It’s definitely a drop in quality. Just look at what is out in movie theaters these days. 90% of the movies are either sequels, marvel movies, or live action remakes of films that were already made. The amount of original storytelling or unique content has dropped rapidly in the past 5 years. As someone who grew up loving going to the movie theater, it makes me so sad, and I rarely go anymore.
Whether you like or hate Barbie or Oppenheimer, they were pretty much some of the only completely brand new high production value movies that came out in the last year, which I believe is part of why they were so popular. People are craving originality, even if a lot of them don’t realize it
A24 is a shining beacon in these dark times. They are pumping out some really weird movies and I love them for it.
They also worked with the unions and were able to continue making films during the strikes.
Were they not acquired by some soul sucking entity this year?
A24 is truly a diamond in the rough, everything they make is so unique
While I don’t disagree on the main points of your post, I’d like to counter by saying I think we are back on the rise. We see eastern movies more frequently make it to our cinemas (at least where I live), and a decline in interest when it comes to superhero stuff. We had a Norwegian movie outsell Aquaman the past weekend and that’s wild. (I know, Aquaman isn’t at the top of people’s hype-list).
I myself also decided to make the choice to go and see more indepent films, attend screenings/festivals in my city and stop going to the marvel shows. It’s been a blast and I’m loving going to the movies more than ever as a result!
It is possible we’re back on the rise. Schafrillas Productions made a great video on youtube discussing how Disney+ is basically shooting themselves in the foot by overextending their brand and fewer people are seeing Disney movies in theaters because you can just wait to see it at home anyways.
But I do think high budget films will never go back to the times of well-intentioned competition where every movie is trying to earn audiences’ hearts. From now on, they will always make movies with less risk and higher profit margins regardless of whether it could be a huge hit or not, because guaranteed money will always win over creative filmmaking
And Barbie is propped up by a billion dollar toy, and Oppenheimer represents a only partially obscured portion of US history.
I think it has to do with how corporate and formulaic content as become.
There are fewer risks being taken, studios take what they know and refuse to learn something new.
This means that the content they produce is very generic and safe.
The rise of PG-13 killed a lot of interesting projects.
Add to that an ever evolving media market by creators, they might not be able to compete on scale yet, but it is comming.
Documentaries and video essays are really great now on youtube, I mean we have hbomberguy, wendover productions, Peter Dibble, Calum, Side Note, Barely Sociable, Map Men, Mustard, Paper Will, Retro Bytes, TheEpicNate315 and Tom Scott, just to name a few, that are producing brilliant content that in many cases is more interesting than generic post apocalyptic show 537 that just started on Netflix this week.
There are fewer risks being taken, studios take what they know and refuse to learn something new.
I used to LOVE Kdrama. Watched it exclusively for more than 10 years, mostly because it was so different than anything I could see in western media. Then it took off and Netflix got involved in production, and now it’s just the same crap just with an all-Asian cast. Kdrama is a prime example of what you’re talking about. They had a great opportunity to figure out why it was popular and learn from it. But they just can’t.
Don’t get me wrong, it was always “bad” in lots of ways, but often in ways that were easy to overlook. Because underneath the cheap production values, repetitive tropes, and outlandish framing devices, there were engaging stories about people relating to each other. (Especially around toxic masculinity. Western TV has refused to touch that since Luke raped Laura and they fell in love and got married. I wonder if we’d have as much problem with incels if we could have more realistic portrayals of what men and women put up with from each other just to get through the day. --But I digress.) They had a story arc with a definite end. Now it’s all just serial-killer murder mysteries and Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman set in Joseon.
What. Western media touches toxic masculinity regularly. Barbie and The Last Of US, One of the most successful movies and One of the most successful shows of this past year had major sub-themes about toxic masculinity.
It’s been a massive theme in some of the biggest shows and films for the last 5 years. Dunno where they’re getting the idea that toxic masculinity isn’t touched upon.
Ted Lasso too!
I can’t speak to The Last of Us, but Barbie only discussed toxic masculinity at a high level, systemically, not on a personal, one-on-one level. Not in a “Her boyfriend just raped her. Does that mean he loves her or not?” sort of way. We’re all socially adept enough to sit back and say, “Of course not,” from the outside. But it’s never that easy or clear-cut from inside a relationship. THAT’s what western media won’t touch. There’s a post on the front page about a politician apologizing for joking about spiking his wife’s drink with a date-rape drug. What does that kind of relationship look like? Where is something like that explored in western media? If you can name some I’d be glad to hear it, and interested in watching.
Some of the best movies/TV I’ve seen have come out in the last 10 years. I’ve watched a lot of movies and TV too. So I always find these takes funny because y’all are ignoring the 80% shit that came out in decades past like they don’t count but the 80% shit that comes out now counts more.
The whole “everything is just sequels and remakes” complaint has been around for so long. The ironic thing is that it’s just as original of a critique as the movies they’re complaining about.
This is fairly easy to disprove as I can think of in say, video games, a company releasing 5-6 remakes of games they made 30 years ago. So… 30 years ago, the games they released that year were the originals. This year, it’s 6 remakes. Someone on reddit analyzed this, though it’s kind of vague as there are no units for the vertical axis. I suppose it does show proportions by year.
Seriously. Plenty of original stories out there. Looking at laaf year’s Oscar nominees for Best Picture, there were a ton of interesting new stories being told. This year, Barbie and Killers of the Flower Moon are probably gonna get a ton of nominations. And Oppenheimer, which I was generally just OK with, but still doesn’t fit the criticisms in this thread. I’ve heard great things about some of the other likely nominees, but haven’t personally seen them.
And maybe Spiderverse or Barbie are technically established IPs, but they also show that there can be good movies told using existing IPs.
Looking solely at box office, you’ll still see that there’s interesting risk taking going on. A24 obviously deserves credit for making interesting, risky stuff.
Survivorship bias
Quality drop resulting from devotion to “safe” and “cheap”.
I’m not sure it even is a devotion to cheap. I think a lot of major media projects now play everything so safe specifically because they’re so expensive and therefore cannot afford to fail
Which costs more, a decent writer given the time to write a good script or 70 hours of reshoots? The cost is A: to hide the skimming off the top by the studio heads. and B: because the folks calling the shots are so completely out of touch with reality.
You don’t need to invoke corruption or reshoots to explain the costs of these big-budget blockbusters though. They have thousands of people working on them, and… Yeah, hiring thousands of professionals for years of work is going to cost a fucktonne of money. It won’t necessarily make a good film, but it will definitely cost a lot.
What a lovely dodge. But see that is the whole point. If things are efficient it is a lot harder to hide the graft.
Let me use marvel as the best example, regardless of the fact that there are many others. The marvel movies used to be something you needed to see. But of the shows and movies recently, there have been some true garbage offerings to the modern viewer: Black widow, Falcon and winter, Ms marvel, Secret invasion, Wakanda Forever, Eternals, (for some, not me) she hulk, Hawkeye… pretty much everything but Shang chi and Wandavision, have been absolute garbage. True dreck trash that had no business flying the marvel banner, and it wasn’t fatigue, regardless of what many like to say, instead they were just poorly made garbage. The writing and production on these things are barely mediocre at absolute best. Other examples are WW84, the flash, and pretty much all DC titles ever since The Dark knight (short of The Batman and Joker). All of these things are such garbage that it truly is an embarrassment to the entire genre, and makes me think more and more that the cancellation of Batgirl was actually a good thing. The only good DC in the recent times besides what I held is Aquaman (not an Original WW fan, so idk what to tell ya). None of these are fatigue, they are very clearly poorly produced products that are just pushed out for the money of it all, and not the actual art that could be made, or the adherence to the original story that could be maintained. If another phenomenal hero title comes out, then I’m there day one to see it. But if they keep offering failures at story telling, then what’s the point?
I’m sure that most of society feel like they’re feeling some fatigue of some kind, but it’s bad story fatigue whether they know it or not. The studios need to find better and more compelling stories to tell, or the public will truly convince itself that it is actual superhero fatigue and the stories will depart for decades until a nostalgia wave hits. Hopefully the studios realize this, and start putting out quality content, otherwise, those of us who are true fans, will be doomed to the same crap from the early 00’s that we had before. Yes some of it was good, but really think back to the heyday of the marvel flicks, right after the first avengers when the Thanos anticipation was truly palpable, and it seemed like marvel could do no wrong. Then think about stinkers like Dark World or Ultron, and consider how they were capable of recovering from that. Long story short, it’s the writing and production, not fatigue.
I mostly agree with your disdain for DC, because they truly have terrible movies, but the new suicide squad was good and the series Peacemaker was also very good.
Could it be comparable to the rise and decline of Westerns?
No, it’s mostly drop in quality.
With the whole superhero stuff it’s also a consequence of their own success. Back in the day there weren’t many super hero movies, so we watched them even though they were campy and mediocre (batnipples come to mind).
Then they had some real bangers mixed in with trash and the whole thing took off. The Dark Knight trilogy for example and the first Iron man movie, just to name some. People have then come to expect that level of quality, while most of what they put out is mediocre and a lot of it is total trash.
Instead of working on quality they worked on quantity, riding the wave as hard as they could. But people only give it so much chances, there need to be some good movies to keep on coming back. Instead the quality declined and went back to mediocre/trash levels, but since people remember the good ones it’s not acceptable anymore.
It feels like there are two types of productions since Covid… $200m+ epic productions, or Netflix style lazy cookie cut crap. I hope one day we go full circle and resurrect some forgotten genres that just don’t get funded anymore
I want Dark Fantasy to come back, especially the style from the 80’s.
Watch the south park special that perfectly summarised why movies are declining. Pandering means watered down no risk projects that frankly are just a bit ass for everyone.
Quality fluctuates, there are good and bad years. During the pandemic there were very few actually good releases but this last year has been pretty great. Of course when I talk about a ‘good year’ I mean there were a handful of great releases, not that everything released was good. Most of new releases are trash (always have been) but you can happily ignore those if there are enough of the quality shows/movies.
The thing is both audiences and TV shows/movies evolve. Once you see something revolutionary it’s hard to go back to some of the old stuff that now feels stale or lacking. So in order to release quality content, I would argue, you actually have to do better every year.
Also, studios love repeating what works already. This grants them safe, repeatable profits, but reduces experimentation and means they release similar movies repeatedly year after year. Take a look at the Marvel movies since Endgame. I would actually say that quality hasn’t actually been dropping necessarily, (at least not on average) as many say. It’s just that the premise of a Marvel movie in 2023 is so boring and played out, everyone already knows how the movie will flow. But I think a 2017 audience would enjoy Guardians of the Galaxy 3 just as much as they did the previous movies.
Finally, Hollywood seems to love tropes. In the 80s and 90s it was macho action man, the 2010s we had a superhero craze, and this last decade it seems to be female empowerment. As with anything after a few years it starts to become stale and the best movies are usually the ones defying the industry because, as you said, fatigue sets in. (the 2000s seemed great in this regard I can’t really pin an overarching trope on them)
So I think the quality of cinema is increasing but so are our expectations. And we can get bored by seeing the same movie over and over again.
Part of it may be due to troops as well. There is some audience fatigue, but that’s only because companies try to play it safe by recreatung old ideas instead of coming out with OC.
Sure, in general people are going for quantity over quality but I have watched some really good TV shows which aired new seasons this year in Ted Lasso, Fargo, and Shoresy.
I dunno but im watching as much media as ever. Just not much current stuff.
100% quality drop, but it is due to the other reasons you listed.
VC has entered the industry, this is what media is now.
I just tried to watch “Barbie”; had to turn it off. Unwatchable. Yet, it was WB’s fastest film to cross $1 billion in just 17 days.
Unwatchable???
I’m confused, I’m way more critical of it than alot of my friends (corporate feminism is of course paper thin and filled with holes) but it’s still honestly hilarious with some super catchy music.
Obviously you are entitled to your own opinion, but unwatchable feels harsh to me. What turned you off?
A lot of mysoginists didn’t like it because it draws attention to things women go through on a regular basis and they don’t like being called out.
Yes, unwatchable.
Care to, elaborate?
He definitely doesn’t lol
un·watch·a·ble
/ˌənˈwäCHəbəl,ˌənˈwôCHəbəl/
adjective
adjective: unwatchable(of a film or television program) too poor, tedious, or disturbing to be viewed. "it's the flashiness that makes so many films of the 1960s almost unwatchable today"
Lmaaaao. Okay. Sure. No explanation needed for how terrible it is. Sorta fells like you posted a self report, but okay. You do you. 😂
