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The root cause of this is basically Hollywood (i.e. who makes what gets shown in your local multiplex) has given up on making movies exclusively for American audiences. You need a global audience, and you need the potential to get a billion dollars + in revenue. E.G. as he points out comedies have died, that's because comedy is highly localized versus the kids movies + adventure plots which are more universal. End result is everything gets boiled down to its rawest, most accessible elements and everything feels samey.

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> End result is everything gets boiled down to its rawest, most accessible elements and everything feels samey.

This is basically what is referred to in the industry as "high concept." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_concept

Bob Iger, Ex-CEO of Disney, was a big proponent of high concept movies. You can read more about it in the screenwriting book, Save the Cat. https://www.amazon.com/Save-Last-Book-Screenwriting-Youll/dp...

> The root cause of this is basically Hollywood

this is what i've started calling the "it takes one to tango" fallacy, where an issue has two responsible parties but only one gets blame. hollywood's not forcing people to spend their money on mass-produced uninspired movies - worse! thats what people pay to go see!

Sure, the consumer does have some degree of influence here, but they're still picking from the menu of options the studio makes available.

If someone likes movies as recreation, even if they would prefer something different than the action blockbusters, their choices are "don't enjoy yourself to send a message to the studios" or "watch a movie you might enjoy less than something from another genre"... most people who enjoy watching movies are probably gonna chose the route that still lets them enjoy watching a movie.

The incentives don't line up. Its like buying McDonalds at an isolated highway rest stop - I don't particularly love McDonalds, but if my choices are a hot meal or whatever I can get from a vending machine or pack with me, I'll take the hot meal every time. Its not an enthusiastic endorsement of globalized fast food chains despite my paying for it.

> The incentives don't line up.

this is again "it takes one to tango" - the people create the incentives the studios follow. movies largely make money with sales volume. this is important; tickets arent more expensive for different movies, its strictly a numbers game (ignoring uncommon deals like toys and video games, etc). according to the first link i clicked, marvel's last movie infinity war grossed two BILLION dollars. you are simply wrong if you think some novel, avant-garde sundance indie is going to interest that many people.

the world is the way people want it to be. this is the tyranny of the majority. if we want non-incentivized things to exist, we're gonna have to invent new socioeconomic theories in this movie thread : )

You are assuming a fair and competitive market where the consumer is actually in charge. False assumption.

The world is the way the people with money want it to be, because it’s the lowest effort, most extractive model they can legally get away with. That’s not to say people didn’t like Endgame, but we all could have done without the last 3 or 4 Transformer movies. There are plenty of examples of trash movies that only get made because the story is watered down enough to pass globally.

The entire premise here is a bit odd to me; are people forced to spend their time and money watching a sub-par movie? Couldn't they watch one of the innumerable television shows that are available, watch YouTube, older movies, etc., etc.? The comparison made above to having to eat McDonald's in a desert doesn't make any sense in this context since that is talking about needing life-supporting nutrients in a literal desert.

Invert it. I want to watch a movie in theaters because that's a treasured pasttime. What's available to see is what's most profitable to the producer (which is measured globally), rather than what's pleasing to the customer (which is measured locally). It doesn't matter that there are alternative avenues - we're talking about a specific, consolidated economic sector that is behaving irrationally at the local level.

I didn't write the McDonald's thing, so I'm not gonna try to contextualize it.

I understand your frustration but I still cannot get past the point that, generally speaking, an individual must make a specific, conscious, and unforced series of decisions in order to repeatedly end up in front of movies that they dislike. Their decisions must also by necessity happen in a context where there are many other media options available.

I also enjoy the cinema but I only go when there are films that I find interesting and worthwhile. In my specific case this means that over the past few years I've seen Parasite, a showing of the original Alien, a few midnight B-tier horror movies, etc. I don't get to go to the movies as often as I would prefer but the alternative of wasting my time on films that I don't find attractive while simultaneously financially supporting an industry I disagree with seems obviously non-viable to me.

> I understand your frustration but I still cannot get past the point that, generally speaking, an individual must make a specific, conscious, and unforced series of decisions in order to repeatedly end up in front of movies that they dislike.

That seems like another odd assumption to make. It doesn't need to be based on individual choices, social dynamics drive plenty of decision making [1]. FWIW, I've only seen 1 new movie this year, and I only plan to see 1 other, so it's not like I disagree with you at an individual level. That's not how it works out in the larger population though - for many people it's their leisure activity of choice.

[1] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox

Lots of people go to movies to go out with a group of friends. They have to agree on the movie, and don't each pick their own one. They enjoy spending time together maybe more than they enjoy the actual movie.

If there's nothing in movie theaters but trash, but your culture values movie-going experience, then you have no choice but either watch trash or forgo this part of your cultural experience altogether. I've been choosing the latter for years now, but I can understand people that choose the former - because I still miss the experience. I'd love to go back to it - but not with trash.

The McDonalds analogy is actually better than you think - imagine by some market quirk most of the restaurants in your city hired chefs that suck at their job. Because, say, The American Culinary Institute declared food is not supposed to taste good, it is supposed to send the right message, and the taste is secondary. It's not like the food isn't edible or harmful anymore - it still delivers the nutrition, and still kinda edible, but sucks. Ignoring the fact you could cook for yourself - let's imagine for a minute you have to dine out - what would you do? You'd go and eat sucky food. And since you do, the business model is provably working. Maybe if the whole town agreed to not eat out for a couple of months as a protest against sucky food, it could be changed - but what are the chances of that actually happening?

Another way of wording this is there's plenty of sequels that play to the long tail of fans of the original who will see anything relating to it

The consumer is in charge of what movies they see. To suppose otherwise assigns people no agency: it's easy to do when it's others, but, it's not a valid way of analyzing it.

I see this as a slippery slope argument that supposes any people who choose to see movies are drowned out by zombies who see only what ads tell them to see and think they're happy, but they're actually not

> The consumer is in charge of what movies they see

No they are not. The consumer is in charge of what they see given the options available. If what the consumer wants is not being produced, then the consumer is choosing the least-bad option (which is sometimes to choose a different activity).

I agree, and the next step would be to argue if there's _any_ options that pass arrosenberg's 'bad' filter, and I feel it gets awkward from there: I can't tell you what passes your filter. I respect your opinion and often say as much myself, but the argumentation is weak in several areas

In general I agree with you. But I think you're committing the fallacy illustrated by the following joke:

Two economists go walking down the street. One of them looks down and says, "is that a $100 bill on the sidewalk?". The other economist says, "it can't be, someone would have picked it up already", so they ignore it and walk on by.

Hollywood is controlled by a small number of corporate conglomerates, many of which have their hands in too many pies to keep track of. Their movies are largely stagnating, which is probably creating an opportunity for better movies to capture an outsized share of the market. Some day, some of those movies are going to come out and make a lot of money. Studios will scramble to react and get stuck in a newer and more different rut.

This is the same kind of cycle that Hollywood has gone through over and over again since the beginning. We're just in the trough of the cycle.

>but they're still picking from the menu of options the studio makes available.

They're often not, just choosing whatever gets more promoted.

"Nothing" is the common denominator of everything. Mass market movies are attempting to reach this perfect "nothing".

Yeah i guess the root root cause is TV + streaming competition has squeezed them so much that's the only way to get people to come out to the multiplex.

Edit: Well since I introduced the idea of a "root cause" I concede the truth is the root cause of all business decisions is, has been, and always will be market forces.

I know more than a handful of people who complain about Hollywood originality, but only go to the theater for Marvel or Star Wars movies.

Or who only go to see a movie that has 80% on Rotten Tomatoes (unless its a franchise movie).

The real problem is that TV killed the middle-rung movie. All that is left is blockbuster spectacle (which costs too much to take risks with) or art house stuff.

> The real problem is that TV killed the middle-rung movie

I nodded away to your last paragraph, but then I thought about my old Saturday job at an independent cinema. We charged £2.50 for a ticket (now £3.50, just checked; about US$3.50 & $5 in today's), the money was in the snacks, and of course it is in major chains too.

I think the real problem is consumer perception/treatment of cinemas as expensive rare treats comparable (in price) to going to a theatre. Which they are, at major chains fully laden with snacks, but don't have to be. Television is no doubt a contributor to that image of cinema, but not I think in itself the cause of this.

> I think the real problem is consumer perception/treatment of cinemas as expensive rare treats comparable (in price) to going to a theatre.

My happiest relationship with film was when I was able to go to the movies every week (some weeks even twice!). I was going alone, during the week, to independent movie theaters that charge 4-5€. It's a great experience, even if you don't love the movie. It never feels like a ripoff.

The main problem IMO is that people don't want to get out of their comfort zone (and lack time/interest to find new stuff they might like). But of course when tickets are 15€ instead of 4€ people are much less willing to take the risk.

The price of popcorn and a soda/pop at one of the big cinemas is comparable in price to a movie with dinner at one of the local places that serves a meal with the movie. Given the choice, I know what my dinner-and-a-movie date night choice is.

What we are paying for as consumers is the experience, but the experience keeps getting worse, and the price keeps going up. I suspect this is also part of what's killing the drive-in theaters too.

>The real problem is that TV killed the middle-rung movie.

You're 70 years too late. Life magazine in 1957 talked about how one of the consequences of the Hollywood studio system (from both TV, and the 1948 Paramount antitrust case) was the death of the "million-dollar mediocrity" (<https://books.google.com/books?id=Nz8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA146>):

"It wasn't good entertainment and it wasn't art, and most of the movies produced had a uniform mediocrity, but they were also uniformly profitable ... The million-dollar mediocrity was the very backbone of Hollywood".

The "million-dollar mediocrity" died because the Paramount case forbade block booking, in which studios required that theaters purchase said mediocrities to also buy big films. Original TV movies appeared in the 1960s but their budgets and production values were too low to really fill the hole in Hollywood, but today's streaming companies' insatiable appetite for content has opened a new outlet for middle-tier films (and, more importantly, series).

> today's streaming companies' insatiable appetite for content has opened a new outlet for middle-tier films (and, more importantly, series)

Also consider that a home entertainment room has a comfort and quality level that surpasses that of a typical budget [movie] theater (though I've been to a more luxurious theater that I would gladly pay money for even if I had a proper home theater -- it was that good).

What I miss by staying at home and watching a Netflix film is the social aspect, and after the past 14 months, I think people are hungry for that. It's fun to cheer when your favorite star makes a cameo, or sing along to a Disney musical. If someone could figure out how to market it, I think there's money to be made there.

> "it takes one to tango"

Love it.

Every US movie watcher could stop watching certain movies and the studios would still make a lot more money globally than a US centric comedy, for example.

The consumer does not have that much power. The individual consumer almost certainly doesn’t.

Don't forget product placement and merchandise sales; those can pretty significantly offset the cost of making a movie. Ticket sales are becoming a smaller and smaller piece of the pie over time.

To assign blame to diffuse 'consumers' as well as the Hollywood/politicians/FAANG/manufacturers/international megacorporations that are the other side of whatever 'it takes two to tango' issue, the consumers need to have the capability to effectively communicate their demands back to their partner in the trap. Not only do they need the capability, they also need the expectation that the communication will be heard, else there is no reason to do it. But that line of communication is lost at large scales. Maybe a few purists will make a principled stand for nuanced, poignant, artistic, deep films, against the degeneration of the film industry towards bland, repetitive, shallow superhero rehashes, and will refuse to buy a ticket. But capturing those ticket sales would likely mean that more casual viewers didn't bother with the more difficult films. The only number that matters to Hollywood in the end is the box office gross sales; artistic purity is either counterproductive or immeasurable in that context and therefore irrelevant.

I want to make responsible choices, and want to reject bland movies, or disposable packaging, or privacy-invading ad trackers, or greenhouse gassy lifestyle choices, or any number of similar issues. And I do make personal sacrifices that reflect these preferences. But I fully expect that Hollywood will continue to churn out uninspired movies, that the 'local' Walmart and, shortly thereafter, the landfill will contain almost as much plastic as product, that websites will increasingly pack their pages with ever-more-invasive trackers, that people will still live in single-family housing with multiple internal-combustion vehicles and long commutes.

To be clear, I believe the blame actually lies with neither of the dancers, but with the system in which they operate. You can't expect the biggest studios like Universal/Paramount/Warner Bros/Disney/Columbia to make any decisions other than those which they're incentivized to make. They have no reason to do so, and if they did, they'd soon be replaced by a competitor who didn't. A corporation is not a moral entity, it's essentially an AI that attempts to maximize quarterly financial numbers, you can only expect it to act in the narrow context of incentives and consequences on which it operates. That cultural/social/political/economic context is the enemy, not any individual consumer and not any individual corporation.

You're simultaneously claiming that movie viewers have no way to communicate and that Hollywood listens very hard to ticket sales. I think you'll have to pick one.

I agree these are systemic problems, but I think it's a giant mistake to absolve a corporation's execs and employees for moral responsibility for their actions. The social context is also part of the system, and it's one of the easiest parts to change.

It's simultaneously true that a single individual cannot communicate and that the actions of a diffuse, uncoordinated population are heard. That population can always be expected to contain a lot of uninformed, irrational consumers. "But what if everyone simultaneously thought very carefully about they want to consume" is not a thing that will ever happen and therefore not a valid solution.

I don't absolve executives of moral guilt, they're clearly doing something wrong. I distinguish between this condition of being in the wrong with the condition of being to blame or responsible for the result. They are guilty, but if they didn't make the call, there will always be another greedy, narcisistic, power-hungry sociopath ready to take their place in the boardroom. "But what if all executives in the entire competitive industry rejected the cash grab and instead made the moral choice" is also not a thing that will ever happen and therefore not a valid solution.

Without a mechanism for coordination, neither consumers nor producers can effect change; the system is all that's left to blame. Therefore, instead of moralizing or advocating individual action, we should build mechanisms to help people coordinate, work to shift the Overton window, and change the system to incentivize the behaviors you want, building very carefully to make sure that your changes are self-reinforcing.

Movies aren't made for single individuals, so I'm not sure why you think explicit communication from a single individual is the important kind of communication here.

Who gets to decide that the consumers are uninformed and irrational? I presume that's you judging people for their tastes? In my view people are in fact pretty good at picking the kind of entertainment they want.

A lot of critics complaining about mass tastes seem to have not thought through what is economically viable in mass media. The complaint is effectively, "I, a discerning person who had studied this medium, want different things out of it than casual consumers." Which is almost tautological. What restaurant critic goes to McDonald's and complains that the food's not amazing? Its job isn't to amaze the kind of person who becomes a restaurant critic.

But there is a mechanism for coordination. You're using it. Fans use it all the time to push entertainment industries in directions the like. In my view, that this isn't happening with film is not because of lack of communication. It's that the number of movie tickets sold peaked in 2007: https://www.the-numbers.com/market/

Innovation has moved away from the dying medium because the economic incentives for film have shifted.

> That cultural/social/political/economic context is the enemy

quite right! what to do?

i usually dead-end with some question like "how to reverse incentives" or "forcibly generated counter-incentives" or "inherently diversified incentive portfolios". i wonder if we need some kind of knights-errant (justicars from mass effect), agents small in number but large in power to correct wrongs.

in daniel suarez's freedom, there is a meter/gauge that measures the concentration of power. the desired state is not diffuse OR centralized, but in the middle. you need both. the public needs power to be involved and feel involved, but there is not always time for a decision by committee and there is a time for prompt, decisive action.

I think this is ignoring the problem of the global market. Studios found that it was more profitable to cater to multiple countries and cultures simultaneously.

For example, even if 100% of America went to see a film, that only represents approximately 1/3 of China's population. As a studio, ignoring that market would be seen as throwing away money. So you will see immense pressure to make your movie marketable in China as well as America.

Even if many American consumers choose to watch a film catering to them that studio would still be pressured to view that film as a commercial failure.

It doesn't seem to matter so much what the local consumers want since their demand is dwarfed by global demand.

Hmmm. So who gets the blame for sugary drinks, snacks and other unhealthy junk food? The peddler or the consumer?

I do blame consumers as well. Lowest common denominator consumers are absolutely to blame for their exceptionally poor taste. Unfortunately, they happen to be the majority of consumers.

This opinion simply doesn't get expressed very often. People think it's elitism or something and react negatively to it.

One party in the equation is a very powerful, profitable industry, the other is a huge but atomized group of people.

To assume that the only power dynamic at play is consumers making individual choices as fully rational, considerate actors is a vast oversimplification. Your equation isn’t more even, you’ve just flipped the one side, assuming that consumers have all the power and Hollywood is just haplessly following demand.

Yes, lowest common denominator viewers are the biggest purchasing group, and that’s the money that Hollywood is chasing. But that was true before. What changed isn’t the same consumers demanding more Avengers and less art films, but Hollywood setting their sights on the global audience, thus increasing the market for generic movies a hundred fold. Now the incentives are so skewed towards that group that the individual American consumer has next to zero power in influencing Hollywood’s direction with their dollars.

You also ignore the power of advertising and limited choice. Marketing can and does create an audience of consumers that didn’t exist before. It’s not about “here are my products, now you choose the best” it’s “here are my products and I will subtly convince you that you need them.” Consumers are not rational actors in a classical sense of going to a market for a specific need and picking the best product from a wide selection. Marketing is sufficiently advanced that the owner of a supply can also create demand for it.

Finally, Hollywood also controls the selection of choices. So as others have pointed out, people who would prefer smarter films have to forego movies altogether if they really want to “vote with their dollars.” So they might still choose a sub par movie if they like the theater and their friends want to go.

PS: I’m not advocating for a solution, so much as I am pointing out that there’s more to market forces than a simplistic libertarian view of the market can offer. I think in this case it’s inevitable and Hollywood movies are just gonna be like that now. But there’s more at play than “oh well, consumers chose it!”

Hollywood certainly involved, but I think something closer to the root cause is that the number of tickets sold for films in the US peaked in 2007: https://www.the-numbers.com/market/

I think the root cause of the ticket shift is technological: cheaper screens, higher resolutions, better bandwidth. People have lots of entertainment at home.

So what does that shift mean? Execs get risk-averse in flat/contracting markets, which alone would account for some of the perceived decline. Artists and execs who are excited for innovation/risk are going to move toward expanding market segments, meaning toward streaming.

Also important here is who is buying tickets. 20 years ago I would happily haul my ass out to an art-house theater to see something novel and interesting. Now it's almost all available from my couch; the hard problem is picking something. More educated audiences are more likely to have the money and technology to watch from home, making niche theater-distributed films even riskier.

What's still going to work in theaters? Things with mass appeal and audiences, especially ones that take advantage of the kind of sound/video that most people don't have at home. Things where audiences know what they're getting. Of the top 20 films from 2019, 18 were related to existing IP, and the other two were from famous directors: https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/2019/

That’s an interesting. It seems then that French cinema, or European cinema in general is more localized and thus rarely becomes an international blockbuster (with rare exceptions).

Mexico tends to export to Latin America (southern cone) altho one could argue that while there are regional differences, in broad strokes mainstream latam culture jives with each other.

Industry knows that. Netflix did damage to the industry (and ultimately to themselves) according to the actual Hollywood. Lynda Obst talks about it here (how Netflix did damage): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_oHW31jQfg I recommend watching the full interview, it gets to the bottom of it.

It's why we don't see many satirical films in the same vein as Robocop and Starship Troopers anymore. It would be something that the Chinese censors would never allow. Whether it's the over the top violence or the skewering of the state and corporate power structure. Stuff like that annoys the Chinese govt more than most, so Hollywood would just bow out on such a film

It's funny how many strange one off films and games are being made online through crowd funding now (not all are good but a few are decent) due to this global pleaser approach to film making.

Why would Chinese censors have a problem with films making fun of American capitalism and imperialism?

I don't think the modern Paul Verhoeven would be poking fun at just America. I think that hypothetical director would be poking fun at China and its attempts to bully other nation states in Africa and the world as well. That enough would throw it in the "not in China" camp of films.

Robocop and Starship Troopers were criticizing ideology and norms that are widely yet unconsciously accepted in America. That's why they're good.

Anti-rival sniping is comparatively boring and we're all steeped in it all the time, anyways. It's the furthest thing from counterculture.

Because people might view it as making fun of Chinese capitalism and imperialism.

Avatar was viewed by some as being about problems in China relating to demolishing people's existing homes to build new buildings in their place. There was some discussion at the time that they only allowed it due to being the top grossing movie of all time.

“Good films get smaller audiences, but more of the viewer.” - Jean-Luc Godard

Comedies have most certainly not died. They've just changed in tone.

A few highlights from the last decade — Booksmart is a very different take on the teenage buddy comedy. Jojo Rabbit and The Death of Stalin are some of the darkest black comedies I've ever watched, which would never have gotten made in the 90s. Birdman is completely surreal. The Grand Budapest Hotel is one of most joyous films to watch I know of, and The Artist is a comedic love letter to the silent era.

Booksmart was the first thing I thought of too when he said, “since 2012, the only successful comedies have been animations aimed at young children.” (edit: I mean to say, you can still see movies with originality even if they're not "successful" i.e. blockbusters)

In 2018 when I originally got AMC A-list subscription, I tried going to 3 movie a week at first, so I went to a lot more movies I was unsure about but they were very original and memorable, but they weren’t super popular (at least I was the only person I personally knew who had seen it).

Sorry to Bother You ($18 million)

Blackkklansman ($93 million)

Eighth Grade ($14 million)

Crazy Rich Asians ($238 million)

Sorry to Bother You was so interesting, especially how they approached the first 2 acts. It was like a surrealist version of Do the right Thing. the 3rd act is well, it's different and while it doesn't live up to the build up... it's unforgettable .

I concur. Sorry to Bother You was a really good movie. It is often missed how good this movie actually is. I feel like there needs to be a louder conversation on how brilliant this movie is in so many ways.

Blackkklansman was brilliant

The Death of Stalin is one of the funniest things I have seen in a long time. Cannot recommend enough. Sorry I don't have much more to add, but it's so good I wanted to add my recommendation to the pile

I don't think even that is true. There's plenty of fairly mainstream successful comedies. Jumanji comes to mind.

That was... 26 years ago?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumanji:_Welcome_to_the_Jungle

Fifth highest grossing film of 2017

Sequel did very well as well

For sure. Or look at things like Knives Out or Thor: Ragnarok. Solid comedies both and mass-market successes.

The notion that people can't be funny anymore just because they can no longer use particular groups as punchlines is just lazy. A great example is Get Out. It's a lot of things, but it can reasonably be called a comedy: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/11/jordan-peele-ge...

Or look at Sorry to Bother You: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorry_to_Bother_You

I thought both of these movies were hilarious, and they worked with extremely "challenging" social topics.

As an old, when people start talking about movies were only funny back in the day, I suspect they just imprinted on whatever was funny in their youth. Time moves on, and humor has to move with it.

You're not helping your argument though.

Those were great films, however, they were niche.

'Superbad' was a big, hollywood thing. A cultural touchstone that we remember, make jokes about, memes.

Very few people ever saw Booskmart or The Death of Stalin.

The Globalization of Hollywood - and increased cultural sensitivities have changed this.

Comedy doesn't cross borders as well as Thor.

Without going into details, cultural sensitivities and fear of Twitter mobs is a 'fundamental' issue. It's not a side issue it's a primary driver. Have a listen to the podcasts and talks by various comedy writers, you can see the evolution.

People with power have their knives out to destroy others - some of them obviously need to be cancelled, and some others raise some questions, but there are very, very few left with the power to make the jokes they want. Everyone else has to kowtow in fear. Comedy requires 'absolute safe spaces' in order to work, particularly writers rooms, which, if we could record what they say ... my god we'd all be offended.

I'm hoping that this will just be a 'phase' but I'm afraid it may not be as the issues overlay with ostensibly historical issues of social justice, and as soon as we broach that domain, everything becomes deadly serious and we all act like good corporate citizens.

It may very well take an established 'provider' like a different kind of Netflix with a different set of sensibilities.

Edit: listen to Tina Fey and Judd Apatow podcasts and less public interviews, they hint at the shift while being very polite about it.

Death of Stalin, Booksmart, Jojo Rabbit are definitely smaller independent comedies, but compare:

    The Artist:        $130M gross, $15M budget
    Knives Out:        $311M gross, $40M budget
    Birdman:           $100M gross, $18M budget
    Grand Budapest:    $173M gross, $25M budget
    Midnight in Paris: $154M gross, $17M budget
    Superbad:          $170M gross, $20M budget

All of those are in the same rough ballpark, but Superbad had 70% of its box office revenue in the US+Canada.

Compare Grand Budapest and Birdman, which only saw 40% of their takings in NA. Midnight in Paris comes in at 37%, and, as a European production, The Artist saw only 35%-ish of its revenue in NA. Even Knives Out, the most hollywood-y of the lot, came in at 53% revenue from NA.

Superbad is a Hollywood movie with Hollywood sensibilities, so it obviously performed best in the US, and it's obviously become a cultual touchstone there — but I personally only even heard about it relatively recently. All the other films performed much better elsewhere so obviously don't seem to have had as much of a cultural impact from a US-centric perspective.

I don't understand what point you are making?

1) Superbad was sleeper hit - it did well in the theatres but far better in the long run. It launched a bunch of careers into the mainstream. It's also a broad comedy.

It was no more or less 'Hollywood' than the films you listed.

2) The films you listed are mostly Oscar Winners - which get a massive, global boost from that kind of exposure. They're also 100% 'artsy' kind of comedies made by highly respected auteurs - they're not broad comedies like Airplane or Animal House (or Superbad).

3) They're also mostly from the 2000's era, in which the general point is being made about 'challenging to make comedies' these days.

4) I don't think the box office differential rally helps that much as conceivably Superbad is going to naturally appeal a little bit more to North American audiences for the reasons you stated.

Here is a Hollywood reporter take on it [1] the decline of comedy is not a controversial idea.

"It’s been a decade since any comedy launched a blockbuster franchise. "

"The studios have backed away from comedies, just as they have mid-budget dramas, perceiving both as far harder to sell than tentpoles. "

"Even a comedy superstar like Will Ferrell has had trouble getting movies made. “It’s becoming a little finicky,” he told the podcast Armchair Expert in early June. “I’ve recently come across things where I thought, ‘Boy, what a great idea,’ and went around town and everyone just went, ‘Nope.’ “"

...

[1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/comedy-b...

Comedy is way too broadly defined. Maybe my definition of comedy is too narrow, but I at least expect to laugh out loud during a comedy once in a while. Too many comedies lately just reach for the "cynicism" and "dark comedy" tools rather than genuinely make you laugh. Another thread put it better: We need more slapstick. We need more irreverence. We need a modern Mel Brooks or David Zucker / Leslie Nielsen combo to come back and show moviegoers how to totally run out of breath laughing again. Be able to poke fun at people, or companies, or institutions, or at least something outside of politics, and not worry so much about the Twitter mob sharpening their knives.

Apparently you couldn’t make a Mel Brooks film back when Mel Brooks was active either because hate mobs[1].

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62cPPSyoQkE

What you're referring to is 'broad comedy' - and that's my point. They don't make them in a big way.

The films listed above are not 'broad comedies' they're comedy/dramas.

I'm not sure of the 'Mel Brooks is not an argument' (link in one of the responses) is a defence at all, because the fact is, he took excessive risks while trying to make a point, risks which would not be made today.

He was Jewish and took on very serious issues with Nazis ... but he definitely was not Black, and Blazing Saddles ... wold be too much for today.

By all accounts, Tropic Thunder would not get made today because of the ostensibly 'blackface' character - I think that's a really good 'threshold' to analyze because while I don't think the character is generally offensive and most wouldn't see it as that - but it's definitely going to be for some, to the point where Execs just couldn't back making the movie. There's going to be guaranteed outrage, and that outrage, if the press decides to amplify it, will kill a film and have all the parties involved running scared with apologies.

The Kids in the Hall (Kevin McDonald) indicated they couldn't make what they made today. They did indicate they got pushback back in the day from some of their bits that mocked religion - particularly from the US - but they still got to make it, which is the point.

Casting for any role which involves 'mixed' anything is a minefield which risks overthrowing a project. The casting of Cleopatra (who was Macedonian), caused controversy by people speaking on behalf of ... Ancient Egyptians? Whom even modern Egyptians could hardly make a claim to?

There's a lot of good talk about having more people from different backgrounds in roles, and especially have them among rank and file production, which is obviously good, but this should be a different theme from say, what jokes are acceptable and not.

Those are different kinds of issues that are getting crossed up in a cacophony of Twitter noise.

HBO, Disney and Netflix are not interested in creative expression, they're inserted in products, broader audiences, and films that speak to their choice narratives. If you listen to some podcasts you can hear the opinions of these executives themselves speak about it. These are not your 'creativity first' type of people.

Cable TV has always allowed for a narrow set of channels that challenged conventions, kind of a 'Late Night Loophole' in which naughty stuff was tolerated. We need this equivalent for streaming sources. We need an 'Adult Swim' version of Netflix that invests heavily in outrageous things.

Blackkklansman was a relatively big budged film starring popular actors and made by an established director back in 2018, Spike Lee, and oh boy did he take risks. Despite being a historic drama/comedy the movie ends with the horrors of the Trump presidency. Just like Mel Brooks, the message is pretty obvious. Despite these risks this movie was aired in most big cinemas throughout the USA for several weeks (just like any other big budged drama/comedy would).

Casting: I don’t remember a time when casting didn’t cause the hate mobs to go haywire. When Noma Dumezweni was cast as Hermione Granger people went nuts. Some historians raised issue with the fact that Xerxes II was acted by a black man in the movie 300 despite being Persian. And I’m sure casting a black man as Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar was equally controversial. Now in the era of people realizing how much representation matters, of course it is going to cause controversy if you hire an actor to play a role of a underrepresented group while the actor does not belong to said group. This didn’t used to be the case, but it is today. However this has such an obvious solution that I doubt it has hindered the production of a single movie.

> "It’s been a decade since any comedy launched a blockbuster franchise."

The times change. At one point hiring a white actor to play a black role did not stir a huge controversy, now it does. Franchises come into fashion, people get tired of them, creators move on. Just because comedy franchises aren’t big today, it doesn’t mean they are not possible. More likely is that people have seen enough sequels in other genres that they don’t want to see Baby Driver 2 no more then they like to see Dump and Dumber 5. And I think for a reason, comedy sequels tend to be pretty shitty (and I guess it makes sense, how often can you tell the same joke before it stops being funny).

I think you are over-reading into the twitter mobs. I don’t think they have as much power as you give them credit for. I think the biggest achievement of the twitter mob in the film industry was to give Sonic the Hedgehog a makeover. I don’t know of a single example where a comedy was cancelled because twitter didn’t like it. And I think comedies get made today just like they did yesteryear. And I think producers of comedies had to be careful about the subject matter before just like today. And I think they stirred controversies before, and they will continue to do so, irregardless of the political climate.

Obviously comedies will still get made on some level - and certainly times will adjust ...

... but I am I am listening to Conan O'Brian's podcast with Sean Penn at this very instant and they've literally brought up the challenges of comedy writing in cancel culture. Literally today's episode.

These are comedy/acting figureheads discussing the problem, so I'll take the word that it's an issue.

Casting is far more controversial that it's ever been, with an ever developing set of rules for who can play what under what terms. 'Progress' in the 1960's was allowed more expansive casting, i.e. breaking taboos. We are now in the process of establishing taboos.

Sean Penn just said 'I would not be allowed to play Harvey Milk in today's climate'. He then indicated that it's important to support people who have not had opportunities, but said in private conversations (this would be Hollywood 'elite' - Sean Penn is extremely connected) - the view is universal that anyone should be allowed to play anyone and that it's only on podiums on TV do the more radical voices come out. He and Conan then both agreed to terminology as 'Virtue Signalling'. It's a thoughtful discussion I recommend the podcast episode.

Kevin Hart was cancelled for the Oscars and that's a 'huge' thing as it's a global brand and they were left without a host. They've made all sorts of adjustments due to popular outrage. Just as a quick example.

It's not so much 'cancellation' as the mobs influence over the very sensitive Studio Execs and their various decisions.

Superbad would not get made today. It could (if they cleaned it up a bit) but it's just not thematically right: it's way too young white guy, crude, the tranny jokes, the 'girl on period jokes' - it just wouldn't make it past the ideation stage. Seth Rogen is now doing 'Social Progress' movies aka 'Long Shot' with definitive feminist values. Nothing wrong with that at all (it was modestly funny) - other than to say - that's what's being made instead of Superbad.

Tropic Thunder is comedy genius and it simply could not get made because of the main character's blackface, and the other major characters portrayal of mentally handicapped people. They couldn't adjust the script around that. So forget 'ideation' even if it was pitched it would be a 'no go'.

The Hollywood system is very sensitive these things and all sorts of deviations are made. A lot of it is good spirit, but a lot of it is just suffocating.

> there are very, very few left with the power to make the jokes they want.

I guess Spike Lee (Blackkklansman, 2018), Boots Riley (Sorry to Bother You, 2018), Taika Waititi (Jojo Rabbit, 2019), etc. are one of the few people left with the power to make the jokes they want. Or are those not the kinds of jokes you were thinking about?

(TW: next paragraph) I get the sense that you are simply wrong about this. I don’t know of any examples where a good comedy was ‘cancelled’ because of a twitter mob. If you are afraid that the era of the prison rape joke is over, then I hate to brake it to you, that joke was never funny, and even if it was, it certainly isn’t any more[1].

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc6QxD2_yQw

You should not be downvoted for this—you are correct. These are exactly the conversations that film executives are having internally, especially on the buying side. They don’t see it as a Twitter thing entirely, but as an engagement with the social “conversation” and the realities of the marketplace. However, the incentives are primarily fear-based. Why court the risk of a backlash when you could develop something else (they think)?

... and the root cause of that is the commercial nature of most popular film production.

This might sound like a trivial statement, but as we are finding out - the profit motive can take us down a highly problematic and noticeable path.

A challenge, though, is figuring out what paths, content-wise, this has already taken us down with us simply having internalized the choices as axiomatic.

I view that as a positive. Like a lot of other things in the US, the film industry has a long and racist past starting with the infamous "Birth of a Nation," which was highly profitable at the time of its production, but you couldn't make a blatant racist propaganda film like that now, which I'd say is for the better. The article mentions "Borat" which is an interesting example because I'd imagine a lot of people just don't get the joke and would also view it as a racist and anti-semitic film.

> the profit motive can take us down a highly problematic and noticeable path

when i was writing a sibling comment i had this same realization. the fault of capitalism is that its an expression of populism, of the tyranny of the majority.

i think the american founders had this correct, at least in principle: there needs to be a system of checks and balances with populism meeting elitism.

i wonder how one would go about architecting such an economic system. free market capitalism only for small businesses, no larger than one state? stronger government intervention interstate?

China does this to some degree. Small businesses are free to transact without much intervention but very large companies get influenced/controlled by the small government elite in the Chinese Communist Party.

In which corruption is among the most pronounced problems.

That’s a misapplication of the principles they sought to apply and why they sought to apply them.

To put “checks and balances” in context, the United States was not at the time a “state” in the post-Napoleon sense, it was a Union of States that better fit that model, and what they were trying to create was something in between the completely impotent Congress of the Articles of Confederation and a centralized Congress with carte Blanche authority. We got a Congress that could do more stuff, with theoretically carte Blanche authority, but unable to act with that because Congress cannot speak with one voice, and we gave it a whitelist of powers that it could exercise, later supplemented with a blacklist of powers it was forbidden from exercising. The United States also for the first time had its own Executive authority separate from the militias and armies it paid for and its own courts and revenue separate from the States.

The impetus for this by the way was not successfully prosecuting a war of Independence, that made the Constitutional Convention more possible and peaceful than it otherwise might have been, but because Congress, as it existed at the time under the Articles of Confederation where each State had effectively one vote, could not effectively resolve State and marketplace disputes. If Rhode Island’s government was knocked out and taken over by a militia of debtors devoted to the cause of cancelling their own debts, especially their out of State debts, there was not a damn thing Congress could do on its own. No bankruptcy courts, no protections, no courts of any kind flying the American flag and a Massachusetts Court couldn’t effect action beyond the borders of Massachusetts; Massachusetts would have to go to war to effect any action in Rhode Island.

Political systems are considered dangerous and hard to manage, in need of those checks and balances, because their powers as seats of authority are a target for ambitious people who seek to control or abuse their fellow men, and those powers range all the way up to cancelling debts, seizing private property and putting people to death. Economies don’t have offices of power because they are not organizations to be managed and controlled: only the results of human activity.

> when i was writing a sibling comment i had this same realization. the fault of capitalism is that its an expression of populism, of the tyranny of the majority.

Then, you had the opposite realization to mine, since I described a "tyranny" of the capital-owning minority, who, in particular, control the large film production studios. And if you believe they simply must give the people "what they want", then I'll quite some Bakunin at you:

> ...That abstraction called the common interest, the public good, the public safety, ... where all real wills cancel each other in that other abstraction which bears the name of the will of the people. ... this so-called will of the people is never anything else than the sacrifice and the negation of all the real wills of the population; just as this so-called public good is nothing else than the sacrifice of their interests."

obviously these harsh words are not directed at the outpouring of Kung-Fu Panda and Marvel superhero films, but if you tone it down a few notches it sort of applies.

What?

The great American comedies are loved worldwide from the classics like the Three Stooges and Abbot and Costello to the "modern" dumb movies like the Hangover or Superbad. The pull to milquetoast, harmless comedies come from INSIDE the US by the usual suspects.

A comedy like Borat can be made because it makes fun of the "right" people, a FSU country, Islam, Roma people, American conservatives, rednecks, etc, so it is New-York-Times readership approved. Keep the same script but change the demographics and you will get pages upon pages of harsh criticism all over the media.

Young people need to understand that there is always an ideologically war going and the powerful people push their worldview unto us.

FYI The Hangover came out 12 years ago, Superbad came out 14 years ago. The rest of your post I'm not so interested in discussing, but comedy to me appears to be a genre that has moved to TV, like most genre fare for adults these days.

FYI Bradley Cooper stars in the Hangover, now that we are sharing useless and obvious facts. The point is that those kind of irreverent movies were loved abroad so the current situation is not because the globalization of the audience, a thing which btw is 40 years old at the very least.

I just found it interesting how you called them modern, they were probably some of the comedies I would call modern, and then I looked and realized they basically predate the founding of Uber.

Those movies you mention weren't necessarily made to cater to foreign audiences, Hollywood may have always enjoyed making money from foreign audiences but the balance has largely shifted over the last several years to the point where foreign box offices and audiences come first and determine what films get made and their content, that's a big shift in my opinion.

> they basically predate the founding of Uber.

So anything before the smartphone era is what... not-modern, sorta-modern?

If the founding of Uber (2009?) is a milestone of some sort, man I feel ancient.

OP must be 21 or younger

I should have used the creation of Bitcoin, the true cultural milestone on this board (January 2009).

That's an interesting choice.

Personally, I think I'd go with the release of the iPhone (June 2007).

Let me narrow things up... Hollywood's global market is located in Red China. Tailoring for them is the reason why HW's products are so dull so they hardly can compete with high-class TV series.

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