But the effects-driven blockbuster, more than its 1980s antecedents, empowered a fandom culture that offered built-in audiences to studios, but at the price of subordinating traditional aspects of cinema to the demands of the Jedi religion or the Marvel cult. And all these shifts encouraged and were encouraged by a more general teenage-ification of Western culture, the extension of adolescent tastes and entertainment habits deeper into whatever adulthood means today.
Over time, this combination of forces pushed Hollywood in two directions. On the one hand, toward a reliance on superhero movies and other “presold” properties, largely pitched to teenage tastes and sensibilities, to sustain the theatrical side of the business. (The landscape of the past year, in which the new “Spider-Man” and “Batman” movies between them have made over a billion dollars domestically while Oscar hopefuls have made a pittance, is just an exaggerated version of the pre-Covid dominance of effects-driven sequels and reboots over original storytelling.) On the other hand, toward a churn of content generation to feed home entertainment and streaming platforms, in which there’s little to distinguish the typical movie — in terms of casting, direction or promotion — from the TV serials with which it competes for space across a range of personal devices.
Under these pressures, much of what the movies did in American culture, even 20 years ago, is essentially unimaginable today. The internet has replaced the multiplex as a zone of adult initiation. There’s no way for a few hit movies to supply a cultural lingua franca, given the sheer range of entertainment options and the repetitive and derivative nature of the movies that draw the largest audiences.
The possibility of a movie star as a transcendent or iconic figure, too, seems increasingly dated. Superhero franchises can make an actor famous, but often only as a disposable servant of the brand. The genres that used to establish a strong identification between actor and audience — the non-superhero action movie, the historical epic, the broad comedy, the meet-cute romance — have all rapidly declined.
One of the primary reasons I stopped caring about superhero movies well before “Endgame” came out (never saw that one, either) was the ongoing origin story retellings over and over, most notoriously with Spider-Man but exclusive to that character.
I gave up because, even as capeshit, I would have watched it longer if it did something with the capeshit besides reset the story arc again and again.
Yes! This is also what makes me so disinterested in Superhero stories, it feels like they always restart before anything interesting can be done with them. An origin story is meant to be a starting point for the story not most of the story itself.
Oversaturation was an issue even 20 years ago. These people are just noticing because it’s gotten to the point where their dumb medieval epics and 50’s reboots don’t hit the same both financially and culturally.
There’s plenty of good movies being made, you just have to look beyond Hollywood.
There’s plenty of good movies being made, you just have to look beyond Hollywood.
1000% this, I thought I stopped liking movies as a format but it turns out that I like movies that encourage its audience to do some critical thinking and I hate CGI slop.
I also like movies with lesbians in them — highly recommend checking out film recs from LGBT sites since they tend to have more indie and foreign films in the mix, along with older films that still hold up. Autostraddle’s top films list is great for sapphic stuff
Yeah! My #1 recommendation right now is The Handmaiden (2016) directed by Park Chan-Wook which is a Korean film set in the 1930s in Japan-occupied Korea — my strongest recommendation is to not learn anything else about it and just watch it whenever you’re in the mood to watch a 3 hour film with subtitles. (CW for a couple fairly graphic sex scenes and some implied CSA)
Oversaturation was a problem 20 years ago, but movies were still more varied. In 2000 there were three different comedies on the top 10, along with two disaster films and a horror movie. There were three franchise films in the top 10 that year - Mission Impossible 2, The Grinch, which is an edge case, and X-Men. Compare that with 2019, where all 10 were remakes, sequels, or Joker, which might as well be.
it was different before! it was more artistic 20 years ago!
:thonk: which is what they were saying 20 years ago. and 20 years before that. Snobs have been complaining about lowbrow pushing out highbrow since like, the advent of the talky. And then in a couple decades it gets reappraised as ‘oh that schlock we were hating on is actually Super Art and the shit coming out now doesn’t compare’.
But they can never talk about why this is, even though its obvious and has been the same fucking process the entire time. Hollywood has always always always been about getting asses in seats, never artistic achievement. You want to see what artist-lead film is go back in time to the fucking Soviet Union.
God these nostalgia hogs make me sick
Wrong, culture is dying and being killed by market forces more and more. Capeshit is objectively worse than 90s schlock action and you will never change my mind
a culture notably devoid of market forces circa 1992.
don’t get me wrong most of what comes out now is still horseshit, it just used to be too. collective memory separates the chaff and gives people an incomplete picture of whatever era they’re nostalgia-ing
Falling Rate of Profit squeezes out any room for creativity or culture. Yes it was always for-profit, but it is undeniable that it has gotten worse
they can never talk about why this is
Two quotes from Fredrick Jameson’s Postmodernism:
What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to aeroplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation.
What has not been taken into account by this view, however, is the social position of the older modernism, or better still, its passionate repudiation by an older Victorian and post-Victorian Bourgeoisie for whom its forms and ethos are received as being variously ugly, dissonant, obscure, scandalous, immoral, subversive, and generally “antisocial.” It will be argued here, however, that a mutation in the sphere of culture has rendered such attitudes archaic. Not only are Picasso and Joyce no longer ugly, they now strike us, on the whole, as rather “realistic,” and this is the result of a Canonization and Academic Institutionalization of the modern movement generally that can be to the late 1950s. This is surety one of the most plausible explanations for the emergence of postmodernism itself, since the younger generation of the 1960s will now confront the formerly oppositional modern movement as a set of dead classics, which “weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” as Marx once said in a different context.
As for the postmodern revolt against all that, however, it must equally be stressed that its own offensive features – from obscurity and sexually explicit material to psychological squalor and overt expressions of social and political defiance, which transcend anything that might have been imagined at the most extreme moments of high modernism – no longer scandalize anyone and are not only received with the greatest complacency but have themselves become institutionalized and are at one with the official or public culture of Western Civilization.
I will never watch another Spiderman or Batman movie. Enough already.
Newer grimmer darker Batman movies with more and more fascist virtue signaling each time, forever. :so-true:
The grimmest darkest Batman film (Batman: Darkest Midnight (2027)) is just three hours of poorly-lit shakycam footage of a nude Timothy Chalamet writhing around in a sewer and eating the viscera of a community organizer “gang leader” while they’re still alive
Fortunately after the revolution, Batman is retired for a generation until Superman: Red Son is made as part of a therapy program for elderly capeshit fans with dementia. This kicks off a short run of other nostalgiabait films, including the anarchist Batman that another comrade here sketched out the plot for like a month ago.
I think the video game industry is a microcosm of this and have been like that for years now. The industry is built around the demographic of teenage shitheads with small worldview who just play the same damn games and genres over and over again. The industry is built around chasing whatever the current trend is and driving it to the ground, companies pretty much sticks hard to whatever genre they’re known for and only make games in that lane. We even have reached the point with Gacha games where the exploitative skinner box mechanism isn’t hidden behind the curtain, but rather up in the front as the entire core gameplay.
Of course, off the side we still have indie devs doing cool unusual shit like :lt-dbyf-dubois: or Cruelty Squad. But just like indie movies, the only people who know indie stuff are those who are already in the know in the first place, and are still ultimately a miniscule minority when compared to the mainstream industry raking billions of dollars monthly.
I haven’t bought a AAA game in years. They all look so bland and boring - I don’t know how anyone can get interested in the new Assassin’s Creed or Far Cry games or whatever else when they’re so trite and basic. Half of them are just a multiplayer only thing, and seeing those just makes me want to play the games I already have because they aren’t doing anything new. The other half are these horrible unending open world games where you just have the most bland, undesigned map ever and a random scattering of scavenger hunt bullshit in the place of actual gameplay. Like sure, they look pretty, but they’re not actually conducive to interesting or fun gameplay. I won’t even play good games with open worlds anymore because after I sat through all of Borderlands 2 I never want to have to go to a place ever again, and I’m actively having to fight myself to play Fallout: New Vegas. The only stuff I can even understand people liking from recent years is stuff like FromSoft games and Nintendo stuff, since those still have some kind of coherent vision instead of just trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
