I was skimming through this thread last night while watching a series on the History Channel about the men who the built the automotive industry: Ford, Olds, Rolls, Royce, Bentley, Daimler, Maybach, and later on Chrysler, Porsche, Ferrari, Toyoda, Honda. The one trait they all had? They were visionaries. Certainly determined to be financially successful as well but very aware that recognition, and by extension wealth, wouldn't happen without innovation. Clearly this is the main problem with modern cinema and after watching the video just now, Chris appears to think the same. No visionary talent or perhaps more so the lack of courage of studio heads to give that visionary talent a chance.
Is there no sense of pride anymore? Are filmmakers today really satisfied with the dreck they put out?
When I was young, I thought about pursuing a career in film. My dream was to make movies of everything I grew up with from Star Wars to Superheroes to action movies to you name it. Now if I had the chance? I'd want nothing to do with any established franchise. I'd rather make something original than retread old ground. Guys like Spielberg, Scott, and Lucas thought the same. That's why they have the legacy they do. Now we live in a world of Abrams and Taika Waititi. God help us.
It seems to me so many industries have become stale. Cinema, music, radio, news, sports, TV, books, cartoons, video games all seem to have their best days behind them. It makes me wonder if there isn't a broader dilemma at work here.
Call me an optimist but I believe this will happen one day. As much as studios have muddied the quality of cinema in the past 10 years, audiences will eventually have had enough and demand something newer and better. Interestingly it was this very notion that catapulted Star Wars.
You can add my name to that list as well. I love the first Iron Man and really enjoyed the first round of movies leading up to Avengers 1 but after that it ranges from decent to awful for me with a couple of notable exceptions that were great (CA: Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy). That's not to say I hated all the subsequent movies but they were just not as interesting or memorable to me as that first round was. Like
Cephus said, it was more character driven at the beginning. The later movies were more "event" driven. I'll tell you this, with the exception of the first phase ones, I've never had a desire to rewatch any of the MCU movies. There's a couple of the recent ones I didn't even bother with at all. Phase 4? I have zero interest. The only one that intrigues me is the next Spider-Man movie and that's only because I like the premise and hopefully it means it's unattached to the rest of the MCU.
Couple of thoughts here. First, visionaries are rare in any field. We remember them
because they're visionaries. There are tons of workmanlike directors out there just shooting films but who don't get recognition. And there's tons of folks whose movies are just run of the mill films. They make money, but they aren't the films we remember.
This has always been true, especially in genre films.
Second, Taika Waititi, at least from what I've seen, is pretty terrific, and at least is bringing his own style to films as opposed to just cranking out generic schlock.
Finally, re: the whole "event vs. character"-driven film thing, that's always been true in comics, too. You get runs where there's a deeper focus on the characters, and then it's CROSSOVER TIME! because it's the time of year where we run annuals of every title and connect them to each other in one ginormous imprint-wide event. P.S., we're gonna reset the whole continuity, too, because our data shows that people cycle out of comics after about 5 years, so a roughly 5-8 year cycle for each iteration of the universe is about all we need to bother with anymore.
But there's the rub, Hollywood isn't about making art, at least the major studios aren't. They're in it to make money and have been from fairly early on, since at least the days of the old studio system. Getting as many butts into as many seats as many times they can is what the studios are about. If the movie is crap (artistically) but makes ton of money, they're happy. If the movie makes tons of money and is hailed as a masterpiece, then that's just icing on the cake for them.
This is why we get so many reboots, sequels, and prequels these days. It's easy, low risk money for them. With movies costing so much money to make these days, the big studios are unwilling or reluctant to invest a lot of money into an unknown IP. Remakes, reboots and the like bank on the name recognition which, in the minds of studio execs, is a far safer bet than something brand new.
Also, as far as movies being art is concerned, how many times have you heard people complain that when the winner of Best Picture at the Oscars is some movie that nobody has ever heard of or watched? Of course, then the next year when the big winner is some blockbuster like Titanic, you get complaints that it only won because it made tons at the box office. Damned if they do, damned if they don't.
Bingo. It's all about risk vs. reward. Most of what gets made is low-risk with the potential for high reward. There are also untapped markets in the form of China. HUGE amounts of money to be made there if you can figure out a film that can get through the censors and that the audience there likes. So, yeah, big franchises, big names, stuff people in China might have heard of so it isn't just some random American film. And that's how you make money, which is, again, always the point.
I think Mark Hamill said it best here…
“…in Hollywood, remember, kids, it’s not important that it’s high quality…only that it makes money…”
I mean, yeah, it's a business. Always has been. To the extent that there was an era in the 70s and 80s where these daring, wunderkind directors came up out of nowhere, it's more of an historical anomaly than the norm in the industry. If you grew up during that time, though, you wouldn't know any different and would assume it always worked like that. But it didn't. Hollywood has always pumped out crap, and lots of it. We just don't know about most of it (outside of, like, MST3K) because it usually ends up forgotten.
And it's not even necessarily "crap" that Hollywood puts out. It's mostly just mediocre, blah material.
Examples: When's the last time, other than at maybe a BTTF trivia night, that you thought about the film "The Secret of My Success"? Have you ever heard of or seen the film "Disorganized Crime"? Ever see the 1950 John Ford film "The Wagon Master"? How about the late 80s/early 90s Sean Connery film "Medicine Man"? Or if you're in the mood for a different jungle-themed film, the early 80s Jon Boorman film, "The Emereald Forest." Heard of these? Seen 'em? Thought about 'em in a while?
My guess is you've either never seen, or maybe even never heard of these films. And if you have, you probably haven't thought much about them in years. They're not even necessarily bad films, might even be made by acclaimed directors, but you just...don't think about 'em,
While that's true to a certain extent, Hollywood in the early days was like a coal town but the coal were films, and the studios were primarily in business to keep cinemas stocked with films. Now, you'd have a wide array of films of varying quality, but the amount of films they put out back in their hay-day, a great deal of them are considered all-time American greats, now. Before social mores and tastes changed, and the model for making films became stagnant, despite its short-comings the studio system worked in that money-making fashion and a lot of great films came from that.
"A film doesn't need to be good, but it better be." What is and isn't "good" is always up for debate, and from big films to small films, no one ever intends to make a bad film. The biggest problem for modern films, especially larger productions, stems from "good" being interpreted as satisfying the widest, broadest, largest, market available and appealing to the lowest common denominator possible. The funny thing I see parallels with the state of the current corporate system is the old Hollywood Studio system. The majority of films just for us common folk are stagnant, rigid, and unimaginative, and I believe people are looking for something else without wanting to delve into the esoteric indie-films. I think it's just hard to intellectualize and verbalize exactly what it is. People just instinctively feel what it shouldn't be. Exactly the mentality as it was then.
With the advent of streaming and ability to make something on a smaller scale and getting it out there, I think the potential of returning to form is there. The problem is that the studios just won't die when they need to, because they are just divisions of larger corporations, now; they're too big to fail. The current studio formation needs to change, the Oscars and all that extravagance to prop up the image of the industry---that's on it's way out--- and I think corporate heads see it too. That's why they're carving up the market with their own streaming services. However, cutting up the streaming market isn't helping change anything. It's gone to a worse form of cable packages. The deal with rights and licenses to many profitable films and shows, made to protect the studios in another age, is also causing another big problem.
So while I believe that all it takes is one film to start the kindling that sets the whole cinema-zeitgeist on fire, the fact that so many fingers in the streaming pie means that a lot of films that could do that are buried and are never seen. Theaters may be in danger but they are still a filter as to what's worth seeing. If there was a way to get the potential of these two together, I think there would be a huge shift in the culture akin to that of the 60's New Wave. The components are there, I just don't know what it will take and what has to be done; all the things out there that's on these platforms, they can be accessed and watched readily, but out of all of them, splashed across the marquee are the truly notable things that exist alongside your big studio monsters.
I used to think like that. I thought like that with respect to the music industry, specifically. What I believed was that the industry seemed poised for another sea-change like what happened when Nirvana hit or the Beatles or something, and I was thinking this stuff right around when the disruptive force that was file sharing first hit the scene (so, think late 90s, early 00s). But you know what? It never came. The labels all still exist, mass produced, mass consumed music is still pretty much what it's been and to the extent it's evolved, it's been the same kind of gradual evolution that dominates history, rather than the shocks to the system that upend everything, make a big splash, and we remember, but which are remembered primarily because of how they're aberrational rather than the norm.
It's the same with film. I would argue that the current mode developed as a result of the first Pirates of the Caribbean film, which began the shift towards franchise/brand driven films, possibly dating back to around 2000 when the modern iteration of comic book films began with X-Men. So that model has held true for around 20-ish years, depending on where you start counting. I expect it will continue to hold true, and that even with streaming, we won't see massive disruption. If anything, we'll see...what we're already seeing: a bifurcated phenomenon where you have the mass-appealing tentpole, franchise-driven films (e.g., Marvel films) on the one hand, and increasingly balkanized content focusing on smaller slices of the public via streaming platforms, generally produced at lower budgets, and driven primarily by data mining and trend analysis.
Because, again, at the end of the day it's all about making money and keeping the lights on.
I've always enjoyed interacting with you on here as well.
