Sadly, this article doesn’t actually deliver of the headline and tell you how they did it. A lot of people, including some extremely powerful media executives, would like to know.
I see a studio that consistently produces content with excellent visual quality, excellent audio quality, consistently high quality acting, decent plot twists, cross-film synergy (even working across studios), and even morally ambiguous characters.
I don't see what's missing, aside from a failure to play to elitist tendencies that assume mainstream=bad. The reflexive assumption that something is popular is automatically trash (I see this with pop music a lot, too) seems like it is predicated on a fundamentally bizarre conception of 'good'-ness or quality.
I don't have proof, just an opinion. The storylines and plot lines are all formulaic and one dimensional, the characters have basically no depth to them, the name of the game is throw a budget at graphics and rake in the money, and finally, lots of expressive elements are off the table if they want the Chinese market, which they do.
I don't know how many times people can watch the good guy fire laser beams at the bad guy and win and still enjoy it, maybe one day they'll have to mix it up and have the good guys lose until the sequel comes out in which they undo the loss and still win, predictably.
I get that you don't like the genera of action films, and that's fine. But there are moments of the film between the laser beams firing. Sometimes long moments. Sometimes the majority of the film.
Are there any films that aren't formulaic? Or are original in some way? As far as I can tell, the trend is: human or human surrogate faces challenge or complication that is resolved. Often following a heroes journey pattern. Sometimes the enemy is nature. Sometimes man itself (I would interpret as another form of nature, but not so useful). Sometimes the challenge is loss. Sometimes the challenge is fear. Sometimes it's fear of loss. Sometimes it's a mating attempt. Sometimes it's an existential risk.
Of course you can dress up the underlying formula a variety of ways. If your a french or whatever filmmaker and want to pander to artsy types you add lots of long slow scenes where nothing happens. Sometimes you spice it up with a gay kid or something. Maybe throw in a racial aspect to make a statement.
I don't know how many times people can look at any human endeavor and not realize it is all bullshit. But if it is all meaningless bullshit (in a meaningless universe) then perhaps none of it is? Perhaps many MCU entries are technical achievements with interesting twists that are exemplary specimens of exactly the type of film they are meant to be.
I'm not asking for proof, I'm asking for evidence of anything beyond a facile, intellectually lazy approach to media criticism. And believe me, there are a lot of flaws in modern Hollywood, but action movies being too well produced isn't really one of them.
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/movies/the-invisible-man-...
Perhaps I'm too much of a child to understand your point, but this seems like a straw man.
I think the original contention was that MCU content is low quality (and no one has provided anything to support that claim beyond hand wavey "it's for children" nonsense). The other contention was that MCU films reduce the quality of the cinema industry overall, which is a similarly baseless claim.
Independent films still exist. Dramatic films still exist. Artistic production still exists. I haven't seen stats, but I would be shocked if the market for such content is smaller now than it was in 2008.
There's the possible claim that MCU sucks the oxygen out of the room for more artistic productions. I think the idea is that the world would be better if popular content didn't exist, so that we'd all have only "artistic" content available. I think that is a world in which fewer people watch movies at all, not a world in which everyone is driven to only appreciate high art. Thus the claims that MCU reduce the quality of cinema overall seems hard to defend.
I'm curious about the other perspective, so any perspective or analysis that better explains the thinking would be helpful. Otherwise I have to assume folks are just coming up with stories to justify their elitism.
BTW: "theme, meaning, film making craft, and artistic merit"
- craft was addressed in all of the sub-categories listed: performance, visual art, music, audio, effects
- theme/meaning: varies by film (because they aren't all the same). Sometimes it's loss and grief. Sometime's it's managing conflicts. Sometimes its reckoning with the inherent conflicts in heroism. Sometimes it's displacement after war. Sometimes it's about the forces that drive people to extremism. IDK humans aren't that complicated.
- artistic merit: a bullshit concept and I think you know it. Literal urinals have artistic merit. Canvases painted red have artistic merit. "Artistic merit" is elitism in distilled form.
Edit: I will concede that the performances in "Black Widow" were particularly weak.
I was never the target audience for this stuff but I was willing to be dragged along to Iron Man and Captain America because at that time “October Movies” still existed. That is mid budget Hollywood dramas and thrillers targeted towards adults, typically with an edgier tone, released in October after the summer tent pole season has run down but before Oscar candidate season has fully started. Basically everything David Fincher directed prior to being scooped up by Netflix fell into this category. Nightcrawler, All is Lost, and Captain Philips, are other “recent” examples, but of course they’re from the first half of the 2010s because Hollywood no longer green lights projects like these in the cinematic universe era. When MCU critics talk about crowding out better films, this is the sort of thing they’re referring to.
Look I apologize for not containing my scorn, but the fact is that the typical 9 year old can understand everything there is to understand in an MCU film modulo the punchline of a couple jokes. These are thematically simple films with no point of view and nothing to say for fear of shrinking the size of the big tent. The sad thing is that films targeted at children don’t have to be dumb; Bambi for example is a shockingly grownup film that sensitively deals with the passage of time and seasons, death and grief, coming of age, the hardness of life, and the cycle of generations, all within a runtime of under 70 minutes. There’s a lot going on there for the story of a fawn who does stuff in the woods. Yet that kind of depth does not exist in the children’s cinema of our times, ie the MCU, and the popular audience doesn’t even know to ask for it anymore.
We’re a stupid people and we get served correspondingly stupid culture. Sorry to rant and be rude, but in my view the MCU’s popularity is one of the leading indicators of our cultural decline, right up there with Trumpism and social media.
> Bambi for example is a shockingly grownup film that sensitively deals with the passage of time and seasons, death and grief, coming of age, the hardness of life, and the cycle of generations, all within a runtime of under 70 minutes.
I'm not going to defend MCU as being a pinnacle of meaning or depth, because honestly I tend to see _all_ of art as being fundamentally bullshit. However, all of what you wrote can describe one MCU entry or another. Literally every single one. I get media criticism, but ffs you should probably actually watch a recent entry before you pass judgment. Ideally with an open mind - if you go in assuming a work is trash, you will find it is trash. Even bubble gum pop has artistic value; I'm sure if you look hard enough you can find intellectually interesting themes in MCU.
I recommend you take a moment to watch Captain America and the Winter Soldier. It has (for a child's movie at a nine-year-old level) sophisticated treatment of the security-vs-liberty tradeoff, the politics of mass surveillance, adapting to societal change, dealing with loss, and more. https://ew.com/article/2014/04/06/captain-america-the-winter...
Unrelated to above points, but I think you should reflect on your arguments and whether things like the production schedule are actually part of a coherent framework to evaluate film, or just another fact pulled out of a hat to prop up your prejudice.
If you're willing to call everyone else stupid, I hope you won't mind me saying I expect better from someone on HN.
Take every criticism of MCU here (which I am not defending) and it applies just as well to one bit of art or another.
The difference is the art house filmmaker either is lying to himself and the world or is simply deluded. That's fine, there's a lot of awards authorities who will award bullshit! It's kind of the point; the market rewards everything else.
It sort of reminds me of ice cream. Not particularly meaningful, but very meaningful to the person it brings joy to. Thousands of vendors make boring, trash ice cream that is formulaic: ice, cream, sugar, and a mix of flavorings and sometimes chunks of sweet and salty things.
But for Salt and Straw, the artsy/edgy types who are too self-obsessed to realize how basic they are, the formula isn't enough. They say, "ice cream isn't art unless it has anchovies". And unless it does something weird, it isn't _really_ anything but trash. It doesn't matter how premium the caramel, how many thousands of hours that went into perfecting the syrup recipes, how polished the flavor balance is, it isn't good unless you add something to make it unpopular.
Because if the hoi polloi can understand, then it isn't art. The sophisticated people who bitch about how formulaic cinema is these days say, "I want anchovies! I want garlic-gruyere-gumdrop ice cream! I hate vanilla and caramel because I resent the common people for liking that, I am better! Formulaic ice cream literally makes people stupid and degrades intellectual discourse! Too many people like vanilla so it is bad! If only no one made vanilla ice cream, the dumb people would be forced to love garlic-chocolate-pine needle ice cream!"
Art is a tool. People who want to use 'artistic merit' as a cudgel against art products they don't like should probably take a step back and reflect on art history. I won't argue any particular way, but if you zoom out far enough to see a whole, the only common pattern is it is all bullshit.
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-duchamps-urina...
Barely. There's no money left in the industry. Everyone is trying to make the next universe, and failing.
5 years ago Birdman was very close to not being a thing because they couldn't find money. How many Birdmans of today can't?
They both tried to create universes from the outset, Universal IIRC even announced their Dark Universe before the first movie was released.
The Conjuring Universe on the other hand started the same as the MCU, and seems to have been a success: Make a good movie or two, then sequels and spinoffs, expanding organically until there's nothing else to call it but a "universe". It seems to be going well, with the 8th movie released this year, 2 more planned, 5 short films, and a comic book [0].
The acting isn't high quality across the board -- it's average. The plots and their twists are, frankly, banal in every aspect apart from being vehicles of spectacle. There's no real moral gray-ness to the characters, Wenwu from Shang Chi being an obvious exception to the rule.
The shows, which were supposed to come in with a fresh, long-form perspective on main characters and their struggles start out with interesting premises and then quickly falter because of their adherence to the MCU mythos. Wandavision and Loki completely fail in the latter half of their seasons to pay off any of the character beats in favor of big spectacle and exposition dumps.
Versus DC that went with two gorillas and a hot chick formula. They got props for a fish movie after floundering about. Marvel is vertically integrated all the latest social memes.
Comics have a long history of taking life seriously and being socially aware; Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Green Arrows sidekick Speedy being a dope fiend was written in 1971; really all they had to do was a detailed translation of the material rather than treat it like camp.
For risks:
1) Casting unknown or washed up actors in leading roles
2) Switching up the genre with every movie. Iron Man was a classic super hero movie, Thor was fish out of water, Captain America was a spy movie, Ant Man was a heist movie, Guardians a space comedy, etc.
3) Forcing people to watch past movies to understand new ones. Accepted wisdom before Marvel was no one would do that so you have to dumb it down.
Sure they take some risk with casting, but they take very few risks in other areas. How many of the plots are basically quipy selfish hero learns to stop acting in selfish self-interest long enough to save the world, well still being a little bit of a dick so as not to be boring? Half. Don't get me wrong, its a good groove, but it doesn't scream taking risks.
Similarly with 2- sure they switch out the genere,but its always using the trappings superficially. Capt may be a spy movie, but just barely and not a very good one. Its a good super hero movie, but i wouldn't watch it if i wanted a good spy movie, and similar for all the others.
In the end, they manage to make it different enough to not feel repetitive, well still being similar enough that the risk of making something that doesn't work is low.