The Bulwark
Across the Movie Aisle
An All-'Sinners' Episode
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An All-'Sinners' Episode

From Coogler's unusual deal to the film itself.
‘Sinners’ (MovieStillsDB)

Alyssa is off this week, so Sonny Bunch (The Bulwark) and Peter Suderman (Reason) are joined by Ben Dreyfuss (Calm Down) to discuss all things Sinners. In cons and nons, they ask if Coogler’s unusual deal granting him copyright on the movie 25 years hence will really “destroy the studio system.” And then they review the film, which has done boffo box office and earned a coveted A from CinemaScore audiences. Make sure to swing by Bulwark+ on Friday for a bonus vampire movie draft. And if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend!

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Jake's avatar

Speaking as an indie filmmaker I can’t stress enough how YouTube (or any other platform currently in existence) is not the future of film distribution.

The reasons are numerous but the two main ones are a) long form videos are not rewarded on YouTube b) people are not going to YouTube to watch narrative videos.

https://influencermarketinghub.com/types-of-youtube-content/

George Lucas was right about YouTube when he told the creators, to their face, that they just created a puppy throwing platform. (Kara Swisher writes about this in her book)

Listen, I’m currently looking for a distributor. I could drop it on Vimeo or YouTube and it would be ignored. I need an established distributor, even a small one, to get it to people on SVOD.

AI is also bad for filmmaking.

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Jeff Biss's avatar

OK, about that "AI is bad thing", why do you think that?

AI truly cannot do anything outside its training set because it is not creative. However, I also don't see that human generated stories are necessarily more creative. For example there are myriad movies that are essentially derivative, as arguably there are a finite set of plots:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots

- https://www.openculture.com/2020/08/37-possible-stories.html

Or duplicates as in remakes, or beating a story to a thin, flavorless broth through franchises. Couldn't it be claimed that humans have been doing what everyone believes that AI will do?

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Jake's avatar

No. Humans even do bad better than AI.

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Jeff Biss's avatar

I agree. AI's threatened capabilities are all hype.

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Travis's avatar

Typo in the headline

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Sonny Bunch's avatar

lol thanks

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