Being old-enough to remember the live-action SpiderMan, and The Hulk TV shows; I was happy to see SUPERheros in multiple forms and mediums. One could argue that CGI is finally good enough to match with the imagination of the directors. And that's a very good thing.
I do however wish that other things were being produced. Heavy Sequel'ization of movies just leaves me bored.
The same can be said of the Star Trek franchises, and quite frankly anything more then "2" has grown tiring.
Game of Thrones* has shown hollywood that there is an appetite for epic storytelling, and that people are willing to sit through 7 season of shows to be entertained by an engaging story. (In my heart Babylon5 pioneered grand-story telling.)
There are thousands of great books that would do well adapted to TV/Movies, I'd like to see some of these instead of another superhero flick.
> I do however wish that other things were being produced
Here's a list of films produced in the US in 2020. I didn't count, but it looks to me like not much of it is superhero-based. And this is just the US, and ignores a lot of low budget / less notable films.
I get a bit frustrated by people complaining everything's a superhero movie or a sequel, when there are so many options they're ignoring.
Edit: If you only watch heavily advertised films, you're basically limiting yourself to films with mass, cross-continental appeal, which is inevitably going to be heavy on culturally-neutral stuff like big CGI fight scenes.
Many of those movies never make it out of the US or are locked up behind streaming portals. If a movie can't be found by its audience it might as well not exist.
I can't speak for every country but for me (in the UK) I think I'd run out of easily-watched superhero movies long before I ran out of easily-watched non-superhero movies, if my film-watching needs were that high.
Edit: Also the original complaint was about a supposed lack of non-superhero film production.
Whilst that is a useful list, that’s somewhat of a misnomer in isolation.
To provide a fuller comparison, you’d need to also incorporate: share of viewing (per title), average box office returns (per studio eg Marvel/Disney), number of articles in mainstream media, etc.
Why? Can we not assess the films produced by looking at the list of films produced? I'm not saying as many people watch or knowabout the other films. In fact that is precisely the reason I don't like it when people imply they don't exist.
You can, but the total output is not the same as that ‘consumed’ and the importance in this context is the influence, not the sheer output.
For example, it could be that 10% of the films on that list are produced but never released (studio dumps, legal issues between producers and creatives, etc).
Just look at the USA box office impact of Black Widow, and Shang-Chi. Only two films but a huge proportion of post-covid box office revenue.
It's obviously true that superhero films make a lot of money. I'm saying nevertheless, other films are produced, and it's possible to watch them, and thus "I wish other things were being produced" isn't a very reasonable complaint. Unless you're under some obligation to only watch high-earning movies. If people watched the non-superhero movies rather than complaining about their non-existence, maybe we'd get more of them.
A lot of people are under the mistaken impression that money going to the mainstream is money denied to their preferences.
If Disney vanished from the world today, the dollars flowing to them wouldn't suddenly filter out to a bunch of niche and avant-garde media. There's some overlap, but people in that overlap are already into both things and funding them. The djent fans who also love a good radio-friendly bop are already buying djent albums on Bandcamp and listening to the radio-friendly bop on Spotify.
> Game of Thrones has shown hollywood that there is an appetite for epic storytelling, and that people are willing to sit through 7 season of shows to be entertained by an engaging story.*
If you haven't already, check out The Expanse.
The book series is set to be finished with the final (9th) book being released this fall. The final (6th) season of the television series wrapped filming this past spring. (The discrepancy is because of a large time jump between the second and third 'sub-trilogies' in the novels.)
And let's not forget the obligatory scenes where you have the protagonist(s) beating up and killing hundreds of generic robot/alien/monster goons. Because you can't have graphic mass murder in a PG13 movie.
Hell, the Putty Patrollers had more character than these guys.
On a similar note, I recently decided to watch the Hobbit trilogy after rewatching LOTR for the 20th anniversary. Whereas everything had weight and tension in the original (up to a point), in the Hobbit everything is cranked up to 11 and it suffers from the exact same thing.
Every scene becomes a zergling rush vs 5 units with cheat mode turn on. There's an actual line in the last movie along the lines of "You go, there's only a 100 goblins, we can easily take them."
I simultaneously violently agree and violently disagree.
This is kind of my main beef with the Marvel stuff I've seen - they all end with these boring flying, shooting, punching VFX scenes, even if they started more interestingly (eg. WandaVision). But for me that's a writing choice, if they'd written something better we wouldn't have to sit through it, and if it'd been shot without VFX it'd still be boring. Complaining about the "CGI" is complaining about the wrong thing.
But most fight scenes were fake, even before CGI. In fact, almost nobody ever gets hurt on set... and when people do get hurt, its in stunts (not the fight scenes).
The number of "realistic fight scenes" are incredibly slim. Chinese martial arts are mostly Wuxia: a branch of martial arts that was developed for stage performance (flips, spins, etc. etc.) that has very little practical relevance.
"Kung Fu" films (ie: Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan) reduce the number of filps... but even then, Jackie Chan's use of hilarious stage props is anything but realistic.
I mean: just imagine "Die Hard", no one can sustain that many injuries realistically and keep going. Its fake action, yes with practical effects / non-CGI (blood packs and stunts), but its still fantasy. And "Princess Bride" duel is fully ridiculous: with more flips and gymnastics than actual fighting (arguably the point: it was a comedy film making fun of tropes).
Anyone who has actually been in a fighting-sport (themselves mostly "fake", as duels took place centuries ago), will instantly recognize the bad form most of these older fight scenes had. Enemies charge the protagonist one at a time (yes: even in "practical" Kung Fu movies with few special effects)
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"Fake" is fine. But there's a lack of progression or understanding going on in a lot of the CGI-fight scenes. They're willing to spend tons of money on big explosions or special effects, but they don't always hit home with me.
The famous "Jackie Chan Ladder Fight" is a good example of a ridiculous fight scene, barely plausible. But its highly imaginative and has a great progression and rhythm. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrRFzwPE0d4). I'm not here because I want to watch a realistic 4-person Bo-staff fight vs a single dude with a ladder (which would almost certainly result in the ladder-user in getting beaten up). I'm here to watch crazy stunts and imaginative fights.
The use of music / rhythm (notice how the fight is on beat to the soundtrack) increases the entertainment value. These little things should be easier in CGI, but somehow aren't being done.
> But most fight scenes were fake, even before CGI.
There's fake made with human actors, and there's "f--k it, just cut and paste 1000 zombies or robots in the next scene and make the heroes cut through them like butter" fake.
But I enjoy Dynasty Warriors / Wuxia / Dragonball Z!! (Or 300 if you prefer American)
Heck, I enjoy watching Yu-gi-oh with my nieces. It turns out that full fantasy fights with completely different sets of rules is certainly a genre. Sure, its a cartoon, but the entire point is that the fights progress by a completely different set of rules on purpose.
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> There's fake made with human actors, and there's "f--k it, just cut and paste 1000 zombies or robots in the next scene and make the heroes cut through them like butter" fake.
You mean like Star Wars stormtroopers? In something like 3 movies, they only ever land ~2 or 3-shots off on the main characters (R2D2 and Leia in the 3rd film IIRC).
I think about some older movies I've enjoyed: Star Trek, Flash Gordon, etc. etc. Plenty of "1000-to-1 odds" going on and yet I still enjoyed the film. Or Indiana Jones. The 1000-to-1 odds thing is basically an ancient trope: found in old epics / stories, and even movies from decades ago.
One of the examples making that point is Star Wars. JJ's CGI heavy films almost killed the franchise, The Mandalorian, focusing on good story telling, using almost no CGI and having exactly the right amount of nostalgic moments (Clone Wars, the old extended universe) saved it. IMHO CGI is simply making film makers lazy, getting "epic" fight scenes is easy now, getting good story telling still is hard.
Edit: Just to elaborate, I'll note that when the first JJ film came out a lot of people's take was "thank God it's not an awful VFX fest like the prequels", despite it actually being vastly more VFX heavy. It's funny seeing this repeated.
The Mandalorian used CGI for sure. Background and a lot of other stuff was screens, as opposed to green screen, so. and it showed, the set was way more realistic than a pure CGI one. also, it had much less boom and bang for the effects only in it.
It's basically souped-up rear projection[1], which suits the "classic western" feel of the material really well. I'm not sure it's exactly "more realistic" - maybe we're just less used to seeing that look in 2021.
Edit: To be clear this aspect is really about the way the elements are combined, rather than the way they're generated. The way they're generated is with vast amounts of CGI.
They apparently did a lot of the cgi in real time with an curved led wall and some version of unreal engine. They track the camera position so they can move the image on the screen to match properly and They only render high resolution what’s in the camera viewport and the other stuff just provides some nice realistic ambient light.
I turned on Terminator Dark Fate today, and was totally bored with it. It was nothing more than hitting things, shooting things, blowing up things, and crashing things, without respite.
Should take away the graphics cards from the film crew.
I have a hard time distinguishing if the reason I find almost all new media content boring is because I am getting older and I have already seen a version of it, or if it is objectively overdone.
In an odd paradox, it seems to me that some of the best Marvel things are the ones that really lean into older tropes. Eg. Winter Soldier ('70s style conspiracy thriller), Logan (Classic western), Guardians of the Galaxy (jukebox musical).
The good Vs bad thing is a point that I can't seem to get across to my friends who enjoy a certain type of movies. I want to be challenged and choose what is good or evil (preferably neither, reality is rarely so absolute) not just be dictated to.
Same with video games, in Fallout New Vegas you march into the bad guys (they are objectively bad people regardless) camp expecting some boss fight but if you listen he will make a reasoned and historically contextualised argument against democracy and liberalism.
Compare and contrast with a call of duty game where I run around in an "apolitical" simulation (read: simulacra) of war shooting anything that moves.
I suppose they're tried and tested formulas, that have become sufficiently unfamiliar that they stand out from their contemporaries. In 30 years maybe you could do the same with films about superheroes discovering their true inner strength and having a big CGI fight at the end.
Before CGI, it was always the "climactic fight in the darkened warehouse" finale. It would go on and on, the machinery would get turned on at some point, the bad guy would have to be killed several times, etc. Oh, for a movie where people don't keep fighting after massive blows to their head, or are little affected by a shot in the shoulder, etc.
I hear ya but I agree with the comment above. I was a comic book kid, and love a lot of these characters. But I find these movies where the climax is just a bunch of cg puppets punching each other boring and formulaic.
If I had to pick a "uses superpowers action scene" from any of these movies over the years, it's probably still Magneto escaping the plastic prison. I like that scene because it shows the character isn't just powerful in a brute force way, but can do amazing things given even the slightest opportunity. Obviously they had an incredible actor in Ian MacKellen to sell it, but they also didn't need to turn him into some cg puppet to make a big impact scene. I feel like that more creative and subtle conception is missing from most of the more recent movies.
> But I find these movies where the climax is just a bunch of cg puppets punching each other boring and formulaic.
Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade said he liked the first Dr. Strange film because the ending was one in which things weren't resolved where one character punches another in face until submission/death. Dr. Strange negotiates.
Yeah, I'd totally agree with that. I liked that movie since Strange's arc was mostly about him conquering his inner turmoil, and because as powerful as Strange is, he has to use his brain to prevail.
Then I think about Tom Cruise's stunts especially in Mission: Impossible series. It got his own brand out of doing things more real. Similarly how Mad Max: Fury Road was received. Most also have very good writing (certainly not M:i-2).
It may be not superhuman by Marvel standards, but certainly are by real life standards. At the same time in superhero flicks they are often unable to do things they should be able to do, because they did something like it before. Also most humans, that do not posses super strength in those movies are fighting almost like equals with bunch of baddies.
Funny thing about Ethan Hunt from M:i is that his biggest super power is luck, like Rincewind from Discworld.
This is what makes some recent movies (like Mad Max Fury Road) so much more intense.
The director has intentionally decided to not use CGI for anything which can be done with real vehicles and real actors.
And unlike the Marvel superhero snore-fest, it actually looks and feels real, because it is real. And your mind can tell. This makes you actually care.
CGI is instead just used for matte painting, to touch up the scenes or scenery, rather than compose core of the shot. And the result looks brilliant.
If you are making a product that has an intended market of billions of people, it needs to have incredibly universal appeal. This is in direct opposition with producing a memorable piece of art.
That doesn't really make sense to me - a market of that size ought to have niches and market segmentation. After all, no matter how generic and broad-appealing the script is, I don't think my 60+ year old mother is going to get excited about the next Marvel movie.
In my opinion, it is essentially a perfect movie. Fantastic music. Gorgeous sets. Great fight scenes. Good story. Interesting characters. Proper science fiction.
Most importantly, it stayed true to the original, while still having a novel story, that nonetheless touched on the theme of the original without being overly repetitive like the latest Disney-made Star Wars movies.
I thought the movie was basically genious, and I will now watch anything Dennis Villeneuve directs.
But if you listen to reviews by typical moviegoers, they panned the movie. "Too slow", "Boring", etc...
Interstellar similarly polarised viewers.
This is why most movies are made the way they are: to avoid negative reviews by the mass market viewers and hence to maximise profits.
Or to put it another way: Their only metric is ticket sales, not the level of your enjoyment. They don't get a cent more if the movie touches your soul.
It's a bell curve issue. Most of the audience is close to the centre. If you challenge them too hard and don't give them the roller coaster ride they're paying for and expecting, they get bored and tune out.
Subtlety and nuance are not the point. Big Dumb Movies are a theme park ride, and deliberately designed that way.
For example though, Interstellar is a convoluted mess, where the resolution depends on the unseen hand of the future humans (with the characters in the film having to take some risks to carry out the plan the future put into place...).
Nolan tends to do that though, wrapping science words around some magic thing that is needed to drive the plot.
Yes but if you're making a movie that costs $200m then it needs to target the average of the planets expectations for a movie to make money. Any divergence from that ends up confusing some of your target audience.
Sure this will end up turning off a bunch of people who have tastes that demand something more authentic, but you don't care about that because most peoples tastes are clustered around the mean.
Look at pop music for comparison. Or imagine the Apple of the 00s announcing Memoji as a feature.
Part of the problem is that writing a script is a logistical problem as well as a writing problem.
You have to account for actors maybe not being available, scenes getting cut, action scenes being shot early for various reasons which means you have to retrofit them into the story you're writing, some actors being so expensive that any retake you shoot with them has to be justified, etc.
In a book you can afford to write a plot where every little detail matters. In a big budget movie, you need to keep to the broad strokes, because course-correction is expensive.
I think the reason is in theory. When you read movie analysis and contemporary writing advice, following them literally leads to those repetitive boring scripts.
They are not badly written, then are well written, but in tradition that is fundamentally stiff and don't allow complication.
These movies exist because audiences keep paying money to see CGI explodium with cliched plots and writing. These are cash cow movies generated on a production line with fungible components where the cows are the audiences.
Hollywood can do better when it wants to. But visual SF is a nostalgic cliche-saturated form now, and original ideas are High Risk and unlikely to get the green light unless they're being pushed hard by a big name director. And sometimes not even then.
Big budget superhero movies are perfectly capable of failing because of bad writing and directing regardless of the CGI, and many of them have, particularly many DC movies. By your theory, Justice League should have made a fortune.
Batman vs. Superman and Justice League were both very much unjustly maligned superhero movies. They suffered from the same "big cgi fx" problem all modern superhero movies do, but the stories themselves were far better than the one-dimensional, flat dreck Marvel has been putting out the last decade. I mean, they're superhero movies, so they're about characters that are mostly one-dimensional anyway, but at least these two tried to push the boundaries a bit.
Wikipedia says it made $657.9m against a budget of £300m. I think the rule of thumb is movies need to make double their production budget to be profitable. So it seems like it did at least OK, financially
You can find great storytellers, they'll just take way too long to write the script and there's no certainty that having a great story will make bank anyway. In fact the only correlation the industry knows about films to box office is how much you spend in marketing. The more you spend in marketing, the more box office you tend to have.
Unfortunately I am not kidding. So as long as you have a "passable" story you win.
I guess technology sucked the human budget, people couldn't write movies for the visual thrill only so they had to be creative on the scenario. In the last decade there were so many reboots and even reboots of reboots it was odd.
I've been a CGI head for a while, and IMO, Iron Man was the first movie to be reaching organic/transparent realistic fantasy level of details (geometric, texture, animation). It had weight and yet the superpower quality to moves and actions that people drew in comics or animations before.
Prior this, Transformers had a shot but it was overblown and used for extreme wow (apt for a monster-blockbuster movie).
Compare this to Star Wars prequels, which were a massive leap in tech (full blown CGI everything, planets, nature, armies) but was clearly still just a tad too cartoonish.
I'm fascinated by this because I'm beginning to suspect it's impossible to really escape uncanny valley, almost by definition.
The CGI "style" seems to rely on battering the viewer into submission by packing as much detail and movement into every frame. But it's exhausting to watch and even if everything is perfectly photorealistic it's still kind of jarring.
If what I'm seeing on the screen cannot exist physically then it doesn't matter how detailed it is - my brain responds with "That's just CGI" and it loses credibility.
My partner works on opera productions and it's been really interesting watching high quality theatrical effects create believable settings on a stage.
Physical objects have a weight and credibility that I suspect 2D CGI can never match. With skilled designers those physical objects can be made to do impossible things, but somehow they're still believable - which actually makes the experience more convincing and magical when they do something extraordinary or uncanny.
There's also an element of sketching and leaving elements to the imagination of the audience. A lot of staged work implies something, and it turns out this makes the experience more engaging. CGI tries to make everything as explicit and busy and huge and detailed and overwhelming as possible, which actually has a distancing effect.
We'll have immersive VR movies soon and we'll see if they work any better than 2D.
I too felt that the uncanny valley would never be closed. That said superhero movies don't need to close the gap, just to provide the amplified organic real life movements that we expected from comics and animation shows.
Also practical effects often have something else. Probably the fact that they live on atomic scale of complexity. Colors have more depth and diversity, particles too. Also it impacts actors around them a bit more than green screen studios which may influence the final result too.
A slight anecdote, the first time I lit an LED (noob electronics kit) it felt so utterly magical to me. I was 30, did advanced studies, interacted with LEDs all my life, but "creating" light was so soul sucking. Same goes for other experiences. The brain sense when something lies on the plane of "it affect your life, body" rather than "it's only advanced sensory input fooling you". Your gut gets involved I guess.
And I agree that modern tools push movie maker to explain too much, logify too much, show too much. A few 80s reboots were mostly trying to add a logical layer onto what was self sufficient already.
You’re absolutely right. My partner works in VFX and this is precisely his beef with Marvel movies and a lot of the other box-office-optimized schlock that’s out there these days: zero respect for the physical rules of reality. You can give scenes, objects, people and motion a weight and physicality that feels real, but the current style is to inexplicably ignore all that and make this unrealistic stuff we see today.
Given current technology it’s more a problem of how VFX is being used than anything.
But these are comics based movies, it's excepted of the genre to go hyper just a bit. Same for anime. It's not made for reality, and actually it was the value of these movies, the ability to take physics, bend them just enough to reach wooh and call it a day. Just like comics are amplifications of physics to match our fantasies.
True BUT the best fantasy obeys some laws of physics so things feel real and more exciting. It’s the execution of the shot, not the content of the shot that’s the problem.
Why even have live action if the show is going to be mostly CGI anyway? Just make the entire thing animated. I really enjoyed Spiderverse, the Castlevania show on Netflix, and the What If series. Animation seems like the ultimate medium for storytelling and possibly uproots the Hollywood model of top tier casting--voice work seems way easier than acting.
I stopped watching stuff, but full cgi movies (say after the avatar tech was built), often lack grounding. Since everything is possible, there's too much going on.
> Game of Thrones* has shown hollywood that there is an appetite for epic storytelling, and that people are willing to sit through 7 season of shows to be entertained by an engaging story.
I really want to believe this, but I’m afraid Hollywood understood GoT’s success as “people want to see dragons”. Even early TV reviews were focusing on the dragons part, and recommending other shows that had dragons (or Middle Ages fights).
A lot of Hollywood and TV reviewers apparently failed to appreciate that people may just have really like the epic story of a world, rather than a typical story of a couple of main characters. This is also apparent from the evolution the show went through, diverging into a more mainstream story focusing on main characters rather than the story/world itself.
Speaking of the 'how' (given the article is just a brief rundown of the box office numbers), Marvel made enough good movies in phase one (with Iron Man 1 & 2, Captain America, The Avengers) for people to be intrigued about the idea of multiple characters coming together to fight a common enemy. Once you have people invested, getting them to watch the next movie or the next TV show is easier with the promise of familiar faces showing up to connect events together.
Each episode may not be that great, but the series as a whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.
And like any serialized TV series, you can't really skip episodes without missing key parts of the story, so once you commit to the show you're on the bandwagon.
And given the success of the MCU, it's carved itself a powerful place in popular culture that won't disappear for a long time.
Also, even the Marvel TV shows can be surprisingly high quality (I absolutely loved Loki and Wandavision, but hated Falcon and the Winter Soldier)
> And like any serialized TV series, you can't really skip episodes without missing key parts of the story, so once you commit to the show you're on the bandwagon.
There’s a flip side to that, though: once someone is off it’s a lot less likely they’ll jump back on (or even jump on in the first place)
I count myself in that group. I’ve watched Marvel movies here and there (either Thor Ragnarok or Doctor Strange was the most recent) but at this point I’m turned off from watching more because I know there are numerous plot points I won’t get. And I don’t want to commit a week of my life to catching up.
Now don’t get me wrong, clearly Marvel doesn’t need people like me to be an enormous success. But I think it’s a bit of a high wire act that other pretenders to the throne (DC etc) run the risk of failing at.
Loki was probably better quality entertainment than a lot of the MCU movies. It's amazing that we live in an era when TV production can rival theater movies in all aspects acting, cinematography, visual effects and scale of story.
I recently learned that Falcon and the Winter Soldier was so bad because they had planned for the baddies to unleash a deadly virus which they had to cut out due to the semblance to COVID.
I'm too old to care about movies much, but that's an interesting point.
I wonder to what extent high-dollar bespoke TV series are hurting the movie business. Streaming and theatres at home were bound to change some habits, but would people prefer to watch a series now rather than a single work?
Personally, I think it's a shame how much movies (a lot them at least) and video games appear to have merged in terms of pacing, volume, general aesthetic, but you can't expect things to always stay the same.
I'm at the point where shows like the sopranos I would love to watch in their entirety in theaters. I could see an era where shows have their weekly premiers in theaters in their later seasons after achieving a certain level of success.
Here's what I miss, and it mostly just shows my age, and that's truly huge screens.
Modern flat panels are so large/cheap that they're a no-brainer in place of most modern theatres. OTOH, the peripheral vision-spanning screens that used to exist were really a spectacle. I remember seeing 'Waterloo' (Rod Steiger) when it came out and that was really something on a giant screen.
It was also a perfect storm of nostalgia, a gap in the market of "epic cinema" (LoTR / Harry Potter were ending), and a huge library of IP to run with.
Generally companies/funds sleep on IP, I am rather surprised that there is not more companies that acquire IP that has strong fandom and start pumping new stuff across media landscape.
The Hobbit was roughly contemporaneous to MCU Phase 2. (Its hard to view the LotR and Hobbit trilogies as single ongoing “thing” that the MCU came in at the end of when most of the time between the first LotR release and the last Hobbit release, including the time the MCU rose to prominence, is the time between the last LotR release and the first Hobbit release.)
Sometimes I have the impression to be alone in viewing Endgame as one of the worst Marvel films. The end fight is just boring (two groups charging each other...). Even worse is the whole writing, if Time Travel isn't the story it is just lazy. Endgame could have been such a dark film, after all half of all living things in the universe just deintegrated. Instead of exploring that beyond Thor, they resorted to a time travel hack that revisited half of the older films. And should have negated all films after Guardians 1, with Thanks being gone and dead.
They have a podcast epsidoe released around the same time that covers the same content, if you prefer listening.
People like to criticize marvel (mostly closed-minded people who assume all the movies are the same and choose not to watch them because they 'lower the quality of film' somehow by existing) but there's a lot to learn from them.
There is a lot of fantastically original content coming out of marvel. I thought WandaVision was a particularly fun twist on the history of television.
The real secret sauce: Kevin Feige of Marvel Studios, and his team including the top-tier casting director Sarah Halley Finn.
Kevin Feige prevented Marvel movies from getting stale by completely switching the genre every single movie: eg, Winter Soldier (political thriller), Ant-Man (heist movie), Spider-Man Homecoming (high-school drama movie), Thor Ragnarok (Australia/New Zealand comedy), Shang-Chi (mythical Chinese martial arts movie).
Feige has said if a character is ever successful enough to have a third movie, they will always take a very different approach from the prior two movies. Thor Ragnarok is the best example of this: a soft reboot of the personality of a previously dull Shakespearean character into a fan favorite. The success of that soft reboot was enough to give that C-level character his fourth solo movie -- something Marvel has not done before.
None of Marvel's competitors have any producer of Kevin Feige's caliber. Not Warner Bros (DC comics), not Sony (Spiderman-villains universe) and not even Disney's LucasFilm (Star Wars).
Kevin Feige is 48 years old and it's not clear whether he'll retire after the X-Men and Fantastic Four are integrated in the MCU.
His magic touch and keen understanding of the characters have been a key part of the Marvel Studio's success, and it's not at all clear whether it will survive when he leaves.
Marvel Studios could become like LucasFilm after George Lucas sold it. It's a shell of its former self that can barely produce anything passable: Mandalorian and Rogue One just make the cut as being acceptable Star Wars, but very little else.
The Mandalorian is a bit more than "acceptable Star Wars" - they experimented with production techniques that are one step beyond anything attempted before, while resurrecting a side of SW (the 'western' one) that had been effectively lost since the end of the original trilogy.
And the main guy behind it? Jon Favreau, the man who effectively invented the MCU formula (fights and laughs) with the first Iron Man.
Feige is good, but I'd bet more on Favreau to deliver than on any producer.
(also, Thor a "C-level" character? He's had a dedicated monthly comic-book basically uninterrupted for more than 50 years, and features an entire cast of dedicated supporting characters and locations in Asgard... He's definitely an A-lister. IronMan, on the other hand, could absolutely be called a B-lister, since he spent large parts of his publication history effectively as little more than support for the Captain America / Avengers ecosystem, with very bad stories and artists. I would absolutely call "C-listers" Iron Fist, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, or the Guardians of the Galaxy - definitely not Thor.)
The Mandalorian episodes that Jon Favreau directed are definitely top tier Star Wars. Great writing, great acting, great storylines.
But there are so many lower-quality episodes in that series from less experienced directors with bad acting and weaker storylines. I believe things like bringing back Ahsoka Tano weakens the storyline of the Star Wars original trilogy as much as bringing back Palpatine in the sequel trilogy did. It reduces the impact of sacrifices that were made and raises questions that may never be answered.
I agree the new technique of using "virtual sets" with Unreal Engine rather than green screen [1] is great innovation that helps make way more immersive TV shows with less budget (the first time I saw reflections of CGI characters on Mando's metallic helmet I was awestruck).
I just hope Mandalorian and the other Star Wars series maintain a high quality that we've seen brief flashes of. I'm disappointed when the franchise doesn't live up to my high expectations. Many episodes of Mandalorian are not quite there for me. Some definitely are "perfect Star Wars" though.
I think Thor being C-level comes from a pure MCU standpoint: the first two Thor movies weren't as well-rated as the rest of the Phase 1 and 2 movies. They're the only two anyone considers skipping for newcomers/when re-watching the MCU, with TDW being the least important of the two (and the plot points in the movie are explained in the first act of the movies they were set up for, that being the reality stone and Loki disguised as Odin).
At the time, the first Thor had quite the cultural impact though, at least here in England. "Superheroes do Shakespeare", Sir Anthony Hopkins strutting around, Idris Elba's "Black Heimdall", and a certain female view in Natalie Portman's character, were the talk of the town for quite a while around these isles. The problem it has now is just that is not as funny as the rest of MCU - back then the formula was still being developed and they were trying different things, likely leaving more freedom to directors (see also the difference in experience for Favreau between the first and second IronMan - when clearly the suits stepped in to freeze the setup). I agree the second Thor is basically a footnote (I think I watched it but tbh I don't really remember it), but then Ragnarok comes and it's so fun... Also Thor becomes pretty central to the Avengers storyline, tying up the Earth side and the cosmic side. I think "C-level" is way too harsh.
the writing on mandalorian is ultra bad. The characters are caricatures, the dialog stunted. Their ultra advanced production techniques just look like props with some CG. Rather than a show that would appeal to kids but have depth for adults, you get a mostly simple main character who does inexplicable things. Find the baby using locator, fly off with baby, forget about locator? Leave the baby every bounty hunter is looking for on the space truck with the local dockwoman and go do something else, etc.
It was unbearable to watch from a story perspective so I stopped about 3/4 of the way through season 1. being "ok star wars" seems to be the very best it can aspire to.
It's just a pastiche of star wars with some mixed in memberberries.
And the original Death Star had an unprotected exhaust tunnel going all the way to the critical core... It's StarWars, some suspension of disbelief is necessary. "Mando" is a guy who simply struggles with anything that is not bounty-hunting, and acting as a parent clearly sends him in complete confusion more often than not.
I know there are weak episodes, some almost on purpose (like the village defense, a homage to samurai films from a simpler era), but I don't agree about The Mandalorian being bad overall because it just isn't. It delivers worldbuilding, ambience, and characters (ironically, the ones under helmets end up being more memorable than the others...); the soundtrack is insanely good, the production art alone is fantastic, and it's a miracle that it's a tv-series at all. My kids just love it in a way they've not loved any other SW material.
The only thing I would change is Gina Carano (bad actor, bad casting, and turns out she's a bad person too), but that's it.
>And the original Death Star had an unprotected exhaust tunnel going all the way to the critical core... It's StarWars, some suspension of disbelief is necessary.
bad writing does not require suspension of disbelief to handle, that requires poor critical faculties. Luckily kids tend to have both.
Also, architectural flaws in a government project are more believable than revolving lists of characters being inexplicably stupid at just the right plot moments for their stupidity to have maximum effect, and then going back to competence once the twist of their stupidity has done its work, which most dramatic series rely on for their momentum.
And what about all those poor government contractors, installing toilets for stormtroopers, blown to hell by some left-wing radical in the name of some mysticist religion... /s
I think there is a lot of revisionism around, about how "good" the original StarWars movies were. Yes they were fun, did worldbuilding very well and all that, but they weren't exactly particularly clever cinematic masterpieces. What followed them in many cases was much worse (the prequels are atrocious), but still, I don't see them as particularly better than stuff like The Mandalorian.
Boba Fett is your example of a smart character? The character that jetpacks within lightsaber reach of a Jedi then gets knocked into a sarlacc pit by a blind guy with a stick?
It’s always funny to me how much dumber the writing in Star Wars (1977) gets when it strays away from its source material (The Hidden Fortress and The Dambusters)
I agree. I find there are sometimes flashes of Star Wars perfection, and it has all the pieces to be consistently top-tier. The depth they put into expanding upon the culture of the side species like the Jawas was great.
But so much is wasted on bad character decisions, bad dialogue, bad acting and more. Just overall bad writing.
There's so much potential, but it doesn't live up to what I expect from Star Wars. And that's so disappointing.
I hope Disney/LucasFilm does better, because Star Wars continues to be a very important franchise to me and many others.
The clone wars started really bad, but it got better and better with every season. I mean there are always a couple of meh episodes per season, but overall they're getting better, and the last season is getting better than episode III.
Clone Wars was 7 series of 10 to 22 episodes each - 133 episodes, many of them barely watchable by anyone over 10 years of age. The good ones are really good, but there is a lot of dreck too, particularly the first 3-4 seasons. Take 16 random CW episodes and I don't think you'll find a better level of sophistication in it than in The Mandalorian.
It's not 'mando' its that the writers are writing a story where the characters go do things the writers decided without having internally consistent logic or motives.
The character is dumb because the writers are bad.
It's definitely the best thing to happen to Star Wars in a long time, but amazing? It isn't. It just goes to show how low Star Wars has fallen that boring drivel that is Rogue One and unassuming adventure for kids like Mandalorian are praised as the best thing since sliced cheese.
Like the comment you’re replying to said: this is your opinion. I loved Mandalorian and looked forward to it every week. I - and my friends who watched it - certainly didn’t see it as boring drivel or an “unassuming adventure for kids” (I don’t even know what that means). But you’re speaking with great conviction as if this is an objective fact. It’s not - we all get different things from it just like any other media. No need to insult Star Wars fans either. You don’t like it - that’s fine - but this is completely subjective.
There are some objective-ish criteria we can apply: plot structure, themes, language and dialog complexity etc.
There are also more subjective criteria which can nonetheless employed like character development and character complexity in general, plot lines and plot wholes, number of literary and narrative devices employed etc.
Mandalorian is a simple linear narrative with an episodic structure with a rather thin plot, little to no character development, and the only "arc" serving as the single motivation for the plot to advance.
This especially evident in Season 2 Episode 7, where they tried to cram a series worth of a character's redemption arc and world building into a single episode.
This doesn't make Mandalorian bad. It's a very enjoyable well executed show with surprisingly few really weak points. This also doesn't make Mandalorian great, or amazing.
In 14 episodes Firefly had more character development, better dialog, working jokes and better acting than 16 episodes of Mandalorian.
As to boring drivel, that's my view of Rogue One: thin plot full of plot holes. The only narrative structure in the entire film is "15 minutes of static talking heads followed by rather uninspired and badly edited CGI action"
Yes I know about the structure of a film, dialog etc. But even with that kind of breakdown it still comes down to whether you like the film or not, which is completely subjective. Back in the day Ebert and Siskel - arguably the top film critics of their day - also knew about all the things you listed and could break down any film in the same way. Yet on the show they had vehement disagreements over certain movies that one liked and one didn’t. I’m not arguing over anything you said - all I’m saying, like the parent comment, is that this isn’t as objective as you’re trying to make it. Experiencing any art is subjective, whether movies, paintings, books, etc. Objectivity requires something that is true for everyone. Your opinions of the series certainly isn’t true for me and my friends, and other people on this thread who’ve said they liked it. So they’re your opinions, and only that.
> is that this isn’t as objective as you’re trying to make it.
I mean, I started with my reply to a comment that literally said this: "Every adult I've introduced Mandalorian to loves it." :D
Of course everything is subjective. We can still say about something "something is enjoyable, even if something is simple and is mostly aimed at kids", or "despite apparent complexity and serious themes something is boring and unimaginative".
For example, basically all of Marvel is based on the formula of "simple but enjoyable". Ain't nothing wrong with that :)
I too am an adult. One of those that saw Star Wars New Hope in the cinema. I gave up on Mandalorian after 4 episodes. Cancelling Gina Carano will make it hard for me return for whatever else they do.
Star Wars is my biggest cinematic disappointment. Empire will always rate as one of the best movies I've ever seen. But making I to III look like a Lego set and making 7, 8 and 9 rehashes of 3, 4 and 5 was... disaster.
Just to talk in concrete terms, Jon Favreau only directed Iron Man 1 and 2. He was executive producer on Iron Man 3, and Avengers 1-3. Plus acting credits in MCU Spider-Man films.
He deserves plenty of credit for his work on Iron Man and launching the MCU (and the MCU's film making formula). Favreau has contributed to the MCU's continued market success with the Avengers films.
In my view Favreau's contribution ends there: the MCU is far more than just the Iron Man character, and Kevin Feige seems to me to be the one who has been pushing the MCU forward and keep it relevant.
I've seen a lot of these MCU movies. I tried, but for me they are mostly fluff I forget the second I get out of the cinema.
Pure low brow spectacles apart from maybe a couple.
Am I closed minded oh great judge of taste and personality?
I've watched most of them, and after you've seen more than a couple with the same protagonist they all start to blend together. They're all pretty entertaining at least, which is why I like to watch them. And occasionally there's one that's actually pretty good and original, which is a nice surprise, but to me those are the minority.
I watched a ton of the earlier Marvel films including the first two avengers movies and you can call me closed-minded all you like it doesn't change the fact that they are mostly the same.
After the second Avenger's movie (Age of Ultron) I found the quality seemed to increase and became fresher and less repetitive (Guardian's of the Galaxy, Thor Ragnarok, Spider-Man Homecoming).
But still if you didn't like the first 8 movies, you probably won't like the next 14 movies.
But I still highly recommend Thor Ragnarok. Even as a standalone movie. Especially if you didn't like the first two Thor movies.
Thor Ragnarok is one of the few capeshit movies I have seen and it was pretty bad. The entire dialogue is written around forced oneliners from a minute into the opening scene. Guardians of the Galaxy was OK but nothing to write home about or even make me remember to watch the sequel(s?).
All of them are a steep drop in quality from The Dark Knight and there certainly isn't enough material there for twenty something 3hr films and half a dozen TV shows. Just like The Empire Strikes Back is a legitimately great movie while everything else Star Wars themed asymptotically approaches zero.
The whole idea of world building with dozens of movies is a scourge on story telling and a complete dead end imho.
Ragnarok is one of my favorite movies of all time, as I found it unique, mesmerizing, and incredibly re-watchable. Great comedy, great drama, great action, great world building.
The Dark Knight and the rest of its trilogy are just so ... blah. I just re-watched the 3rd and still find it so tepid and uninspired. I mean, Bane is kinda cool, but the rest is just bad. The story was insipid and hacked.
The multi movie story and world building is the best thing that has happened in cinema in a long time.
So you and I apparently have quite different tastes.
Just to clarify, there has been four MCU TV shows this year so far: Wandavision (great), Loki (great), Falcon and the Winter Soldier (terrible), and What If (good and sometimes great).
All four are made by Marvel Studios (not Marvel Television like Daredevil and Agents of Shield) with actual Marvel actors and firmly take place in the MCU.
It's worth checking out What If. If you don't like the show, I still recommend watching the fourth episode (Dr Strange).
For me it is an example of superhero inflation. After the third time a city is rampaged you stop to care. They introduce more and more powerful characters to use them in almost medieval battles. I would like to see WWI or WWII tactics super hero movie, but for now I am on a diet and just don't care.
Sure, everyone has different tastes. In my opinion Thor Ragnarok and the two latter Avengers movies (Infinity War and Endgame) are worth a watch even for non-hardcore fans.
Avengers movies (Infinity War and Endgame) are worth a watch even for non-hardcore fans.
While Infinity War can work as an almost standalone movie, if there ever was a movie made for the hardcore fans, it's Endgame. Unless you've absorbed all the lore that came before, 80% of the call-backs and references that the whole movie is built on won't mean anything to you.
I mean the scene in the climax the all the fans lose their shit over and considers the most powerful and pivotal scene in the movie is a character picking up a weapon and saying a word. Nothing within that movie gives any indication as to why any of that is a Really Big Deal.
I enjoyed Dare Devil, Punisher, and Jessica Jones, but I really cannot get into /any/ of the marvel shows that are on Disney+... Production quality is high but they are just so boring to me.
Fascinatingly, that is the one show I am not enjoying... specially because I keep thinking "this is just a comic book, made into a TV show for seemingly no reason" ;P. (The issue with it for me is that every single story is underdeveloped and rushed, which seems to be part of the genre of comic books... and I honestly kind of get it for a comic book? But it doesn't stand up for me at all in a TV show format. Wandavision, in stark contrast, was just a beautiful use of the TV medium to me, starting with the very first minute when you are hit with "OMG, this is the set of the Dick van Dye show... or is it?" and they spend the entire series paying homage to the entire history of sitcoms in its own medium.)
Their success might be the main reason I no longer go to the movies. I like sci-fi action movies like Starship Troopers, Terminator, Alita: Battle Angel, Total Recall, Avatar, The Matrix and such.
But these days no one seems to care for such products. What makes the big bucks seems to be super heroes made by disney. Would have been fine had they not have completely taken over the market now.
Yes, I'm an old fart and movies/TV is targeting the young population. Totally normal. But am I just old and bitter, or is this superhero trend just marketing? I think it's mainly the latter.
As another somewhat old fart, it feels like we don’t see any novel breakout titles take top spot at the box office anymore - titles that come out of nowhere; in addition to the movies you mentioned, Forest Gump, The Godfather, Goodfellas, … etc. It’s all superhero stuff. That’s all people are willing to talk about. It practically dominated the conversation.
The last SF or fantasy movie I've liked was, I believe, Interstellar. Everything since has either been a superhero movie, Star Wars (please make it stop), or a massive flop. Actually, Bumblebee was pretty entertaining now that I remember.
The TV has kinda become the new medium for SF/fantasy, but it too has started to become flooded with superhero shows, superhero deconstruction and more Star Wars.
You didn't like The Martian and Blade Runner 2049? Not exactly mid-budget movies but one is a well-made popcorn-flick while the other is the highly improbably well-made sequel to a 40 year old cult classic. The amount of non-superhero Sci-Fi in the theaters at the moment is a bit of the low side for me but there has been significant, good movies since 2014 and Interstellar.
Sadly, this article doesn’t actually deliver of the headline and tell you how they did it. A lot of people, including some extremely powerful media executives, would like to know.
I came to say this and also gripe about the fact that this franchise of franchises has gobbled up cinema and contributed in lowering the quality of mainstream film across the board. I personally cannot stand any of the Disney properties, particularly marvel and star wars, or their competitors anymore who are basically copying them to compete and also making their products mediocre.
Do you have evidence that they have lowered tbe quality of cinema across the board?
I see a studio that consistently produces content with excellent visual quality, excellent audio quality, consistently high quality acting, decent plot twists, cross-film synergy (even working across studios), and even morally ambiguous characters.
I don't see what's missing, aside from a failure to play to elitist tendencies that assume mainstream=bad. The reflexive assumption that something is popular is automatically trash (I see this with pop music a lot, too) seems like it is predicated on a fundamentally bizarre conception of 'good'-ness or quality.
You're asking for proof that a subjective medium of expression has changed measurably in quality?
I don't have proof, just an opinion. The storylines and plot lines are all formulaic and one dimensional, the characters have basically no depth to them, the name of the game is throw a budget at graphics and rake in the money, and finally, lots of expressive elements are off the table if they want the Chinese market, which they do.
I don't know how many times people can watch the good guy fire laser beams at the bad guy and win and still enjoy it, maybe one day they'll have to mix it up and have the good guys lose until the sequel comes out in which they undo the loss and still win, predictably.
I feel the same way about endless prestige dramas involving guys doing crimes and then agonising about it. I don’t believe any of us is starved for content though.
Maybe I'm too much of a nerd, but I think quality can, in general, be defined and measured.
I get that you don't like the genera of action films, and that's fine. But there are moments of the film between the laser beams firing. Sometimes long moments. Sometimes the majority of the film.
Are there any films that aren't formulaic? Or are original in some way? As far as I can tell, the trend is: human or human surrogate faces challenge or complication that is resolved. Often following a heroes journey pattern. Sometimes the enemy is nature. Sometimes man itself (I would interpret as another form of nature, but not so useful). Sometimes the challenge is loss. Sometimes the challenge is fear. Sometimes it's fear of loss. Sometimes it's a mating attempt. Sometimes it's an existential risk.
Of course you can dress up the underlying formula a variety of ways. If your a french or whatever filmmaker and want to pander to artsy types you add lots of long slow scenes where nothing happens. Sometimes you spice it up with a gay kid or something. Maybe throw in a racial aspect to make a statement.
I don't know how many times people can look at any human endeavor and not realize it is all bullshit. But if it is all meaningless bullshit (in a meaningless universe) then perhaps none of it is? Perhaps many MCU entries are technical achievements with interesting twists that are exemplary specimens of exactly the type of film they are meant to be.
I'm not asking for proof, I'm asking for evidence of anything beyond a facile, intellectually lazy approach to media criticism. And believe me, there are a lot of flaws in modern Hollywood, but action movies being too well produced isn't really one of them.
I'm usually in the cinema for opening night of new MCU movies, so this isn't said from a place of hatred of disgust of the movies. They're cookie-cutter corporate media that does the bare minimum to not be entirely the same movie every time.
The acting isn't high quality across the board -- it's average. The plots and their twists are, frankly, banal in every aspect apart from being vehicles of spectacle. There's no real moral gray-ness to the characters, Wenwu from Shang Chi being an obvious exception to the rule.
The shows, which were supposed to come in with a fresh, long-form perspective on main characters and their struggles start out with interesting premises and then quickly falter because of their adherence to the MCU mythos. Wandavision and Loki completely fail in the latter half of their seasons to pay off any of the character beats in favor of big spectacle and exposition dumps.
Have you considered the possibility that critics of the MCU are not elitist and that you merely have underdeveloped taste? That ostensibly educated adults will go to bat for the cultural dominance of stories that are thematically simple enough to be understood fully by children will never cease to amaze me.
If you consider liking/appreciating the MCU films as 'underdeveloped taste', then that's pretty close to being elitist. Not everyone goes to the cinema for the same type of content, so everyone's "taste" will be subjective. In that same respect, I don't think OP can ask for "evidence" that the MCU has lowered the quality of content across the board - the only thing we can see is that many other media companies want to mimic the money-printing machine that is the MCU, only to fail by outputting (unanimously) subpar films. The poster child is DC, but there are other examples, like how Universal tried to make a 'Dark Universe' and has effectively canned that[0]. That might mean more movie budget is used to poorly mimic a formula you dislike instead of movies you would like.
If you think it’s elitist to ask adults to like adult things rather than things for children, have at it. I should note that the poster I responded to, in listing the merits of MCU films, discussed only technical details and the baseline of coherent storytelling; theme, meaning, film making craft, and artistic merit shockingly did not enter the discussion. I would call that underdeveloped taste and a limited understanding of how literary media work as art. If that makes me elitist, fair enough, but I’d much rather be an elitist than go through life thinking comic books are the height of human expression.
> I’d much rather be an elitist than go through life thinking comic books are the height of human expression.
Perhaps I'm too much of a child to understand your point, but this seems like a straw man.
I think the original contention was that MCU content is low quality (and no one has provided anything to support that claim beyond hand wavey "it's for children" nonsense). The other contention was that MCU films reduce the quality of the cinema industry overall, which is a similarly baseless claim.
Independent films still exist. Dramatic films still exist. Artistic production still exists. I haven't seen stats, but I would be shocked if the market for such content is smaller now than it was in 2008.
There's the possible claim that MCU sucks the oxygen out of the room for more artistic productions. I think the idea is that the world would be better if popular content didn't exist, so that we'd all have only "artistic" content available. I think that is a world in which fewer people watch movies at all, not a world in which everyone is driven to only appreciate high art. Thus the claims that MCU reduce the quality of cinema overall seems hard to defend.
I'm curious about the other perspective, so any perspective or analysis that better explains the thinking would be helpful. Otherwise I have to assume folks are just coming up with stories to justify their elitism.
BTW: "theme, meaning, film making craft, and artistic merit"
- craft was addressed in all of the sub-categories listed: performance, visual art, music, audio, effects
- theme/meaning: varies by film (because they aren't all the same). Sometimes it's loss and grief. Sometime's it's managing conflicts. Sometimes its reckoning with the inherent conflicts in heroism. Sometimes it's displacement after war. Sometimes it's about the forces that drive people to extremism. IDK humans aren't that complicated.
- artistic merit: a bullshit concept and I think you know it. Literal urinals have artistic merit. Canvases painted red have artistic merit. "Artistic merit" is elitism in distilled form.
Edit: I will concede that the performances in "Black Widow" were particularly weak.
How about this: MCU movies begin production with the VFX work for the major action scenes. This happens before they have a script or even a director. Have you ever noticed how MCU movies feel like a completely different movie once the CGI action sequences start? It’s because they are. These are not serious works of craft: they are marketing exercises meant to keep a money tree well watered.
I was never the target audience for this stuff but I was willing to be dragged along to Iron Man and Captain America because at that time “October Movies” still existed. That is mid budget Hollywood dramas and thrillers targeted towards adults, typically with an edgier tone, released in October after the summer tent pole season has run down but before Oscar candidate season has fully started. Basically everything David Fincher directed prior to being scooped up by Netflix fell into this category. Nightcrawler, All is Lost, and Captain Philips, are other “recent” examples, but of course they’re from the first half of the 2010s because Hollywood no longer green lights projects like these in the cinematic universe era. When MCU critics talk about crowding out better films, this is the sort of thing they’re referring to.
Look I apologize for not containing my scorn, but the fact is that the typical 9 year old can understand everything there is to understand in an MCU film modulo the punchline of a couple jokes. These are thematically simple films with no point of view and nothing to say for fear of shrinking the size of the big tent. The sad thing is that films targeted at children don’t have to be dumb; Bambi for example is a shockingly grownup film that sensitively deals with the passage of time and seasons, death and grief, coming of age, the hardness of life, and the cycle of generations, all within a runtime of under 70 minutes. There’s a lot going on there for the story of a fawn who does stuff in the woods. Yet that kind of depth does not exist in the children’s cinema of our times, ie the MCU, and the popular audience doesn’t even know to ask for it anymore.
We’re a stupid people and we get served correspondingly stupid culture. Sorry to rant and be rude, but in my view the MCU’s popularity is one of the leading indicators of our cultural decline, right up there with Trumpism and social media.
I think the stupidity lives in your point of view here. "Old x was better because it was sophisticated, new x is not because blah blah blah" is a story as old as time. The observable fact that you are either unaware of recent history or unwilling to learn from it is revealing. https://pessimists.co/novel-archive/
> Bambi for example is a shockingly grownup film that sensitively deals with the passage of time and seasons, death and grief, coming of age, the hardness of life, and the cycle of generations, all within a runtime of under 70 minutes.
I'm not going to defend MCU as being a pinnacle of meaning or depth, because honestly I tend to see _all_ of art as being fundamentally bullshit. However, all of what you wrote can describe one MCU entry or another. Literally every single one. I get media criticism, but ffs you should probably actually watch a recent entry before you pass judgment. Ideally with an open mind - if you go in assuming a work is trash, you will find it is trash. Even bubble gum pop has artistic value; I'm sure if you look hard enough you can find intellectually interesting themes in MCU.
I recommend you take a moment to watch Captain America and the Winter Soldier. It has (for a child's movie at a nine-year-old level) sophisticated treatment of the security-vs-liberty tradeoff, the politics of mass surveillance, adapting to societal change, dealing with loss, and more. https://ew.com/article/2014/04/06/captain-america-the-winter...
Unrelated to above points, but I think you should reflect on your arguments and whether things like the production schedule are actually part of a coherent framework to evaluate film, or just another fact pulled out of a hat to prop up your prejudice.
If you're willing to call everyone else stupid, I hope you won't mind me saying I expect better from someone on HN.
Take every criticism of MCU here (which I am not defending) and it applies just as well to one bit of art or another.
The difference is the art house filmmaker either is lying to himself and the world or is simply deluded. That's fine, there's a lot of awards authorities who will award bullshit! It's kind of the point; the market rewards everything else.
It sort of reminds me of ice cream. Not particularly meaningful, but very meaningful to the person it brings joy to. Thousands of vendors make boring, trash ice cream that is formulaic: ice, cream, sugar, and a mix of flavorings and sometimes chunks of sweet and salty things.
But for Salt and Straw, the artsy/edgy types who are too self-obsessed to realize how basic they are, the formula isn't enough. They say, "ice cream isn't art unless it has anchovies". And unless it does something weird, it isn't _really_ anything but trash. It doesn't matter how premium the caramel, how many thousands of hours that went into perfecting the syrup recipes, how polished the flavor balance is, it isn't good unless you add something to make it unpopular.
Because if the hoi polloi can understand, then it isn't art. The sophisticated people who bitch about how formulaic cinema is these days say, "I want anchovies! I want garlic-gruyere-gumdrop ice cream! I hate vanilla and caramel because I resent the common people for liking that, I am better! Formulaic ice cream literally makes people stupid and degrades intellectual discourse! Too many people like vanilla so it is bad! If only no one made vanilla ice cream, the dumb people would be forced to love garlic-chocolate-pine needle ice cream!"
Art is a tool. People who want to use 'artistic merit' as a cudgel against art products they don't like should probably take a step back and reflect on art history. I won't argue any particular way, but if you zoom out far enough to see a whole, the only common pattern is it is all bullshit.
> the only thing we can see is that many other media companies want to mimic the money-printing machine that is the MCU, only to fail by outputting (unanimously) subpar films. The poster child is DC, but there are other examples, like how Universal tried to make a 'Dark Universe' and has effectively canned that
They both tried to create universes from the outset, Universal IIRC even announced their Dark Universe before the first movie was released.
The Conjuring Universe on the other hand started the same as the MCU, and seems to have been a success: Make a good movie or two, then sequels and spinoffs, expanding organically until there's nothing else to call it but a "universe". It seems to be going well, with the 8th movie released this year, 2 more planned, 5 short films, and a comic book [0].
I don’t agree with the sentiment, but the typical argument is that there is not much originality or risk in pop films: they follow a formula or pattern that succeeded before (like The Heroes Journey and others) with slightly different details or characters.
Success in numerous contexts; hiring diversity, a generation of parents and DINKs with cash who grew up on the material, sincere effort at complex emotional themes, world building attract diverse crowds.
Versus DC that went with two gorillas and a hot chick formula. They got props for a fish movie after floundering about. Marvel is vertically integrated all the latest social memes.
Comics have a long history of taking life seriously and being socially aware; Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Green Arrows sidekick Speedy being a dope fiend was written in 1971; really all they had to do was a detailed translation of the material rather than treat it like camp.
Short answer is willingness to take risks and good taste.
For risks:
1) Casting unknown or washed up actors in leading roles
2) Switching up the genre with every movie. Iron Man was a classic super hero movie, Thor was fish out of water, Captain America was a spy movie, Ant Man was a heist movie, Guardians a space comedy, etc.
3) Forcing people to watch past movies to understand new ones. Accepted wisdom before Marvel was no one would do that so you have to dumb it down.
I think the thing is that they both do and don't do that at the same time, so they get the benefits but not the blowback.
Sure they take some risk with casting, but they take very few risks in other areas. How many of the plots are basically quipy selfish hero learns to stop acting in selfish self-interest long enough to save the world, well still being a little bit of a dick so as not to be boring? Half. Don't get me wrong, its a good groove, but it doesn't scream taking risks.
Similarly with 2- sure they switch out the genere,but its always using the trappings superficially. Capt may be a spy movie, but just barely and not a very good one. Its a good super hero movie, but i wouldn't watch it if i wanted a good spy movie, and similar for all the others.
In the end, they manage to make it different enough to not feel repetitive, well still being similar enough that the risk of making something that doesn't work is low.
For a wider context on current/future state of cinema and TV, I read this choice quote in a WSJ article[0] yesterday:
“Hollywood has taken notice that younger generations are spending less time consuming movies and television. A recent study by Deloitte said that Gen Zers—defined as ages 14 to 24—prefer playing videogames, listening to music, browsing the internet and scrolling through social media in their leisure time over watching movies and TV at home. Every older generation ranked movies and TV as their top entertainment option.”
Kinda ironic to be alive in a golden age of fictional content, and instead "wasting" time with trash content. But it's understandable, as in that age discovering the world and finding your place is more important than entertainment. And the addiction of low-quality social media stuck content is also a serious matter as I learned for myself last year. I never cared much for Social media or youtube, but getting stuck at home, away from people, I learned to understand those stuff and dropped Netflix & co. surprisingly fast.
It will be interesting to see how that generation will develop in the next decades...when they settle in their life, understand the bad sides of social media better, focus on new things.
I'm GenX, so most of my entertainment comes from older video games and movies. And I have an incredibly jaded view of the narcissism of social media.
I recently started dating a Gen-Zer. This guy is all about TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and any other similar social media you can think of. A lot (most) of it is pure garbage, but there are some real gems out there (especially music). I still think it's a bunch of narcissistic nonsense and there's too much garbage to wade through to make it worth it. But over time it might not be that way.
Actually, I think the "trash" content is actually a sign that we're all putting way too much importance in big movies.
Large video games like Skyrim or Fallout or GTA are no different from a Hollywood production except for visual quality. The story telling is not far removed from minor and some major movies, but instead of passively observing the story you can actively take part in it. There are artsy games for those who would watch complex cinema, there are games that can be played as a sequence of action scenes, there are comedy games, the list goes on. Previously, everyone who'd much rather interact with their fiction would be stuck in the cinema, but these days that's no longer relevant.
Memes on social media show that you don't need an epic story to get fiction or a shared perspective among a large group of people. People can get the same joy out of a drawing of a green frog or a hidden "Loss" that they'd previously get out of a Monty Python reference. Cross-cultural borders have been opened by the internet the same way movies and TV did many decades ago.
There's also the specificity that the internet brings us. If you were living in a small town and had a passion for building wooden crossbows, there'd be nobody to discuss your hobby with and no way to find them. You could run classifieds, but there's no way you'd reach someone in Canada about this stuff. Now with YouTube you're one search query away from a world of people who share the exact same niche. Mass media is made for the masses, and designed to resonate at least a little with as many people as possible. Social media allows media to be made for a tiny subset while still gaining attention. Sure, it won't make millions or billions, but it'll connect people who'd otherwise thought they were the only people who'd enjoy a certain type of thing.
The internet and the age of interactive media has brought us a culture in which we can participate in rather than be a passive observer of. I think this is part of reason for all of the friction against copyright laws that exists these days; covers, re-enactment, let's plays and other such content is being claimed as copyright violation by the big media companies while the people participating in them see them as ways to express themselves and add to the worldwide culture that's grown around certain media.
I think the next generation will grow up with a mindset completely foreign to my own, accepting being recorded at all time, accepting that anything you say as a teenager can cost you your job fifty years down the line. The omnipresence of tracking and other invasions of privacy as well as the fact that a few large, American tech companies have unopposed control over your life will shape young generations in an interesting but kind of scary way.
Disney does not yet own the DC universe (Batman, Superman, etc).
Warner Bros can and should rival Marvel and should definitely be ahead of what Star Wars has become.
Bonus points if Warner Bros invests more in video games than Disney does. Video games are a huge market Disney doesn't do a great job with. The golden age of LucasArts (not to be confused with LucasFilm) did much better with their Star Wars games than they have since under Disney management.
Disney invested in video games... but they got Square Enix to do an Avengers game just last year, and it's pretty sub-par experience with bugs and generally unfun, repetitive gameplay. It supposedly costed just under $200 million to make[0].
Disney probably got a better deal when they licensed Epic to put the characters in Fortnite with an entire 3-month season (Chapter 2 Season 4) dedicated to Marvel and Galactus[1].
Was it Matt Damon who said you can't make projects that aren't block busters anymore because Streaming has completely eroded the Media sales market where smaller projects could recoup box office loses?
Matt Damon said you can't make non-blockbuster films because streaming eroded the DVD sales that supported those films.
Matt Damon forgets that non-blockbuster films were popular before DVDs were invented.
In the 1950s people went to the movies often, sometimes more than once a week, just to hang out with their friends and be entertained. Today there's so many more ways and venues to achieve that goal, movies get a smaller and smaller slice of that pie. DVDs weren't the solution, they just put off the inevitable for a little longer.
He might have a point. Maybe it’s rose tinted glasses but I see the 80s and 90s as the peak of Hollywood’s creativity … which so happens to be the time home video in the form of VHS took off. Coincidence?
Surely the audiences that bought DVDs are still there, so I guess the issue really is either:
a) streaming does not pay per viewer as well as DVDs used to do (which is a commercial issue and relatively easy to fix: just force streamers to pay more, or invest in a dedicated "alt-films" service), or
b) current streaming services fail at surfacing non-blockbusters. This is hard to fix (it's a problem common to basically everything on the web - there is only so much space on a screen, winner-takes-all, and people don't like going to multiple sites to do one thing).
I mean, it's a "people problem" - given the right incentive and alignment of social planets, it can definitely be done. Whereas the other side of the problem may not be solvable at all. Hence "relatively".
super unpopular opinion here, and I know I'm going to get downvoted into oblivion...
I don't think sophisticated adults should be into spiderman. i only see them when I'm with my nephews and always fall asleep. give me a bad story with bad characters any day, over 98 minutes of nonstop cgi action scenes
Because they're high quality and there's a fair amount of variety; three MCU TV shows out this year are all quite different from each other, for example.
Shang Chi just came out, and while there are some familiar Marvel beats, it still manages to feel moderately different from any of the previous MCU films. People go to see even an obscure character like Shang Chi because Marvel has done a good job of building trust that even their crappy movies are still okay.
It's apparent that many of the critics only watched the early movies that were more same-y -- by the time you hit phase 3 they're doing a much better job on average differentiating the films. Thor 1/2 vs Thor 3 is a perfect example of this, with the first two being competent but rote, and then Ragnarok being wildly different (and simply better).
I am going to admit I rarely go see Marvel movies but I have seen at least two from phase 1 and two from phase 2 and they were all quite formulaic. The plot follows generally the same trops. Music mostly was the same. Easy jokes came counterbalancing heavy moment of gravitas. The overall editing was close with comparable duration of takes and timing. They really calibrated products.
Then again, I think it's why people go see them massively. These movies can be consumed with zero intellectual effort and are built to give you a dopamine rush while never challenging your world view in any way.
I personally believe this is where cinema goes to die but both the indie scene and foreign industries are producing more movies than ever so I don't really care.
I have seen Iron Man 2, both Guardians of the Galaxy, the fist Captain America and the second Avengers movie. So it's actually five movies (one more than I thought).I might have seen part of the first Hulk on TV but I'm not entirely sure, could have been any of the other ones. I stand by my opinion.
When you consider that Hollywood produced movies like The Deer Hunter, Chinatown or even the first Jurassic Park if you want to talk about blockbusters (not the new ones they could be Marvel movies), it makes me a bit sad.
I mean, don't get me wrong. I enjoy going from McDonald's from time to time. Nothing like a bunch nuggets when you had too much to drink. I just don't go around pretending it's good food.
I mean certainly and Shakespeare plays are known for having a somewhat formulaic plot structure.
Of course, Shakespeare plays also tackle issues which had never been tackled before, throw unconventional elements into conventional structures and use literary devices which are ahead of their time. All things I wish could be said of Marvel movies.
I respectfully disagree. The Marvel films still follow the same formula as they always did. Not that it is wrong, to each its own. But it's obvious that the films are not driven by vision but by maximising mass audience appeal. That's why they are all the same. They need to have x amount of jokes, x minutes of action, the dialogue needs to be simple, etc
Low effort direction in action scenes spoil Marvel/Disney movies for me.
When action scene starts its time to go to kitchen to take more snacks, because directing is so low quality and standardized. It's more emoting, posturing, and short bad ass sounding phrases. Everything is achieved using fast cuts. Nothing really happens. Production quality is high, but making action movies boring is achievement in itself.
I own Disney stock, because I think they are doing movies exactly right from business perspective. They do what large customer groups wants. Marvel is like McDonalds and Coke. You sell what sells and they can endlessly milk the franchise.
I would like to see more standalone movies like the Joker. DC has a good opportunity to cash in on niche art pieces like that, which really digs into the character and motivations.
It was a far superior movie than all the Marvel formulaic pieces combined.
Some more details are covered in Bob Iger’s book The Ride of a Lifetime. It’s obviously about burnishing his legacy but if you’re a fan of Disney or the challenges of being a CEO at scale, it’s pretty good.
I do however wish that other things were being produced. Heavy Sequel'ization of movies just leaves me bored.
The same can be said of the Star Trek franchises, and quite frankly anything more then "2" has grown tiring.
Game of Thrones* has shown hollywood that there is an appetite for epic storytelling, and that people are willing to sit through 7 season of shows to be entertained by an engaging story. (In my heart Babylon5 pioneered grand-story telling.)
There are thousands of great books that would do well adapted to TV/Movies, I'd like to see some of these instead of another superhero flick.