Anyway, right around '10 the industry was really stressed. The financial crash was 2 years in, and the recovery was more propaganda than reality. The productions were chasing a Hollywood market that the population did not have the disposable income to support. Then in all that stress, the Me-Too movement starts. Rumors and murmurs at first, but soon a tsunami of women from the entertainment industry sharing their institutional abuse and choosing to leave the industry entirely. My wife was one, an Academy Award winning filmmaker, famous for children's media.
That line in time of Hollywood films going bad? It is when the women that were silent in their abuse chose to leave the industry enmasse. What replaced them were clueless men and women okay with the abuse, and the reduced quality of Hollywood is a reflection of the quality of their intellects.
Many european countries are constantly releasing movies with low budget but far better in terms of character work, plot, etc.
Asia is killing it as well, with south korea having golden era hollywood quality, Japan being consistently decent and China starting to develop a world-friendly industry...
Marketing needs 4 second jokes to put in the trailer; sales needs a cute pet to sell toys; an actor demands dramatic moments aiming for an Oscar; market research needs a love story, a diverse character, and a specific geographic location to widen the audience; early screenings show that attention drops so story is simplified...
All of these roles should be working to support a product, but they should never interfere with its creation. Instead, they're the main creators. People in the industry genuinely believe that the plot is just an excuse to do all the above, and results show.
Coincidentally, I'm doing the same thing with movies, TV shows and games, and 2010 still feels too modern for me. I try to make it before 2005.
I mean, I understand and somewhat share some of the criticism, but it has to be said that Hollywood used "wigs, makeup, and so on" from its very beginning. Movie stars were always supposed to be "more" than everyday mortals. The only real aberrations of modern hollywood are plastic surgery and deeply unnatural body types (stick-thin women and dehydrated steroid-pumped men), mostly because they are abused to the point of absurdity.
'The Americans' Wig of the Week: Nina's Emotional Disguises
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2014/04/the-americans-wi...
>Each week we will be crowning a "wig of the week" from The Americans, FX's wonderful show about Russian spies who happen to wear a variety of insane wigs when doing their spy duties.
>Wig of the Week: As you might have already been able to tell, we've diverged from the theme a little this week to focus on double agent Nina Sergeevna.
>Why This Wig: There were some good wigs in this episode. Elizabeth pulled out her sophisticated blonde number to meet with Andrew Larrick, the dangerous Navy captain the Soviets are using. Philip, to bug the ARPANET, pulls out a Rust Cohle sort of look, which only makes him more horrifying when he murders an innocent who happened to get in his way.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheAmericans/comments/el1o11/wigs/
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheAmericans/comments/1hn88mx/favou...
It's not an immutable fact of the human society.
Unless the problem is people isolation in way, that people would not consume standardized content that also, to some extent, standardize their mind. But in that case it's an isolation problem even without AI when people check out from mass culture and entertain themselves. Wether entirely solo or in small fringe subcultures. Which is kinda isolation if you look from 19th/20th century point-of-view when name of the game was to normalise all the regional cultures into bigger bodies of people. But is such isolation the wrong or a good kind of isolation? I'd lean towards the later.
But yes, mass/pop culture as we know it would be dead. And IMO the world would be better off.
I agree with other comments that may lead to people staying inside their comfort zone. But I think it's question of time when good portion of people would start sharing that content with other people. Expanding each others' imagination. And few that don't... Well, existing pop culture is not exactly good at expanding mind as well. And such decentralized content creation may be less prone to propaganda and other social control efforts.
Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs