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Comment by Joeboy | Hacker News Reader

> I do however wish that other things were being produced

Here's a list of films produced in the US in 2020. I didn't count, but it looks to me like not much of it is superhero-based. And this is just the US, and ignores a lot of low budget / less notable films.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_films_of_2020

I get a bit frustrated by people complaining everything's a superhero movie or a sequel, when there are so many options they're ignoring.

Edit: If you only watch heavily advertised films, you're basically limiting yourself to films with mass, cross-continental appeal, which is inevitably going to be heavy on culturally-neutral stuff like big CGI fight scenes.

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Many of those movies never make it out of the US or are locked up behind streaming portals. If a movie can't be found by its audience it might as well not exist.

I can't speak for every country but for me (in the UK) I think I'd run out of easily-watched superhero movies long before I ran out of easily-watched non-superhero movies, if my film-watching needs were that high.

Edit: Also the original complaint was about a supposed lack of non-superhero film production.

Whilst that is a useful list, that’s somewhat of a misnomer in isolation.

To provide a fuller comparison, you’d need to also incorporate: share of viewing (per title), average box office returns (per studio eg Marvel/Disney), number of articles in mainstream media, etc.

Why? Can we not assess the films produced by looking at the list of films produced? I'm not saying as many people watch or know about the other films. In fact that is precisely the reason I don't like it when people imply they don't exist.

You can, but the total output is not the same as that ‘consumed’ and the importance in this context is the influence, not the sheer output.

For example, it could be that 10% of the films on that list are produced but never released (studio dumps, legal issues between producers and creatives, etc).

Just look at the USA box office impact of Black Widow, and Shang-Chi. Only two films but a huge proportion of post-covid box office revenue.

It's obviously true that superhero films make a lot of money. I'm saying nevertheless, other films are produced, and it's possible to watch them, and thus "I wish other things were being produced" isn't a very reasonable complaint. Unless you're under some obligation to only watch high-earning movies. If people watched the non-superhero movies rather than complaining about their non-existence, maybe we'd get more of them.

A lot of people are under the mistaken impression that money going to the mainstream is money denied to their preferences.

If Disney vanished from the world today, the dollars flowing to them wouldn't suddenly filter out to a bunch of niche and avant-garde media. There's some overlap, but people in that overlap are already into both things and funding them. The djent fans who also love a good radio-friendly bop are already buying djent albums on Bandcamp and listening to the radio-friendly bop on Spotify.

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