."

The next step is to be able to control your dreams. You’ll just tap into a different part of your brain. You’re just going to put a hat on or plug into the computer and create your own world. … We’ll be able to do the dream thing 10, 15 years from now. It’s not some pie-in-the-sky thing.

From the fall of movies to the rise of video games and brain implants. These guys talked about it all. I'm curious to see where the future of entertainment takes us, but one thing is for sure, things are going to keep changing and evolving. We just have to be ready and willing to adapt to these changes. The one thing that will always remain constant is telling stories. That's the main ingredient in all of these things. 

You still have to tell stories.  Some people will want to be in a game… and some people will want to have a story told to them. Those are two different things. But the content always stays the same. The content hasn’t changed in 10,000 years.

The End.