Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has said that Hollywood will eventually go the same way as the dead-tree edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which was recently shuttered for good following a drop in sales.
Wales was giving a keynote address at the INET convention in Geneva when he made his prediction, saying “Hollywood will be destroyed and no one will notice. Collaborative storytelling and filmmaking will do to Hollywood what Wikipedia did to Encyclopedia Britannica.”
Wales went on to say that, as predictions go, he’s usually wrong but his experiences with Wikipedia have shown him that online collaborations can produce some massive results. The growing presence of software designed for making movies could provide for collaborative efforts that might make a dent in Hollywood’s bottom line at a fraction of the cost of big budget productions.
It goes without saying that producing a full-length feature film via an online collaboration would be a far more unwieldy affair than editing a Wiki page but, as Wired’s Ryan Singel puts it, “… if the next generation turns out to find a way to creating the next Titanic on a $5,000 budget, Hollywood won’t even see the blow coming.”
Source: Wired