Entertainment Forum General Chat Thread • Page 628

that’s because bigger budget, superhero movies etc have been shoved down people’s throats.

 

And people are glad to have them shoved down their throats, clearly. You all can keep thinking otherwise but if people didn’t want to keep seeing them they wouldn’t keep doing so well, even during a deadly pandemic.

People on here just seem to be way more optimistic than me about this stuff I guess. If the theaters were only showing Licorice Pizza, West Side Story, etc., those movies wouldn’t be making Spider-Man money. They’d be making more than they currently are, sure, but how much more? Enough to keep the theaters open? I doubt it. It’s fine if you don’t doubt it though! There’s no way to test who is right and who is wrong on this.

 

spider man at 35 showings at my Cinemark when it opened, licorice pizza had 3. You are wrong.

 

This doesn’t disprove anything I’ve said. I’m saying if you replaced those 35 showings of Spider-Man with 12 showings of Licorice Pizza, 12 of West Side Story, and 11 of Nightmare Alley, all you’d have is 35 nearly empty movie screenings per day. Like I said, if you disagree that’s fine, there’s no way to tell who is right here.

 

because over the last 10+ years the superhero movies have been shoved down peoples throats and that’s what has changed what people want to see. You think there’s 35 screenings because that’s what the people want. That’s what they’ve been conditioned to want.

 

People have wanted superhero movies since the original Superman in 1978. Batman in the 90s made tons of money. X-Men and Spider-Man in the 00s. Iron Man 1 in 2008. They’ve always been something audiences turned out for in droves. And blockbusters in general have been huge money-makers ever since Jaws and the rise of the national multiplex chains. Have people been conditioned by the industry to think that the only movies “worth seeing” in a theater are big blockbusters? Maybe. But the rise of streaming and digital distribution have been just as big a contributor to that as superhero movies have been over the last 10 years. The whole “eh I’ll just wait for it on Netflix” mantra that we’ve all constantly heard since 2010 at least. Really digital distribution has devalued art in general, but especially music and movies.

But the whole “conditioning” thing, idk, it’s really a chicken or the egg situation as far as I’m concerned. Agree to disagree I guess.

 

two other factors
movies have gotten more expensive so people are less willing to take risks and boomers are hesitant to return to theaters hence more pandering to millennials and zoomers

 

Yes exactly, rising ticket costs are a huge factor in this as well. People think that if they’re paying $15 dollars per ticket then the movie should be an “event”. Movies that aren’t “events”, they can wait to watch on steaming or rent on iTunes in a couple months.

 

people aren't conditioned to prioritize eventized/populist pieces of other culture, though, at the expense of the stuff that is actually good. an adele album or taylor swift album being a big deal doesn't make it more difficult to hear a Japanese breakfast or mitski album. young sheldon or Yellowstone getting exponentially more viewers than succession doesn't make it more difficult for jesse armstrong to write that show. and yet these massive blockbusters make it more and more difficult every year for filmmakers with original ideas to be able to get viewers to watch their films, which in turn makes it more and more difficult for them to continue to make original films without taking paychecks from the big studios, furthering the cycle. if you don't see that as an awful reality, idk what to tell you, I guess I'm glad you're the only person in the multiverse who loved the eternals

 

Always making shit personal for no reason lol

 

I liked Eternals

 

Eternals was good

 

The Marvel monopoly started in 2008, so we are coming upon 14 years of cultural dominance. That doesn't just mean it is what people want, but it has actively conditioned people into expecting a certain thing from a movie. You have people in college who would not be able to remember a time of multiple superhero movies per year. That is why it is so easy to cite the handful of examples that came out beforehand. When Spider-Man came out when I was in 8th grade it was an event, because before that all we really had was Batman.

If you show a black-and-white or silent film to a modern audience, they often brush it off for feeling old, and if you showed a hyper-edited movie with cuts every 2 seconds from today to people in the Fifties they would feel disoriented and confused. It is also true for genre and tone. Early films were shot like plays because that is what people knew, until others started experimenting. Trends come and go through the years, from the sword and sandal epics of the Fifties to slasher films in the 80s to found footage movies after the Blair Witch Project. If you made a horror movie like Psycho during the height of the Saw craze, you would have lost money, but one of the things that was always true was that these trends inevitably died out. What is so damaging about the Marvel films is that they are so tightly controlled at a corporate level that they will almost always be at least decent enough to keep hitting the pleasure centers of their audience. They fire any director who threatens to rock the boat, so you are never going to get an experimental failure like Batman and Robin. Even The Eternals, for all of the negative press it received, made a ton of money. At the end of the day, what you get is cinematic Applebee's; it is decent enough that you aren't expecting to get sick or have to send it back, but will you really remember it? However, if you keep going to places like Applebee's, you assume it is something of quality; after all, it isn't McDonald's. Just because there are still some other places struggling to stay around doesn't really mean you have a choice if you have been conditioned to make a certain choice. You have been watching explosions with people in capes punching each other since you were in diapers so you are not going to watch a movie with people talking.

 

this

 

Another factor is that IP-driven movies effectively act as recurring revenue, which is like catnip to investors and shareholders. In the past, studios took more risk with blockbusters - the studio would spend a bunch of money on like Waterworld or something, it bombs and blows a hole in their profits.

When Disney is at Comic-Con and shows a list of MCU movies stretching out to 2026 , they're saying to investors "hey, we can practically guarantee $X in profits for the next 5 years" and it makes the studio go up in value.

 

This is why last year when they couldn't do a real Comic-Con Disney instead did all the announcements they would usually do at Comic-Con in their literal investor presentation.

 

Disney investor calls are literally marketing events that Marvel and Star Wars fans look forward to, lol. The level of symbiosis between corporate PR & marketing and the fandom is a particularly gross bit of the equation.

Just look at how, after Disney bought Fox, fans cheered and active root for their monopoly to further consume Sony. When they temporarily brought up over Spider-Man contract nuances, which involved Disney wanting more, Sony were the bad guys. Which, Sony releases Spider-Man and Ghostbuster and Jumanji movies, so it's not like they're a bastion of independent filmmaking, but they're at least a company outside of Disney! And, don't get me started on how much of online fandom reacted to the estates of Steve Ditko & Stan Lee suing Marvel for the Spider-Man rights (which surely won't go anywhere, like always with these comic book legal messes, but it sucks that fans want them to lose).

 

Every big blockbuster is marketed with "you must see this on the biggest screen possible!" (this is sort of a backhanded compliment to these blockbusters, though it holds true that most of them aren't all that interesting when you remove the scale), which conditions people to believe that if it's not that type of movie, it doesn't require a big screen. This is why the few non-Disney movies that tend to breakthrough still fit a similar bill or are marketed in the same way (see Nolan films or Dune). I'll be curious to see if the Oscar bump is a thing this year.

 

To expand on the Applebee's analogy, it's also like if you had a great restaurant in your neighborhood with a fantastic chef who regularly rolled out exciting new specials. But then Applebee's parent company bought out the property that restaurant leases and started jacking up the rent. It's now harder for that restaurant to stay afloat. So it's left with a few options. Move to a new location where the market it likely smaller, call it quits and let the property become another Applebee's, or take an offer from Applebee's that let's your restaurant stick around under their ownership. The third option seems the best at first because the restaurant sticks around. But under the new ownership, they start making changes. The ingredients are now bought from cheaper sources which have a slightly lower quality to save costs. Eventually those specials you liked go away because it costs to much to experiment like that. Then eventually the chef is fired altogether for someone cheaper and easier to control. So now the restaurant is technically still there, but it's basically just an Applebee's.

 

Final post/rant on the subject. I also agree with what @Anthony_ is saying. I don't think giving half or even all of the screenings of Spiderman to Nightmare Alley, Licorice Pizza, or whatever would suddenly mean those movies are making billions either. People are just less inclined to see those in theaters for reasons that myself and others have already articulated. This is a larger systemic issue of capitalism. The way I see it, the way to fix is:

A) Break up Disney - Make Marvel, Lucasfilm, Pixar, and Fox their own companies again so Disney as a whole has less market power. This would in theory make it easier for theaters and creators to gain more bargaining power.

B) IP Law Reform - It is far to easy for large corporations to swallow up the biggest IP and hold it hostage. Change the IP laws and these characters are now fair game for more creators.

C) More funding for the arts - Not just film, but music, theater, etc. Make it easier for local art scenes and creative people to stay afloat. This will make so we have less writers, directors, composers, etc who are dependent on large corporations for paychecks.

D) Better arts education programs - You cannot just tell millions of people the movies they like are dumb and rotting their brains, so they should go see something else. We need better arts education programs in our public schools to generate more interest and creativity long term in order to foster a culture that values art that is interesting and offers new perspectives.

Sadly, all of these are very unlikely. I'm hope eventually audiences will tire of the same old, same old. But we've been talking about 'superhero fatigue' for a while now and nothing has really changed.

 

because the market has designed it not to change lol. they don’t want it to change, they want it to continue in this direction since it garners larger receipts

 

Yes. Which is exactly why the options in my last post need to happen. But they won't. So we need audiences to change. But they won't.

 

None of these things (that we all agree should happen) are going to happen. Blame capitalism and the failure of the federal government to regulate businesses in any meaningful way. Every art form (books, movies, tv, music, video games) has had to reckon with capitalism in some way because art does not exist in a bubble independent of capitalism. This is just how it happens to be affecting the film industry.

The good thing is that access to independent and foreign films has never been better at any point in history. Digital distribution and changing audience preferences has muscled those kinds of movies out of theaters but they can now be found online at reasonable rental/purchase prices, or on steaming services like Netflix. That’s the positive flip side of the issue. People that live in parts of the country that have zero independent theaters can always eventually watch pretty much everything they want to. The old way of hoping a movie plays in your town, or that your local video store gets a copy of it, or that your local Walmart is carrying it on DVD, and just not seeing it if none of those things ever happen, that’s thankfully a thing of the past now.