I would argue this is a symptom of the money men exerting too much control over entertainment. Everything has to be safe and neutered, every investment has to be as sure as possible. This isn't down to writers, there's interesting writing going on, you just won't see it come out of the big studios unless it's a smaller subsidiary.
Hmm. I've seen a few "passion projects" that reach new heights of uninterestingness. Detach the creative from needing to bring in an audience and we get projects that "explore the liminal space of boredom" and such. Once directors get the "make whatever you want" power it's not always a happy outcome. Same thing with authors - they get famous with a tightly edited 300 pages and use that to release a 1200 page barely edited brick.
Sometimes the balance of the two really works - the money man is the only representation of the audience and can cut out that nonsensical 45 minute dream sequence. I guess what I want is not a money man as such, just an editor with a bit of power as an objective source of improvement.
Creative led projects are at least personal and that gives them a unique quality even if the project is an overall failure.
>I guess what I want is not a money man as such, just an editor with a bit of power as an objective source of improvement.
Editors would generally be considered creatives and not businesspeople. There is also no such thing as "an objective source of improvement" when it comes to art.
If there is a project that literally and perfectly matches your description, it is "Paint Drying", a 2016 protest film against censorship and classification mandates in the UK [1].
This is what happens when the money men also think of themselves or their buddies as creatives. Extremely high production values on extremely stupid movies.
A bunch of people who didn't inherit a franchise also complain about "toxic fandom". What's the problem with saying that? Do creatives have to butter up their fans?
I know the cases you're referencing, and I don't disagree with you that "toxic fandom" was a fake complaint in those specific cases. But it's not the writers who use this to deflect from criticism, it's the investors behind the scenes. The writers (the ones that are part of the normal work force) want to write good stuff and create good entertainment.
But, say, the actress of Rose from Star Wars? She has every right to complain about a toxic fandom. Christ, they sent her death threats because she performed as asked for by the studio!
> Then game of thrones proved it was possible to make an adaptation that was both faithful and good cinema
.. up to the critical point where they couldn't be faithful because GRRM hadn't written the ending, so they wrote one which everyone got mad about.
The idea that Hollywood actors and writers are arrogant elitists who look down on "regular" working folks is, to a large extent, propaganda, specifically intended to destroy solidarity in moments like these.
I couldn't help but notice how the wild artistic risks taken in the movie would likely never happen today unless the artists paid out of pocket for both the production and distribution
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Na1h7ozW9VQ
Putting money behind stuff like this is dead.
> the wild artistic risks taken in the movie would likely never happen today
Tim Burton or Christopher Nolan would disagree. And there are plenty of brave films out there, just not necessarily from big Hollywood studios.
Here it is in full if you'd like to compare https://archive.org/details/the-fabulous-baron-munchausen
George Harrison of Beatles fame ended up funding the movie, I believe almost entirely out of his own pocket. This was back in the 70s.
The top marginal rate of income tax was ~90% and this heavily encouraged investments like this. It meant that there was more space for creative risk taking as well as more commercial/industrial capital investment.
It wasn't “someone has suggested/demanded it be removed, and we have refused” but “if someone did suggest/demand it we wouldn't”.
Back then, the short late-night voiceover, "Portions of the following program may be unsuitable for younger or more sensitive viewers," was the hallmark of Quality TV.
"Market logic" is very easy to misunderstand. For instance, do people in food deserts really want cheez-its and ice cream for dinner? Or do they just not have sufficient access to healthy options that they prefer?
Sometimes people actively want something that allows them to, even requires them to, shut off parts of their brain.
It is that contemporary screen writing is unable to engage with characters and complexity outside of, like, 5 stereotypical tropes. That they internalized set of rules about how to simplify things and just can't comprehend any slightly realistic psychology of adults or set of events.
The money men did a lot of damage and are the ones who set the rules. But the bad writing we see now is because writers insist on cproducing bad writing even having choice. Maybe all the good writers left, maybe it is something else, but they screw it up even when having freedom.
(I hear tell that as adaptions go The Expanse was relatively well done, though I haven't watched it myself as yet)
I've seen Japanese subtitles before (I mean Japanese language subtitles) and almost all subtext is lost regardless. Far worse than the english subtitles on anime.
You might as well make the movie you want, the end result abroad will be bland regardless. The translation issues are just an excuse.
However, the dubs are the complete opposite. They pack in a ton of the original subtext and nuance, character quirks, etc, even making new jokes when necessary to convey something similar when the original is impossible. And of course the voice actors are great.
Japanese subtitles being terrible isn’t necessarily a natural state. It seems to just be where things landed in that industry.
Over the half of people (including many non movie enthusiasts) prefer dub, but sub is very popular in the internet because such people is verbose. I like sub for English (that I can understand a bit and good for learning), dub for the rest.
Ditto for India.
You see absolutely crazy stuff like The Eric Andre show get 6 seasons. A talk show that is basically just out to torment all their guests. 'Off the air' while only a few episode every few years, is much more of an art experimenter than anything you would consider a show, it is wonderful.
Every few months there is something new and twisted that comes along, it feels like Adult swim is that TV studio that the main company complete forgot exists and that head corporate hasn't checked on since the late 90's.
But the budgets also show, there are no million dollar budgets here.
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. It only existed because of a special relationship with the late show. Without worry about ratings, he did some great stuff that wouldnt get past the moneymen today.
The older seasons of Top Gear. It was wildly popular but got its energy from an old form of "blolky" male-dominated humor that just doesnt fly these days. The Grand Tour continues but is a pale comparision of the previous energy.
Note that all of these are dominated by male protagonists, a rare thing in recent years.
Man did he flirt with the beautiful actresses he had on the show.
I believe media should be arranged by at least the following categories. Year Studio Director Genre Country of Origin
After that they can do whatever they want. I hope I"m wrong but I can't do this with iTunes, Netflix, HBO whatever, Criterion, TCM.
Criterion has newer films once they are released to the home market.
Also Criterion just edited "The French Connection" to make it more appropriate for viewers.
Nobody is giving 200 million dollars to a director just to break even.
As the budget increases, more and more people get involved; and decision by committee is a terrible system.
Is this concretely true, or just disinformation to put blame on writers vs. producers?
I’m not saying it’s not plausible either way, but this is a common cop out.
> "I've been on shows — namely 'Witcher' — where some of the writers were not or actively disliked the books and games (even actively mocking the source material). It's a recipe for disaster and bad morale," wrote DeMayo.
https://www.looper.com/1128621/the-witcher-writer-casually-c...
Maybe he's being paid by the producers to lie about that, but that seems like a strange theory to me.
Also, this characterinzaction of the Witcher series writing is 100% correct - especially in last season. Going by the comments writer made publicly, she did not even understood events or relationships between characters in books. It is as if she understood adolescents, but had real issue comprehend adults or write about them.
This seems like a very common problem in modern American entertainment. I think it's because they're hiring writers who are too young with too little life experience. Characters who should be mature adults seem like immature teenagers. Maybe the writers know how to write mature characters but think this is what audiences want... but I tend to think the writers are nepo hire hacks.
Second, being fully grown adult does not have to imply perfection. Fully grown adults make bad insensible decisions all the time. They however do that differently then teenagers, for different more complex reasons.
And this is something that is super visible in Witcher. Original characters don't make sensible decisions all the time ... but they have adult psychology. Even when they are bad to each other, they still don't act like middle schoolers. They act like adults with issues. And show writing just completely stripped them off the adulthood.
That’s what you get when you hire writers willing to work in mini-rooms (and not go to production): inexperienced folks still sponging off their parents.
The other part of the comment that isn’t fair is the “sponging” part. Generally this implies loafing or laziness, someone taking their parents resources and being lazy with them. But we’re talking about working people who are new to their career and putting in the sweat and willing to work in mini-rooms. I don’t think using parental resources is sponging when someone is early career and trying to work hard to get ahead.
If the pay is so bad that the job's only available to kids with rich parents, whence comes the breadth of experience needed to portray the world as it really is?
And by offering such bad pay, hasn't the industry brought this on themselves?
Imagine a world where all junior developers are contractors hired for a month or two. They work with more experienced senior devs to write a program together. But junior devs contracts end before the code is ever compiled or run, so they never learn anything about bugfixing or adjusting to client changes or performance with real world data. This is what working hard to get ahead looks like in Hollywood today.
And good writing sees the difference. Take Breaking Bad - neither Walt nor Jessie make good decisions. But Walt is clearly mature man and Jesse is young and immature(and matures during the show). That is good writing involving mature adult, Walt, despite him making one bad and emotional decision after another. Same thing Game of Thrones in initial series - involves well written mature adults doing horrible things.
Then take writing in the Netflix Witcher (and everything that was said about it) or last Game of Thrones series. Long term friendship between mature imperfect adults is something the writer did not even understood. Complicated respectable mature women (who still have difficult personality) is changed into clingy teenager with crush. And judging from interviews, the writer just does not understand these aspects of humanity or of writing.
> They might be better at hiding it, but they still do it.
Then the character should hide it like adults do.
A classic case of hating or not caring about source material, whilst also being a complete writing hack.
Whatever they're trying to do, it's not that: https://i.imgur.com/yIzvm1d.jpg
No one was forcing them to took up that job/stay at that company...
and in the case of the witcher the talent and the writers had pedigrees, not like henry cavil wasn't in movies before, or since.
I have bills to pay too. But when job-hunting there are some industries I simply won't consider.
The bottomline is that as a screenwriter you should do the absolute best work you're capable of, within the constraints of the project. If you can't do that because you aren't passionate about the franchise or whatever other bogus reason, don't take the job. You'll only hurt your own reputation.
They've likely done several other shows where they were told that ignoring their distaste and working hard would serve them well in the future, then the only options provided were more shows where they'd have to ignore their distaste and work hard. Eventually you'll try to cram your ideas into a project you aren't terribly fond of.
To illustrate my point, while it's probably not a comprehensive list, I took a look at this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fantasy_television_pro... and from what I can tell there is one fantasy show not based on an existing franchise airing after 2020. The Outpost on CW.
No one said anything about original TV shows. 99% of screenwriters - a number I pulled out of my ass - never have one greenlit.
I did. That's what I meant by targeting existing markets over taking risks, or why I mentioned non-franchise fantasy writing opportunities, and what I assumed the person I was replying to was talking about when criticizing using The Witcher as a backdrop for their disconnected stories.
And even if we brought that number down to 95% of screenwriters, that would still provide a place for everyone to stick their own ideas in.
Actors all look the same? You bet they do, we market tested the top five male face shapes and we make sure every actor’s face is modelled on the most popular.
Writing derivative? You bet! Our customer surveys said they love that curly haired kid from Stranger Things! That’s why he’ll be the lead character in three separate Stranger Things spin-offs.
The Chris Pratt school of not acting is strong.
It can still be fun and enjoyable, but it's not Acting.
Joel Kinnaman on the other hand. Why is he repeatedly cast in leading roles?
In terms of acting, where you adopt someone else's persona, he makes Sylvester Stallone look diverse.
Joel does stoic tough guys with a dead-pan sense of humor extremely well and doesn't stand out as miscast in the things I see him in.
It’s because the market dynamics have changed and we stopped buying DVDs and VHS.
Matt Damon talked about this just a few years ago on Hot Ones.
“So what happened was the DVD was a huge part of our business, of our revenue stream,” Damon said.
“Technology has just made that obsolete, and so the movies that we used to make you could afford to not make all of your money when it played in the theatre because you knew you had the DVD coming behind the release.”
Links:
https://www.ajc.com/life/why-dont-they-make-movies-like-they...
Licenses are written before the technology is invented. Originally we had radios and record players. Each new medium requires a new license due to the structure of the ownership of the content.
Publishers that own images for print can't post them on the web. The problem is the exceptional nature of the contracts. This is why things are so splintered. All the acquisitions of corporations may create even more exceptions to the licenses.
If you have an original DVD collection of The Boondocks [1] then you have the episode
Boondocks, The S03E04 The Story of Jimmy Rebel
banned after first showing on Adult Swim for excessive depictions of racism and perceived racial insensitivities over the episode's portrayal of a racist country singer named Jimmy Rebel (a parody of real-life white supremacist country singer Johnny Rebel). [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boondocks_(2005_TV_series)
Getting $20-30 per DVD from this audience was much more lucrative than the cents you get per stream when competing against the algorithm of "what should I watch next". It's a VERY different market now. Smaller stuff just doesn't compete.
Once you remove the need to personally curate and review (think also towards the death of the film critic), you introduce a homogenization to the industry.
Streaming is fantastic for convenience. It is terrible for variety, despite the illusion that we're overloaded with choice. The modern streaming system hides everything in plain site. It is almost impossible for me to "browse" streaming sites the way I used to in a Blockbuster or Best Buy. Discovery is much harder.
It can't be there sole reason, and I sincerely doubt it's even true. Sure, the price of a single DVD would've covered the price of 1-2 months of streaming on Netflix, but people didn't buy a DVD each month. And if they did, they lent it to friends after.
Makes me think - how do copyright owners know how many times ie Netflix streams given movie? Or do they just get some bulk fees from Netflix based ie on region and duration, and nobody cares about actual view counts?
I recently tried to watch Spirited Away on Netflix. While Netflix has umpteen audio versions on mobile and desktop, it only shows 5 (Japanese, English, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish) on Apple TV. Why?
Somehow they still let you cast from mobile to TV with all the audio versions, but I expect them to remove that ability soon.
The actors and writers, who may be paid residuals on a per-stream basis, do not have access to this information, and I believe this is one of the demands of the current strike.
Actors should never be whispering or mumbling for real. Even an actor pretending to be drunk should be able to clearly enunciate their words while still making themselves sound drunk. I'm sure modern actors can still do this, but they're being given bad direction.
I can't comment on the sequels.
Absurd.
But watching any US movie and I have to either turn on subtitles or blast it so loud that some action scene will probably crack speakers or the wall, since I hate getting lost in plot.
If they mixed it right, center speaker should be mainly dialogue.
And no, this is not a technical limitation: case in point, the new Star Trek shows. We've had three of them produced in parallel, sharing some sets and props, and they go full-spectrum - from "every scene is night scene" Picard, through "everything is underlit" Discovery, to "everything is bright well-lit all the time" Strange New Worlds.
The only reasoning I can think of for making what's clearly an artistic choice is that maaaybe it looks better on actual TV. I wouldn't know, who owns a TV these days anyway? But I got one clue - rewatching parts of last season of Picard on a hotel TV, I was suddenly able to make out colors and shapes that I couldn't on a computer screen.
I must be odd because I have 6 of them: family room, office, master bedroom, both kids’ bedrooms, and back patio.
I am going to guess a majority of people in the US live in a residence that contains a TV, probably even a large TV.
I'm glad I'm not the only one to notice this one. There seems to be five or six "allowed looks" for each gender, and many mainstream Hollywood actors and actresses have become almost clones of those archetypes.
I thought maybe I'm just old and more familiar with actors from older generations. Show me a random famous Hollywood actor who's under 35 years old and I probably can't tell you who it is. But maybe it's because they all actually do look the same!
The last leading man that I can remember with non-conventional looks, is Vin Diesel - and he got there by muscling (eh) his way in, not by acting.
Hollywood was never about matching reality, rather just creation/working on dreams, so one shouldn't expect these things. If you complain, you basically complain about what majority wanted to see at given time, which is never fringe-pleasing experience.
It has been years since I followed Scientology, but IIRC its beliefs see physical attractiveness and physical fitness as a sign of moral correctness, therefore anyone without it is suspect.
Heh, this can be interpreted in two ways and I think both are true. His movies have too many attractive people (over-cast). Also none of those attractive people are very memorable because they're in Tom Cruise's shadow (overcast).
It is not just US cinema though. I see the same in other countries' movie markets such as India's. Possibly just that population increase of potential actors made it more competitive, so minimum standards increased.
You can see this very clearly in US remakes of some UK stuff where they'll add a black guy or whatever and increase diversity by that metric, but typically diversity goes down by almost every other metric.
And I'm not against adding black folks, I'm just saying that the US idea of "diversity" is exceptionally narrow, one-dimensional, and overall quite un-diverse.
Sad part happens due to rise of situations where certain art (and I still call much of Hollywood product an art, just like white triangle on white canvas can be called one) can't be produced anymore. Think about ie Tropical Thunder, even Downey jr admitted it would be impossible to do such project only a decade later due to exactly this. I guess the conservatives again won, even if within diversity movement.
I recall vividly, when doing Aconcagua trip few years ago, one team member was a 2nd or 3rd generation taiwanese immigrant lady from New York. She was so pissed off how diversity movements in US are actually racist towards any other than black race, specifically her own. Try to say anything, ask anything, and you are immediately labeled as another racist, no discussion, no understanding.
I guess we all get why its wrong and then somehow on our own come up with ways to adhere to it, and sometimes some folks overdo it just to not be seen as not caring enough. Western Europe is same scheize, especially it seems English folks tend to go that extra mile in this without any actual need for it. Eastern Europe just stares cluelessly, we really don't get this since we have no shameful racist history to work through (plenty of other shameful history to work with though, but we prefer being ignorant and tell ourselves sweet little or big lies to feel good, critical thinking ain't popular here).
Yeah, I think there's a certain amount of unexamined prejudice in the Balkans.
But it's a zugzwang: impossible to avoid woke ideology in movies, because minorities had become such a powerful entity that they have ability to destroy the company or a life of any person if they don't like what you do or say.
Transposing 2023 American social problems 1:1 into a fictional universe, as many productions do today, has the effect of breaking suspension of disbelief completely. It's not interesting or insightful. To someone like myself who actually agrees with this stuff it comes off as cheap pandering. I can imagine how fucking annoying it is to see if you have a different worldview.
It also doesn't help that the veil of mystery around a writer's or director's intention is often intentionally removed by endless interviews, teasers, and press junkets. Again, the "woke" media of the 90s did not suffer from this nearly as much. What the author intended was often a mystery and up to the viewer's interpretation. Combined with the aforementioned allegory or metaphor, it made it possible to enjoy media made by someone whose views you would 100% disagree with.
Yes. It's just not very well thought out. And unfortunately the "critical" ecosystem on youtube and social media makes this even worse, when films are torn apart by people who can't read subtext and misinterpret the views of a character for the views of a writer.
Doing "wokeness" by box-ticking also has counterproductive effects when writers try to get too many things into one film, resulting in lots of one-dimensional characters. It works a lot better when the diversity originates from somewhere slightly outside the system but intrinsic to the film, such as Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Or worse, confuse the character as-written with the actor performing that role. I'm sure this happened before the internet, but people couldn't reach out and send vitriol towards the actor quite as easily. I still remember when Anna Gunn got a bunch of hate mail for "being mean to Walt". It's a miracle that good movies/TV shows still manage to get made in this environment.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DIS/disney/gross-p...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/193140/revenue-of-the-wa...
The only apparent "colossal losses" to Disney seem to be due to Disney World attendances cratering during the pandemic.
Seems a bit unfair to blame Disney for upholding the work started by George Lucas.
Are they even capable of trashing Lucasfilms IP to any degree greater than that already demonstrated?
However we are both commenting on a sub branch headed by a comment:
Colossal losses of Disney ...
Regardless of its trashiness in the eyes of fans it still box officed $1.334 billion after a budget < $320 million (according to wikipedia).
Let's agree that it was slop ... but it was slop that made bank for Disney.
I'm only commenting here to counter the upstream claim that "going woke is sending Disney broke".
I'm seeing the counter position that "pushing trash is pumping cash" (for now at least).
The MCU suffers from largely the same problem.
The entire history of art relies on rethinking of classical plots in new ideology.
People like to slag on Rian Johnson, but it was JJ Abrams that trashed the trilogy and left the mess to Johnson. And none of this has anything to do with video games anyway, Disney executives dropped the ball with bad hiring and that turned the Star Wars fanbase sour to future movies.
Why? Is it not possible the proportion of the population that wants to watch movies (especially non novel ones) in movie theaters is trending lower and lower?
Based on the fact that the examples you listed are all sequels, the quality of the content is also suffering, but it is very possible that even if it was not suffering, the demand would be lower.
I consider this to be mostly a positive. I'm interested in following stories rather than watching the N+1th Actor X movie.
Finance is nothing more than rent seeking. The correction required is society wide movement to dethrone finance.