The LA Film Fest speech by former Miramax president Mark Gill is getting a lot of notice. The title of it is “Yes, the Sky Really Is Falling.” Here’s some of his evidence:

• 5000 movies were made last year; 600 were released theatrically in the U.S., or just over ten a week.
• The average cost of a studio film is now $70 million, with half that again needed for advertising. So the benchmark for releasing a studio film in the U.S. has finally reached $100 million. He also says that the costs of his main concern, so-called speciality films, have gone up “dramatically,” but didn’t cite figures.
• But by way of example he says Sundance gets 5,000 submissions a year. (Jesus.) Of these, perhaps one hundred get a theatrical release, and of those, five make money.
• Meantime, on the corporate level, independent houses and the studio specialty units (like Universal’s Focus or Fox’s Searchlight) are in a state of extreme upheaval: Besides the closing or de facto closing of Vantage, Picturehouse, New Line and Warner Independent, Gill says he knows of five more “in serious financial peril.”

Which sounds like the sky is falling. But it’s hard to see really what the problem is.

It’s not like Warner Independent or Picturehouse were fabled indie imprints. They were corporate creations. As for New Line, its masters gave up their control (and pocketed their payday) when they sold their company to Ted Turner way back when.

And it’s not clear that the market for indie films is shrinking. To the contrary: Gill says, for example, that specialty films used to make up five to six percent of the tickets sold. And he says that that figure has recently risen to ten percent.

He doesn’t mention it, but it’s also true that they have essentially taken over the Oscars, to the point where there’s been a keening wail of protest from everyone from Nikki Finke to A.O. Scott that the  Oscars are no longer populist.

It seems plain that those films are doing what they should do—working hard to build up an audience and occasionally make a big payoff, the way Juno did last year.

So as I understand it, here’s the situation:

• There are a more and more movies made, which gives more and more people the opportunity to make movies and, as importantly, learn to make movies.
• And, while I certainly don’t want to watch most of these, I do very much care that I have the opportunity to if I want to, which is why the exploding different venues to do so is good for me, for you, and for the filmmakers: There are myriad cable channels looking for products; there’s Netflix, the iTunes Store, and myriad other online outlets; and if the producers of the film really want to get it out there, they can just stream the damn thing free on the internet to get someone to notice it.
• And, just at the point going to the movies—in terms of ambient noise, personal comfort and ability to concentrate on an ostensible work of art—becomes more and more like going to a Nascar event, there are many news ways of experiencing movies, too, and lots of new opportunities for mediators to guide us (good for film guide sites, critics, journalists, even editors!)—and, as I’ve noted before, the plunging availability of big HD televisions means that staying at home to see a movie doesn’t require aesthetic compromises, either.

So the only folks for whom these new realities aren’t ideal are those who are charged with making the really big bucks from them, which is to say, the weasels of the film industry.

So I’m not crying. And if you read Gill closely, his prescriptions for weasel success in the future seem only to make things even better for us, the audience:

Clearly, only the better films will succeed in the theaters of the future. Certainly the number of releases will drop–by half or more. Probably everyone other than the folks who work on tentpoles will be paid less. The words “theatrical necessity” will take on greater and greater meaning. Probably a lot of theaters will close. But I think the best theaters showing the best films will always have an audience. And the rest of the films will have their premiere in Walmart, or on your cell phone.

Interestingly enough, in this Darwinian new future, there will absolutely be a premium for good films on tv, pay per view, on-demand, internet–or whatever that large pipe that goes to all of our houses will be called.

Why do I know this? Because one of the big research companies conducted a study recently which gave viewers on-demand everything. No more schedules. No more appointment television. Just tune in anything—any movie, any TV show—at any time. And guess what: the best stuff won out. Hands down.

Patrick Goldstein, in his new LAT blog, has a slightly different critique:

The real problem with the indie business isn’t quality, but discipline. We have a generation of filmmakers who feel entitled to make personal films at studio prices. (The poster boy for this would be Wes Anderson, a gifted artist who makes increasingly idiosyncratic cinematic sketches on a far-too-costly canvas.) We also have a generation of studio executives who’ve been willing to, essentially, use specialty films as a loss leader to launch their divisions. That’s why “There Will Be Blood” cost $40 million-plus and “No Country For Old Men” and “Babel” cost $30 million-plus to make, which along with the untold tens of millions spent to run Oscar campaigns, made the films a losing proposition.

If people in the indie world want to start making money again, they have to start treating their investment like a truly precious natural resource, not like Monopoly money. Discipline is not antithetical to art. The oldest and most consistently successful specialty division, Sony Pictures Classics, keeps making money because it resolutely, sometimes to a fault, never overspends on a film. When there is a bidding war, you can always find SPC chiefs Tom Bernard and Michael Barker running in the other direction.

Ditto for Fox Searchlight, an equally disciplined, incredibly well-run company that only acquires movies it knows how to sell. When my colleague John Horn recently wrote a story noting that Paramount Vantage had nearly 100 employees and had yet to make a profit, Paramount production chief (and Vantage founder) John Lesher called him and launched into a profanity-filled tirade. Instead of yelling at a reporter, Lesher, not to mention many of his indie film colleagues, should be doing some serious soul searching. The indie film business isn’t going to get any better until filmmakers and studio executives stop their spending sprees and start making indie movies for a true indie price.