who is to blame for why movies are terrible?
a response
I sort of jokingly answered this question a month ago with my essay on Barbie, Marvel, and Christopher Nolan, but I stumbled across a very good essay that breaks down why most movies look and feel terrible now.
Really, the whole essay is great and definitely worth reading as
breaks it down with concrete examples that clearly demonstrate how and why modern popular movies are just terrible1.We all feel it.
We all know it.
Still, I’m sure some will call this pretension or whatever else, but the fact that a movie like Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, when adjusted for inflation, would have made 150 million dollars at the box office on a 10 million dollar budget, we see that what many might now describe as an arthouse movie was, in fact, a very popular movie.
By way of contrast, EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE2 made about 140 million dollars on a 15 million dollar budget. We can argue about whether EEAAO was actually popular with the general public, but there’s no denying that it was financially successful. I think it also demonstrates that there was and will always be a relatively large segment of the US public ready and willing to see weirder movies.
I’ll quote myself quoting Roger Ebert when reviewing Chungking Express:
This is the kind of movie you'll relate to if you love film itself, rather than its surface aspects such as story and stars. It's not a movie for casual audiences, and it may not reveal all its secrets the first time through…If you are attentive to the style, if you think about what Wong is doing, Chungking Express works. If you're trying to follow the plot, you may feel frustrated…When Godard was hot, in the 1960s and early 1970s, there was an audience for this style, but in those days, there were still film societies and repertory theaters to build and nourish such audiences. Many of today's younger filmgoers, fed only by the narrow selections at video stores, are not as curious or knowledgeable and may simply be puzzled by Chungking Express instead of challenged. It needs to be said, in any event, that a film like this is largely a cerebral experience: You enjoy it because of what you know about film, not because of what it knows about life.
There used to be an audience for these kind of movies, or so the thinking goes. I think there’s still an audience—possibly a much larger one than people think—but Ebert is absolutely correct that this appreciation for film was institutionally fostered.
Now we have no such thing, which brings me to the final statement from the
essay:Maybe the movie will experience a return to form at some point. Maybe. It would require a radical shift in priorities in the part of viewers, one I have trouble imagining. At the very least it would require millions of people to stop giving their money to these awful forms of sub-art. But people seem mostly okay with that. The problem, ultimately, isn’t that filmmakers are making these movies; it’s that moviegoers want these movies to be made. There is only so much critical analysis you can do before you run up against the hard facts of consumer choice. These new movies are not going anywhere, because moviegoers aren’t going anywhere—except to these movies, of course. Hopefully they will be rewarded with many more scenes of Avenger superheroes having cocktails together, because in this landscape there is not much else to look forward to.
While this isn’t incorrect, I do think it’s shifting blame onto people who have no power to decide what Hollywood actually makes, except indirectly.
I almost always see this argument, though. The problem isn’t with the people producing art, it’s the consumers—or lack thereof—who only want terrible garbage fed to them at terrifying velocity.
But I’ve heard from screenwriters themselves who have pitch meetings with Studios, and if they like the pitch, the first question is invariably some version of: How can we tie this into IP that we already own?
If you’re pitching a neo-noir, for example, they might ask if there’s a way to make the protagonist Batman. Or if you’re pitching a romantic comedy, they may ask you if this can, instead, be a reboot/sequel of Coming to America or Knocked Up or Crazy Rich Asians or Pretty Woman or whatever.
just this week had an essay out about the monopolization of Hollywood, which, I think, does much more to explain what’s gone wrong.
It’s not that the masses are all clambering hogs willing to gobble up the detritus of culture, but that Studio consolidation has dramatically narrowed what gets produced.
Stellan Skarsgard even discussed this exact thing a few years ago:
The relevant clip is from 28:34 to 33:06.
This is a structural analysis, of which most people tend to be allergic to, but the reason this blew up across the internet when he had the audacity to say it is because we have all been feeling this way already, for years.
As Matt Stoller puts it, one of the problems goes back to the consolidation of movie theatres themselves:
This consolidation changed movies. In the late 1990s, giant new multiplexes “jolted the Hollywood power structure,” as theater operators played the biggest hits on several screens at once. Films began to do most of their business in the first few weeks, so well-branded tent pole movies with strong IP - aka Marvel-style movies - displaced word of mouth. As Adam Mastroianni noted with this chart, movies, along with much of pop culture, became an oligopoly.
But he doesn’t stop there:
When Comcast bought NBC, Netflix, then a minor player, feared it would lose access to content from studios. So it began buying its own movies and shows, combining distribution and production as the first studio-streamer. Apple and Amazon, for whom Hollywood revenues were a rounding error, eventually entered the business. Netflix, Apple, and Amazon put pressure on the traditional studios, who were judged based on profit and loss. Studios realized Wall Street was valuing Netflix stock more highly as a ‘tech’ company. They wanted in on that as well. All except Sony followed Netflix and became studio-streamers.
But something wasn’t right with the streaming model Netflix introduced. There was no way to know ratings or box office take, since Netflix held its own data without third party auditors. Its then-CEO, Reed Hastings, pretended Netflix used its data to scientifically know what users wanted. But that wasn’t true. (See “The Algorithm is a Lie.”) Netflix was just overpaying for content, and losing money to acquire market share, a technique known as predatory pricing (that used to be illegal until the Supreme Court de facto legalized it in 1993.)
Now, I could keep quoting at length from the article, but you really should just read it yourself.
So while I think it’s comforting and self-congratulatory to say that we, the true patrons of the arts, understand what is wrong with movies, it’s just the mob of idiots filling the world that stand in the way.
It makes us, in a way, the center of the universe, while giving us a certain illusion of power. If only we could convince the dummies we know to see Oppenheimer instead of the Barbie Movie, part of what is precious could be saved.
But Barbie movie itself is not the problem. The problem is that Studios are dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into things like this Barbie movie instead of funding, like, a hundred movies from young and aspiring talented writers and directors who will make something weirder and riskier.
And so, no, I don’t believe modern audiences are to blame. I mean, a little bit they are, but the ways these big movies from recognizable and well tested IP are underperforming or even flopping is a sign that these sweating hogs are sick of eating shit.
Yes, they’ll go see the next Superman movie or the eventually rebooted Iron Man trilogy3 but only because their other options are the sequel to You’ve Got Mail—now titled something that will be immediately dated, like You’ve Been Tagged and the premise will hinge on a viral moment where the lovelorn protagonist is caught hilariously in the background during a wedding proposal and Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan will sleepwalk through cameos where they’re a cute old couple possibly giving advice to one of the romantic leads—or the sixth Bourne Identity movie now starring Kevin James or whatever Disney4—who now produces, like, half the movies made since their acquisition of Fox—keeps churning out.
The problem with Hollywood is not the audience, just like the problem with US politics isn’t that we have too much democracy5. The problem is that all the decision-making and cultural power is clenched tightly between the whiteknuckled fists of a few dozen people who own the corporations who, in turn, own most book publishers, music studios, film studios, TV studios, news organizations, and are increasingly buying up the bulk of videogames studios.
Let’s break them up and get good movies back.
And now for some free books:
The focus on dialogue is especially accurate, and something I’ve talked about here in places too varied to bother linking to
I do quite like this movie, but it is, in many ways, a sleight of hand to just repackage the Marvel structure and aesthetic into High Cinema (lol)
Probably starring a queer woman of color as a counterpoint to Tony Stark’s straight white manliness, and the movie will continually draw attention to the fact that the new Iron Man is a queer lady of color in such awkward and smug ways that it’ll produce slightly embarrassing dialogue to listen to because the people behind the camera don’t have the bold confidence required to just make a movie about a queer woman of color without snidely calling attention to itself and some movie critics out there who are pressured to churn out mountains of words every month will describe it as, like, a crucial response to the toxic masculinity of 2008’s Iron Man or a needed antidote to the social upheaval of 2028’s election of some ghoul like Ron Desantis
Don’t get me wrong, I like Disney movies, but they aren’t exactly taking risks.
lmao
Agree 100% and seldom watch any movies now. "Living" and "Banshees" were the only films I watched that were 2022.
I liked both the original essay and the response!