Joss Whedon

The Hollywood studios don’t “get it” yet, writer-director Joss Whedon (pictured, left) declared today at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco.

You’d think that Whedon, the lead writer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who more recently hit big with Internet TV show called Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog, would be more optimistic about the intersection of traditional media and the web.

But when asked point-blank which of the big Hollywood studios understand the Internet, Whedon said, “I don’t think any of them get it.”

There’s a reason that Whedon produced Dr. Horrible independently: The real excitement about new media, he said, comes from Hollywood’s creative folks, not the studios. (There was also a little thing called the writer’s strike going on during the show’s production.)

“They’re trying to recreate the model of a successful television show — you pour in millions and you get back many more millions,” Whedon said. “It’s a huge priority, but they’re coming at it from a very ossified point of view.”

Whedon seems to have found a model worth replicating — he produced the equivalent of an hour-long drama for a cost in the “low six figures” rather than millions or ten of millions of dollars. It became a top-seller on iTunes, and is now making more money on ad-supported Internet TV site Hulu. Interestingly, Whedon also released the show for free for a week.

“The idea was not just to get people to see it and to give something for the fans,” Whedon said. “[It was also] to make a statement about the Internet — this is a place where you can have an event.”

Still, Whedon’s embrace for the web only goes so far. Moderator and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington closed the panel by exhorting everyone to accept the benefits of less “official” web distribution channels like BitTorrent and YouTube, but earlier on, when he asked Whedon about the sites, the writer-director didn’t sound too enthusiastic. (Of course, content creators can make money from unauthorized YouTube clips, too, and many are choosing to do so.)

The other speakers on the “Silicon Valley meets Hollywood” panel appeared to be a little more optimistic than Whedon that the studios will adapt, albeit slowly. As Arrington noted, actor Ashton Kutcher just launched a new site at the conference called BlahGirls. Some of the panelists even echoed what Kutcher told us earlier, namely that the Internet and television are merging.

And if the studios don’t evolve?

“They’ll lose,” said Stan Rogow, executive producer of the web show Gemini Division. “They will become irrelevant.”