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- "Alien: Romulus" Gets Practical
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Alien: Romulus Gets Practical
Alien: Romulus did big box office its opening weekend, including at my screening where a fire alarm went off halfway through and an elderly man took pictures of the movie with his iPhone. It’s true! It’s not just Gen Alpha misbehaving in movie theaters. It might also be weird boomers!
I’ll save my review of the movie for my cult podcast (BTW “cult” absolutely does not mean “single digit listener-having. It’s at least double digits!), but I did think director Fede Álvarez’s explanation for his preference for practical effects was interesting:
It really transcends the discussion of, which is an impossible discussion to get to, which is what looks better or what it's not about that best because CG should be invisible so you cannot compare.
It's really what's best for [the actors] and for myself, when you get into the adventure of making the movie, you got to be things happening that they can react to and I can shoot and we can be in real places.
…I didn't get into film to shoot a green screen and empty places that then someone in animation world is gonna build later. And so, they can tell you firsthand their experience of what it is to be on a set where everything is real, right?
I think this attitude points to the direction of Hollywood filmmaking over the rest of the decade; we will see a marked return to a stronger sense of physicality in effects-heavy films, and less reliance on entirely green-screened sound stages with actors performing against tennis balls or pictures.
As described in VFX Voice, not using CGI has become a point of pride (and advertising), a far cry from the heyday of CGI bragging in the 1990s and 2000s. Yet the claim that a movie like Top Gun: Maverick didn’t use CGI isn’t strictly accurate:
…the people who made those CG jets would be perfectly fine if the audience assumed that it was all practical. The same way a stuntman’s finest achievement is that the audience does not even notice or think about when the director cuts between an actor and him.
I think this is the crucial place where filmmaking is moving, CGI being seen as appropriately complementary to the other elements within a film’s visual effects scheme instead of the centerpiece, in the same way a matte painting can be used to extend a film’s set as opposed to shooting the entire movie in front of one.
The Ongoing Death of DVD
Variety has a solemn report on the state of the DVD business, which has been rocked by COVID-19, the dual strikes, Netflix ending their DVD business, and the collapse of Redbox. Per Variety:
Physical disc spending in the U.S. reached $218 million for Q2, a nearly 30% decline compared with the same period last year. Thanks to a relatively stronger Q1, physical sales generated around $451 million to date, which is still a roughly 22% decrease from the first half of 2023 (and a 52.38% drop since midyear 2021).
These are huge drops, almost as bad as the listenership fall-off on my cult podcast between episodes 1 and 2! To be fair, 2 came out after my Aunt Joan landed in jail, and she was 50% of the listenership!
Obviously streaming is gobbling up much of these eyeballs. Is it solely to blame? Probably! But sometimes I’ll grab a recently-released DVD and get mind-boggled over how few special features it has. Take the most recent Garfield for example. The DVD doesn’t appear to contain any additional special features about the film. Just the movie! Why wouldn’t someone just watch it on streaming?
As I’ve noted before, it’s the boutique physical media companies who are still doing decent business, mostly because they are putting out highly-desired catalogue releases with significant special features of interest to collectors. This is also reflected in the Variety article:
Collectable disc formats for older releases saw a boost in Q2, with spending on SteelBooks up 44% and 4K UHD Blu-rays up 16%. For physical media purists, these metrics are promising signs of the DVDs’ rebirth as a specialty item by way of vinyl.
I agree that a sort of vinyl collector future is where physical media will go. Studios could staunch some of this bleeding by actually including content on physical media you can’t get on streaming, but that seems particularly unlikely!
Kernels (3 links worth making popcorn for)
Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:
Which publishers are signing AI content licensing deals? (link)
How Google became a monopoly, and what happens next. (link)
Netflix’s TV season release schedule is annoying! (link)