They keep making boring content and using progressiveness as a cover, IE: if you find the stories bland and the characters having no depth then you must be racist, homophobic or misogynistic.
But I think a larger cohort of people have realised that, no, actually people were not slamming these movies because everyone is anti-progressive.
The only issue now is that Disney owns half of all media, so if you like movies or want to go on a date or take the kids to the cinema, you don’t get a seriously large variety.
Loki was truly excellent though, so they can do this; they just choose not to make complex and interesting stories and characters.
I think they’ve also hit the limits of escalation. That’s the ultimate problem with a large shared cinematic universe. They’ve had to keep escalating the big baddies and now there’s really nowhere to go but down. They haven’t built out the “infrastructure” to focus on the storytelling quality, just what they need to pump out splashy hollywood blockbusters. It’s not like Star Wars where they can tell an infinite number of interesting stories with the endless back and forth between the Empire and Rebel factions in the background.
Where do you go after Thanos wiping out half the universe with the flick of a finger? Thanos 2.0 wiping out 2/3rds of the universe? Who gives a shit. Deadpool is invincible. Scarlet Witch is basically a god. So is Vision. Loki is literally capable of time jumping at will while the universe disintegrates around him. There’s only so much you can lean on zany characters like the Guardians of the Galaxy before they jump the shark too.
All the good TV shows either ran their course (Agents of SHIELD), or were prematurely canceled like Punisher and Luke Cage during the Disney handover. Seriously, what now?
They just keep escalating with Loki. He Who Remains is another one of those deus ex villains that they’ll have to one up even further. Based on the season 2 finale I can’t even tell if they want a season 3 or if thats over too.
Loki is over. Both as a show, and as a character. Tom Hiddleston bid a heartfelt goodbye to the conclusion of "fourteen years of my life" through the finale:
Eh, I mean it's hard to say if there's any correlation between bad movies and progressive movies. Some of the best movies recently are progressive (everything everywhere all at once, barbie). Some recent shows from Disney are terrific too (Andor).
Some terrible shows aren't progressive at all.
There are definitely cases that people morally blame audiences as a false cover for a bad movie, but there are also people who can't enjoy great movies if they can find any progressive meaning in them and make a career about ranting about it.
>Eh, I mean it's hard to say if there's any correlation between bad movies and progressive movies.
>but there are also people who can't enjoy great movies if they can find any progressive meaning in them and make a career about ranting about it.
the problem is that being 'progressive', whatever that means today, shouldn't come before making a good movie when the goal is.. to make a movie.
No one would have cared about any of Kubrick's social messages if they hadn't been wrapped in spectacular cinema.
the 'life and times' are inexorably twisted into the cinema, but some people want to just sit back and watch robots shooting lasers at each other without being reminded constantly that the world is an unjust and uncivilized place outside of the silver-screen.
I think that there is a general fatigue among spectators in the cinemasphere for the burden -- which isn't to say that 'crusading in popular media' isn't an important concept, but rather to say that a fatigued audience will be less likely to lend an ear.
I just don't see any evidence for the idea that studios are intentionally placing message before financial success. I see bad movies and progressive movies as two unrelated categories that sometimes overlap, but just as often don't.
My point is not that the message comes before the story. My point is that there really isn't a “message” at all.
Its that they make something as generic and “safe” as possible, then put women, minorities or homosexual representation in the movie very late (after writing maybe) and it becomes forced.
Then when the movie bombs for being uncreative and forced they claim that it’s because of racists or misogynists. Because a few people genuinely are racists and misogynists it masks all the criticism and they can blanket deny that theres any issue.
Sorry, but season 2 of Loki was a nonsensical mess of a show. They used up most of their best ideas in season 1. I think it’s time for Disney to give the MCU a rest and come back to it in a decade or two.
Loki was absolutely incomprehensible but between the emotive acting and good production (both the practical effects-looking retro sets and the musical score) it made the show probably the best Disney+ content besides Andor, imo. The finale is surprisingly effective, and affecting.
Someone on Twitter likened Loki to a really expensive version of Doctor Who, and based on what little I know of that show, I can see that. The cosmic time-jumping sci-fi plot is all nonsense and ancillary to the characters, who are elevated (more than the show deserves) by the talent.
It also reminded me of Terry Pratchett novels, which usually devolve for me into arbitrary magical/fantasy illogic three quarters of the way through deus ex machina style, but the strong characterization, the concepts, and the comedy salvages it.
They simply make way too much money off of Marvel from the fanboys, etc to care about whether the movies are actually good. This may have been a flop, but there are a plethora of trash marvel movies that have made a profit, they will definitely keep milking this
They keep making boring content and using progressiveness as a cover
It has nothing to do with 'progressiveness'. Wall St. ate Hollywood. All the major studios are run by investors who reduced everything to a game of metrics. Major studios don't 'create' movies anymore. They manufacture them. The executives running these companies have simply lost sight of the forest for the trees and are now at the throwing poop at a wall and seeing what sticks phase.
IMO its more like they're tapped out general appeal and are trying to monetize and cash out on niche groups. They're just throwing accusations about because its not working. What, just because I'm <insert targeted demographic>, I'm supposed to fork out cash and see the movie because they headlined an character in/portraying that demographic? Fuck that
great acting by Tom Hiddleston & Sophia Di Martino and excellent chemistry
Superb writing
Wonderful action and better than movie quality special effects.
Many of the other MCU shows & movies are similar in that they have a strong lead, talented villians, excellent writing, easy to understand plot and devices, and great special effects. If we go over the historical heroes and villians across MCU, the vast majority have great presence and we see some phenoms showing up even in bit roles. The MCU has really been a Cornucopia of Who's Who in Hollywood that has acting talent.
Unfortunately, Brie Larson and Teyonnah Parris are not comparable talents to Scarlett Johansson or Elizabeth Olsen, and though I think Iman Vellani is quite talented she is not as experienced as an actress yet. I view the casting of Brie Larson in the role as an epic failure that has led to the rejection of the movie, and her role. She is not comparable to the highly talented folks in the MCU, and I think the only fix is recasting the role.
Brie Larson is quite good in Lessons in Chemistry on Apple TV+, though ironically it’s by playing a character whose personality it pretty much opposite of her MCU role.
Brie Larson is a good actress she is believable in many of her roles before captain marvel.
Even in captain marvel she is consistent- the issue is the writing makes her a smug self-centered person with no growth other than gaining even more confidence.
Its exclusively a writing/directing problem.
The hate got directed at her because she was the lightning rod for the movie, and she had a couple of awkward interviews and made a few really alienating comments about the franchises core audience and their relation to the movie.
>The only issue now is that Disney owns half of all media, so if you like movies or want to go on a date or take the kids to the cinema, you don’t get a seriously large variety.
Not true, you just need to watch movies at home. I brought my girlfriend over to my place and showed her "Alien" and "Aliens" (she had never seen them) and she loved them. Why bother watching new junk when there's SO many wonderful classic movies you can watch instead? And you can get an absolutely huge flat-screen TV these days for not that much money. Who needs a cinema?
There’s lots of reasons movies can be bad, but focusing on woke box checking instead of entertainment is a recurrent reason. It’s like Kamala Harris. Yes, there were unpopular vice presidents before, but she’s bad for the specific reason that Biden selected her to check demographic boxes, despite her terrible 2020 primary campaign.
To be fair, vice presidents almost always are chosen to tick boxes. For example a Northern presidential candidate will often choose a Southern vice presidential candidate and vice versa. Given how little a vice president matters (unless tragedy strikes) using them to "tick boxes" is their primary use.
Usually, the VP pick shores up support among a specific coalition. E.g. Trump picking Pence to shore up support among traditional evangelicals. But Biden was already far more popular than Harris among black voters. The campaign seems to have expected “first black woman VP” to carry weight, even though Harris had little pull among actual black voters. It’s quite distinct from traditional vice presidential box checking.
To map that to the movie analogy—Marvel isn’t making a big deal about the first Muslim super hero to make the movie popular among the 1% of the country that’s Muslim.
Incidentally, Marvel badly executed the details - it isn’t wise to trumpet the Muslim part when you go ahead and use Punjabi Sikh cultural references that are extremely grating to Punjabi Muslims’ ears. (Not offensive, just extremely incongruous)
Its a nice feeling knowing the MCU is faltering because of it's reliance on "The Message" rather than good writing or character development. I hope they have learned their lesson.
Superhero movies might be in need of a breather. Fear not, for those who want pulp commercial pop culture fandom adaptations, this year was a turning point for video game movies at the box office, signifying perhaps the next decade plus of Hollywood:
How on Earth does this guy make a 10 minute long video out of this being the year video game movies dethrone comic book flicks with only two films as evidence? Super Mario and FNAF barely make a pattern, let alone a trend. I don't think you have to worry about drowning in video game films just yet. Meanwhile, Mattel have something like 45 films in the pipeline following Barbie. Point your dread that way instead.
Comic book movies seem to be dethroning themselves. Super Mario coincidentally being #2 at the box office would be the sort of tipping point for the studios to hungrily eye an alternate source of IP to adapt. (https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/world/2023/ - I will concede that FNAF is all the way at #18, which isn't very impressive).
I mean, they're already greenlighting nearly twenty Mattel based projects just because of Barbie (https://www.insider.com/all-upcoming-movies-mattel-toys-barb...), it seems like Hollywood hasn't come a long way from the video's intro anecdote about how the original Batman movie ushered in a wave of adaptations of retro pulp heroes, rather than the more naturally lucrative choice of comic book adaptations. So who's to say they won't look at the similar success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie and mine video game IP for adaptations?
At the same time, I think that other than for Daniel Kaluuya's 'A24-Type' Barney movie, most of the Mattel projects are not even going to see the light of day. It's a much more limited IP vein and once there's a box office bomb or two, the studios will quickly put the kibosh on the outlandish idea. Battleship, for instance, didn't exactly unleash a huge trend of board game movies.
Outside of the theaters, The Last of Us being a huge hit and a critical darling would seem to indicate that after decades, we might finally be seeing the end of the video game adaptation curse. The fact that there are any quality video game adaptations now, let alone successful ones, is itself a sea change. And as the video theorizes, maybe this isn't 2008 so much as it's the early '00s when the original X-Men and Spider-Man adaptations came out. A sign of the shift that is to come. But I firmly do believe it so to come. There are far more video games than there are Marvel/DC superhero properties. More genres, even.
I like to think of myself as an average moviegoer, and I have no interest in seeing this film because of a) superhero fatigue (I know exactly what's going to happen) b) these characters aren't interesting, and c) there's too much MCU shit out there that I'm not going to catch up on as a prerequisite.
I did recently beat the new Spider-Man PS5 game, and it was a great time. There were interesting twists on the story, characters I cared about, and the interactivity of it sets it apart from yet another film.
In my huge sample size of A Few Acquaintances, people seem to be turning to the Marvel TV shows instead.
I did this for Star Wars... I had basically zero interest in the new movies or really anything but the Old Republic setting, but the SW TV shows are pretty engaging. They're so much more grounded than... Whatever was going on in the new movies.
there are so many movies in this universe—-i’ve given up because i’m so far behind at this point. theyre absolutely milking the content at the expense of quality.
i’m also confused about the batman movies. how many reboots at this point? i’ve similarly given up here too.
I feel like, completely anecdotally, Disney+ is a pretty big factor, here. Maybe not in it being so much lower, but I get a free subscription to the service through something else, so I have no motivation to go see Marvel/Star Wars/Disney movies at the theater, when I can just watch them at home a few weeks or months later. I’d have done the same in the first round, if it’d been a frictionless option.
Seems like even the most brainless consumers are starting to give up on the creatively bankrupt leeches across media. I’ve noticed that certain video game franchises that banked on increasingly garbage franchise milking are starting to falter as well.
I really like the Marvel stuff but they have two problems that are well known at this point:
Quality and volume.
Some of their recent efforts, like Loki season two and (apparently) The Marvels are quite good.
The problem is we already got burned by a number of poor entries like Thor: Love and Thunder and The Eternals (I mean, wow). It seems rare I hear about a good movie these days, even when they make one, but the bad ones get mentioned a lot. Or the ones that people just dislike for whatever ideological reason like She-hulk: Attorney at Law.
Much like with Star Wars they put things out so fast that it feels like you’re always trying to keep up. Even if DC and others didn’t keep trying to make superhero movies they would have oversaturated the market alone.
Combine those and it can feel like you’re always trying to keep up with a bunch of bad stuff in hopes of finding the rare good one. It’s exhausting.
And all of that is just Marvel stuff. But they’re also up against great TV, great video games, and everything else going on in the world. Trends away from wanting to go to movie theaters.
They drove the audience away with too much cash grabbing. Pure and simple.
I 100% reject the nonsense “go woke go broke” arguments, everything that’s going on can be explained without that perfectly, and there is no actual evidence to back it up.
But I think a larger cohort of people have realised that, no, actually people were not slamming these movies because everyone is anti-progressive.
The only issue now is that Disney owns half of all media, so if you like movies or want to go on a date or take the kids to the cinema, you don’t get a seriously large variety.
Loki was truly excellent though, so they can do this; they just choose not to make complex and interesting stories and characters.