Capitalism has decreed that we live in an era where distribution is simpler than it has ever been, where the hurdles for bringing a film to an audience are lower than ever, where everyone has a camera in their pocket that can outshine the Best digital cameras that existed 20 years ago, where a hobbiest with a piece of free software can produce special effects that rival or surpass big budget spectacles of years past, and anyone can just start a television station ( see https://communitymedia.network) and yet ...

Fewer people than ever are actually making movies! It feels like independent cinema is effectively dead. Low and mid budget movies are a rarity. And to top it all off, physical media releases are the exception, rather than the rule.

It's more profitable to destroy a brand new film than to release it.

It's more profitable to delete something from streaming services than to keep it available.

It's more profitable to sell an empty box than a blu-ray (at least, that's what Disney is trying to do!)

In a world of digital distribution, manufacturing on demand, and multi gigabit home internet, the fact that it's more likely that a film is impossible to see than it is that I can easily find it is absurd.

It does not cost much money to host a DVD quality copy of a film on a streaming service. Storage is cheap, compression is very good. If no one is watching it, it's basically free at scale, a rounding error. HD and 4k get in to slightly more expensive territory, but logistically there's no good technical reason that every film ever made isn't available for us to stream at any given moment, and even less technical reason that I can't buy it on a DVD-R or whatever.

(Obviously, the barrier here is not technical, it's "legal" and "economic" which means it's bullshit.)

Motion picture distribution and productuon companies have always been a hotbed for scams, financial shenanigans, and outright fraud.

The boom in independent cinema of the 60s and 70s was a tax dodge.

The death of modern film is down to financial shenanigans. It has nothing to do with consumers or demand or art, and it certainly has nothing to do with Markets. It's about consolidation of capital and financial shenanigans.

And the bright spots in this are still pretty dim and bleak.

The biggest homes for independent cinema right now are Tubi and Yuku (I think I'm anglicizing that correctly.)

Tubi ... I mean, it's the closest thing to a good guy the US has, and it's owned by Fox, with everything that implies.

(And it still doesn't help with Ownership. I can't buy a blu-ray from tubi)

Part of the problem here is that movies almost always come with super lopsided contracts. The studios tend to retain exclusive distribution rights and IP ownership, and they don't even have to promise to actually release the thing.

Directors and producers tend to get paid based on how well the film does after it is released, and studios get to define what "release" means, and frequently also what "well" means.

For you, it was art.

For the studio? A tax dodge.

There is no film equivalent of lulu or create space.

There is youtube instead. It serves a vastly different role.

(Create space and Lulu let people self publish books which can be purchased by other people. For a fee, books published through Lulu and Createspace enter the Ingram catalog, which is where most bookstores place their orders.

The upshot here is that publishing on YouTube is roughly analogous to sharing fiction via Tumblr. There is no analog for createspace or Lulu. Vimeo comes close, I guess, but even that has more in common with Medium.)

And I don't think Lulu or createspace are benevolent here. Createspace specifically is just Amazon, and Amazon is evil.

But these platforms provide a way for indies to self publish and potentially profit, without signing away the totality of their rights, and to still potentially be carried in stores!

This option is basically nonexistent in video, and video stores are largely dead.

@ajroach42 Welp, two more projects for local makerspaces to implement:

- Provide a service for filmmakers to self-publish physical media of their films
- Resurrect the video store (seriously, who saw "Be Kind, Rewind" and didn't immediately say "this is dope as heck, we should start a video shop"?)