Kill Hollywood

January 27th, 2012

Paul Graham wants to hasten Hollywood’s demise:

How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What’s going to kill movies and TV is what’s already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?

While it’s almost certain Hollywood’s relevance will decline, I don’t think it’s going to be any one thing that replaces it. It’s going to be a lot of little things—games, amalgamations of books and videos, small shows and movies created by small groups and distributed online—that end up doing it.

What’s fascinating is how wide-open everything is. It wasn’t long ago that television and movies held most of people’s attention, but that’s no longer true. The web broke down that wall, and I don’t think it’ll ever go up again. Now our attention is spread over a wider range of things, and that’s an opportunity for smaller scale projects to be successful.

You don’t need to have the resources of a movie studio to make a great film (and Hollywood is doing a very poor job of making good films with the resources they have, anyway), and what I hope we see is a better way for small groups to make films, distribute them online, and make money doing so.