Indiana Jones 5 officially announced
- Thread starter ghostryder
- Start date
Agreed. I think plain old audience fatigue is a big factor. Superhero burnout.
The long run of Marvel stuff in the 20-teens culminating with 'Endgame' was an anomaly. It was good, but I think that's kind of the problem. It was so good that it coaxed the audience to keep watching more superhero movies than they really wanted to. By the time it ended everyone was just overspent on the genre. At least that's how my friends and I felt about it.
Now we're in the hangover period where the studio tries to figure out why their free money-printing machine has quit working. Eventually they'll come back down to earth and realize it's not coming back. But it might be a while before they quit trying. Like, decades.
Well, nobody ever said Disney is in their right mind...
Cephus
Master Member
I'm not tired of superhero movies, I'm tired of bad movies. If they made a good superhero movie, I'd see it. I saw GotG3. It was fine. Most are just crap though. I also didn't much care for Endgame. It became nothing but CGI porn and too many characters to deal with. I much prefer smaller, tighter films that aren't stupid sky beams and CGI stupidity.
That's the stuff they're not making.
Paul Andrew
Master Member
I'm not sure it's burnout as much as it's just difficult to shift gears from huge climactic story to mostly a new run of origin stories.
In the comics you would often get kind of a breather issue where you got to see the characters reflect on the new (old) status quo and then hook you on the last page with the emergence of a new conflict.
You can't have a whole movie (or series of movies) dedicated to catching your breath. The medium just isn't suited for it.
I was definitely ready for a new movie after the COVID delays subsided, but I don't think they did a good enough job getting people invested in the new slate of heroes. They really kneecapped themselves in a way, by giving Cap and Tony their perfect exits it precluded them from having those characters around in the background to bolster the new roster.
I dunno. I'm rambling a bit.
Indiana Jones was decent enough, even if the deaging was a bit dodgier than I expected.
In the comics you would often get kind of a breather issue where you got to see the characters reflect on the new (old) status quo and then hook you on the last page with the emergence of a new conflict.
You can't have a whole movie (or series of movies) dedicated to catching your breath. The medium just isn't suited for it.
I was definitely ready for a new movie after the COVID delays subsided, but I don't think they did a good enough job getting people invested in the new slate of heroes. They really kneecapped themselves in a way, by giving Cap and Tony their perfect exits it precluded them from having those characters around in the background to bolster the new roster.
I dunno. I'm rambling a bit.
Indiana Jones was decent enough, even if the deaging was a bit dodgier than I expected.
Cephus
Master Member
I stopped reading comics for the same reason I stopped watching most movies. Because they're crap. I didn't leave comics and movies, they left me.
Paul Andrew
Master Member
I had exactly the opposite experience. I read comics religiously from 91-'07 and when I stopped it was because the titles I was reading hadn't grown with me.
Not to say they were without value, every comic is someone's first, but they felt like rehashes of the same stories I'd been reading for over a decade. I couldn't fault them for being the same thing they always were, but my own tastes were changing.
ScourgiousJinx
Master Member
I had a very similar experience except I started religiously reading comics in the mid '80s. Then one day I just felt like a different person reading the same redundant stories.
I like that you recognize that comics have value even if not for you. I think that's an important message that often gets lost here. Our own opinions and thoughts about what is good and what has value (comic, film, show, book whatever it may be) are not the end all be all for everyone else.
A problem I've decided I have with most comics, I don't retain the stories over the years like movies. You read them, bag and board 'em so they will last for millienia so George Taylor can find them in the beach sand, and they are forgotten in the long box. Very few I would go back and re-read, And damn they are insane expensive, as one of my late comic store owners used to say, comics pretty much track a gallon of gas. And then they are worth their weight in paper when you walk out the door with them. LOL
Laspector
Master Member
I stopped buying super hero comics around 1991. I just didn't see the point anymore. These days, if I'm going to sit down with a bowl of cereal, I find I get much more pleasure out of my old Uncle Scrooge, Richie Rich, Dennis the Menace, and Archie comics.
I still have all my old super hero comics, I just find that I read them less and less these days.
I still have all my old super hero comics, I just find that I read them less and less these days.
Solo4114
Master Member
I actually think this is where the TV shows make sense. They provide the opportunity for a smaller-scale, lower-stakes, more contained story, but one that can be told over multiple hours. But it's worth noting that the films aren't exactly "catching their breath." I mean, in terms of the multi-film-long arcs, they are. But they're still individual stories with action and stakes involved in each film. They just don't feel as connected or as if they're building towards anything (well, up until the new Ant-Man film they hadn't).
The difficulty, I think, is that people expect stakes like Thanos, and they just aren't getting it. Their memories are short, and they can't put themselves back to, say, 2009/2010 when the biggest thing we were building towards was "We're gonna make a team." Now we're kind of back in that same state, and audiences just don't care. For that matter, they don't even see the "team" forming.
Yeah, but I think that it worked better for their stories and offered a chance at a real exit for them. But right now it does feel like Endgame was kind of the end of the MCU, and what we're seeing afterwards is almost a new universe in the same setting, if that makes sense. There isn't the kind of continuity between the old and the new, and as a result, people just aren't as invested in these characters.
For me, the experience with comics was probably similar but set in different decades. I went from buying issues at the drug store here and there in the 80s to hitting the comic shop in the late 80s/early 90s and discovering titles that I really wanted to collect, to totally burning out with my first big "title shift." I was into the X-men back in the 80s/early 90s, and had pretty much ignored most other titles just for them. At that point, there were basically three main books: The Uncanny X-Men, X-Factor, and New Mutants. I really only paid attention to the first two, and then mostly to just the first one. There were other books like Wolverine and Alpha Flight, but they mostly kept to themselves and didn't interact with each other.
And then 1991 hit.
That was the point at which they exploded into, like, 6 different titles, each publishing monthly, each with storylines carrying over between the titles. You had X-men, The Uncanny X-Men, X-Factor, New Mutants, Excalibur, Wolverine, Alpha Flight, etc., etc., and right with the first storyline, I just...dropped off. I couldn't afford it. I was a kid with an allowance that let me buy maybe 1-2 comics a month, and I couldn't afford to be buying 31 different titles just to figure out what the hell was happening in the story.
That was also the point at which I discovered Dark Horse comics, and started collecting the old Classic Star Wars series, Knights of the Old Republic, and some others. But from that point forward, all of my comics consumption was either sporadic at best, or consisted of much later in life picking up TPBs and getting caught up on this or that storyline. And that's pretty much how I interact with them now. I'll grab a TPB once in a while and read it, but I don't collect (except for the stuff I still have from the old days, most of which is in crap condition and is largely worthless).
But I think that's often how it goes. Either you can't afford the habit, or you just age out of it. You stick with a story for a while, with a group of characters, or whathaveyou, and then after about 3-5 years, they switch creative teams (new writers, new artists), and you realize that it just doesn't give you what you want anymore, and you move on.
robstyle
Master Member
I've glanced over, super speed read, the prior super hero talk here and it's very relevant to what Dial of Destiny suffered from, genric formula, rinse and repeat, bland action, bigger set pieces....
I'll refer again to what Tom Holland (writer and director Tom Holland) once told me about what killed films in the 80's, Big corporations came in and believed they could make movies like they make products. And they did, and we're in the long term end run of that era. It peaked, it took many years but it peaked. And the downward spiral is epic. The issue is those big corporations own the industry. They can afford to take the hit, restructure, and burn it all down time and again. We're at the cusp of the helix and the next big thing in pop culture. Nobody yet knows what the next big thing is but it's coming. The 90's helix was pulp crime movies and grunge. Nobody seen it coming, not even those involved in creating the content.
Hopefully the next change in pop culture is a return to indie film making and lower budgets. $300 million on one movie, those in charge of allowing that to happen, heads need to roll.
I'll refer again to what Tom Holland (writer and director Tom Holland) once told me about what killed films in the 80's, Big corporations came in and believed they could make movies like they make products. And they did, and we're in the long term end run of that era. It peaked, it took many years but it peaked. And the downward spiral is epic. The issue is those big corporations own the industry. They can afford to take the hit, restructure, and burn it all down time and again. We're at the cusp of the helix and the next big thing in pop culture. Nobody yet knows what the next big thing is but it's coming. The 90's helix was pulp crime movies and grunge. Nobody seen it coming, not even those involved in creating the content.
Hopefully the next change in pop culture is a return to indie film making and lower budgets. $300 million on one movie, those in charge of allowing that to happen, heads need to roll.
At the rate hollyweird is going, expect them to remake Jack and the Beanstalk, complete with lens flares, explosions and a woke message about becoming vegans "to save the Earth"
Too bad George Lucas never followed through with his dream of creating a studio (if that's even the right word) for small art films. He was all about working outside the system, and then he just did the big stuff. (Granted, he did help a lot of smaller films get made by being a silent exec producer, etc, like Body Heat.)
Cephus
Master Member
Would not be at all surprised.At the rate hollyweird is going, expect them to remake Jack and the Beanstalk, complete with lens flares, explosions and a woke message about becoming vegans "to save the Earth"
At the rate hollyweird is going, expect them to remake Jack and the Beanstalk, complete with lens flares, explosions and a woke message about becoming vegans "to save the Earth"
Except it would be "Jaqueline and the Organically Grown, Free-Range Beanstalk" with the Cloud Giant Kingdom replaced with a boardroom full of stupid, poopy headed man-children
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