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Comment by CuriouslyC | Hacker News Reader

Movies have gotten worse, without question. Big budget movies now are consistently cliché ridden rehashes of proven IP because studio execs don't want to take any chances. This behavior really took over in the early aughts, and you can look at the top 10 movies for each year to see the slide from ~2004-2010.

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I think blockbusters got too expensive to make (relative to economic conditions) so now the money men don't want to take any chances when funding a movie. Everything needs to be designed by committee and run through a hundred focus groups; this kind of process can never produce true art, only soulless LCD slop. But it maximizes the chance of a movie not being a commercial flop, and that's what's important to the movie industry right now. This is the same reason we barely get anything besides remakes, reboots, adaptations and "cinematic universes". The movie industry in recent years is very averse to risk.

People who reject qualitative artistic appraisal of movies will reject that any such trend exists, and will say that everything is fine by the empirical metric of box office returns. They're missing the point; the reason movies are being made like this is because it's the least risky way to make a movie. Of course box office returns are going to look good, that's the point.

I don't know what the "Top 10 Movies" are.. Is this just, like, box office sales? How could one even judge one set of ten movies against another?

If the problem is simply, "I have to look too hard to find good things," or "ugh, they are making another Minions movie," then, congratulations, you are a hipster. But that's not really a problem, you just have good taste!

Hollywod and big budget movies are not particularly great, it's true. There's a few exceptions - Dune and Don't Look Up, off the top of my head.

But there are great movies still being made. You just have to look fairly hard. The last few years have seen some brilliant films like:

* Everything, Everywhere All At Once

* Nobody Knows I'm Here

* Portrait Of A Woman On Fire

* Argentina, 1985

* The Banshees Of Inisherin

I do agree that lack of risk-taking and sameness are affecting the music and movie industries. But it’s entirely possible movies “feel” worse because… there’s more of them. Maybe Sturgeon's law is at work, and the more movies we make, the more shit we get.

And yet, they got huge audiences and revenues, so it isn't that studio executives judged the market wrong for many years.

It's not wrong if you don't care about art, or the legacy of the time. They're aiming for repeatable mediocrity, which is more profitable, but 50 years down the line nobody will remember the profitable trash, but they'll remember the art that was made before it.

Not sure I subscribe to your definition of art. Making a movie that has a hundred million people watching it when it is released is art in my view. Most "art" even from the 1970s is utterly forgotten by now, for example, while certain blockbusters endured.

But that is how it has always worked. Movies in the past just seem better because you only remember the good ones. I would argue it was even more egregious in the past because under the studio system they used to quickly crank out huge numbers of formulaic movies that no one really though about after they had a theatrical run.

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