Reel Inequality: Charting the Vanishing Middle Class of Movies | Hacker News Reader

Reel Inequality: Charting the Vanishing Middle Class of Movies

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32 pointstennisprince42 comments

2023 had a lot of big-budget bombs. Ant-Man, Indiana Jones, Mission Impossible, Transformers, The Flash, Fast X, Blue Beetle, Elemental, Shazam!, and the Marvels all underperformed somewhere on the scale from "disappointment" to "disaster".

On the other hand, aside from the massive big-budget hits of Barbie and Mario, there were also a number of mid-budget films that did very well: John Wick 4, Sound of Freedom, Five Nights at Freddy's, Cocaine Bear and M3GAN all exceeded expectations.

So it's hard to interpret this as the "middle class" of movies disappearing. I'd say it's the opposite, in fact. People have gotten sick of the big-budget crap that follows the same formula (note how most of those bombs are superhero movies). It's really the big-budget films that are falling apart.

To be more precise, those mid-budget films all did well relative to their budgets. Marvels still made far more money, but the budget was so bloated that Marvel took a loss.

Five Nights at Freddy's: $286,595,570

The Marvels: $197,035,186

That's how badly Marvel movies are bombing now. FNaF actually straight-up beat Marvel, and by a very comfortable margin.

There is no minimizing this. This is disastrous for Disney.

They lost at the box office, but reviews for The Marvels suggest it's the better movie (although not by much). That's even taking into account the fact that horror tends to get worse reviews as a genre. There are a lot of reasons why The Marvels might have performed so much worse in ticket sales (I'm guessing superhero fatigue, and the character(s) not being very popular to begin with had a lot to do with it), but Disney's MCU can recover as long as they're willing to put more effort into giving people a story worth watching. The NYT's review was titled: "You’ve Seen This Movie 32 Times Before"

> 2023 had a lot of big-budget bombs. Ant-Man, Indiana Jones, Mission Impossible, Transformers, The Flash, Fast X, Blue Beetle, Elemental, Shazam!, and the Marvels all underperformed somewhere on the scale from "disappointment" to "disaster".

And rightly so. The so-called special effects in those superhero movies are really getting exhausting. What's the point of having superpower yet battling like a peasant in medieval times? What's the point of having super intelligence yet making so many illogical decisions? What's the point of having the best technologies on earth yet having your tribe living in dirt and fighting with rhinos and using duels to elect your leaders? I can even tolerate such plot holes if the movies have good stories or interesting characters, but do they?

>What's the point of having the best technologies on earth yet having your tribe living in dirt and fighting with rhinos and using duet to elect your leaders

Yes, Marvel is shit now, but escapism and fantasy entertainment doesn't work on real world logic. If I want to see realistic battles going on I just turn on the news. I go to the cinema because I want a dose of escapism while I turn off my brain for 2 hours.

Me too. It's just that I don't want to escape into the world of the villagers in Wakanda, where owners of stealth jet and energy shield fought on rhinos with spears, and a handful of people lived like royalties but I would live like a peasant.

>It's just that I don't want to escape into the world of the villagers in Wakanda

Then why do you go watching Black Panther movies, when you already know the plot holes? It's not for you or me, but according to their finances, a lot of people seen to enjoy them .

If you haven't already read Mother of Learning you really should, you would absolutely adore it.

And Torth series. No punches pulled on the logical outcomes of superintelligence and powers.

!!! This is a new one for me, but it's definitely up my alley. Thanks!

Some people call this genre rational fiction. Personally I really liked Harry Potter: Methods of Rationality. The MC was super narcissistic and nitpicky, a true engineer. For example he was often looking for ways to create perpetual motion machines / infinite energy with magic.

I love rational fiction. Yes to Methods of Rationality, Mother of Learning, and also Paranoid Mage and a few others, including Majority by Abby Goldsmith.

Oh wow, I just binged Paranoid Mage and it was really good (especially books 1-3). Thanks for the recommendation!

If you have superpowers, you are more powerful than almost all weapons. So you fight with you as the weapon, because it's the most powerful you have.

Also: I presume you meant duel. Using a duet to elect your leaders has a certain charm to it...

Thanks, it should be duel. Updated accordingly. I kinda think that quantitive change in energy output will lead to qualitative change in the form of fighting. In addition, it's hard for me to relate to fist fighting among superheroes. If I were to enjoy fist fight, Legend of Fist by Jet Li is a much better alternative.

For me it's not the bad plot decisions, it's the tone. Every movie has the same "feel" to it. It's a milder version of the "algorithm optimized" tone of eighty percent of YouTube videos. Almost like every movie is being made by the same person. I think the reason I loved Dune is that it didn't feel fucking identical to everything else I watched in the last ten years.

> For me it's not the bad plot decisions, it's the tone. Every movie has the same "feel" to it. It's a milder version of the "algorithm optimized" tone of eighty percent of YouTube videos. Almost like every movie is being made by the same person.

This too!

I don’t feel like you can look at the top ten movies of the year and tell me they had the same tone

I haven’t seen the marvel films but even those I think are pretty darn different

What does “like a peasant” mean? Like uninspired punchy fights that don’t utilize powers creatively?

I feel like marvels been decent at that since Thor 3.

But that's not really what the graph plots; it doesn't try to estimate revenue expectations or even production costs. (Although, that would be interesting to factor in production costs.)

Comparing 2006 to 2023, I see more sequels early in the list, and fewer originals.

Right, which is why concluding that there's a "vanishing middle class" from those charts doesn't make sense. (assuming that's what the author intended the conclusion to be. Aside from the title, there doesn't seem to be much of one.)

I agree. The opposite seems to be happening. This trend has been a while and this article is REALLY late

You forgot "Napoleon", one of the worst movies of the year.

The view of the director or the screenwriter is very strange. There are so many things to film about, for loving or hating Napoleon, yet the film makers chose to show the well debunked hoaxes on Napoleon. Also, Napoleon shattered the world with his military might and his politics. So many people were inspired by him, followed him, fought for him, and died for him. We can hate him for his doings, but in the director's eyes, he was a f&@$ simp? All the historical moments were merely happenstances because Napoleon was stalking Josephine? And why did the movie list out the death tolls on Napoleon's side only? As if the Quadruple Alliance didn't launch wars and didn't kill people? What kind of twisted view was that? And what kind of leaders could possibly inspire his people with that bitter and hysterical face as depicted by Joaquin?

Perhaps it’s the death of variety (in general, yes there are some individually excellent films every year or two).

Have a look at your 2023 disaster list.. superheroes and remakes.

I’m bored with the same old movies, characters, plots… have been for at least a decade.

Isn't this because the mid range is going straight into the streaming services, rather than through (an I assume expensive) distribution process into theaters?

Theater going is expensive (I think it's expensive), the alternatives are "pretty good", so that impacts overall theater presence.

Having a "block buster" that can justify the expense of marketing and distributing to the now weaker theater market seems like a prudent thing for the studios and it's just part of the current reality of entertainment.

I know I don't see many movies in the theater. I don't know if I've seen anything since Top Gun. I was hoping to see Dune 2, but it's delayed. I will be seeing the Ferrari bio-pic, simply because I'm a Mann nut. Otherwise, we rented Barbie. We rented GoG3, we'll be renting Oppenheimer.

And whatever other random stuff I sleep through from Netflix.

Theater going is expensive relative to watching at home.

Examples;

Theater: $6 discount discount tickets, $12-$20 normal tickets, $20+ Imax (light) ticket; $10+ in refreshments per person.

At Home: $13/month streaming service, $20 purchase, $2.99->$5.99 rental for 2-6 people. Soft drink; $1, Popcorn $1

Then consider the comforts: No drive; no other patrons on cell phones or making noise, can pause a 2hr+ (more commonly 3) for bathroom and refreshment breaks.

I'm not sure 2023 is a good year to compare against, what with the actors' and writers' unions striking for several months? If you look at the list of "2023 movies", you see titles such as Coraline (Remastered), Star Wars Episode VI, Titanic (25 yr Anniversary) and probably some others that I missed which are not really 2023 movies...

I miss “smart” mid-budget movies of the kind Miramax used to put out in the 90s. With a few exceptions they don’t seem to be as prevalent. The market has changed.

I miss the cheesy but wholesome comedies and parodies of the 1990s and 2000s: Anger Management, Rush Hour, The Cable Guy, American Pie, Scary Movie, Bruce Almighty, Eurotrip, Tropic Thunder, Hot Shots, Borat, Idiocracy, How High, White Chicks, etc.

We can't have any like those in this age because someone on Twitter will claim to be offended. Good thing to back-up those old gems as well before they get cancelled/edited to comply with modern sensibilities.

> We can't have any like those in this age because someone on Twitter will claim to be offended.

I think this is mostly an exaggeration. I think there will always be an audience for tasteless and raunchy movies. It might be a good long while before we see another white actor in blackface though, I'll grant you that.

> I think there will always be an audience for tasteless and raunchy movies.

There still is an audience but that audience is not cared to by Hollywood for fear of social media backlash. That's why nobody's making edgy comedies and parodies anymore and the movies currently been made massively alter their original IP to conform to modern identity politics("put a brown chick in it and make her lame and gay")

South Park are the only ones left because they're not Hollywood.

It's the economics.

John Wick is a really good example. Without the DVD aftersales, John Wick would never have gotten a second movie. Without DVD aftersales, movies in the $10-$25 million range simply can't exist.

Matt Damon talks a lot about this.

Can't we replace DVD sales withs streaming revenue?

I wonder how valuable this is as a metric, since much of what gets viewed is a function of art as much as it is marketing, production, or other elements. Some years studios make movies that are just bad--I wouldn't necessarily expect the income distribution to remain balanced across years.

Furthermore, these graphs don't appear to take into account the production cost of movies. If a low-budget film garners critical acclaim, it means more than a studio movie that just broke even, although their gross incomes could be pretty similar.

Please, please, do not override my mouse scroll wheel behavior!

Please, please, please let me scroll where I want, lord knows it would be the first time

I don't think that "inequality" is even a thing when it comes to movies. Who said that all movies should be equal? Some watercolor "art" sells for $15 at an art-and-wine street fair while other pieces have five figure prices (or, of course, much more).

Secondly, as others have pointed out, the mid-budget movies are now on streaming or cable channels.

But yes, special effects extravaganzas are going to die out, just like Westerns and musicals did. Until they get revived.

I think that the data is missing something crucial, because it only talks about percentages. It's also important to know the total absolute (inflation-adjusted) revenue for each year. I'd like to know if the non-top movies are doing worse than before, in absolute terms, which we can't tell from the charts.

I feel like consumer choice has kinda gone too far with movies, people never cross genres because they never have to go along with something they don’t like.

You should see the book requests posted to communities like r/printsf now. We have genre readers that have evolved into "I only read material containing this exact set of tropes" it's straight up weird.

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