The biggest problem with movies is none of the labor has been automated much.
You still need an entire film and sound crew. You still need a cast of actors and a director and a screenwriter and a composer. You still need to raise money, producers, etc.
Sure, video & sound editing have had a lot of automation improvements via software - but that's pretty much it.
One person can make a game with a bunch of cheap pre-made assets and make something really interesting and cool.
I feel like CGI has increased productivity a lot. Not so much in big, effects driven movies, but in everyday type shots where they can change backgrounds or remove things so they don't need to make big elaborate sets or control environments quite so much. That's my guess at least. Film was also a huge cost of production and especially distribution that's essentially gone now. I think Hollywood unions also add a lot of jobs - look up the job of focus puller sometime.
On the other hand to all the expensive stuff - you can just not do those. I'd take Primer as an example. I believe it was shot for the cost of a Toyota Corolla and became a fairly significant film. I've also seen "low budget" movies (meaning $3-5 million or so) in the last decade or so that probably would not have been possible 20 years or more ago, so I feel like there has been some progress.
> I feel like CGI has increased productivity a lot.
Yeah, but take a look at the massive number of VFX people listed in the end-credits of CGI-heavy films. Often several different companies (e.g. DNEG) each with its own array of artists, modellers, riggers, tech, pipeline engineers, asset developers, IT support, etc etc.
Yep, that's what I mean when I say not so much in big, effects driven films - I suspect those will always consume as much budget as you throw at them because there's always a cutting edge to push. But in smaller and less effect driven films/TV shows, the tech seems to be a net win for productivity.
You're not going to have multiple locations, good actors, good writing, good composition, quality cinematography, etc - unless you're incredibly talented and not counting how much your time is actually worth.
Films for a wide audience these days basically require - at a minimum - 6 specialists working for a month of shooting. Plus 5+ actors.
The absolute minimum that costs in labor - if you actually counted the value of your time - is ~$200k+.
A good script itself is worth well over $100k...
Realistically - it's almost impossible to make something with wide appeal for less than $2m in the US - or $1m internationally.
I would actually say, "almost nothing" in movie terms means, "human scale almost nothing" all the way to perhaps, "cost of a house". We all have phones, video editing software is free, there's plenty of distribution channels. If you want to make a movie for "almost nothing", you can do so.
Doesn't mean it's going to be good, or that anyone wants to see it.
Is this a peculiar concept? We all work OSS every day, right?
True, to the extent that any 90 minutes of smartphone footage uploaded to youtube is technically "a movie". In order to be "a movie" in the sense that Evil Dead or Primer are movies, I would say you need a bit more than that.
You still need an entire film and sound crew. You still need a cast of actors and a director and a screenwriter and a composer. You still need to raise money, producers, etc.
Sure, video & sound editing have had a lot of automation improvements via software - but that's pretty much it.
One person can make a game with a bunch of cheap pre-made assets and make something really interesting and cool.
You just can't do that with film.