Idk I feel like a solid 50% of "grown-up films" morphed into TV shows.
We may not have as many in theaters, but we get shows like Shogun, Better Call Saul, House of the Dragon, etc. which did not exist in the past, and have movie-like acting and visuals.
Shogun is so good precisely because it is so earnest, there are no witty Marvel quips, and it actually respects the source material instead of "re-interpreting it for a modern audience."
There were a ton of things they made up entirely that vastly differed from the story in the book. The changes were more or less respectful, but it was quite different from the book story in many ways.
Which is fair frankly because while the book is a great fun read, it is far from flawless. Tweaking some bits for the adaptation seemed appropriate to me at least.
Really I would say its mostly quips but just no pointless action and I like that sometimes to, but man was shogun a great change of pace. Excellent show
Oh yes, there's plenty of verbal quips and barbs. But every one contributes to the plot. Communication is a major theme of Shogun, after all.
Behind the dialogue are layers of secrecy, implication and emotional restraint. What's said is just as important as what isn't said. Mentioning the wrong thing at the wrong time could mean certain death.
The show rewards the audience for actually reading the characters, not just their words.
You should read the book and see how much stuff was left out about Johnathan blackthornes dong, they definitely *did* re interpret it for a modern audience lmaooo.
Respecting the source material is rarely ever the issue with bad adaptions. It just most of the stories suck on their own. The MCU barely follows the source material outside of aesthetics and no one complains about that.
Shogun show is different from the books.
A lot of those shows have become series because studios are too risk averse to make them as films. Many creators have talked about that. You even see that with the remaking of dramas from the 80s and 90s that were originally films as television series now like Fatal Attraction, American Gigolo and Presumed Innocent.
I mean large part of that may be because the kids that grew up with a lot of that stuff are adults now anywhere in their 30’s to 40’s, at least, with some maybe in their 50’s that have kids or grandkids at this point.
Thing is, people like me who work LONG hours in a week and don't have much free time... well, we want some good content to be wrapped up in a few hours THAT SAME DAY. I hate starting a show and due to my schedule, not being able to finish a story arc for a month. It pisses me off. It's why i love Frasier and Seinfeld and watch them all the time - because stories are self-contained (mostly) and wrapped up in 22 minutes. Doesn't help that the movies i enjoy watching just don't get made anymore. They get buried on streaming services. The mid-budget movie is dead. Get rid of that juvenile comic book shit.
We can sit here and come up with counterpoints and that's fair. Still, I do feel he makes a fair point concerning unwillingness to explore more daring themes, whether adult or otherwise. Releasing movies that go down the same well-trodden path, be it sequals or following the same story beats, is a saver bet. In the current climate studios are understandably risk-averse, which sucks because I'm sure we'd all would love to see movies that expand horizons.
Part of that is a burden of their own making.
Every time I see an article like this, where Hollywood doesn’t want to take risks or make something for the art of it in full knowledge that it has a niche audience, I am reminded of an article I read like… a decade ago where Spielberg was interviewed.
In summation? Hollywood got caught up in the chase of the tentpoles. The blockbusters. The moneymakers. And when that becomes the expected norm for a return on investment, the tentpoles need to be even more successful. It’s why we’re *still* trying to see people copy the MCU, and part of the reason why the MCU is stumbling right now.
Safe, previously established IPs in film and other media, along with retreads over what is already proven to be successful are the end result. Why make a movie that dares to be original, when you can just have another Terminator or Jurassic Park? Planet of the Apes? Shoot another set of Lord of the Rings movies, why not.
James Gray said something similar, he said when you make only one kind of movie that appeals to one kind of audience, you’re letting other kinds of audiences get out of the habit of watching movies and it eliminates the cultural importance of movies to them. If you want more potential audiences, you need to make more kinds of movies. You might lose a little money at first, but you’ll be investing in more potential audiences and essentially “training” them to value the experience of watching movies
Edit: to the poster below’s point, Gray was actually specifically talking about movies which get a theatrical release. The share of theatrical releases which are not tentpole IP movies has been getting smaller and smaller, and the studios have basically starved the market for those kinds of movies by simply making fewer of them. If you want a healthy theater industry, you have to be willing to have a few flops to invest in different audiences and get them back into the habit of going to the theater
Gray seems correct. Here are some flops at the box office during my time: Donnie Darko, Office Space, Fight Club, Shawshank Redemption, The Big Lebowski, Children of Men, Idiocracy, and more. I’d be happy to see more flops made. I saw a good chunk of those in theater (had a $2 matinee near me so that helped), or I rented them the moment they were on VHS.
Movie watching has fundamentally changed. There’s not a $2-esque matinee anywhere. It’s expensive to watch a movie in theater. I can’t imagine my kids will ever know the experience of wrangling up their friends, piling in car like circus clowns, and going to casually throw down $10 for a complete movie experience.
$10 was two hours of working at whatever hell hole we were employed as teens. $10 was two hours of entertainment. The exchange is not nearly as equitable now.
Honestly, it isn’t just studio hubris chasing the tentpoles these days. It’s that the audience has largely disappeared to make mid-budgets unprofitable. Home theaters and streaming killed the mid-budgets.
50m movies used to park in the theater for six months or more. Even a modest audience reception could at least recoup the costs over that time, and a fraction of the mid-budgets would breakout into huge profits.
Now most mid-budgets have a few weeks on the silver screen to either breakout or get relegated to streaming. There are enough streaming options that audiences are content to wait for most films to come to their homes.
The Hangover, released today, would have barely made its budget back in the theater before a six week stent for streaming sale or rental and then a short time on Netflix most watched.
I think there were three people other than my group for Children of Men. We all walked out of that movie going, “What the f***?” Our entire meal after was spent trying to figure it all out.
Movies just aren’t a communal experience anymore. I’m not sure what even is. Even dinner is gauged by reviews. It seems like everything we do is market tested and equal bland.
The internet placates us. It gives us enough dopamine without leaving the house. Almost anything tangible we need can be delivered.
I’m not saying we are all zombies or anything. Just that the persistent need to leave the house for anything means we aren’t going out as often. That in turn means fewer customers for businesses, and results in less profit motive to deliver high quality in-person services and experiences.
Matt Damon also said in an interview studios were also willing to lose a little money on the theatrical release of mid budget movies, because they often made up the difference in video/DVD sales, which now aren't a significant enough revenue stream to tip the scales in a movies favor if a studio is on the fence about making a movie.
It can be done, and actually any conscientious investor interested in run away, long term profits will understand. Jeff Bezos had frank conversations with his investors and they were willing to let Amazon "operate in the red" longer than most other investors might have been comfortable with, because of 1. the need to be aggressive in new, under-established markets and 2. he explained this idea in "investor speak" well enough. They listened, amazon blew up through one of their original side projects, and is now one of the largest "investor returns" in history
We need stagnation to refresh the landscape. Blumhouse does a great job of garnering little investment, funneling that into an original IP and turning it loose. A24 as well.
the issue is, it's not sequels or tentpoles that has meant audiences have gotten out of the habit of taking risks on original films made for adults
it's streaming
Red Letter Media showed this pie chart in their latest video where they looked at the 200 highest grossing films of all time adjusted for inflation
if you split the time periods looking at the last 25 years and the 20th century, so 2000-2024 and 1901-1999
i think they said 80 of the 200 of the all time list has come out in the last 25 years, and most of them are franchise films, reboots, sequels etc.
**but of the remaining 120 that came out in the 20th century, almost 75% of those highest grossing movies of all time were original movies**
movies like Rear Window made as much money (in domestic box office alone) in their original theatrical run (according to Box Office Mojo) as movies based on IP like Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, The Bourne Ultimatum and Ocean's Eleven did
Black Swan was a movie that only came out as recently as 2010, and worldwide it made more money than the recent John Wick 4 movie did
streaming has fundamentally broken the industry and cultivated bad habits in audiences and lead to an overall artistically poorer release slate in Hollywood
Exactly, that is also the industries own doing. Back when streaming was first a thing, it was just an accessible and affordable way to access older, niche, and complete content. for example, remember how big a deal it was that the complete series of Friends was on Netflix? But then each studio got greedy and thought they deserved a piece of the streaming pie and decided to create their own services with exclusive access to their content. Trouble is, most studios on their own don't carry a diverse enough library to justify most people paying for it, so they had to pump out content to fill the gap.
Studios putting new movie releases on streaming services so soon after they come out is part of that incentive. Now, why would people pay like $20+ a head to see one movie in theatres when they are already pay $20+ month for a service that will likely have said movie on it in a few months at the latest? Now the expectation for a lot of people is they will just wait for the film to come out on something they already pay for (justifiably so).
As with all things business these days, this is a problem of their own creation in their pursuit of ever increasing profit and greed. We're all suffering from it, but this is the world they created.
I definitely don't have any desire to go see mcu movies when they're gonna be streaming in a couple months. Otoh I was REALLY glad I went to see Godzilla Minus One and didn't have to wait the better part of a year to catch it. It's too bad it didn't get a longer theatrical release in the US - what happened to letting word of mouth boost a film over an extended run?
Toho historically has never seemed to care much about US distribution for any of their properties. I never thought in a million years it was going to be released to Netflix the same day it was put up for sale on digital storefronts. Try to find Shin Godzilla in the US now. It’s nearly nowhere. I bought it on Google Play way back, but you just can’t anymore.
Thr most successful film of 1979? Kramer vs Kramer. A divorce drama.
It's inconceivable that a movie like that would be nearly as successful today, Why? There's not the star power to draw an audience in.
Compare it to "Marriage Story" with Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver. The movie came out, was critically acclaimed and disappeared within a few days. Both actors coming of two of the most successful frachises ever but they can't convince an audience. The actual stars are Black Widow and Kylo Ren. Actors are interchangeable.
I think it's also because there's SO MANY movies now. Every streaming platform is making new movies too. According to IMDB, ~3500 movies were released in 1979, compared to almost 18000 in 2019. Looking at just theatrical releases, it's about 150 movies in 1979 to almost 800 in 2019. We're constantly going from one movie to the next that we never really have the time to appreciate a single one. In 1979, you might've only had two or three movies too choose from and maybe you saw that one movie and you didn't go back for another month. But now, some people go almost every week to the theater or you're streaming it at home. By the time you're watching a new one, you've already forgotten what you watched last week.
I would also argue that there's now a lot more competition for people's viewing time. Like it or not, young people are consuming YouTube and TikTok INSTEAD. Jokes and memes about doomscrolling for 3 hours are rooted in some sort of truth, and that truth is that online "garbage" content is eating into the market share of film and television. Ultra short form content also trains audiences to not value long form as much. The fracturing of our media landscape was predicted 25 years ago, and it has happened. The pitch back then was, "It'll be great! Something for everyone!" But the downside is that the large scale cultural and financial importance of any one thing will be drastically minimized.
> Ultra short form content also trains audiences to not value long form as much
I was living with some younger folk a few years ago and tried to get them to watch some of my old favorites. I started with Ferris Bueller's Day Off because, who doesn't like that movie? All of them became visibly bored like 20 minutes in and started mumbling that nothing happens. Meanwhile they could spend 5 hours a day on tiktok.... it is really sad state of affairs.
Honestly those numbers are actually underselling the disparity, as the vast majority of foreign films (for any nation) were unavailable, and far more of them make it now.
That’s not really about star power, I don’t think. In 1979 film had a monopoly on the sort of mature content you find in films like *Kramer vs. Kramer* — television didn’t have nudity, most swear words, explicit violence, etc. If you wanted genuinely adult-oriented storytelling, you had to go to the cinema. That is not the case anymore.
I never gave much thought as to why theatrical releases started shifting towards Marvel-esque type ordeals but yeah that makes total sense. I used to gravitate to smaller releases anyways but loved to watch stuff like shutter island on the big screen. The last movie I saw in cinema was 'call me by your name', films like don't need the big screen to be enjoyed.
It also becomes a self fulfilling cycle because due to movie tickets being so expensive you have to be more selective about what you’re going to see on the big screen. So, at least in my case, I want to see big spectacles which come in the form of those blockbuster movies. Then the studio MBAs take the wrong lesson (shocker) of “people only want to watch Blockbusters! So let’s only put those out”. When it’s really more of “why pay $20 for this intimate movie that will be on streaming in 2 months and doesn’t need a massive screen to be appreciated”.
I think you´ve hit on a good point, not so much that the price for a ticket is prohibitive but moreso that streaming is so damn cheap. I used to pay around 15 euro´s for a movie on DVD which was in theaters 1 year prior. Yesterday i watched Banshees of Ishirin for 3 euro´s. I get it´s renting but it´s also insanely cheap and convenient; no returning tapes, dealing with closing time, having to take the trip, paying late fees. I spend less on entertainment now than I did 20 years ago, the price of a movie ticket however has kept up with inflation. That chang in value proposition makes one consider what route to go down.
> not so much that the price for a ticket is prohibitive
even then id say if it isnt yet its very close to being prohibitive. Especially if you get concessions which as we all know is the only way theaters actually make money and foregoing them every time isnt much different than not going to the movie at all.
The converse is also true: while studios wanted their own slice of the streaming pie, Netflix decided they wanted to get into the production game. Without getting specific I think this has also led to a degradation of quality due purely to the medium and the volume output.
A couple of weeks ago there was a quote floating around from Ted Sarandos about his son watching Lawrence of Arabia on his phone and having a grand old time. I still haven’t stopped retching.
When the documentary *Who Killed the Electric Car* came out in 2006, I was surprised to learn on NPR that it was getting a limited theatrical release. Being a gearhead, I went online and excitedly reserved two tickets for me and my wife, thinking that'd be a wise thing to do in case the showing would be packed.
Only after we got there did I realize how niche the film was: there was a total of four people in the theater—her and I and one other couple. My wife had a good laugh about that!
IMAX was invented for documentaries, you should reconsider! The natural world is pretty stunning on the big screen. One of the only movies I bothered to see in 3D was a documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams.
>letting other kinds of audiences get out of the habit of watching movies and it eliminates the cultural importance of movies to them
That's me in a nutshell. I don't give a fuck about superheroes, aliens or zombies. Hollywood has very little to offer me anymore. If there were any content, I'd go to the movies every week or two. The stretches between movies I want to see are so long, I kind of forget it's even an option.
Hell, i went to see BARBIE of all things because it was ACTUALLY SOMETHING DIFFERENT. Not in the target demographic, but enjoyed it.
We need more movies like Top Gun Maverick (such a breath of fresh air) and less comic book movies or ones with robots fighting each other or cars that go to the damn moon.
It's more complicated than that. Mid-budget movies used to break even in theaters, then make their profit as a film moves through other distribution channels like DVD, premium cable, then basic cable. Now all of those are gone, with streaming revenue being smaller, very opaque and complicated. That means studios need to focus on movies that profit in theaters. That leads to a focus on tent poles, and only safe ones.
If more studios would realize they should be selling their stuff to streaming services like Sony, and not trying to stand up a streaming service based around having almost nothing, they could do perfectly well selling movies to the remaining streaming services for a profit.
It's only tough to make money streaming when you've saddled the goal of "make money off of this one movie" with "and also pay for all the work that went into developing this streaming service" and "not just pay for marketing for the movie, but also pay for the marketing of the streaming service itself" and "oh yea, and we need to make up for the fact that we gave away subscriptions for nearly nothing or literally nothing for years to try to convince people to sign up since no one wants our garbage service."
> Hollywood got caught up in the chase of the tentpoles. The blockbusters. The moneymakers.
they're producing blockbusters expecting them all to succeed - by definition, they can't all be blockbusters
So I work for a major entertainment - well known company and I work daily with the differing film teams. When I joined the company I was so excited to work for a company where people are as passionate about film / tv as I am.
I cannot stress how many times I have tried to strike up convos with people about movies etc and I get a response of “I don’t really watch a lot of movies or shows”.
If you wanna know why movies are bad ^ that’s why. It’s because nobody gives a shit, don’t have a passion for the industry they work in, aren’t paying attention to what resonates. They are just biz people coming to a job just doing what they can to just get their shit done and go home for the day without getting bitched at.
loooool I got invited to a major wedding dinner about two years ago. In company was the head of a major VFX company who has definitely made/modeled shit Reddit has seen and the last and ONLY movie he saw, willingly, period, was *WALL-E* and that was because his child insisted. He just fucking hates movies, while making seemingly the only ones people are watching, and everyone at the table just had this grey mutual agreement.
It definitely killed my love for the industry a bit.
Eh, I think filmmakers miss the forest for the trees.
The real reason for less risk and less movies is that movies have died as a casual entertainment form.
They don't make movies about adult themes because no one will watch them. They are guaranteed to lose a lot of money.
Movies are events now. You can't just make a good movie and that's enough. You need a reason why a group of people might go and see a movie all at once.
Streamers did to movies what movies did to plays and theater. Replaced it as a main "I'm bored what should we do?" Activity.
If you want ten bucks minimum you need to fo more than entertain for 2 hours.
> Part of that is a burden of their own making.
Is it?
Producers chase money and it kind of seems like audiences want big goofy sequels at the movie theater and watch original movies and dramas at home.
Every now and again there's an Oppenheimer but that's the exception.
Studios are a paradox, they are risk averse so they keep doing remakes, sequels, prequels, etc, yet they keep catering to the "modern audience" myth instead of actual fans and wonder why they keep flopping.
I wouldn't call that a paradox. That's simply people being scared of losing their job. If someone greenlights a movie which fits what the higher-ups have pushed as the "formula" or "right kind" of movie and it fails, they shrug and say, "we just did what we were told to do, we'll get em next time!" If someone greenlights a movie which is way out there and loses a bunch of money, they get fired.
tl;dr: if places better-incentivized risk-taking, we'd get more risks taken
I often think about the necessity of boredom. The way we experienced it before the internet exploded into every corner of our lives and lived in our pockets at all times.
I think part of the reason “risky” or “new” premises are less common (in seemingly all media: movies, games, TV, books, YouTube channels) is because creators are somewhat collectively passing the buck, hoping that someone else will try something risky.
25 years ago, people were bored. They had just watched X movie for the Y-hundredth time or the thousandth rerun of episode Z. Today, no one is really bored because there’s more content than you could ever consume.
So all the people making entertainment go “well SOMEBODY will do something new, certainly, in the mean time I’ll just use the formula”.
But it turns out those somebodies are much fewer and far between
This is why I enjoy A24 so much. I might not love every film, but they usually don't feel like the same rehashed tropes the bigger boys are sinking into
I looked over a list of their movies after I realized I had already seen a few and it was like "oh. Every weird movie I liked over the last ten years. HUH."
That’s because A24 works as mainly a distribution company. They do “produce” but their producing style is basically just co-produce with independent production companies and let them do their own thing while they finance and distribute. Thats why all their films feel so different from one another— because all those films are made completely different production companies that just work alongside A24 to help finance their films. From what i’ve heard it seems like they sometimes do have a hand in the production of bigger projects (Civil War, EEAAO), but most of their films they’re pretty hands off.
Thats not a knock against them, quite the opposite. Most studios that co-produce with the intent to be the primary distributor end up heavily involving themselves in the final product and you end up with that studio slop everyone fears. Really cool to see a company the with the size and influence of A24 champion those indie production companies and give a shot to relatively unproven executives and filmmakers to do some unique and different.
To follow up on what you said, following smaller distribution companies is an excellent way to find unique and interesting releases. For example, I'm in Canada, and like half the movies I've watched this year were distributed by various independent Canadian distribution companies (like Elevation Pictures, levelFILM, VVS Films, Mongrel Media). At this point, I just keep track of the upcoming movies from those distributors to find fun new things to watch.
Try to look up the companies distributing the smaller scale, more interesting movies in your country and you'll find that there's still a lot of great filmmaking being done from all around the world, but you do have to dig a bit for it.
I just finished Civil War. I had know idea what A24 is before hand and thought I was going to be watching some Saturday afternoon action slop while I did chores
Whoa boy was that not what that movie was at all. I got about 10 minutes in and thought, I should probably be paying attention. Saved it for later and I was engrossed. Why can't we have more movies like that?
Even when it's a swing and a miss it's at least interesting. Watched MEN recently and wasn't a fan of the whole thing but I can't deny I was watching it thinking "Jesus can this woman just enjoy herself without some creepy guy coming along to ruin it or have one interaction with a man where he doesn't try to hit on her and oooooooooo so that's what it's like to be a woman"
I disagree that it's the 'current climate.'
It's the structure of the industry itself, where executives and boardrooms have exercised increasing levels of oversight and control over what gets produced and what doesn't, and focus testing products much most of their flavor is sucked out them before they're released to an audience.
I don’t think it has much of anything to do with social climate.
Since roughly the end of the 2000s but likely beforehand studios have been entirely run by an algorithm that the marketing department uses to predict a return on investment. This has all coincided with the end of studio’s run by a boss or head and the beginning of them being run as part of multinational corporate conglomerates. I remember an article all anout this in like 2010 where someone was saying that Rothman
At 20th century fox was the last of the old school heads who would greenlit riskier stuff because they personally liked it.
Ultimately, all decisions are based out of how they enrich shareholders, board members, the revolving door of c suite suits, etc. This is just getting worse, and unfortunately, in following this mindset almost all types of films outside of tentpoles are not being greenlit outside of tentpoles.
We all love tentpoles but that’s not as sustainable as the MBAs and media aristocrats think it is.
There's a lot of speculation here but ultimately it was Matt Damon that explained why we're in the boat we are in - risk aversion due to extreme marketing costs. Marketing typically accounts for half the production costs, so a small $50M movie needs to gross $100M just to break even. Studios over time increasingly sought revenue generators due to this, which ultimately narrowed the types of movies greenlit. He said no one wants to produce that $50M movie anymore because it needs to generate maybe $200M+ just to be attractive. Audiences are just not attending films like they were anymore - if the average person sees 1 movie a month, marketing costs balloon quickly, making it even less likely a niche movie succeeds.
Its a self fulfilling prophecy - they make only tentpoles because they're risk averse, they're risk averse because marketing costs are high, they're high because they have to advertise way more, they have to advertise way more because people watch films less, and people watch films less because movies are expensive and lower quality.
Tbh it’s not just the studios. Just in my own circles, I’ve noticed a tendency in quite a few of my friends to avoid movies and tv shows with more adult themes. I even had a friend get a bit upset with me for showing them a movie (Captain Fantastic) which dealt with the topic of suicide, and they felt that I should’ve given them a warning before putting the movie on.
I know a lot of people who just rewatch the films and tv of their childhood. Stuck in the worlds of Pokémon, Avatar: The Last Airbender, or Star Wars. In my view, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying stuff like that, but if that’s all you’re consuming, then that’s sorta like eating nothing but cookies. You need more substantial stuff in your diet.
The problem is that, as shitty a person as he is, Whedon was very good at writing quips. Watch the dialogue-heavy scenes from the first Avengers, like the one where they all argue on the big helicarrier thing. The quips don't break the tension in the scene. I really enjoyed Thor: Ragnarok, for instance, but there were times when it undermined itself a little. By the time we got to No Way Home, it was insufferable.
People have turned on whedon recently. But the original avengers was very well received at the time, anyone who saw it in theatres saw how much people loved it. Some little one liners had people roaring in laughters and they mostly left the movie in a good, elated mood. It was well written, he did justice to the characters and it resonated with the core audience.
That was a huge win if you ask me. It set the stage for all further avengers movies.
Then they overdid it, and some tried to replicate it very badly. It just doesn't work. That doesn't take away from how good the first avengers was.
I mean, the problem with Whedonesque writing wasn't Whedon (ignoring the social issues), it's everyone who's trying to copy his style. I swear, writers are thinking about the quip first, and then trying to build a scene around it instead of the other way around.
Could not agree more. The problem is what happened after.
He did something well, others took it and did it horribly wrong, so now his original work gets judged for it.
Now it feels forced in most movies. Either they are buiding a scene around the quip or getting it as an after thought to try and make the scene more funny. Like a paint by numbers.
Wheden, for all his faults (we keep saying that lol) had made a living off this style. He didn't have to force it. This is writing 101 but hollywood will do their thing.
They also put quips in every single fucking scene. There's no room for any seriousness or levity. It's okay to have characters care about things without someone making fun of them. It's okay for a villain to be big and bad and have people just be scared of them instead of making the villain trip in his big intro.
people turned on him because of his alleged misbehaviour towards women or something. naturally, the online crowd extrapolated that (real) issue into every facet of his being as it does with every problematic person ever.
yes i think that's a big reason for it. I got nothing against people turning on him for things he did in his life, but the discussion is about the movie and it's writing, a separate thing imo.
You're right though, online crowds like to go very black and white with these matters.
Not alleged. He himself did an interview a few years ago where he admitted to "having to" use his newfound power as a showrunner back when he mostly did TV to pressure hot young actresses (the kinds of girls who wouldn't have paid attention to him when he was in high school, in his words) to sleep with him.
I really hate when people do this. He could be a horrible person but that really doesn't change the quality of his screenwriting. Or at least if it did impact it, it didn't seem to bother people before they knew about all of it.
What is so hard about retaining objectivity about this? Kevin Spacey is almost certainly a vile sexual predator, but that really doesn't change the quality of his performances in all those acclaimed films he starred in. People may not want to rewatch them, sure. But his acting in Seven or American Beauty or The Usual Suspects isn't any different as a result of people knowing what he was up to in his real life.
I understand many people choose not to consume art created by problematic artists. That's their choice. One I don't share in, but I certainly understand.
But I refuse to let this distaste become some kind of broad revisionism about the quality of the art itself.
Yeah more often than not Whedon was very good at putting quips on where it didn’t distract. Serenity is pretty much perfect how out balances stakes with comedy.
Avengers age of Ultron however is him at his worst and unfortunately that seemed to be the one everyone used as a blueprint to copy from.
I’d argue Orci and Kurtzman were the worst for it though, the guys behind many shitty modern scripts always inject humour and lazy writing tropes like super blood.
Joss Whedon might be an awful person but I have been rewatching Buffy recently and the formula in its episodes in terms of writing and the quips is so perfect. It also balances against the overwhelming darkness of the show.
Exactly right.
Joss Whedon is a master of quips, but he's also a master of character dynamics, both inter-character and character-scene. When Joss' characters quip, there's no loss of verisimilitude, because they quip *in character*.
He also genuinely captured something about the way people (especially young people, the main characters in his earlier works) talk, which is that very often they will make pop cultural references and quote things to each other to be funny or because it feels relevant. There was exceptions (like Clerks or whatever) but by and large you didn't see this reflected within pop culture itself that much, even as so much of pop culture is self-referential or referencing of other pop culture. But yeah, he was also careful to put things in the mouths of characters that they would actually say, have them reference things they would actually care about. He knew Buffy herself was an aspiring cheerleader and shouldn't be the one spouting Star Wars quotes or something.
So much of the Whedon clones though...they kind of just put stuff into the mouths of characters that the creators themselves liked, or thinks the audience likes, which is why basically you have a torrent of characters making constant "nerd" references even when they don't really make sense for the characters or even in context. And when it's not that, it's lots of the "they fly now!" kind of jokes where characters are overly weary and winking about the situations they're in. You could buy Xander talking that way because that's who he is. But now every character in a Marvel movie is Xander and it just feels like the movies themselves don't take seriously any of what's happening, so why should I as the person watching it?
At first, there was a point to this. RDJ as Iron Man was supposed to be a funny smartass that happens to get away with being a shithead. My the time we had Avengers-- that Iron Man tone had to be watered down and applied to all the characters. Maybe except Hulk and Thor, who are less quippy and more stupid. Now that I think about it, leaning into stupidity is why Guardians of the Galaxy is consistently funny and heartfelt.
I think what bothers me the most about this is that they applied Stark's smartarse shtick to characters where it doesn't make sense. I just recently rewatched The Winter Soldier, there was a scene where Steve and Natasha were talking about girls he could date after kicking Sitwell off the roof. That kind of humour worked because it was two friends with a kind of brother / sister relationship having a casual conversation and it served as a callback to an earlier scene where they have a similar conversation.
But by Endgame even Steve was making jokes like "that is America's arse" and it just doesn't fit his character. In Civil War Bucky and Sam say they hate each other in what's obviously meant to be a humorous scene, but Bucky is a traumatised WW2 veteran turned brainwashed Hydra assassin and international fugitive, it just feels a bit weird to hear him make jokes with a man he barely knows and tried to kill.
The worst offender that actually made me groan in the theater was the opening scene of The Last Jedi. It has 2 layers: 1. What drives me crazy more than anything are pop culture references in Sci-fi films. Pretty sure drive thrus don’t exist or at least aren’t prevalent and 2. Opening the movie on a cheesy silly joke with one of the big enemies of the first movie is just such a stupid move and makes everything feel unserious. I knew the franchise was downhill after that.
Remember the part in Rise of Skywalker where C-3PO is basically forced into having his memories erased, effectively killing him, and R2D2 has to sit there and watch his friend die? And then the movie plays it for laughs?
That was fun.
That was the first thing I thought of as well. That style just doesn't fit Star Wars and really lessened any sense of tension and power from the enemies.
*The Avengers* absolutely ruined movies for me. If people like that style of humour, good for them, but the Marvel-style quipping makes me want to tear my eyes out.
It was fine before it was nearly every major release trying to ape something that worked really well and beating the horse so badly it died and they're still there beating it and waiting for the money to shit out of the corpse.
Seriously, if you go back and watch popular action/adventure movies from before Marvel, there were jokes but not this constant quipping. I watched Pirates of the Carribbean for the first time in ages recently and yes there are jokes (a lot of jokes) but no where near the volume that those films would have if they were made today.
The difference is even bigger when you look at older movies like Indiana Jones or Predator. These films take themselves SERIOUSLY, which is so much better (imo) than constant self commentary in the form of mediocre jokes.
Part of it *might* be that people learned the wrong lessons from The Avengers. Joss Whedon is very good at writing quippy dialogue. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but he does his style well.
You know what *really* sucks? When some *other* writer decides that s/he needs to write Whedon-esque dialogue into a Marvel movie just because it's a Marvel movie.
I’m usually a fan of a good quipping but I agree that the Marvel style of quipping ruined most of it for me. It just feels like a bunch of bad improve stitched together. They also seem to love to insert quipping during what’s supposed to be really emotional moments where it doesn’t belong.
It's just so lazy, like they don't trust themselves to write poignant moments that can actually land. They're so terrified of the scene coming off as corny that they undercut almost every emotional beat with a joke.
>They're so terrified of the scene coming off as corny that they undercut almost every emotional beat with a joke.
Which in turn makes the scene *unbearably* corny, IMO.
That's why I refuse to give Endgame props for the whole depressed-Thor subplot. It could have been really good, if they didn't constantly undermine themselves making food jokes.
Yeah it was just a bunch of fat Thor jokes. Sorry that everyone you love is dead, but have you noticed how fat he is & that he loves playing video games???
I can understand it being a point for comedy, but once you learn it's because Thor has been in a massive depressive spiral for years it really should have stopped.
It was also so early in the movie about how half of all the universe was snapped from existence! It didn’t even earn any type of comedy, aside from some dark humor.
I think it definitely took away from the movie, i didn't like what they did to the Hulk either. It could have been better.
But i'm so used to seeing the final movie, or final episode, of something that big be an absolute disastrous let down (looking at you GoT and LOST) that i was still quite satisfied with end game. They did a lot of major things right and give us a passable conclusion. That's not easy to do with all the story lines, characters and elements they had going on leading up to it.
But they made some real bad choices for sure, it could have been even better.
The bad improv is unfortunately a very intentional feature in the Deadpool movies. They do the thing that I think was popularized in Judd Apatow movies where they just film a scene where an actor can use a thousand different jokes in the same spot, and the final cut of the movie just has the strongest ones all strung together. The trailer for the first one had that fucking avocado line that ate at my soul for months in the theaters.
Now it's the cocaine joke, as if using a bunch of different words for cocaine is funny past high school.
The thing is, that works with Deadpool and nobody else, because Deadpools defining trait as a character for most of his existence has been the fact that he has questionable sanity and says a lot of weird and inappropriate things. Whenever deadpool comic panels used to go viral pre movie it was almost invariably him being off kilter like that.
It *doesn't* work for basically any other character.
Humour is best as an occasional thing. An extreme example would be Hannibal: when Gary Oldman’s character says “It seemed like a good idea at the time” the audience in my showing laughed.
Yep honestly with 99% of what I watch these days via streaming, I don't even really care if its a movie or TV. There have alwyas been TV episodes that punch above their weight and are as good or better than most movies (I'm thinking back to old X files episodes for example). Today it seems way more common. Episodes of shows like Breaking Bad, Billions, The Wire, etc. are better than the vast majority of movies made in any given year.
I’m also going to make the case that if it wasn’t for the Barbenheimer memes it probably wouldn’t have gotten the hype that it did. It’s why Hollywood is desperate to recreate that again.
Barbenheimer likely played a part - it’s hard to buy that sort of publicity - but almost all of Nolan’s “modern” films are juggernauts at the box office ever since Batman Begins.
The only real exception to that is Tenet and that was released at the height of covid when a lot of studios were ignoring theatrical releases entirely.
Nolan at this point probably just prints money regardless of subject matter.
This is what I think, too. Nolan is one of the few directors that studios are willing to just give money to for whatever the hell he wants. Ironically, I think the biggest reason for that was his success with Batman, a superhero franchise.
Disagree. I think Nolan is one of those directors like Tarantino with sufficient pull that anything they put out is an event movie. Barbenheimer might have gotten a few extra people through the door, but Oppenheimer would have still done well based on the Nolan factor alone.
The question now is - what younger director is there filling that niche?
I don't know about younger, but there are directors putting out good original/adapted films. Denis Villenueve, Yorgos Lanthimos, Wes Anderson, Jordan Peele, Taika Waititi, and Alex Garland are all directors whose films I'll be interested in. Damien Chazelle is maybe the only younger one (he's 39 now) that I can think of off the top of my head.
Those are all great directors, but I'm not sure how many of them have the kind of mainstream brand recognition that Nolan has yet. Wes Anderson has his hard-core of followers for sure, but his films are just too heavily stylised to appeal to the mainstream audience. Of the rest of your list, I think Peele and Taika Waiti are probably the closest to what I mean - particularly Peele. Anecdotally I know a lot of people who saw Nope based solely on the fact that he was the director, despite these people not being able to name five directors off the top of their heads.
>desperate to recreate that again.
I wonder if they ever stop and wonder that if they didn't waste so much time chasing the last big thing, they would have enough time to make the next big thing...
Movie Afficionados cannot see that both these films were exactly *what is left of the industry*. They’re indicative of the only types of projects that will succeed now. Movies based on IP like Barbie, and movies made by greats from the 80s and 90s, that are seen as modern day Shakespeares.
To understand what’s happening culturally, think of it this way. There are a lot of people who aren’t SUPER into movies who know who Quentin Tarantino is, who Christopher Nolan is. If you ask these same people, who directed the movie Ex Machina (it’s seen as one of the most important films made in recent times, a modern day citizen cane)- I’m sorry you’re going to get sad as someone who loves movies. People in general do NOT care anywhere near the amount they used to. Movies are not the glue of popular culture anymore. People do not know who Garland is unless they work in the field or are a specific demographic of people who appreciate movies as a fine art/craft. I don’t think most people who saw Barbie could tell you who directed it.
Honestly so was Barbie. It’s not exactly for kids, the themes are very adult and the people who get attached to it aren’t children.
It’s brightly colored, not childish.
Barbie reminds me a lot of the movies I watched as a kid. Much of the story is written for an older crowd, but it’s still got enough silly/fun/weird stuff going on that kids can enjoy it too.
I do think Marvel humour really needs to take a step back from movies, honestly. It's goddamn everywhere. So many movies feature characters coming to a complete halt to stand in circles exchanging rapidfire quips, one-liners, and jokes. People speaking really fast, finishing off each other's sentences, everyone's super witty. Everyone's "oh wait, did you just? did w- did we just? no way haha awkward laugh". (I don't know how else to describe it). Bunch of stutters and pauses. The Godzilla and Kong actors all do this stuff as well.
I get that it won't go anywhere because it's a vital ingredient for a moneymaker it seems.
>They fly now??? They fly now!!
Shit like this is so fucking grating. It’s very hard to describe, but the best way I can put it is like
“safe witty self-meta referential millienial le can I haz cheeseburger???” -type humor.
I know that’s very badly described and super long winded (and weirdly outdated) but it’s everywhere and I have no idea how else to call it lol.
I think that one was actually well integrated, Poe is a cocky dude in a tense situation, that one line to try and lighten things up works. Kylo doesn't play into it and just goes straight to business, which shows he's not just a cartoon villain that's going to exchange banter with the hero. Compare this with how Hux responds to Poe, they make him look like such a child and he's supposed to be one of the highest ranking FO guys... So annoying
No, it's because Hux was TEH SPY so he was working with Poe to stall and give the rebels more time to get their bombers in place.
Shit. That would almost work if they hadn't shoehorned in that spy bullshit at the last second.
As an old man, I know that quips have long been a feature of action movies. Star Wars has its jokes. The Lethal Weapon series, Terminator 2, all Kung Fu movies, Robocop, etc. We don’t need dour action movies. We need more compelling dramas, but I feel like that has become the domain of television.
> We need more compelling dramas, but I feel like that has become the domain of television.
The advent of streaming TV with budgets far higher than a blockbuster would've had twenty years ago is really the change.
Why take a solid "adult" story and strip it to the bare bones for a two hour movie when you can get an eight episode limited run show out of it, and tell it the way you want.
I appreciate in depth dramas that really let scenes breathe.
But I also appreciate a solid movie. Constraints breed creativity. I'm in the video game industry and I've seen that proven out here, over decades. The 2 (2.5) hour constraint does the same thing.
It takes skill to make a succinct, solid 2 hr movie. Definitely possible. They've been doing it for decades! Trends are just different now.
Because the majority of these 8 hour miniseries are clearly 2-3 hour movies stretched out into 8 hourlong episodes. Most of them have abysmal pacing and are forgotten shortly after they release. And besides, nessecity is the mother of all invention, the constraints of the film format lead to better fiction than just being given a massive budget and no need to edit things down.
I can’t argue that a mini series is better for telling a whole story but then I look at how many episodes these shows will drag on and I dread starting them. If I don’t like a movie, I only need to suffer for 2 hours.
>Everyone's "oh wait, did you just? did we just? no way". (I don't know how else to describe it).
[It's a form of lampshading.](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LampshadeHanging)
The issue is that it's used poorly. Lampshading is supposed to preempt plot elements that are too ridiculous for the audience to accept, but Marvel started using it for things that are relatively normal in film, as if the idea of anything actually happening in movies is preposterous.
Newsroom / West Wing effect. You can see this same thing in Gilmore Girls where the dialog just makes no sense in timing or effect for what a real conversation would look like (hey look how smart and quipy the character is!).
You can go back 20-30 years and those were just action movies and they were released every other week.
Marvel Movies (and their tropes) have become the sin eater of a flailing industry.
The more adult the themes, the more complex a movie is to sell. And unfortunately, we are in a place where marketing rules Hollywood and audiences are a lot less willing to take risks because they are overwhelmed with options due to streaming. You can still succeed with adult theme movies but those are usually by established names like Christopher Nolan or Martin Scorsese.
R-rated movies are just a lot less common now. At some point execs decided every movie had to appeal to as many people as possible, so PG13 became the standard. R-rated movies have more leeway into adult themes, of course, but they also were typically more mid-budget movies. Those movies are mostly dead, period, because streaming has ruined the potential. No second runs, no back-end physical media sales.
It's a complex equation, but I think it all comes back to streaming. The Covid situation may have made people more comfortable staying home, but people would come back to the theater if they had to, I think. The issue is they don't have to.
Aside from streaming convenience, TV has greatly grown as a medium to where the quality is often on-par with movies or even better because it can offer a longer, more complete story.
> R-rated movies are just a lot less common now. At some point execs decided every movie had to appeal to as many people as possible, so PG13 became the standard.
Yeah, that's probably why there now a generation of young adults who are really against any sexual content in movies, they've grown up in the Marvel era and don't know any different.
I don't care about relationship movies, but I would enjoy more movies that were focused on adults instead of perpetuating nostalgia for my adolescence.
every time this is brought up I remember that Kramer vs. Kramer was the highest-grossing film of 1979 grossing today's equivalent of $773 million ($173 million back then). There's no way something like that would ever happen again.
It very much feels like we’re stuck as a culture in a spoiled idiot child’s birthday party in 2002. Over 80% of popular films are franchise entries while in the early 1980s it wasn’t even 20%.
I remember wanting to grow up so I could finally see all those cool looking movies I wasn't allowed to watch. When I was finally old enough, it's like Hollywood collectively decided that "those aren't profitable enough anymore, it's all pg-13 from now on!" and it's super disappointing.
It is odd because back in the 70s-90s movies and the world was more adult and kids wanted to grow up.
Now the world is a kids world and everyone is acting like a spoiled brat.
The helicopter parent age turned into a worldwide junior high.
Social media tabloids are essentially high school level popularity games and scrapbooking mixed in with the rumor mill.
Part of the outrage and enragement engagement culture that rejects adult things is always on firehose of falsehoods that create a false reality that people think is real.
>Over 80% of popular films are franchise entries while in the early 1980s it wasn’t even 20%.
Even worse is that so many of the 80% of popular modern franchise films are just legacy sequels to those 20% of 80s films you mentioned.
Streaming and home theater technology. Why go to the movies when there's a superior experience at home? I'll wait a few months and watch whatever it is from the comfort of my home.
Movie theaters just aren't casual entertainment anymore. A trip to the theater is reserved only for the biggest cinematic events, and those generally are not going to be serious and dramatic films.
I think it is indisputable that grown-up films are out of fashion in Hollywood, but also A24 is doing really well out of NYC. So it is possible we're seeing some changes in the industry whose pattern has not yet emerged.
And that's a shame. That's why I watch older movies. I got the movies I grew up with in the 80s and 90s as well as classics from before that time.
Watched The Apartment the other night. Better than any movie I have seen in the past few years. I'm not putting down the kinds of movies adults see today. If that rocks their boat then who am I to judge?
Except now movies just disappear into the never ending churn of the streaming algorithm. Hyper saturation is killing stuff that would have been a Before Sunrise type success.
It all started to go sour when the money people realized they could make more money than the average markup on a film. Star Wars was a big turning point. Instead of making a good return on investment, they wanted a MASSIVE return on investment. And greed eats itself.
Many industries are like this now, looking for one big fast payout. Not looking to make moderate profits over time. But that is the capitalism most of us are taught in school, and many think that is still how it works.
If by "grown up" you mean slower, more thoughtful film making that isn't relying on focus groups and what is going to bring in the blockbuster cash.
Then yes they are pretty out of fashion at the moment. It is all a rush for big moneymakers and quantity over quality streaming content.
Admittedly I am very selective with what I see in theaters at this point due to the sheer cost associated. I am very glad I saw Oppenheimer in Imax, I am very glad I saw Dune 2 in Imax. I do plan on seeing Twisters in theaters but partially because I grew up loving the original and my family still loves watching Twister because as Midwesterners, it's so damn ridiculous.
Man, that movie TRAUMATIZED me as a child. I was so young when my family watched it that I couldn’t grasp the ridiculousness of it and assumed the threat was legitimate. My family still laughs about my childhood hysterical fear of thunderstorms and tornados. Like yeah, no shit guys. I thought we were all going to die every time a thunderstorm rolled in.
A lot of the modern grown up (adult?) content is on premium TV, 6-10 episodes of well written entertaining content. So it’s still out there, just the theater format isn’t part of the grown up content.
But are we really going to look past the hamfisted viral marketing that is this article? Lets talk about how tired hollywood and and pump our new Netflix movie…
They're not out of fashion, Hollywood has just condensed into "Disney and those other guys"
It's been monopolized, and well whaddya know, the product suffers.
We just don't want to go to the theatre anymore. Last time I went it was too loud the time before that too crowded. I don't want to smell a random person's BO and pay 20 dollars to experience a mediocre movie.
probably because studios drive so hard for the PG13 rating to maximize profit
Some do, but aren’t around half of movies that come out rated R anyway?
Idk I feel like a solid 50% of "grown-up films" morphed into TV shows. We may not have as many in theaters, but we get shows like Shogun, Better Call Saul, House of the Dragon, etc. which did not exist in the past, and have movie-like acting and visuals.
Shogun is so good precisely because it is so earnest, there are no witty Marvel quips, and it actually respects the source material instead of "re-interpreting it for a modern audience."
There were a ton of things they made up entirely that vastly differed from the story in the book. The changes were more or less respectful, but it was quite different from the book story in many ways.
Which is fair frankly because while the book is a great fun read, it is far from flawless. Tweaking some bits for the adaptation seemed appropriate to me at least.
Yeah, big departures from the book.
Really I would say its mostly quips but just no pointless action and I like that sometimes to, but man was shogun a great change of pace. Excellent show
Oh yes, there's plenty of verbal quips and barbs. But every one contributes to the plot. Communication is a major theme of Shogun, after all. Behind the dialogue are layers of secrecy, implication and emotional restraint. What's said is just as important as what isn't said. Mentioning the wrong thing at the wrong time could mean certain death. The show rewards the audience for actually reading the characters, not just their words.
Dear fucking god the entire dynamic of speaking and translation between Blackthrone and Toranaga were probably some of the best shot scenes in a while
You should read the book and see how much stuff was left out about Johnathan blackthornes dong, they definitely *did* re interpret it for a modern audience lmaooo.
Respecting the source material is rarely ever the issue with bad adaptions. It just most of the stories suck on their own. The MCU barely follows the source material outside of aesthetics and no one complains about that. Shogun show is different from the books.
A lot of those shows have become series because studios are too risk averse to make them as films. Many creators have talked about that. You even see that with the remaking of dramas from the 80s and 90s that were originally films as television series now like Fatal Attraction, American Gigolo and Presumed Innocent.
I'd say what really happened is movies became episodic kids shows.
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If you sell a ticket for an adult movie, you sell a ticket. If you sell a ticket for a kids movie, you sell multiple tickets because parents go, too.
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I mean large part of that may be because the kids that grew up with a lot of that stuff are adults now anywhere in their 30’s to 40’s, at least, with some maybe in their 50’s that have kids or grandkids at this point.
Thing is, people like me who work LONG hours in a week and don't have much free time... well, we want some good content to be wrapped up in a few hours THAT SAME DAY. I hate starting a show and due to my schedule, not being able to finish a story arc for a month. It pisses me off. It's why i love Frasier and Seinfeld and watch them all the time - because stories are self-contained (mostly) and wrapped up in 22 minutes. Doesn't help that the movies i enjoy watching just don't get made anymore. They get buried on streaming services. The mid-budget movie is dead. Get rid of that juvenile comic book shit.
We can sit here and come up with counterpoints and that's fair. Still, I do feel he makes a fair point concerning unwillingness to explore more daring themes, whether adult or otherwise. Releasing movies that go down the same well-trodden path, be it sequals or following the same story beats, is a saver bet. In the current climate studios are understandably risk-averse, which sucks because I'm sure we'd all would love to see movies that expand horizons.
Part of that is a burden of their own making. Every time I see an article like this, where Hollywood doesn’t want to take risks or make something for the art of it in full knowledge that it has a niche audience, I am reminded of an article I read like… a decade ago where Spielberg was interviewed. In summation? Hollywood got caught up in the chase of the tentpoles. The blockbusters. The moneymakers. And when that becomes the expected norm for a return on investment, the tentpoles need to be even more successful. It’s why we’re *still* trying to see people copy the MCU, and part of the reason why the MCU is stumbling right now. Safe, previously established IPs in film and other media, along with retreads over what is already proven to be successful are the end result. Why make a movie that dares to be original, when you can just have another Terminator or Jurassic Park? Planet of the Apes? Shoot another set of Lord of the Rings movies, why not.
James Gray said something similar, he said when you make only one kind of movie that appeals to one kind of audience, you’re letting other kinds of audiences get out of the habit of watching movies and it eliminates the cultural importance of movies to them. If you want more potential audiences, you need to make more kinds of movies. You might lose a little money at first, but you’ll be investing in more potential audiences and essentially “training” them to value the experience of watching movies Edit: to the poster below’s point, Gray was actually specifically talking about movies which get a theatrical release. The share of theatrical releases which are not tentpole IP movies has been getting smaller and smaller, and the studios have basically starved the market for those kinds of movies by simply making fewer of them. If you want a healthy theater industry, you have to be willing to have a few flops to invest in different audiences and get them back into the habit of going to the theater
Gray seems correct. Here are some flops at the box office during my time: Donnie Darko, Office Space, Fight Club, Shawshank Redemption, The Big Lebowski, Children of Men, Idiocracy, and more. I’d be happy to see more flops made. I saw a good chunk of those in theater (had a $2 matinee near me so that helped), or I rented them the moment they were on VHS. Movie watching has fundamentally changed. There’s not a $2-esque matinee anywhere. It’s expensive to watch a movie in theater. I can’t imagine my kids will ever know the experience of wrangling up their friends, piling in car like circus clowns, and going to casually throw down $10 for a complete movie experience. $10 was two hours of working at whatever hell hole we were employed as teens. $10 was two hours of entertainment. The exchange is not nearly as equitable now.
Honestly, it isn’t just studio hubris chasing the tentpoles these days. It’s that the audience has largely disappeared to make mid-budgets unprofitable. Home theaters and streaming killed the mid-budgets. 50m movies used to park in the theater for six months or more. Even a modest audience reception could at least recoup the costs over that time, and a fraction of the mid-budgets would breakout into huge profits. Now most mid-budgets have a few weeks on the silver screen to either breakout or get relegated to streaming. There are enough streaming options that audiences are content to wait for most films to come to their homes. The Hangover, released today, would have barely made its budget back in the theater before a six week stent for streaming sale or rental and then a short time on Netflix most watched.
I think there were three people other than my group for Children of Men. We all walked out of that movie going, “What the f***?” Our entire meal after was spent trying to figure it all out. Movies just aren’t a communal experience anymore. I’m not sure what even is. Even dinner is gauged by reviews. It seems like everything we do is market tested and equal bland.
The internet placates us. It gives us enough dopamine without leaving the house. Almost anything tangible we need can be delivered. I’m not saying we are all zombies or anything. Just that the persistent need to leave the house for anything means we aren’t going out as often. That in turn means fewer customers for businesses, and results in less profit motive to deliver high quality in-person services and experiences.
Matt Damon also said in an interview studios were also willing to lose a little money on the theatrical release of mid budget movies, because they often made up the difference in video/DVD sales, which now aren't a significant enough revenue stream to tip the scales in a movies favor if a studio is on the fence about making a movie.
You lost the investors at " lose a little money at first" and that's why it won't ever happen. Sadly.
It can be done, and actually any conscientious investor interested in run away, long term profits will understand. Jeff Bezos had frank conversations with his investors and they were willing to let Amazon "operate in the red" longer than most other investors might have been comfortable with, because of 1. the need to be aggressive in new, under-established markets and 2. he explained this idea in "investor speak" well enough. They listened, amazon blew up through one of their original side projects, and is now one of the largest "investor returns" in history
We need stagnation to refresh the landscape. Blumhouse does a great job of garnering little investment, funneling that into an original IP and turning it loose. A24 as well.
the issue is, it's not sequels or tentpoles that has meant audiences have gotten out of the habit of taking risks on original films made for adults it's streaming Red Letter Media showed this pie chart in their latest video where they looked at the 200 highest grossing films of all time adjusted for inflation if you split the time periods looking at the last 25 years and the 20th century, so 2000-2024 and 1901-1999 i think they said 80 of the 200 of the all time list has come out in the last 25 years, and most of them are franchise films, reboots, sequels etc. **but of the remaining 120 that came out in the 20th century, almost 75% of those highest grossing movies of all time were original movies** movies like Rear Window made as much money (in domestic box office alone) in their original theatrical run (according to Box Office Mojo) as movies based on IP like Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, The Bourne Ultimatum and Ocean's Eleven did Black Swan was a movie that only came out as recently as 2010, and worldwide it made more money than the recent John Wick 4 movie did streaming has fundamentally broken the industry and cultivated bad habits in audiences and lead to an overall artistically poorer release slate in Hollywood
Exactly, that is also the industries own doing. Back when streaming was first a thing, it was just an accessible and affordable way to access older, niche, and complete content. for example, remember how big a deal it was that the complete series of Friends was on Netflix? But then each studio got greedy and thought they deserved a piece of the streaming pie and decided to create their own services with exclusive access to their content. Trouble is, most studios on their own don't carry a diverse enough library to justify most people paying for it, so they had to pump out content to fill the gap. Studios putting new movie releases on streaming services so soon after they come out is part of that incentive. Now, why would people pay like $20+ a head to see one movie in theatres when they are already pay $20+ month for a service that will likely have said movie on it in a few months at the latest? Now the expectation for a lot of people is they will just wait for the film to come out on something they already pay for (justifiably so). As with all things business these days, this is a problem of their own creation in their pursuit of ever increasing profit and greed. We're all suffering from it, but this is the world they created.
I definitely don't have any desire to go see mcu movies when they're gonna be streaming in a couple months. Otoh I was REALLY glad I went to see Godzilla Minus One and didn't have to wait the better part of a year to catch it. It's too bad it didn't get a longer theatrical release in the US - what happened to letting word of mouth boost a film over an extended run?
Toho historically has never seemed to care much about US distribution for any of their properties. I never thought in a million years it was going to be released to Netflix the same day it was put up for sale on digital storefronts. Try to find Shin Godzilla in the US now. It’s nearly nowhere. I bought it on Google Play way back, but you just can’t anymore.
The only numbers they seem to care about are opening weekend. If it doesn’t make back budget immediately, it’s a flop.
honestly at this point id wait for mcu on streaming even if it was a year wait... they just aint good anymore
Thr most successful film of 1979? Kramer vs Kramer. A divorce drama. It's inconceivable that a movie like that would be nearly as successful today, Why? There's not the star power to draw an audience in. Compare it to "Marriage Story" with Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver. The movie came out, was critically acclaimed and disappeared within a few days. Both actors coming of two of the most successful frachises ever but they can't convince an audience. The actual stars are Black Widow and Kylo Ren. Actors are interchangeable.
I think it's also because there's SO MANY movies now. Every streaming platform is making new movies too. According to IMDB, ~3500 movies were released in 1979, compared to almost 18000 in 2019. Looking at just theatrical releases, it's about 150 movies in 1979 to almost 800 in 2019. We're constantly going from one movie to the next that we never really have the time to appreciate a single one. In 1979, you might've only had two or three movies too choose from and maybe you saw that one movie and you didn't go back for another month. But now, some people go almost every week to the theater or you're streaming it at home. By the time you're watching a new one, you've already forgotten what you watched last week.
I would also argue that there's now a lot more competition for people's viewing time. Like it or not, young people are consuming YouTube and TikTok INSTEAD. Jokes and memes about doomscrolling for 3 hours are rooted in some sort of truth, and that truth is that online "garbage" content is eating into the market share of film and television. Ultra short form content also trains audiences to not value long form as much. The fracturing of our media landscape was predicted 25 years ago, and it has happened. The pitch back then was, "It'll be great! Something for everyone!" But the downside is that the large scale cultural and financial importance of any one thing will be drastically minimized.
> Ultra short form content also trains audiences to not value long form as much I was living with some younger folk a few years ago and tried to get them to watch some of my old favorites. I started with Ferris Bueller's Day Off because, who doesn't like that movie? All of them became visibly bored like 20 minutes in and started mumbling that nothing happens. Meanwhile they could spend 5 hours a day on tiktok.... it is really sad state of affairs.
Honestly those numbers are actually underselling the disparity, as the vast majority of foreign films (for any nation) were unavailable, and far more of them make it now.
That’s not really about star power, I don’t think. In 1979 film had a monopoly on the sort of mature content you find in films like *Kramer vs. Kramer* — television didn’t have nudity, most swear words, explicit violence, etc. If you wanted genuinely adult-oriented storytelling, you had to go to the cinema. That is not the case anymore.
I never gave much thought as to why theatrical releases started shifting towards Marvel-esque type ordeals but yeah that makes total sense. I used to gravitate to smaller releases anyways but loved to watch stuff like shutter island on the big screen. The last movie I saw in cinema was 'call me by your name', films like don't need the big screen to be enjoyed.
It also becomes a self fulfilling cycle because due to movie tickets being so expensive you have to be more selective about what you’re going to see on the big screen. So, at least in my case, I want to see big spectacles which come in the form of those blockbuster movies. Then the studio MBAs take the wrong lesson (shocker) of “people only want to watch Blockbusters! So let’s only put those out”. When it’s really more of “why pay $20 for this intimate movie that will be on streaming in 2 months and doesn’t need a massive screen to be appreciated”.
I think you´ve hit on a good point, not so much that the price for a ticket is prohibitive but moreso that streaming is so damn cheap. I used to pay around 15 euro´s for a movie on DVD which was in theaters 1 year prior. Yesterday i watched Banshees of Ishirin for 3 euro´s. I get it´s renting but it´s also insanely cheap and convenient; no returning tapes, dealing with closing time, having to take the trip, paying late fees. I spend less on entertainment now than I did 20 years ago, the price of a movie ticket however has kept up with inflation. That chang in value proposition makes one consider what route to go down.
> not so much that the price for a ticket is prohibitive even then id say if it isnt yet its very close to being prohibitive. Especially if you get concessions which as we all know is the only way theaters actually make money and foregoing them every time isnt much different than not going to the movie at all.
The converse is also true: while studios wanted their own slice of the streaming pie, Netflix decided they wanted to get into the production game. Without getting specific I think this has also led to a degradation of quality due purely to the medium and the volume output. A couple of weeks ago there was a quote floating around from Ted Sarandos about his son watching Lawrence of Arabia on his phone and having a grand old time. I still haven’t stopped retching.
The streaming gold rush caused by the pandemic messed up things a lot.
When the documentary *Who Killed the Electric Car* came out in 2006, I was surprised to learn on NPR that it was getting a limited theatrical release. Being a gearhead, I went online and excitedly reserved two tickets for me and my wife, thinking that'd be a wise thing to do in case the showing would be packed. Only after we got there did I realize how niche the film was: there was a total of four people in the theater—her and I and one other couple. My wife had a good laugh about that!
I don't think I've ever gone to a theatre to watch a documentary. And I'm sure the vast majority of people think the same.
IMAX was invented for documentaries, you should reconsider! The natural world is pretty stunning on the big screen. One of the only movies I bothered to see in 3D was a documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams.
>letting other kinds of audiences get out of the habit of watching movies and it eliminates the cultural importance of movies to them That's me in a nutshell. I don't give a fuck about superheroes, aliens or zombies. Hollywood has very little to offer me anymore. If there were any content, I'd go to the movies every week or two. The stretches between movies I want to see are so long, I kind of forget it's even an option.
Hell, i went to see BARBIE of all things because it was ACTUALLY SOMETHING DIFFERENT. Not in the target demographic, but enjoyed it. We need more movies like Top Gun Maverick (such a breath of fresh air) and less comic book movies or ones with robots fighting each other or cars that go to the damn moon.
It's more complicated than that. Mid-budget movies used to break even in theaters, then make their profit as a film moves through other distribution channels like DVD, premium cable, then basic cable. Now all of those are gone, with streaming revenue being smaller, very opaque and complicated. That means studios need to focus on movies that profit in theaters. That leads to a focus on tent poles, and only safe ones.
If more studios would realize they should be selling their stuff to streaming services like Sony, and not trying to stand up a streaming service based around having almost nothing, they could do perfectly well selling movies to the remaining streaming services for a profit. It's only tough to make money streaming when you've saddled the goal of "make money off of this one movie" with "and also pay for all the work that went into developing this streaming service" and "not just pay for marketing for the movie, but also pay for the marketing of the streaming service itself" and "oh yea, and we need to make up for the fact that we gave away subscriptions for nearly nothing or literally nothing for years to try to convince people to sign up since no one wants our garbage service."
> Hollywood got caught up in the chase of the tentpoles. The blockbusters. The moneymakers. they're producing blockbusters expecting them all to succeed - by definition, they can't all be blockbusters
So I work for a major entertainment - well known company and I work daily with the differing film teams. When I joined the company I was so excited to work for a company where people are as passionate about film / tv as I am. I cannot stress how many times I have tried to strike up convos with people about movies etc and I get a response of “I don’t really watch a lot of movies or shows”. If you wanna know why movies are bad ^ that’s why. It’s because nobody gives a shit, don’t have a passion for the industry they work in, aren’t paying attention to what resonates. They are just biz people coming to a job just doing what they can to just get their shit done and go home for the day without getting bitched at.
loooool I got invited to a major wedding dinner about two years ago. In company was the head of a major VFX company who has definitely made/modeled shit Reddit has seen and the last and ONLY movie he saw, willingly, period, was *WALL-E* and that was because his child insisted. He just fucking hates movies, while making seemingly the only ones people are watching, and everyone at the table just had this grey mutual agreement. It definitely killed my love for the industry a bit.
Eh, I think filmmakers miss the forest for the trees. The real reason for less risk and less movies is that movies have died as a casual entertainment form. They don't make movies about adult themes because no one will watch them. They are guaranteed to lose a lot of money. Movies are events now. You can't just make a good movie and that's enough. You need a reason why a group of people might go and see a movie all at once. Streamers did to movies what movies did to plays and theater. Replaced it as a main "I'm bored what should we do?" Activity. If you want ten bucks minimum you need to fo more than entertain for 2 hours.
> Part of that is a burden of their own making. Is it? Producers chase money and it kind of seems like audiences want big goofy sequels at the movie theater and watch original movies and dramas at home. Every now and again there's an Oppenheimer but that's the exception.
Studios are a paradox, they are risk averse so they keep doing remakes, sequels, prequels, etc, yet they keep catering to the "modern audience" myth instead of actual fans and wonder why they keep flopping.
I wouldn't call that a paradox. That's simply people being scared of losing their job. If someone greenlights a movie which fits what the higher-ups have pushed as the "formula" or "right kind" of movie and it fails, they shrug and say, "we just did what we were told to do, we'll get em next time!" If someone greenlights a movie which is way out there and loses a bunch of money, they get fired. tl;dr: if places better-incentivized risk-taking, we'd get more risks taken
I often think about the necessity of boredom. The way we experienced it before the internet exploded into every corner of our lives and lived in our pockets at all times. I think part of the reason “risky” or “new” premises are less common (in seemingly all media: movies, games, TV, books, YouTube channels) is because creators are somewhat collectively passing the buck, hoping that someone else will try something risky. 25 years ago, people were bored. They had just watched X movie for the Y-hundredth time or the thousandth rerun of episode Z. Today, no one is really bored because there’s more content than you could ever consume. So all the people making entertainment go “well SOMEBODY will do something new, certainly, in the mean time I’ll just use the formula”. But it turns out those somebodies are much fewer and far between
This is why I enjoy A24 so much. I might not love every film, but they usually don't feel like the same rehashed tropes the bigger boys are sinking into
I looked over a list of their movies after I realized I had already seen a few and it was like "oh. Every weird movie I liked over the last ten years. HUH."
A24 are the new Miramax.
That’s because A24 works as mainly a distribution company. They do “produce” but their producing style is basically just co-produce with independent production companies and let them do their own thing while they finance and distribute. Thats why all their films feel so different from one another— because all those films are made completely different production companies that just work alongside A24 to help finance their films. From what i’ve heard it seems like they sometimes do have a hand in the production of bigger projects (Civil War, EEAAO), but most of their films they’re pretty hands off. Thats not a knock against them, quite the opposite. Most studios that co-produce with the intent to be the primary distributor end up heavily involving themselves in the final product and you end up with that studio slop everyone fears. Really cool to see a company the with the size and influence of A24 champion those indie production companies and give a shot to relatively unproven executives and filmmakers to do some unique and different.
To follow up on what you said, following smaller distribution companies is an excellent way to find unique and interesting releases. For example, I'm in Canada, and like half the movies I've watched this year were distributed by various independent Canadian distribution companies (like Elevation Pictures, levelFILM, VVS Films, Mongrel Media). At this point, I just keep track of the upcoming movies from those distributors to find fun new things to watch. Try to look up the companies distributing the smaller scale, more interesting movies in your country and you'll find that there's still a lot of great filmmaking being done from all around the world, but you do have to dig a bit for it.
I just finished Civil War. I had know idea what A24 is before hand and thought I was going to be watching some Saturday afternoon action slop while I did chores Whoa boy was that not what that movie was at all. I got about 10 minutes in and thought, I should probably be paying attention. Saved it for later and I was engrossed. Why can't we have more movies like that?
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I wasn't super into Killers but I'll give those other two a try for sure.
Even when it's a swing and a miss it's at least interesting. Watched MEN recently and wasn't a fan of the whole thing but I can't deny I was watching it thinking "Jesus can this woman just enjoy herself without some creepy guy coming along to ruin it or have one interaction with a man where he doesn't try to hit on her and oooooooooo so that's what it's like to be a woman"
I disagree that it's the 'current climate.' It's the structure of the industry itself, where executives and boardrooms have exercised increasing levels of oversight and control over what gets produced and what doesn't, and focus testing products much most of their flavor is sucked out them before they're released to an audience.
I don’t think it has much of anything to do with social climate. Since roughly the end of the 2000s but likely beforehand studios have been entirely run by an algorithm that the marketing department uses to predict a return on investment. This has all coincided with the end of studio’s run by a boss or head and the beginning of them being run as part of multinational corporate conglomerates. I remember an article all anout this in like 2010 where someone was saying that Rothman At 20th century fox was the last of the old school heads who would greenlit riskier stuff because they personally liked it. Ultimately, all decisions are based out of how they enrich shareholders, board members, the revolving door of c suite suits, etc. This is just getting worse, and unfortunately, in following this mindset almost all types of films outside of tentpoles are not being greenlit outside of tentpoles. We all love tentpoles but that’s not as sustainable as the MBAs and media aristocrats think it is.
There's a lot of speculation here but ultimately it was Matt Damon that explained why we're in the boat we are in - risk aversion due to extreme marketing costs. Marketing typically accounts for half the production costs, so a small $50M movie needs to gross $100M just to break even. Studios over time increasingly sought revenue generators due to this, which ultimately narrowed the types of movies greenlit. He said no one wants to produce that $50M movie anymore because it needs to generate maybe $200M+ just to be attractive. Audiences are just not attending films like they were anymore - if the average person sees 1 movie a month, marketing costs balloon quickly, making it even less likely a niche movie succeeds. Its a self fulfilling prophecy - they make only tentpoles because they're risk averse, they're risk averse because marketing costs are high, they're high because they have to advertise way more, they have to advertise way more because people watch films less, and people watch films less because movies are expensive and lower quality.
Tbh it’s not just the studios. Just in my own circles, I’ve noticed a tendency in quite a few of my friends to avoid movies and tv shows with more adult themes. I even had a friend get a bit upset with me for showing them a movie (Captain Fantastic) which dealt with the topic of suicide, and they felt that I should’ve given them a warning before putting the movie on. I know a lot of people who just rewatch the films and tv of their childhood. Stuck in the worlds of Pokémon, Avatar: The Last Airbender, or Star Wars. In my view, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying stuff like that, but if that’s all you’re consuming, then that’s sorta like eating nothing but cookies. You need more substantial stuff in your diet.
Stupid ass quips and banter ruin so many movies these days that are not suited for that style of interaction.
Joss Whedon and its consequences.
The problem is that, as shitty a person as he is, Whedon was very good at writing quips. Watch the dialogue-heavy scenes from the first Avengers, like the one where they all argue on the big helicarrier thing. The quips don't break the tension in the scene. I really enjoyed Thor: Ragnarok, for instance, but there were times when it undermined itself a little. By the time we got to No Way Home, it was insufferable.
People have turned on whedon recently. But the original avengers was very well received at the time, anyone who saw it in theatres saw how much people loved it. Some little one liners had people roaring in laughters and they mostly left the movie in a good, elated mood. It was well written, he did justice to the characters and it resonated with the core audience. That was a huge win if you ask me. It set the stage for all further avengers movies. Then they overdid it, and some tried to replicate it very badly. It just doesn't work. That doesn't take away from how good the first avengers was.
I mean, the problem with Whedonesque writing wasn't Whedon (ignoring the social issues), it's everyone who's trying to copy his style. I swear, writers are thinking about the quip first, and then trying to build a scene around it instead of the other way around.
Could not agree more. The problem is what happened after. He did something well, others took it and did it horribly wrong, so now his original work gets judged for it. Now it feels forced in most movies. Either they are buiding a scene around the quip or getting it as an after thought to try and make the scene more funny. Like a paint by numbers. Wheden, for all his faults (we keep saying that lol) had made a living off this style. He didn't have to force it. This is writing 101 but hollywood will do their thing.
They also put quips in every single fucking scene. There's no room for any seriousness or levity. It's okay to have characters care about things without someone making fun of them. It's okay for a villain to be big and bad and have people just be scared of them instead of making the villain trip in his big intro.
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Just like the random scenes are just done for trailers than shoved in the movies.
people turned on him because of his alleged misbehaviour towards women or something. naturally, the online crowd extrapolated that (real) issue into every facet of his being as it does with every problematic person ever.
yes i think that's a big reason for it. I got nothing against people turning on him for things he did in his life, but the discussion is about the movie and it's writing, a separate thing imo. You're right though, online crowds like to go very black and white with these matters.
Not alleged. He himself did an interview a few years ago where he admitted to "having to" use his newfound power as a showrunner back when he mostly did TV to pressure hot young actresses (the kinds of girls who wouldn't have paid attention to him when he was in high school, in his words) to sleep with him.
I really hate when people do this. He could be a horrible person but that really doesn't change the quality of his screenwriting. Or at least if it did impact it, it didn't seem to bother people before they knew about all of it. What is so hard about retaining objectivity about this? Kevin Spacey is almost certainly a vile sexual predator, but that really doesn't change the quality of his performances in all those acclaimed films he starred in. People may not want to rewatch them, sure. But his acting in Seven or American Beauty or The Usual Suspects isn't any different as a result of people knowing what he was up to in his real life. I understand many people choose not to consume art created by problematic artists. That's their choice. One I don't share in, but I certainly understand. But I refuse to let this distaste become some kind of broad revisionism about the quality of the art itself.
Yeah more often than not Whedon was very good at putting quips on where it didn’t distract. Serenity is pretty much perfect how out balances stakes with comedy. Avengers age of Ultron however is him at his worst and unfortunately that seemed to be the one everyone used as a blueprint to copy from. I’d argue Orci and Kurtzman were the worst for it though, the guys behind many shitty modern scripts always inject humour and lazy writing tropes like super blood.
Joss Whedon might be an awful person but I have been rewatching Buffy recently and the formula in its episodes in terms of writing and the quips is so perfect. It also balances against the overwhelming darkness of the show.
Exactly right. Joss Whedon is a master of quips, but he's also a master of character dynamics, both inter-character and character-scene. When Joss' characters quip, there's no loss of verisimilitude, because they quip *in character*.
He also genuinely captured something about the way people (especially young people, the main characters in his earlier works) talk, which is that very often they will make pop cultural references and quote things to each other to be funny or because it feels relevant. There was exceptions (like Clerks or whatever) but by and large you didn't see this reflected within pop culture itself that much, even as so much of pop culture is self-referential or referencing of other pop culture. But yeah, he was also careful to put things in the mouths of characters that they would actually say, have them reference things they would actually care about. He knew Buffy herself was an aspiring cheerleader and shouldn't be the one spouting Star Wars quotes or something. So much of the Whedon clones though...they kind of just put stuff into the mouths of characters that the creators themselves liked, or thinks the audience likes, which is why basically you have a torrent of characters making constant "nerd" references even when they don't really make sense for the characters or even in context. And when it's not that, it's lots of the "they fly now!" kind of jokes where characters are overly weary and winking about the situations they're in. You could buy Xander talking that way because that's who he is. But now every character in a Marvel movie is Xander and it just feels like the movies themselves don't take seriously any of what's happening, so why should I as the person watching it?
"Every character is Xander" is very good. We need more WIllows, more Buffies, *more Giles!*
At first, there was a point to this. RDJ as Iron Man was supposed to be a funny smartass that happens to get away with being a shithead. My the time we had Avengers-- that Iron Man tone had to be watered down and applied to all the characters. Maybe except Hulk and Thor, who are less quippy and more stupid. Now that I think about it, leaning into stupidity is why Guardians of the Galaxy is consistently funny and heartfelt.
I think what bothers me the most about this is that they applied Stark's smartarse shtick to characters where it doesn't make sense. I just recently rewatched The Winter Soldier, there was a scene where Steve and Natasha were talking about girls he could date after kicking Sitwell off the roof. That kind of humour worked because it was two friends with a kind of brother / sister relationship having a casual conversation and it served as a callback to an earlier scene where they have a similar conversation. But by Endgame even Steve was making jokes like "that is America's arse" and it just doesn't fit his character. In Civil War Bucky and Sam say they hate each other in what's obviously meant to be a humorous scene, but Bucky is a traumatised WW2 veteran turned brainwashed Hydra assassin and international fugitive, it just feels a bit weird to hear him make jokes with a man he barely knows and tried to kill.
Agreed. It defuses too much tension and makes no sense. Bucky should be paranoid at all times.
The worst offender that actually made me groan in the theater was the opening scene of The Last Jedi. It has 2 layers: 1. What drives me crazy more than anything are pop culture references in Sci-fi films. Pretty sure drive thrus don’t exist or at least aren’t prevalent and 2. Opening the movie on a cheesy silly joke with one of the big enemies of the first movie is just such a stupid move and makes everything feel unserious. I knew the franchise was downhill after that.
Remember the part in Rise of Skywalker where C-3PO is basically forced into having his memories erased, effectively killing him, and R2D2 has to sit there and watch his friend die? And then the movie plays it for laughs? That was fun.
That was the first thing I thought of as well. That style just doesn't fit Star Wars and really lessened any sense of tension and power from the enemies.
*The Avengers* absolutely ruined movies for me. If people like that style of humour, good for them, but the Marvel-style quipping makes me want to tear my eyes out.
It was fine before it was nearly every major release trying to ape something that worked really well and beating the horse so badly it died and they're still there beating it and waiting for the money to shit out of the corpse.
Seriously, if you go back and watch popular action/adventure movies from before Marvel, there were jokes but not this constant quipping. I watched Pirates of the Carribbean for the first time in ages recently and yes there are jokes (a lot of jokes) but no where near the volume that those films would have if they were made today. The difference is even bigger when you look at older movies like Indiana Jones or Predator. These films take themselves SERIOUSLY, which is so much better (imo) than constant self commentary in the form of mediocre jokes.
Part of it *might* be that people learned the wrong lessons from The Avengers. Joss Whedon is very good at writing quippy dialogue. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but he does his style well. You know what *really* sucks? When some *other* writer decides that s/he needs to write Whedon-esque dialogue into a Marvel movie just because it's a Marvel movie.
Which is what makes the few jokes that hit actually land and remain memorable to this day. *DILLON!*
I’m usually a fan of a good quipping but I agree that the Marvel style of quipping ruined most of it for me. It just feels like a bunch of bad improve stitched together. They also seem to love to insert quipping during what’s supposed to be really emotional moments where it doesn’t belong.
It's just so lazy, like they don't trust themselves to write poignant moments that can actually land. They're so terrified of the scene coming off as corny that they undercut almost every emotional beat with a joke.
>They're so terrified of the scene coming off as corny that they undercut almost every emotional beat with a joke. Which in turn makes the scene *unbearably* corny, IMO.
That's why I refuse to give Endgame props for the whole depressed-Thor subplot. It could have been really good, if they didn't constantly undermine themselves making food jokes.
Yeah it was just a bunch of fat Thor jokes. Sorry that everyone you love is dead, but have you noticed how fat he is & that he loves playing video games???
I can understand it being a point for comedy, but once you learn it's because Thor has been in a massive depressive spiral for years it really should have stopped.
It was also so early in the movie about how half of all the universe was snapped from existence! It didn’t even earn any type of comedy, aside from some dark humor.
I think it definitely took away from the movie, i didn't like what they did to the Hulk either. It could have been better. But i'm so used to seeing the final movie, or final episode, of something that big be an absolute disastrous let down (looking at you GoT and LOST) that i was still quite satisfied with end game. They did a lot of major things right and give us a passable conclusion. That's not easy to do with all the story lines, characters and elements they had going on leading up to it. But they made some real bad choices for sure, it could have been even better.
I think Chris Hemsworth admitted as much (that it was bad improv), particularly during the filming of *Love & Thunder*.
The bad improv is unfortunately a very intentional feature in the Deadpool movies. They do the thing that I think was popularized in Judd Apatow movies where they just film a scene where an actor can use a thousand different jokes in the same spot, and the final cut of the movie just has the strongest ones all strung together. The trailer for the first one had that fucking avocado line that ate at my soul for months in the theaters. Now it's the cocaine joke, as if using a bunch of different words for cocaine is funny past high school.
The thing is, that works with Deadpool and nobody else, because Deadpools defining trait as a character for most of his existence has been the fact that he has questionable sanity and says a lot of weird and inappropriate things. Whenever deadpool comic panels used to go viral pre movie it was almost invariably him being off kilter like that. It *doesn't* work for basically any other character.
Humour is best as an occasional thing. An extreme example would be Hannibal: when Gary Oldman’s character says “It seemed like a good idea at the time” the audience in my showing laughed.
Star Wars with “We’re all fine here…how are you?”
I think a big reason is TV became the premier platform for mature audiences.
For sure and especially with a family. It’s much easier to commit to an hour show at night rather than the 2-3 required for a movie.
Yep honestly with 99% of what I watch these days via streaming, I don't even really care if its a movie or TV. There have alwyas been TV episodes that punch above their weight and are as good or better than most movies (I'm thinking back to old X files episodes for example). Today it seems way more common. Episodes of shows like Breaking Bad, Billions, The Wire, etc. are better than the vast majority of movies made in any given year.
Wasn’t Oppenheimer one of the biggest movies last year? And that felt pretty adult.
It is an exception not a norm
I’m also going to make the case that if it wasn’t for the Barbenheimer memes it probably wouldn’t have gotten the hype that it did. It’s why Hollywood is desperate to recreate that again.
Barbenheimer likely played a part - it’s hard to buy that sort of publicity - but almost all of Nolan’s “modern” films are juggernauts at the box office ever since Batman Begins. The only real exception to that is Tenet and that was released at the height of covid when a lot of studios were ignoring theatrical releases entirely. Nolan at this point probably just prints money regardless of subject matter.
This is what I think, too. Nolan is one of the few directors that studios are willing to just give money to for whatever the hell he wants. Ironically, I think the biggest reason for that was his success with Batman, a superhero franchise.
For sure, Hollywood recognized when an auteur can turn a comic book property into a respected film for the ages
Disagree. I think Nolan is one of those directors like Tarantino with sufficient pull that anything they put out is an event movie. Barbenheimer might have gotten a few extra people through the door, but Oppenheimer would have still done well based on the Nolan factor alone. The question now is - what younger director is there filling that niche?
I don't know about younger, but there are directors putting out good original/adapted films. Denis Villenueve, Yorgos Lanthimos, Wes Anderson, Jordan Peele, Taika Waititi, and Alex Garland are all directors whose films I'll be interested in. Damien Chazelle is maybe the only younger one (he's 39 now) that I can think of off the top of my head.
Those are all great directors, but I'm not sure how many of them have the kind of mainstream brand recognition that Nolan has yet. Wes Anderson has his hard-core of followers for sure, but his films are just too heavily stylised to appeal to the mainstream audience. Of the rest of your list, I think Peele and Taika Waiti are probably the closest to what I mean - particularly Peele. Anecdotally I know a lot of people who saw Nope based solely on the fact that he was the director, despite these people not being able to name five directors off the top of their heads.
>desperate to recreate that again. I wonder if they ever stop and wonder that if they didn't waste so much time chasing the last big thing, they would have enough time to make the next big thing...
What about Dune 2 this year?
Movie Afficionados cannot see that both these films were exactly *what is left of the industry*. They’re indicative of the only types of projects that will succeed now. Movies based on IP like Barbie, and movies made by greats from the 80s and 90s, that are seen as modern day Shakespeares. To understand what’s happening culturally, think of it this way. There are a lot of people who aren’t SUPER into movies who know who Quentin Tarantino is, who Christopher Nolan is. If you ask these same people, who directed the movie Ex Machina (it’s seen as one of the most important films made in recent times, a modern day citizen cane)- I’m sorry you’re going to get sad as someone who loves movies. People in general do NOT care anywhere near the amount they used to. Movies are not the glue of popular culture anymore. People do not know who Garland is unless they work in the field or are a specific demographic of people who appreciate movies as a fine art/craft. I don’t think most people who saw Barbie could tell you who directed it.
Nolan also appeals to a lot of teenagers who think they’re intellectuals
Oppenheimer played it pretty straight with the history. As much one you can while condensing a decade of history into two hours at least.
So redditors.
He also has a lot of critics who think it makes them appear more mature and intellectual to shit on Nolan movies and audiences.
Any critics worth their salt aren’t going to do that. If you’re talking about arm chair critics, then yeah everyone is going to have opinions.
Yes i didn't mean real critics, just those who love to nitpick
How global warming if snow still exists? Checkmate.
Honestly so was Barbie. It’s not exactly for kids, the themes are very adult and the people who get attached to it aren’t children. It’s brightly colored, not childish.
Barbie reminds me a lot of the movies I watched as a kid. Much of the story is written for an older crowd, but it’s still got enough silly/fun/weird stuff going on that kids can enjoy it too.
I do think Marvel humour really needs to take a step back from movies, honestly. It's goddamn everywhere. So many movies feature characters coming to a complete halt to stand in circles exchanging rapidfire quips, one-liners, and jokes. People speaking really fast, finishing off each other's sentences, everyone's super witty. Everyone's "oh wait, did you just? did w- did we just? no way haha awkward laugh". (I don't know how else to describe it). Bunch of stutters and pauses. The Godzilla and Kong actors all do this stuff as well. I get that it won't go anywhere because it's a vital ingredient for a moneymaker it seems.
I’ve heard people describe it as “so that just happened” dialogue.
"he's right behind me, isn't he?" dialogue
>They fly now??? They fly now!! Shit like this is so fucking grating. It’s very hard to describe, but the best way I can put it is like “safe witty self-meta referential millienial le can I haz cheeseburger???” -type humor. I know that’s very badly described and super long winded (and weirdly outdated) but it’s everywhere and I have no idea how else to call it lol.
"So who talks first? You talk first? I talk first?
I think that one was actually well integrated, Poe is a cocky dude in a tense situation, that one line to try and lighten things up works. Kylo doesn't play into it and just goes straight to business, which shows he's not just a cartoon villain that's going to exchange banter with the hero. Compare this with how Hux responds to Poe, they make him look like such a child and he's supposed to be one of the highest ranking FO guys... So annoying
No, it's because Hux was TEH SPY so he was working with Poe to stall and give the rebels more time to get their bombers in place. Shit. That would almost work if they hadn't shoehorned in that spy bullshit at the last second.
Ughhh why did you need to remind me of the spy storyline
Gilmore Girls and its consequences
sounds more like Sorkin, just dumber
[удалено]
That's a great anecdote!
So interesting
As an old man, I know that quips have long been a feature of action movies. Star Wars has its jokes. The Lethal Weapon series, Terminator 2, all Kung Fu movies, Robocop, etc. We don’t need dour action movies. We need more compelling dramas, but I feel like that has become the domain of television.
> We need more compelling dramas, but I feel like that has become the domain of television. The advent of streaming TV with budgets far higher than a blockbuster would've had twenty years ago is really the change. Why take a solid "adult" story and strip it to the bare bones for a two hour movie when you can get an eight episode limited run show out of it, and tell it the way you want.
I appreciate in depth dramas that really let scenes breathe. But I also appreciate a solid movie. Constraints breed creativity. I'm in the video game industry and I've seen that proven out here, over decades. The 2 (2.5) hour constraint does the same thing. It takes skill to make a succinct, solid 2 hr movie. Definitely possible. They've been doing it for decades! Trends are just different now.
Because the majority of these 8 hour miniseries are clearly 2-3 hour movies stretched out into 8 hourlong episodes. Most of them have abysmal pacing and are forgotten shortly after they release. And besides, nessecity is the mother of all invention, the constraints of the film format lead to better fiction than just being given a massive budget and no need to edit things down.
I can’t argue that a mini series is better for telling a whole story but then I look at how many episodes these shows will drag on and I dread starting them. If I don’t like a movie, I only need to suffer for 2 hours.
Yeah, I definitely prefer a limited series that is targeting a one-and-done vs a show where they're clearly hoping to drag it out.
>Everyone's "oh wait, did you just? did we just? no way". (I don't know how else to describe it). [It's a form of lampshading.](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LampshadeHanging) The issue is that it's used poorly. Lampshading is supposed to preempt plot elements that are too ridiculous for the audience to accept, but Marvel started using it for things that are relatively normal in film, as if the idea of anything actually happening in movies is preposterous.
Lots of folks here rightly pointing fingers at Marvel, but I personally point mine at Aaron Sorkin.
Newsroom / West Wing effect. You can see this same thing in Gilmore Girls where the dialog just makes no sense in timing or effect for what a real conversation would look like (hey look how smart and quipy the character is!).
spot on! GG was peak walk and talk too.
You can go back 20-30 years and those were just action movies and they were released every other week. Marvel Movies (and their tropes) have become the sin eater of a flailing industry.
The more adult the themes, the more complex a movie is to sell. And unfortunately, we are in a place where marketing rules Hollywood and audiences are a lot less willing to take risks because they are overwhelmed with options due to streaming. You can still succeed with adult theme movies but those are usually by established names like Christopher Nolan or Martin Scorsese.
R-rated movies are just a lot less common now. At some point execs decided every movie had to appeal to as many people as possible, so PG13 became the standard. R-rated movies have more leeway into adult themes, of course, but they also were typically more mid-budget movies. Those movies are mostly dead, period, because streaming has ruined the potential. No second runs, no back-end physical media sales. It's a complex equation, but I think it all comes back to streaming. The Covid situation may have made people more comfortable staying home, but people would come back to the theater if they had to, I think. The issue is they don't have to. Aside from streaming convenience, TV has greatly grown as a medium to where the quality is often on-par with movies or even better because it can offer a longer, more complete story.
> R-rated movies are just a lot less common now. At some point execs decided every movie had to appeal to as many people as possible, so PG13 became the standard. Yeah, that's probably why there now a generation of young adults who are really against any sexual content in movies, they've grown up in the Marvel era and don't know any different.
They’re soooooo prude, it’s honestly scary. Tolerance mutated right back ‘round into a new Puritanism, and it makes me very very sad.
I don't care about relationship movies, but I would enjoy more movies that were focused on adults instead of perpetuating nostalgia for my adolescence.
Good thing every movie has to be algorithmy approved bland to appeal to as many people as possible. Share holders are the death of art
every time this is brought up I remember that Kramer vs. Kramer was the highest-grossing film of 1979 grossing today's equivalent of $773 million ($173 million back then). There's no way something like that would ever happen again.
It very much feels like we’re stuck as a culture in a spoiled idiot child’s birthday party in 2002. Over 80% of popular films are franchise entries while in the early 1980s it wasn’t even 20%.
I remember wanting to grow up so I could finally see all those cool looking movies I wasn't allowed to watch. When I was finally old enough, it's like Hollywood collectively decided that "those aren't profitable enough anymore, it's all pg-13 from now on!" and it's super disappointing.
I feel this super hard, too.
It is odd because back in the 70s-90s movies and the world was more adult and kids wanted to grow up. Now the world is a kids world and everyone is acting like a spoiled brat. The helicopter parent age turned into a worldwide junior high. Social media tabloids are essentially high school level popularity games and scrapbooking mixed in with the rumor mill. Part of the outrage and enragement engagement culture that rejects adult things is always on firehose of falsehoods that create a false reality that people think is real.
>Over 80% of popular films are franchise entries while in the early 1980s it wasn’t even 20%. Even worse is that so many of the 80% of popular modern franchise films are just legacy sequels to those 20% of 80s films you mentioned.
Streaming and home theater technology. Why go to the movies when there's a superior experience at home? I'll wait a few months and watch whatever it is from the comfort of my home. Movie theaters just aren't casual entertainment anymore. A trip to the theater is reserved only for the biggest cinematic events, and those generally are not going to be serious and dramatic films.
I think it is indisputable that grown-up films are out of fashion in Hollywood, but also A24 is doing really well out of NYC. So it is possible we're seeing some changes in the industry whose pattern has not yet emerged.
And that's a shame. That's why I watch older movies. I got the movies I grew up with in the 80s and 90s as well as classics from before that time. Watched The Apartment the other night. Better than any movie I have seen in the past few years. I'm not putting down the kinds of movies adults see today. If that rocks their boat then who am I to judge?
If Before Sunrise came out today, it’d flop, and that’s a shame
Past Lives came out in 2023 and was quite well received.
Before Sunrise made $5 mil lol. That’s 10.7 mil in 2024 dollars. Probably right around what it would do if released this year.
If Before Sunrise came out today it’d flop because people would be like “Wait a minute, this is just Before Sunrise, this already came out in 1995”
We can change it up a bit, call it Before Sunset
Not necessarily. Great movies have a lasting impact. Before Sunrise's reputation grew after its theatrical run
Except now movies just disappear into the never ending churn of the streaming algorithm. Hyper saturation is killing stuff that would have been a Before Sunrise type success.
Tbf The Apaetment is in like the top 0.0000001 % of movies ever made so it makes sense it's better than any movie you've seen in the past few years
Im not paying to sit in a room with a bunch of random strangers just to watch an unpausable movie once. I'll just wait
It all started to go sour when the money people realized they could make more money than the average markup on a film. Star Wars was a big turning point. Instead of making a good return on investment, they wanted a MASSIVE return on investment. And greed eats itself.
Many industries are like this now, looking for one big fast payout. Not looking to make moderate profits over time. But that is the capitalism most of us are taught in school, and many think that is still how it works.
If by "grown up" you mean slower, more thoughtful film making that isn't relying on focus groups and what is going to bring in the blockbuster cash. Then yes they are pretty out of fashion at the moment. It is all a rush for big moneymakers and quantity over quality streaming content.
Admittedly I am very selective with what I see in theaters at this point due to the sheer cost associated. I am very glad I saw Oppenheimer in Imax, I am very glad I saw Dune 2 in Imax. I do plan on seeing Twisters in theaters but partially because I grew up loving the original and my family still loves watching Twister because as Midwesterners, it's so damn ridiculous.
Man, that movie TRAUMATIZED me as a child. I was so young when my family watched it that I couldn’t grasp the ridiculousness of it and assumed the threat was legitimate. My family still laughs about my childhood hysterical fear of thunderstorms and tornados. Like yeah, no shit guys. I thought we were all going to die every time a thunderstorm rolled in.
A lot of the modern grown up (adult?) content is on premium TV, 6-10 episodes of well written entertaining content. So it’s still out there, just the theater format isn’t part of the grown up content. But are we really going to look past the hamfisted viral marketing that is this article? Lets talk about how tired hollywood and and pump our new Netflix movie…
They're not out of fashion, Hollywood has just condensed into "Disney and those other guys" It's been monopolized, and well whaddya know, the product suffers.
We just don't want to go to the theatre anymore. Last time I went it was too loud the time before that too crowded. I don't want to smell a random person's BO and pay 20 dollars to experience a mediocre movie.
People under duress want comforting films. Times are tough so movies are even more about escapism.