Well, evolved incredibly because of the technology mostly amounts two "3 out of 4 movies are superheroes in spandex for adult-children" who can't handle more depth even in their 30s and 40s...
It's a well-researched and planned strategy to ensure largest possible geographic spread, avoiding anything that would be too problematic for the box office. After all, the studios aren't planning just on local release for financials and considering international as bonus.
Capitalism, ho!...
Yes, but without the men-children to gulp those movies down, those scripts would themselves be "problematic for the box office".
The shallowness is exactly what makes it easy watching for large groups that can fit in whatever gaps they find with local preferences, combined with making it much easier for localised edits to be done.
Whether the movie includes comic book superheroes or not is not relevant - arguably, many a comic geek could probably point to reduction of depth in the plotlines in some of those. Same goes for typical US DoD propaganda pieces ^W^W^W^W Hollywood action movies, Disney reboots, "Butchered Love Actually Remake" CXXVII, and many other big budget plays that use this approach.
It works because while it's not a great meal, it gets you an equivalent of mcdonald burger in foreign country. Not great, not terrible, and the local adaptations probably aren't big enough to stop it from being "safe" choice.
Go check out The Green Knight. It's outstanding, and it's in theaters right now.
Or almost anything else A24 releases. And that's just one studio.
In 2000-2010 I think the attention was more distributed, and in the 60s-90s was all over the place, the New Hollywood of the 60s with things like Easy Rider; Coppola, De Palma, Scorsese and Spielberg in the 70-80s, and the edginess of Tarantino in the 90s.
And of course, much more weird and experimental movies where more mainstream, see David Cronenberg, Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch, Wim Wenders, Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski, John Waters, even europeans/asians directors like Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky.
Scorsese talk about that:
>Another way of putting it would be that they are everything that the films of Paul Thomas Anderson or Claire Denis or Spike Lee or Ari Aster or Kathryn Bigelow or Wes Anderson are not. When I watch a movie by any of those filmmakers, I know I’m going to see something absolutely new and be taken to unexpected and maybe even unnameable areas of experience. My sense of what is possible in telling stories with moving images and sounds is going to be expanded.
>So, you might ask, what’s my problem? Why not just let superhero films and other franchise films be? The reason is simple. In many places around this country and around the world, franchise films are now your primary choice if you want to see something on the big screen. It’s a perilous time in film exhibition, and there are fewer independent theaters than ever. The equation has flipped and streaming has become the primary delivery system. Still, I don’t know a single filmmaker who doesn’t want to design films for the big screen, to be projected before audiences in theaters.
>That includes me, and I’m speaking as someone who just completed a picture for Netflix. It, and it alone, allowed us to make “The Irishman” the way we needed to, and for that I’ll always be thankful. We have a theatrical window, which is great. Would I like the picture to play on more big screens for longer periods of time? Of course I would. But no matter whom you make your movie with, the fact is that the screens in most multiplexes are crowded with franchise pictures.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/opinion/martin-scorsese-m...
But I too disagree with those premises.
Matt daemon is saying there isn’t room for the ~25 million dollar movie, because cinema ticket sale now has to carry the entire revenue stream.
But I’ve seen mostly smaller movies in cinema for the past two years.
Hell, parasite, which won best picture was a $15 million production, so obviously there is room for “small” movies
But past the cheap gamble phase, studios start doubling down and throw in big name actors, and start advertising the crap out of it, hoping to get people to watch it. There's no $25 million movies, because they end up $50 million movies.