Fun fact: movie sales, in terms of tickets sold, peaked in 2002. [1] All the 'box office records' since then are the result of charging way more to a continually plummeting audience size.
And this is highly relevant for things like this. People often argue that if movies were so bad then people would stop watching them, unaware that people actually have stopped watching them!
Even for individual movies. For all the men-in-spandex movies, the best selling movie (by tickets sold) in modern times is Titanic, 27 years ago.
In 2002 watching a movie at home for most people meant popping a low quality VHS or DVD into a ~27" tube TV with a resolution so worthless it might as well be labeled "new years" and a 4:3 aspect ratio pan and scan of the actual movie. Getting anything recent meant going out to the blockbuster anyways. In 2022 watching a movie meant streaming something on your 50+" 16:9 4k smart TV by pressing a button from your couch.
This says people go to the theatre less often, not that people watch movies less often. Unless you specifically want "the movie theater experience" or you absolutely have to see a certain movie at launch then the tradeoff is much harder to justify.
The number of movie views per person may well be down (or up) but box office ticket sale counts don't really answer that question.
2002 was also when broadband internet and movie piracy became more prolific - DivX was just out, DVD burners became a thing, etc. Streaming video was in its infancy, with TiVo and VOD slowly becoming a thing (although that only reached mainstream in 2007 when Netflix launched). DVDs and DVD players became mainstream, as well as flat TVs, HD video, etc.
Anyway. The tech in the movie theaters did improve by a lot since then, 3D was a fad but we get 4K, imax, Dolby Atmos, etc nowadays. But it's not as popular as back then, cost and convenience probably being important factors, but the lack of long exclusivity (it's now only weeks sometimes until a film is out on streaming) and the overflow of media nowadays isn't helping either. The last really popular film was the Marvel films and the last Avatar film, other than that it feels all a bit mediocre or unremarkable.
I wonder if that's the other factor. The 90's and early 2000s were for many people the highlight of filmmaking - this may be a generational thing. But there were years where multiple films would come out that were still remembered fondly for years or decades after.
Meanwhile, I couldn't name you a single good or standout film from the past year or years. Nothing I remember anyway. I think the combination of the LotR trilogy and the Star Wars prequels ruined films forever for a lot of people, in a good way for the former and a bad, cynical one in the latter, lol.
There is no evidence as to piracy even being a cause for the decline, I say this not as a supporter (I do not pirate) but to correct a misconception.
2002 is when tvs got larger, fidelity with cable tv improved, dvds were readily available, etc. it was also an era where more people started gaming (the industry took off around this time), so people were shifting away from movie theaters as a social activity.
The rise of literalism (as in the article) is probably a partial response to increasingly shorter attention spans.
Songs are shorter (<3 minutes) and lyrics simpler as a result. People don’t want to think anymore.
I sometimes wonder if we’re using the correct metrics to measure all that. Today, it’s a lot easier to access film and series - streaming, local indie cinemas, YouTube. There is A LOT of movies and yet commentary and awards are always limited to AAA titles and artists. Just the other day, I saw this short on YT and it gave me all kinds of feels and thoughts but even IMDb wouldn’t list it.
So maybe, cinema is no longer an exclusive medium for this kind of content and box office numbers (just like revenue for big tech) aren’t supposed to always go “up”.
That's roughly when I largely stopped going to see movies. I stopped because movies started sucking too much. Sure, there is still the occasional wheat kernel, but there's so much chaff that it's no longer worth just taking a chance on a new movie.
I wonder how much of that is because the movies themselves changed vs everything else that has changed. Back in 2002 most people still watched tv on CRT that were very small by today's standard and had very low resolution. You either had to go out and rent a movie, rewatch something you had recorded or bought or watch whatever was on and enjoy the ads. Now we have a huge choice of movies and tv shows at our finger tips any time. Yes, the screen is still much smaller than in the cinema but I also sit much closer. I can pause the movie when I need a bathroom break. I can eat and drink what I want. A movie has to be really good for me to want to spend $40-$50 on going to see a movie with my wife. No travel required, no sitting through ads, no risk of someone in the audience being obnoxious.
I used to go to the cinema quite a bit. Now I only go once every 1-2 years to see something on IMAX that I hope will really benefit from it. In recent years that was just the two Dune movies and most recently the F1 movie. Unfortunately, even the biggest IMAX theater in my area is still not what I'd consider a proper IMAX like the Metreon in SF so I'm always underwhelmed. Not sure if that's because this IMAX is too small or because even IMAX stopped being amazing due to growth and improvement of other screens.
I used to watch a lot of smaller movies in the cinema. That's stopped entirely. With any movie the question now is how long till we just can watch it at home. Smaller movies which I'd be more willing to support frequently even seem to skip the few months where you have to rent them and go straight to streaming. So unfortunately even less incentive to go to the cinema.
Culture around it doesn't help either. Friends used to recommend movies that they watched in the cinema. I can't even recall when that happened last.
In my pod we've got the theory that more people in the US like anime than domestic pop culture. All the time my son and I have random encounters with people who like Goblin Slayer or Solo Leveling or Bocchi The Rock but never find anybody who is interested in new movies and TV shows. They say Spongebob Squarepants has good ratings -- of course it has good ratings because it is on all the time. People mistake seeing ads for a movie for anyone being interested in the movie.
Anime is the US is about a $2.5B industry, whereas just movies and just box office revenue in the US is about a three times that at around $7.5B. Anime is doing great here and growing fast, but I think you are in a bit of a bubble as far as anime. It tends to be a "bubbly" subculture, so not surprising.
> more people in the US like anime than domestic pop culture
Difficult to get viewing figures for that, but I find it hard to believe. That does feel like a bubble effect. And possibly a piracy bubble effect too.
In fact the difficulty of getting meaningful viewing figures out of streamers is probably a big part of the problem. Nobody knows what's actually popular. Even those supposed to be getting royalties had no idea (wasn't there a strike over that?). And the streaming services themselves pay far too much attention to the first weeks, preventing sleeper hits or word of mouth being effective.
Part of the bubble is generational, what my parents watch, what I watch and what my kids watch are all very different. Aka the death of "four quadrant" entertainment.
Even just saying "watch" feels off as so much of my kids time is spent with franchises in Roblox or other online games.
I don't know if it's really anime eating movies' cake. But anime is generally FAR more on board with literalism than movies. If anime is really eating movies' market share, the lesson movie makers need to learn is to be more on the nose, not less.
It drives me crazy that all the streaming services seem to only push about 20 different choices from there catalog.
Each row of choices contains the same titles as the previous row. It makes no sense to me why should the service care at how popular any single title is as long as we are subscribed to their service.
> It makes no sense to me why should the service care at how popular any single title is as long as we are subscribed to their service
I suspect that, like google's notorious killing of products with "only" tens of millions of users, this is a problem of internal structure. I bet that ranking of who gets into that row is a reflection of the social hierarchy between producers at Netflix whose compensation depends on it.
> They are hampering discoverability.
At some point Netflix really focused on this, then like google throwing away search, they lost it.
I don't like (most) Anime (I feel like it's one way I diverge from typical geek culture) but I do often like foreign movies and TV shows more than domestic ones. That's probably an effect too.
On the flip side, I've heard the blandness of larger ticket domestic US films in terms of things like sexual, religious, or political themes attributable to global distribution. Many culture are much more sexually conservative, and most overseas cultures outside maybe Canada and some of Europe would not get (or care about) US politics.
Movies are still great, just not the main circuit. If you live in a large city most often you have access to indie movies or secondary rotation of festival movies instead of 3 marvels, one remake and one romantic like in the big box places.
I think they simply did what AAA video games did. They found what sold best at one moment in time and then obsessively tried to work to copy that.
But the problem is that people don't want to play 40 different Call of Duties, or watch 30 different Batmen. It's just that Batman or Call of Duty were the 'meet in the middle' of a variety of different tastes. But when those other tastes aren't accounted for, it becomes nauseating. It's like how most of everybody really likes cake icing, but eating nothing but cake icing is quite a repulsive concept.
I think things like Dune, Interstellar, and other such films emphasize that there's a gaping hole in the market for things besides men in spandex, but it's just not being filled. And there's even extensive social commentary in Dune (as in the book) but it's done through metaphor rather than shoving it down your throat. And the movie is also rather slow paced with some 3 key events playing out in a 155 minute film, yet it continues to do extremely well. On the other hand those Fremen suits are kind of spandexy...
Not sure that pointing out the success of sci fi franchises is proof audiences want diversity.
The VAST majority of movies that have been made in the past (when the real indicator, % of population going to movies, peaked) deal with ordinary, realistic human stories. Murders are incredibly popular, of course, but so are fraught romances, coming-of-age, and grounded hero-quest movies (which even Bachelorette Party borrows from).
But your point is otherwise completely valid. They found out everyone likes cake, and converted their buffet restaurant to all-cake all-day!
They didn't that was my point. But if people just go to the food court at the mall and complain there's 90% fast food...
Go to a smaller movie theater, go to movie festivals that happen every year in most big cities, you'll see the majority of movies have nothing to do with the few major Hollywood block busters. And comparing Dune, a major block busters to other ones makes no sense when the point was that you need to go outside the main circuit.
My take is that the movies you see at the arthouse cinema aren't any better than the big movies, they just have a smaller budget. They come out of the same system and would be just as self-indulgent if they had the resources to be.
Ok, what does this have to do with the comment you are replying to? I am genuinely curious how this has any relation to the remarks regarding box office numbers
The main driver IMO is the death of the tight 90 minute, 80 Million decently acted thriller / action / comedy film.
Everything is too big, too epic, too simplistic, and too long.
If I understand movie theater economics correctly, the studio gets 80 to 95% of the ticket sales, depending on how "first run" the movie is. The theaters actually make their money on selling concessions.
Well, the longer the movie, the more people feel the need of snacks to get through it. So maybe the theaters are pushing longer movies rather than shorter, because they make more money that way.
> All the 'box office records' since then are the result of charging way more to a continually plummeting audience size.
I don't think that going to the movies has gotten more expensive in real terms. It's just that the records are usually not adjusted for inflation, so a film with the same audience and the same inflation-adjusted admission price will appear to make 80% more at the box office compared to 2002.
And where the heck can you get a movie ticket for $11? A discount matinee viewing at my local theaters is from $17 to $20. $20-$23 if you go in the evening. The lowest price ticket, a Tuesday noon showing, is $12.
I don't recall the last time I went to the movies with my wife and spent less than $60 (tickets, a shared soda, two snacks).
I think some films, especially movies that aspire to win academy awards, are meant to be played to the world wide lowest common denominator. Movies are made for USA and Chinese audiences first, but they are also made to be easily sold in Europe.
This isn't to say that Hollywood thinks everyone is dumb, but they recognize that all these different people who grew up in different places aren't going to understand the same idioms, or may miss subtle, cultural clues. The director has to spell things out. This explains a lot of what the author coins New Literalism.
Not disagreeing with the economics behind it, but this movie-goer walked away decades ago when the "super hero" genre became Hollywood's focus.
Even before that though otherwise decent movies were starting to play heavy handed and treating their audiences for children that need lecturing — need "The Moral of the Story" spelled out for them. I disliked the "book-ending" that was popular when Titanic, Saving Private Ryan (and even Schindler's List) were released.
Music in film too has, for some time now, been telling us how to feel much too often. In romps or swashbuckling films it's probably an expected part of the genre. I just wish there were more quiet films where we are left to feel for ourselves.
Billy's death in The Last Picture Show (and as metaphor for the death of the town) is an excellent example of old-school film making where you just let the film do the talking. And then it is us, the viewers, who are left talking about it, thinking about it afterward.
Maybe the biggest tragedy of heavy-handed film making is it leaves nothing to really even ponder afterward. I kind of like films that leave you thinking about them much, much later.
While I remember seeing great films like Cool Hand Luke, Summer of '42 and The Last Picture Show, working through the "1001 Films to See Before You Die" has been a real eye-opener to how much film can be art and how far we fallen from anything close to that.
Perhaps we'll get another "New Wave" of young filmmakers to break the corporate log-jam.
Hollywood has always been a little bit dumb, a little bit over-written. It's hard to have both artistic individualism and a reliable business. This is not a new trend.
The examples are not very good. I would take Gladiator II, but Megalopolis was a self-funded project which is completely out of left field, and The Apprentice... I'm not sure what it's an example of. Many more titles are dismissed with a couple words. They really lose me when it comes to Anora. That's quite possibly the worst take I've heard about that film yet, and I've read some Letterboxd reviews.
> What feels new is the expectation, on the part of both makers and audiences, that there is such a thing as knowing definitively what a work of art means or stands for, aesthetically and politically.
Before rushing to judge today's movies, shall we remind ourselves what popular movies 20 years ago were? There were some real stinkers there, too, and they were not more smartly written in this regard. They just weren't.
> The point is not to be lifelike or fact-based but familiar and formulaic—in a word, predictable.
Has this person forgotten Titanic, one of the best-selling movies of all time? It's extremely formulaic, predictable, and intentionally so. It's basically opera, not really a new genre.
I don't know if calling it a "New Literalism" is helpful. I just don't know that a penchant for literalism ever went away.
Now, what IS relatively new is the "ruined punchline" phenomena that they identify (without naming) on the movie recap podcast Kill James Bond, which is that contemporary movies always ruin jokes by telling one, say... "x" and then having another character chime in with "Did you just say 'x' !?"
I think there's a fear of losing attention because you're asking people to think about something other than the eyewash happening right in front of them by inviting them to have to -think- about a movie.
Anyway, to close: "No one in this world ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people..."
>No one in this world ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people...
I think you're disproving your own point.
If you look the major flops in all industries (video-games, movies, ...) the general trend is contempt for the audience.
This generally results in some form of uproar from the most involved fans, which is disregarded because of the assumption that the general public won't pick up on it.
At the very least, I would say that for this to be true you need to have a very specific definition of intelligence that would exclude a lot of crowd behaviors.
Can you describe more about the "ruined punchline" thing? Cause that sounds natural to me. Like in Jurassic Park, Alan Grant hears "We clocked the t-rex at 32 mph" and he goes "Did you just say 't-rex'?". Actually they repeat it like 3 times more to really lean into it.
And I guess my point is that Jurassic Park doesn't feel modern or clumsy in this particular execution.
One might argue that it is the same thing, but that Jurassic Park comes from an era before that was common. It would be a different, though related, point in favor of the duplicative nature of media today to the one the author mentions.
Having never seen Jurassic Park (yeah, right?) I'm guessing the preposterousness to an unaware onlooker is played for effect.
This is a more recent phenomenon. This is literally just repeating a punchline so that it tells the audience - "that was the punchline, you can laugh now."
I've seen plenty but I can't give any specific examples. I mention Kill James Bond [0] because they specifically point it out in the movies they watch. Although they don't watch any Whedon movies, in talking about it in movies where it happens a lot they cite Whedon as particularly guilty of this.
I actually have less than zero excuse. I was a 13 year old nerd when it came out - PRIME market.
But I think even then I was allergic to hype. Same reason I've never seen a vast number of well loved movies. Like Titanic. ... just a contrarian LOL.
We didn't have the money to go to movies. So I think the exposure to entire cohort of my fellow nerds having seen it three times over opening weekend, wearing the t-shirt every day, and talking endlessly about it for weeks made it easy for me to just nope out by the time it came out on video. That and I was really hitting the "girls and rock and roll" part of puberty and probably ran as far and as fast as I could from stuff that reminded me of being younger. Enough biography. LOL
Like others have said, go and watch it. It holds up exceptionally well. It's just a plain good movie. The tension, acting, the special effects, quotable moments, the dinosaurs, everything.
Do it tonight and report back tomorrow please.
I'm not gonna promise that it'll change your life - don't want to over hype it. But I am genuinely curious what an adult's initial reaction to it would be after watching it for the first time.
George Carlin didn't emphasis this enough in retrospect. The idiots in-charge now appear to begging for educational percussive maintenance, albeit in hyperbolic, euphemistic form for legal reasons only.
New Yorker is plagued by shallow snobbery. A kind of assumed elitism based on geographic location and a specific demographic. What makes their opinions so correct? Rich people agree with them.
Of course, we have a term for this, luxury beliefs.
You're right. Their decades of elitism isn't obvious enough. Maybe a dozen paragraphs of my own will hash it out. Let me see if I can pull it off without being too literal, flashing arrow signs and all that. Are bullet points "Literalism"? Maybe I'll make it poem.
Cultural Capital (Pierre Bourdieu):
The magazine reinforces a particular taste culture—literary, highbrow, East Coast intellectualism—signaling membership in elite circles.
Selective Audience Targeting:
It serves an educated, affluent readership, which shapes its tone, style, and content—frequently ignoring or patronizing working-class or minority perspectives.
Institutional Legitimacy:
Its reputation gives legitimacy to certain political narratives or aesthetic sensibilities while marginalizing others as “less sophisticated.”
Soft Power Influence:
Through its cartoons, fiction, essays, and profiles, The New Yorker shapes cultural opinion subtly, cloaked in irony and sophistication.
Editorial Gatekeeping:
The long-standing editorial practices filter out voices that don’t conform to its house style or ideological lens, often excluding radical or populist viewpoints.
Performative Progressivism:
The magazine may adopt progressive stances rhetorically, while structurally maintaining elite biases and power relations—e.g., through writer selection, geographic bias, and subtle linguistic signaling.
Symbol of Class Alignment:
Subscribing to or reading The New Yorker is often more about signaling one’s class and worldview than about critically engaging with its content.
Underlying Function or “Purpose” of This Elitism:
To sustain elite consensus in political and cultural discourse.
To shape the boundaries of "respectable" opinion in American media.
To preserve institutional continuity in the arts and letters by selectively uplifting narratives that align with liberal cosmopolitanism rather than disruptive populism or outsider critique.
Ah, I guess ChatGPT couldn't pull it off!
So the larger media creates a problem of slop, rehash movies and nobody watches them and the cure is the so-called elitist media pointing out the obvious. But that assumes a kind of conspiracy that clearly doesn't exist. Together, they help sustain the illusion of a divided American cultural elite (coastal rivalry, etc.), while in reality they co-produce and co-legitimize the same worldview: urbane, technocratic, selectively progressive, and fundamentally market-aligned, but purely coincidentally.
I'm convinced it has to do with the increased importance of the overseas markets, these movies now must make it past Chinese censors and make sense for people that don't natively speak English or understands its nuances. Showing a flashback scene and swapping in the government approved voice over is a better business decision than not releasing the movie in insert country here.
The bean counters ruin everything with product placement, taking out bits that "offend" certain censors, and explaining jokes. Let them have their own edited versions that suck.
Hard agree. In what other art forms are people expected to produce for "global appeal"? A lot of my enjoyment of books and music IS the fact that I "don't get it", and slowly learning the cultural references is fun and good for personal development
Calling the literalism "new" implies it wasn't present in older pics. You can go back to 1997 when Good Will Hunting won 8 Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Pretty much everything was telegraphed, and that’s ok — the story resonated with millions of moviegoers and made a lot of money.
Other movies of the era (e.g. Being John Malkovich) didn’t telegraph stuff. That movie didn't win any Oscars and sold roughly 10x fewer tickets.
> Other movies of the era (e.g. Being John Malkovich) didn’t telegraph stuff. That movie didn't win any Oscars and sold roughly 10x fewer tickets.
1999 was a bumper year for film in general. There were too many good picks that many had to be passed over. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind came out in 2004 to acclaim, and covered similar themes, so it can be done. The casting of Being John Malkovich also made it a long shot for awards, as all of the actors in it are fantastic, but there aren’t any standout roles because everyone in it is so good already, and none of the characters are redeeming in any way, so it’s a hard watch for most folks.
Spike Jonze did get an Oscar nomination for Being John Malkovich, and it was his feature film directing debut. The writer, also in his respective feature film debut (for writing), Charlie Kaufman, also wrote Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Ticket sales are the wrong metric for artsy stuff like that, imo.
Ebert said it best:
> Roger Ebert awarded the film a full four stars, writing: "What an endlessly inventive movie this is! Charlie Kaufman, the writer of Being John Malkovich, supplies a dazzling stream of inventions, twists, and wicked paradoxes. And the director, Spike Jonze, doesn't pounce on each one like fresh prey, but unveils it slyly, as if there's more where that came from... The movie has ideas enough for half a dozen films, but Jonze and his cast handle them so surely that we never feel hard-pressed; we're enchanted by one development after the next". He concluded: "Every once in a long, long while a movie comes along that is unlike any other. A movie that creates a new world for us and uses it to produce wonderful things. Forrest Gump was a movie like that, and so in different ways were M*A*S*H, This Is Spinal Tap, After Hours, Babe and There's Something About Mary. What do such films have in common? Nothing. That's the point. Each one stakes out a completely new place and colonizes it with limitless imagination. Either Being John Malkovich gets nominated for best picture, or the members of the Academy need portals into their brains."
I'm surprised they call out the Conclave as an example of a good movie. It's not a bad movie, but the final twist (I'm not going to spoil it) is way over the top and almost absurdly Hollywood.
It wasn't just the ending. Any time a priest casually breaks the seal of the confessional and nobody bats an eye, it creates this weird surreal effect where you can't even tell if the author is aware of what he's doing.
Without spoiling the twist, I question whether it’s “over the top.” The specific kind of anxiety alluded to by Conclave about popes is almost a thousand years old and has resurged several times.
The guy is actually way too unspecific about the details there to make much sense of the canonical relevance, which renders the resulting anxiety rather comical.
This spoiler-dogeing (pun intended) makes this comment too unspecific to respond to unfortunately, as it's not clear what you found unspecific. It's understood enough by the person he's telling it to, and it makes sense to be beating-around-bush about a topic that could get the person who's telling it in trouble.
I see few Americans in the credits. Did you mean absurdly following in the Hollywood style, or are the handful of Americans involved in that film enough to make it "Hollywood"? Genuinely asking. Is Hollywood a place, a process, or a result?
Very little of "Hollywood" is about the place today. Movies are often filmed outside of it for tax purposes. Referencing it is almost always about either the style or the clique of people who engender the style.
Is this "new" literalism, or just storytelling as it has always been in movies? I've been on a Billy Wilder kick lately, and there are still a lot of scenes in these 70 year old movies where the subtext gets spoken out loud.
Yesterday, I showed my kids the original Planet of the Apes. It literally ends with the main character going "oh no humanity you killed yourself may you be cursed for eternity".
It's a fantastic movie, and it's as literal as it can be, so I'm not sure this complaints about movies being literal now makes much sense.
We always had more literal and more abstract movies. To stick to classic SF: Barbarella, Quintet, Zardoz, 2001, They Live.. they all exist on the same "literal-abstract" continuum, they are just placed at different points.
There's a disconnect somewhere in the industry, because as I writer I can guarantee you one of the things readers get most annoyed with is on the nose dialogue.
My screenplays are heavily influenced by Japanese Anime (which I have researched to a great degree[0]). Some animes have _a lot_ of that kind of dialogue. Sometimes it's just bad writing, but other times it is actually extremely useful.
The times where it is useful are crucial to make a film or show, especially live-action, feel like anime. Thought processes like those presented in the article make it seem like all on-the-nose dialogue is bad and in turn, make my job much harder.
> Some animes have _a lot_ of that kind of dialogue. Sometimes it's just bad writing, but other times it is actually extremely useful.
I think this is going to need unpacking; anime has its sub-genres, many of which are marketed at children, hence the simpler writing. When is it useful to be on the nose? How much speaking like a shonen protagonist do we really need?
The problem is that it permeates writing in so many places. For example, games get more and more littered with this sort of nonsense, too. And worse, it is often also used as a vehicle to convey all sorts of ideologies. Many people don't care about these ideologies, but they get annoyed fast if someone shouts them into their face like a zealot. Plus it feels just fake, completely artificial.
The other problem with it: To me, as an adult, it feels like whoever wrote this made the assumption I'm stupid. This sort of writing is ok, up to a certain degree, for kids. But for adults? A lot of anime are aimed at the younger generations. Anime written for adults are done very differently.
The Matrix is heavily influenced by manga / anime, which you see in quite a few scenes in how they are shot. But many of the explanations that are done are part of the development of Neo, so they never really feel out of place.
Cyberpunk 2077, which does have on the nose dialogue here and there as part of random NPCs spouting stuff. But by and large it tells a story not just through dialogues but also visually. And the visual aspect is so strong that some reviewers completely failed at reviewing the game, they were unable to grasp it. Which is a huge issue, because we are talking about adults here.
> Many people don't care about these ideologies, but they get annoyed fast if someone shouts them into their face like a zealot. Plus it feels just fake, completely artificial.
Unfortunately this is a real problem even if you agree with the message. People won't let a pro-diversity story speak for itself, they have to fit in a PSA like the ones stuck on the end of He-Man episodes.
Mind you, they feel they have to do that because of all the "wait, Superman is woke now?" commentary idiots.
I noticed American shows and movies demographically aimed primarily at kids often slip in cultural references and subtle dirty jokes aimed at keeping older people engaged. Was or is this still a thing in your domain?
Readers actually enjoy "on the nose" dialogue...depending on the genre.
A drama? Biography? Subtlety is desired.
Action? Comedy? Streaming? On the nose dialog is not only enjoyed, but in many cases required. (For non-prestige shows and movies, Netflix strongly encourages the character dialog state the actions/emotions the actors are visually portraying on screen, with the understanding that much of their lower-tier content is watched in the background while people are doing something else.)
> watched in the background while people are doing something else.
There are these devices called "radios"* and this stuff called "music."
There's no point to "watching" a show if it's not being watched, it sort of ruins the whole purpose of it. Dividing attention lessens almost everything. It's like "reading" a book while moving your eyes over the words faster than you can read them. SMH. It's kind of like the cliché of the Banksy couple staring into their screens across from each other, or people who have intercourse while staring at their phones.
* That have been replaced with apps like Spotify and Tidal.
It's a bit odd to declare that there's no point in doing something a lot of people do, especially if it involves entertainment where the only possible point is the enjoyment of the person doing it, and not any sort of objective outcome.
I wonder how much of the problem is the massive influx of streaming platform money to occupy talented directors, writers, and other people who make films. Why risk a Hollywood release when you can get prepaid for your work?
This. Also, long-form high-budget "tv" on streaming services is a better way to tell longer, more interesting stories. See eg "The Expanse" (based on the phenomenal novels by James SA Corey).
You don't really need a critic to see that it has spread everywhere. People not just adore, they demand to be given a three paragraph summary and a moral of the story for everything, no matter which era, which genre, or how much magnificent embroidery was presented to them. So-called Web 2.0 review platforms have succumbed under the weight of people complaining about not being given clear instructions by the authors, and people trying to invent those clear instructions on “understanding” the work themselves. It seems that the simple truth that the whole point of work of art is how it starts processes in your very own head is a secret which is well hidden from those who expect that others can do thinking in their stead, and just state the “results”.
Of course, from that perspective, modern society hasn't changed much for centuries, they just had different excuses back in the days. However, it doesn't happen by itself; the construct of the presumed movie-goer (or reader, or listener) affects the public. When author has high expectations of a recipient, many of them can find themselves growing to that level, when the lowest common denominator is targeted, everyone's average drops. Writing by committee and directing by committee inevitably results in watching by committee, when no one cares because there is enough ways to find out which opinion you “should” have about the movie, and the only thing left is to check the box for visiting the cinema (the obvious democratisation of an old cliche of rich nobles being bored at the opera).
A lot of auxiliary apologetic nonsense is written about “pop culture” today — its “consumers” need to be told how to look at themselves. A vaccine against that would be finding something so bright and delicate that it can't be stuffed into one of predefined expected reactions. A lot of much stronger criticism have already been written, too. One might point to such “hits” as Vladimir Nabokov's “Strong Opinions” and lectures on literature, although the suit of renowned writer and lecturer was perhaps a bit too bronzy, while in reviews read by a small circle of Russian-speaking emigrants in Europe (collected in “Think, Write, Speak...”) or in satirical passages in fictional works he was a bit more open.
The industry should be so lucky as to be plagued with something as well-defined as "literalism". Right now the industry is plagued with writers who would fail Writing 101. Which I mean fully literally. Failing grade, please retake the class, no credit.
And don't give me "oh, they know their craft so completely that they're breaking the rules they deeply understand". No. Hollywood is not putting out a whole bunch of Memento-caliber movies. They're putting out movies written by writers who would instantly experience a jump in quality if someone gave them an all-expenses paid trip to Los Angeles Community College for them to take Writing 101.
That said, I don't entirely blame the writers. I do blame them, because they really are terrible. But the real blame lies at the executive level. For decades Hollywood executives have used the terrible metrics we all made fun of them for, like thinking all we care about is which actor is in a movie or thinking that we like a legitimately good film because it was full of explosions or something. But the executives tended to get away with it, because sitting under them, however uncomfortably, was a studio system that still respected talent, and good talent could get good movies out even so. The executives could say "Give us lots of explosions and use Will Smith!" and the talent could at least sometimes make good movies under those constraints.
But the executives despised that system, failed to understand it, have now successfully disassembled that system, and what's left is disintegrating rapidly. It boggles my mind to see them pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into movies with catastrophically broken scripts, then pouring hundreds of millions more into reshoots, when any halfway decent TA grader from the aforementioned Writing 101 could have given a decent set of notes about the deficiencies of the original script. The execs seem to give no attention to the scripts, when they are by any measure one of the most foundational elements of a movie.
It's not literalism. The writers aren't good enough to be pursuing "literalism". It's just terrible writing, and executives too out-of-touch and ignorant to realize that's the problem, and if they did, too out-of-touch and ignorant to have any clue how to fix it.
Somewhat related, there have been cases where Netflix executives chastised their movie and show writers for "not being second screen enough [0]; that is, since many people put on a show as essentially white noise in the background while they scroll on their phones, the content cannot be too cerebral and require dedicated attention.
I read the first three paragraphs and thought it was an homage to McSweeny's Internet Tendency. But apparently those are real scenes. While writing this reply I kept coming up with examples from decades past, but realized I was confusing obvious subtext with literalism. Hard to avoid. I'm willing to embrace this as a new art form challenge: how LITTLE metaphor can a writer use until the final composition it inverts itself and becomes something completely new? Like Dogme95 but for the text: no tense, no adjectives, no indirect objetcts. I mean, the writing is the equivalent of first-grade reading texts (See Jane Run), but can that many artists really avoid generating something meaningful behind the text? I'm drunkenly optimistic this evening.
Or, people who want complex plots dont watch blockbuster films; they watch indie movies.
The same way that if you want a literary novel, you aren't reading the latest YA best seller.
The super mainstream stuff is always going to go for broad appeal. There is nothing wrong with that, but the people who want something different are going to have to step outside the bestseller box the way they always had to.
I am confused by the use of the term, telegraphed or signpost. I am not even sure I understand what this literalism is about.
Coming from a martial art background, telegraph means reading the subtle signs that comes before an action in order to anticipate, intercept, and counter it within the same tempo. It can also mean exaggeration of the signs, letting slip one’s intentions as an error in execution, or deceiving someone by falsely telegraphing intentions. They all come before the action, whereas the examples in this article seems to talk about things coming after the action.
"Telegraph" is a bit of an unfortunate word because when used metaphorically it has come to have two almost diametrically opposed meanings. I think that's what's tripping you up.
If that were the case, people would watch classic movies, read novels, etc.
No, I’m pretty sure social media has seriously hurt the average person’s attention span.
The idea of sitting down and watching a two hour movie is really quite daunting when you’re used to videos that are at most 30 min and often less than one.
> The idea of sitting down and watching a two hour movie is really quite daunting when you’re used to videos that are at most 30 min and often less than one.
Whenever I watch a modern Netflix/Hulu/etc show: I'm on my phone 2 minutes into the show. Half paying attention to both.
Whenever I watch a modern BBC-ish (anything British really) show: I literally can't look away for more than 10 seconds because I will miss something crucial. If someone distracts me, I rewind the show and rewatch the last few minutes.
What's different? The Brits (at least the stuff that makes it into syndication) focus on content you're going to watch. The Americans focus on filling air between commercials.
Product placement counts as commercials for the purpose of this comparison.
> If that were the case, people would watch classic movies, read novels, etc.
They literally do. Have you ever tried reaching out people NOT on social networks?
> The idea of sitting down and watching a two hour movie is really quite daunting when you’re used to videos that are at most 30 min and often less than one.
Observe somebody browsing Tiktok/Instagram/YouTube Shorts. People compulsively swipe on to the next reel if the one they're watching doesn't hook them in within the first second.
This gets repeated ad nauseum, but IMHO people are short on patience, not attention.
Parents probably understand this the most: try to find an 80s movie to show to your kids, you'll have a pass at it first to properly remember what it's about, and it will painfully slow.
Not peaceful or measured, just slow. Scenes that don't need much explanation will be exposed for about for 10 min, dialogues that you digest in 2s get 2 min of lingering on.
Most movies were targeted at a public that would need a lot of time to process info, and we're not that public anymore (despite this very TFA about how writers make their dialogues dumber)
Old movies are kind of slow but I'm much less frustrated because they are short: an hour, at most two. That's more than enough to tell a story. Modern movies are two hours at minimum with some crossing over three with absolutely nothing to tell (e.g Babylon 2022, completely pissed me off).
I don't think the reason is "public needed time to process info", more likely both the length and the intensity (of changing sights, not of meaning) were ultimately determined by production costs. Filming two hours is more expensive than one hour. Filling an hour with 60 one-minute cuts is more expensive then 30 two-minute cuts because of all the setup and decorations.
Production is now cheaper thanks to CGI, box offices are larger thanks to higher prices and the global market. You no longer have to be frugal when filming, the protection against sloppy overextended movies is now taste and not money. And taste is scarce.
Go to a restaurant and watch any "romantic" couple, what they do. Pay attention to each other, talk? Nah, stare at their own screens, and every two minutes or so show each other a cute cat video and go "awww!"; pathetic.
Haha, the real reason is that people can’t get a joke. One classic I saw is that pg made some comment about philosophy and some other guy went “Looks like you had a bad philosophy class” to which pg replied “I’ve had many”.
Well, that’s funny in a classic pub humour way. Except the guy didn’t get it (and neither did many others) who went on to say “Many bad philosophy classes you mean”
Like, dudes, what did you think that was? Except the whole internet is full of this. Even the slightest of puns needs a second character arriving afterwards who repeats the punch line but with some obviousness baked in.
It’s just that people aren’t literate. And I’ve got to be honest, a lot of such casual wordplay is just beyond Americans (who are generally superior to the British in every other way). They kind of need to be looking at a guy with a microphone to pick up on the joke. Probably the Germanic influence.
There doesn't have to be a joke. If you're rich enough people feel like they have to laugh at your jokes whether or not they are funny. That's the saddest thing about Elon Musk.
I could never explain to NFT fanatics that I wouldn't make NFT art because I couldn't stand producing a product for people who had no taste and would like my worst output as much as my best.
I think the concept of "functional illiteracy" is key. Almost everybody we interact with these days (aside from small children) is technically literate. That is, they can be given words on a page and read them aloud, or they can hear spoken words and write them down. This is especially true online, where this is still pretty much a basic requirement for participating in discussions.
Which it turns out is not the same thing as being given words on a page and understanding them, or turning thoughts into words which convey those thoughts to the reader. That is a substantially rarer skill, especially for anything with any complexity.
People just don't have any media literacy anymore it seems. Every now and then you get some indie project that doesn't treat the audience as stupid, but then the discourse around it demonstrates that the audience in fact may very well be stupid.
A recentish example I've run into is a song from Hazbin Hotel: Poison. They lyrics go on about how bad it is:
> 'Cause I know you're poison
> You're feedin' me poison
> Addicted to this feelin', I can't help but swallow
> Up your poison
The visuals are largely about the protagonist putting on a brave face under sexual assault. This song isn't putting on any kid gloves. But it's also a catchy pop song. The incongruity is the point. You're supposed to feel weird about liking this song.
But I guess a lot of people can't separate format and content so the discussion in the fandom is about how messed up it is for the authors to "glamorize assault".
Just look at how often political campaigns use songs that sound like upbeat patriotic anthems, but are the total opposite if you actually listen to the words. Using "Born in the USA" for a "woo America!" rally is rather awkward. And of course it's not a new thing; Reagan used that song four decades ago.
1. People are indeed stupid. I don't understand why there's so much belief in human intelligence while there's so much proof of the contrary
2. Sometimes intelligent people don't want to engage with the media. Attention is a finite resource, and when I'm tired after 8 hours of work, 30 minutes of recommended daily exercise, two hours of house chores and one hour of depressive thoughts, I just don't have the energy to engage with your song about a topic that's completely irrelevant to my daily life.
3. Quite often media that's supposed to be good is actually quite shitty. Good media should have layers: surface-level literal fun catches your attention, then you discover there's some depth to it, and then you start digging and you realize it's actually very complex and interesting. The problem is that lots of media either just grab my attention for nothing, or start right from the beginning with difficult topics, and then it's "woo the audience is stupid because they won't engage with my media" no bro, I just think your media is boring.
I think there's a combination of causes for this: People looking at their phones and only half-watching most of the movie, "streamlining" the English in movies to make translator's lives easier, a big smile from Mr. 10tril AUM for making it accessible, and of course good-old "enshittification" (if everyone becomes accustomed to lazy plots, they won't notice as they get even lazier)
Special case of bad writing, which is what really plagues today's movies. I often blame comic book films but I'm not sure that's the explanation. I don't know what the explanation is.
Literalism is bad writing. A movie that feels like it's punching you in the face with its moral themes is bad writing. "Ruined by woke" where it feels like minority characters are shoehorned in is actually just bad writing. Plots that don't make sense or are full of holes are bad writing. And so on.
I've been reading more books for the past several years. Of course books have the opposite problem to movies: oversupply. Writing a book is, like software or music, not capital-intensive, though doing it well is time-intensive. There's a lot of good books but they can be hard to find in the sea of mediocrity and now often AI-generated slop.
It's actually a sort of standing joke that trilogies are sometimes 4-fold. Trivial Pursuit used that answer as one of their copyright test questions (if your game replicates our bad answer, you stole our product).
Weird, I thought it was one of the best movies I've seen in the last few years. Wasn't at all what I expected to see, but was incredibly memorable and impactful.
F1 on the other hand was maybe the worst offender as far as literalism is concerned.
https://archive.ph/ZVQvK
Fun fact: movie sales, in terms of tickets sold, peaked in 2002. [1] All the 'box office records' since then are the result of charging way more to a continually plummeting audience size.
And this is highly relevant for things like this. People often argue that if movies were so bad then people would stop watching them, unaware that people actually have stopped watching them!
Even for individual movies. For all the men-in-spandex movies, the best selling movie (by tickets sold) in modern times is Titanic, 27 years ago.
[1] - https://www.the-numbers.com/market/
In 2002 watching a movie at home for most people meant popping a low quality VHS or DVD into a ~27" tube TV with a resolution so worthless it might as well be labeled "new years" and a 4:3 aspect ratio pan and scan of the actual movie. Getting anything recent meant going out to the blockbuster anyways. In 2022 watching a movie meant streaming something on your 50+" 16:9 4k smart TV by pressing a button from your couch.
This says people go to the theatre less often, not that people watch movies less often. Unless you specifically want "the movie theater experience" or you absolutely have to see a certain movie at launch then the tradeoff is much harder to justify.
The number of movie views per person may well be down (or up) but box office ticket sale counts don't really answer that question.
2002 was also when broadband internet and movie piracy became more prolific - DivX was just out, DVD burners became a thing, etc. Streaming video was in its infancy, with TiVo and VOD slowly becoming a thing (although that only reached mainstream in 2007 when Netflix launched). DVDs and DVD players became mainstream, as well as flat TVs, HD video, etc.
Anyway. The tech in the movie theaters did improve by a lot since then, 3D was a fad but we get 4K, imax, Dolby Atmos, etc nowadays. But it's not as popular as back then, cost and convenience probably being important factors, but the lack of long exclusivity (it's now only weeks sometimes until a film is out on streaming) and the overflow of media nowadays isn't helping either. The last really popular film was the Marvel films and the last Avatar film, other than that it feels all a bit mediocre or unremarkable.
I wonder if that's the other factor. The 90's and early 2000s were for many people the highlight of filmmaking - this may be a generational thing. But there were years where multiple films would come out that were still remembered fondly for years or decades after.
Meanwhile, I couldn't name you a single good or standout film from the past year or years. Nothing I remember anyway. I think the combination of the LotR trilogy and the Star Wars prequels ruined films forever for a lot of people, in a good way for the former and a bad, cynical one in the latter, lol.
There is no evidence as to piracy even being a cause for the decline, I say this not as a supporter (I do not pirate) but to correct a misconception.
2002 is when tvs got larger, fidelity with cable tv improved, dvds were readily available, etc. it was also an era where more people started gaming (the industry took off around this time), so people were shifting away from movie theaters as a social activity.
The rise of literalism (as in the article) is probably a partial response to increasingly shorter attention spans.
Songs are shorter (<3 minutes) and lyrics simpler as a result. People don’t want to think anymore.
I sometimes wonder if we’re using the correct metrics to measure all that. Today, it’s a lot easier to access film and series - streaming, local indie cinemas, YouTube. There is A LOT of movies and yet commentary and awards are always limited to AAA titles and artists. Just the other day, I saw this short on YT and it gave me all kinds of feels and thoughts but even IMDb wouldn’t list it.
So maybe, cinema is no longer an exclusive medium for this kind of content and box office numbers (just like revenue for big tech) aren’t supposed to always go “up”.
Yes, and "prestige tv" took off, shifting a lot of viewing to 100 hour TV series.
What was the short?
That's roughly when I largely stopped going to see movies. I stopped because movies started sucking too much. Sure, there is still the occasional wheat kernel, but there's so much chaff that it's no longer worth just taking a chance on a new movie.
I wonder how much of that is because the movies themselves changed vs everything else that has changed. Back in 2002 most people still watched tv on CRT that were very small by today's standard and had very low resolution. You either had to go out and rent a movie, rewatch something you had recorded or bought or watch whatever was on and enjoy the ads. Now we have a huge choice of movies and tv shows at our finger tips any time. Yes, the screen is still much smaller than in the cinema but I also sit much closer. I can pause the movie when I need a bathroom break. I can eat and drink what I want. A movie has to be really good for me to want to spend $40-$50 on going to see a movie with my wife. No travel required, no sitting through ads, no risk of someone in the audience being obnoxious.
I used to go to the cinema quite a bit. Now I only go once every 1-2 years to see something on IMAX that I hope will really benefit from it. In recent years that was just the two Dune movies and most recently the F1 movie. Unfortunately, even the biggest IMAX theater in my area is still not what I'd consider a proper IMAX like the Metreon in SF so I'm always underwhelmed. Not sure if that's because this IMAX is too small or because even IMAX stopped being amazing due to growth and improvement of other screens.
I used to watch a lot of smaller movies in the cinema. That's stopped entirely. With any movie the question now is how long till we just can watch it at home. Smaller movies which I'd be more willing to support frequently even seem to skip the few months where you have to rent them and go straight to streaming. So unfortunately even less incentive to go to the cinema.
Culture around it doesn't help either. Friends used to recommend movies that they watched in the cinema. I can't even recall when that happened last.
> Yes the screen is still much smaller than in the cinema
I recently got a a pair of XR glasses (ray neo 3). Pretty much replicates the full cinema experience. Only downside is it isn't a shared experience.
In my pod we've got the theory that more people in the US like anime than domestic pop culture. All the time my son and I have random encounters with people who like Goblin Slayer or Solo Leveling or Bocchi The Rock but never find anybody who is interested in new movies and TV shows. They say Spongebob Squarepants has good ratings -- of course it has good ratings because it is on all the time. People mistake seeing ads for a movie for anyone being interested in the movie.
Anime is the US is about a $2.5B industry, whereas just movies and just box office revenue in the US is about a three times that at around $7.5B. Anime is doing great here and growing fast, but I think you are in a bit of a bubble as far as anime. It tends to be a "bubbly" subculture, so not surprising.
> more people in the US like anime than domestic pop culture
Difficult to get viewing figures for that, but I find it hard to believe. That does feel like a bubble effect. And possibly a piracy bubble effect too.
In fact the difficulty of getting meaningful viewing figures out of streamers is probably a big part of the problem. Nobody knows what's actually popular. Even those supposed to be getting royalties had no idea (wasn't there a strike over that?). And the streaming services themselves pay far too much attention to the first weeks, preventing sleeper hits or word of mouth being effective.
Part of the bubble is generational, what my parents watch, what I watch and what my kids watch are all very different. Aka the death of "four quadrant" entertainment.
Even just saying "watch" feels off as so much of my kids time is spent with franchises in Roblox or other online games.
I don't know if it's really anime eating movies' cake. But anime is generally FAR more on board with literalism than movies. If anime is really eating movies' market share, the lesson movie makers need to learn is to be more on the nose, not less.
Riffing on your SpongeBob comments.
It drives me crazy that all the streaming services seem to only push about 20 different choices from there catalog.
Each row of choices contains the same titles as the previous row. It makes no sense to me why should the service care at how popular any single title is as long as we are subscribed to their service.
They are hampering discoverability.
> It makes no sense to me why should the service care at how popular any single title is as long as we are subscribed to their service
I suspect that, like google's notorious killing of products with "only" tens of millions of users, this is a problem of internal structure. I bet that ranking of who gets into that row is a reflection of the social hierarchy between producers at Netflix whose compensation depends on it.
> They are hampering discoverability.
At some point Netflix really focused on this, then like google throwing away search, they lost it.
Well also SpongeBob is excellent and one of the greatest shows ever made.
I don't like (most) Anime (I feel like it's one way I diverge from typical geek culture) but I do often like foreign movies and TV shows more than domestic ones. That's probably an effect too.
On the flip side, I've heard the blandness of larger ticket domestic US films in terms of things like sexual, religious, or political themes attributable to global distribution. Many culture are much more sexually conservative, and most overseas cultures outside maybe Canada and some of Europe would not get (or care about) US politics.
Anime is such a broad genre that it is completely normal to dislike most of it.
I assumed those box office records were also dependent upon global ticket sales vs domestic.
Still, surprising statistics.
Movies are still great, just not the main circuit. If you live in a large city most often you have access to indie movies or secondary rotation of festival movies instead of 3 marvels, one remake and one romantic like in the big box places.
I think they simply did what AAA video games did. They found what sold best at one moment in time and then obsessively tried to work to copy that.
But the problem is that people don't want to play 40 different Call of Duties, or watch 30 different Batmen. It's just that Batman or Call of Duty were the 'meet in the middle' of a variety of different tastes. But when those other tastes aren't accounted for, it becomes nauseating. It's like how most of everybody really likes cake icing, but eating nothing but cake icing is quite a repulsive concept.
I think things like Dune, Interstellar, and other such films emphasize that there's a gaping hole in the market for things besides men in spandex, but it's just not being filled. And there's even extensive social commentary in Dune (as in the book) but it's done through metaphor rather than shoving it down your throat. And the movie is also rather slow paced with some 3 key events playing out in a 155 minute film, yet it continues to do extremely well. On the other hand those Fremen suits are kind of spandexy...
Not sure that pointing out the success of sci fi franchises is proof audiences want diversity.
The VAST majority of movies that have been made in the past (when the real indicator, % of population going to movies, peaked) deal with ordinary, realistic human stories. Murders are incredibly popular, of course, but so are fraught romances, coming-of-age, and grounded hero-quest movies (which even Bachelorette Party borrows from).
But your point is otherwise completely valid. They found out everyone likes cake, and converted their buffet restaurant to all-cake all-day!
They didn't that was my point. But if people just go to the food court at the mall and complain there's 90% fast food...
Go to a smaller movie theater, go to movie festivals that happen every year in most big cities, you'll see the majority of movies have nothing to do with the few major Hollywood block busters. And comparing Dune, a major block busters to other ones makes no sense when the point was that you need to go outside the main circuit.
My take is that the movies you see at the arthouse cinema aren't any better than the big movies, they just have a smaller budget. They come out of the same system and would be just as self-indulgent if they had the resources to be.
The mentality of “content creation” plus A/B testing is how we got to Spandex Man #500
Drive-ins are nice in smaller towns
The Drive-in will never die.
Ok, what does this have to do with the comment you are replying to? I am genuinely curious how this has any relation to the remarks regarding box office numbers
The main driver IMO is the death of the tight 90 minute, 80 Million decently acted thriller / action / comedy film. Everything is too big, too epic, too simplistic, and too long.
I'd be fine with the length if they actually used the time for something good.
If I understand movie theater economics correctly, the studio gets 80 to 95% of the ticket sales, depending on how "first run" the movie is. The theaters actually make their money on selling concessions.
Well, the longer the movie, the more people feel the need of snacks to get through it. So maybe the theaters are pushing longer movies rather than shorter, because they make more money that way.
Just an off-the-cuff hypothesis...
> All the 'box office records' since then are the result of charging way more to a continually plummeting audience size.
I don't think that going to the movies has gotten more expensive in real terms. It's just that the records are usually not adjusted for inflation, so a film with the same audience and the same inflation-adjusted admission price will appear to make 80% more at the box office compared to 2002.
In fact... it looks like they've slightly dropped.
https://www.reddit.com/r/boxoffice/comments/14kznfv/movie_ti...
Dropped? You've produced a graph showing they've been on the increase for the past 30 years.
And where the heck can you get a movie ticket for $11? A discount matinee viewing at my local theaters is from $17 to $20. $20-$23 if you go in the evening. The lowest price ticket, a Tuesday noon showing, is $12.
I don't recall the last time I went to the movies with my wife and spent less than $60 (tickets, a shared soda, two snacks).
When movies are made for entertainments sake, they can still do well. ( Top Gun 2, for example ).
I’m really looking forward to the Space Balls sequel. I have hopes that one will be good.
Unfortunately, Top Gun 2 was not "for entertainment's sake" it was another round of US military advertising/propaganda, just like the first one.
oh wow, Covid really spell the death of movie theaters, and it's never going to recover.
ONLY because of streaming services. The industry exploded after the 1918 flu.
I think some films, especially movies that aspire to win academy awards, are meant to be played to the world wide lowest common denominator. Movies are made for USA and Chinese audiences first, but they are also made to be easily sold in Europe.
This isn't to say that Hollywood thinks everyone is dumb, but they recognize that all these different people who grew up in different places aren't going to understand the same idioms, or may miss subtle, cultural clues. The director has to spell things out. This explains a lot of what the author coins New Literalism.
Not disagreeing with the economics behind it, but this movie-goer walked away decades ago when the "super hero" genre became Hollywood's focus.
Even before that though otherwise decent movies were starting to play heavy handed and treating their audiences for children that need lecturing — need "The Moral of the Story" spelled out for them. I disliked the "book-ending" that was popular when Titanic, Saving Private Ryan (and even Schindler's List) were released.
Music in film too has, for some time now, been telling us how to feel much too often. In romps or swashbuckling films it's probably an expected part of the genre. I just wish there were more quiet films where we are left to feel for ourselves.
Billy's death in The Last Picture Show (and as metaphor for the death of the town) is an excellent example of old-school film making where you just let the film do the talking. And then it is us, the viewers, who are left talking about it, thinking about it afterward.
Maybe the biggest tragedy of heavy-handed film making is it leaves nothing to really even ponder afterward. I kind of like films that leave you thinking about them much, much later.
While I remember seeing great films like Cool Hand Luke, Summer of '42 and The Last Picture Show, working through the "1001 Films to See Before You Die" has been a real eye-opener to how much film can be art and how far we fallen from anything close to that.
Perhaps we'll get another "New Wave" of young filmmakers to break the corporate log-jam.
Hollywood has always been a little bit dumb, a little bit over-written. It's hard to have both artistic individualism and a reliable business. This is not a new trend.
The examples are not very good. I would take Gladiator II, but Megalopolis was a self-funded project which is completely out of left field, and The Apprentice... I'm not sure what it's an example of. Many more titles are dismissed with a couple words. They really lose me when it comes to Anora. That's quite possibly the worst take I've heard about that film yet, and I've read some Letterboxd reviews.
> What feels new is the expectation, on the part of both makers and audiences, that there is such a thing as knowing definitively what a work of art means or stands for, aesthetically and politically.
Before rushing to judge today's movies, shall we remind ourselves what popular movies 20 years ago were? There were some real stinkers there, too, and they were not more smartly written in this regard. They just weren't.
> The point is not to be lifelike or fact-based but familiar and formulaic—in a word, predictable.
Has this person forgotten Titanic, one of the best-selling movies of all time? It's extremely formulaic, predictable, and intentionally so. It's basically opera, not really a new genre.
I don't know if calling it a "New Literalism" is helpful. I just don't know that a penchant for literalism ever went away.
Now, what IS relatively new is the "ruined punchline" phenomena that they identify (without naming) on the movie recap podcast Kill James Bond, which is that contemporary movies always ruin jokes by telling one, say... "x" and then having another character chime in with "Did you just say 'x' !?"
I think there's a fear of losing attention because you're asking people to think about something other than the eyewash happening right in front of them by inviting them to have to -think- about a movie.
Anyway, to close: "No one in this world ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people..."
- HL Mencken
>No one in this world ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people...
I think you're disproving your own point. If you look the major flops in all industries (video-games, movies, ...) the general trend is contempt for the audience. This generally results in some form of uproar from the most involved fans, which is disregarded because of the assumption that the general public won't pick up on it. At the very least, I would say that for this to be true you need to have a very specific definition of intelligence that would exclude a lot of crowd behaviors.
Can you describe more about the "ruined punchline" thing? Cause that sounds natural to me. Like in Jurassic Park, Alan Grant hears "We clocked the t-rex at 32 mph" and he goes "Did you just say 't-rex'?". Actually they repeat it like 3 times more to really lean into it.
And I guess my point is that Jurassic Park doesn't feel modern or clumsy in this particular execution.
One might argue that it is the same thing, but that Jurassic Park comes from an era before that was common. It would be a different, though related, point in favor of the duplicative nature of media today to the one the author mentions.
One one level I really enjoy Steven Spielberg, but boy is he heavy handed.
Yeah, maybe the poster-boy even.
Having never seen Jurassic Park (yeah, right?) I'm guessing the preposterousness to an unaware onlooker is played for effect.
This is a more recent phenomenon. This is literally just repeating a punchline so that it tells the audience - "that was the punchline, you can laugh now."
I've seen plenty but I can't give any specific examples. I mention Kill James Bond [0] because they specifically point it out in the movies they watch. Although they don't watch any Whedon movies, in talking about it in movies where it happens a lot they cite Whedon as particularly guilty of this.
[0] https://killjamesbond.com/
The T-Rex bit is not a joke, the line is said seriously. Also, watch Jurassic Park. Good movie.
I actually have less than zero excuse. I was a 13 year old nerd when it came out - PRIME market.
But I think even then I was allergic to hype. Same reason I've never seen a vast number of well loved movies. Like Titanic. ... just a contrarian LOL.
We didn't have the money to go to movies. So I think the exposure to entire cohort of my fellow nerds having seen it three times over opening weekend, wearing the t-shirt every day, and talking endlessly about it for weeks made it easy for me to just nope out by the time it came out on video. That and I was really hitting the "girls and rock and roll" part of puberty and probably ran as far and as fast as I could from stuff that reminded me of being younger. Enough biography. LOL
Like others have said, go and watch it. It holds up exceptionally well. It's just a plain good movie. The tension, acting, the special effects, quotable moments, the dinosaurs, everything.
Do it tonight and report back tomorrow please.
I'm not gonna promise that it'll change your life - don't want to over hype it. But I am genuinely curious what an adult's initial reaction to it would be after watching it for the first time.
I'd say, if you have a core memory at a zoo or a theme park, then you'll probably like it.
> the intelligence of the [..] masses
George Carlin didn't emphasis this enough in retrospect. The idiots in-charge now appear to begging for educational percussive maintenance, albeit in hyperbolic, euphemistic form for legal reasons only.
New Yorker is plagued by shallow snobbery. A kind of assumed elitism based on geographic location and a specific demographic. What makes their opinions so correct? Rich people agree with them.
Of course, we have a term for this, luxury beliefs.
"I don't have to read or argue with this, it's automatically bad because uh elitism"
Now that's what I call a luxury belief!
You're right. Their decades of elitism isn't obvious enough. Maybe a dozen paragraphs of my own will hash it out. Let me see if I can pull it off without being too literal, flashing arrow signs and all that. Are bullet points "Literalism"? Maybe I'll make it poem.
Underlying Function or “Purpose” of This Elitism: Ah, I guess ChatGPT couldn't pull it off!So the larger media creates a problem of slop, rehash movies and nobody watches them and the cure is the so-called elitist media pointing out the obvious. But that assumes a kind of conspiracy that clearly doesn't exist. Together, they help sustain the illusion of a divided American cultural elite (coastal rivalry, etc.), while in reality they co-produce and co-legitimize the same worldview: urbane, technocratic, selectively progressive, and fundamentally market-aligned, but purely coincidentally.
Keep your AI slop to yourself, please.
I'm convinced it has to do with the increased importance of the overseas markets, these movies now must make it past Chinese censors and make sense for people that don't natively speak English or understands its nuances. Showing a flashback scene and swapping in the government approved voice over is a better business decision than not releasing the movie in insert country here.
Unrelated movie trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRqxyqjpOHs
How are language/nuances relevant to the sword/trump tower label examples?
And the second example makes it harder by referencing a bell and an exchange
The bean counters ruin everything with product placement, taking out bits that "offend" certain censors, and explaining jokes. Let them have their own edited versions that suck.
Hard agree. In what other art forms are people expected to produce for "global appeal"? A lot of my enjoyment of books and music IS the fact that I "don't get it", and slowly learning the cultural references is fun and good for personal development
Calling the literalism "new" implies it wasn't present in older pics. You can go back to 1997 when Good Will Hunting won 8 Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Pretty much everything was telegraphed, and that’s ok — the story resonated with millions of moviegoers and made a lot of money.
Other movies of the era (e.g. Being John Malkovich) didn’t telegraph stuff. That movie didn't win any Oscars and sold roughly 10x fewer tickets.
The only thing I remember from Good Will Hunting was Elliot Smith's soundtrack, ha ha.
Being John Malkovich is film for film people.
> Other movies of the era (e.g. Being John Malkovich) didn’t telegraph stuff. That movie didn't win any Oscars and sold roughly 10x fewer tickets.
1999 was a bumper year for film in general. There were too many good picks that many had to be passed over. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind came out in 2004 to acclaim, and covered similar themes, so it can be done. The casting of Being John Malkovich also made it a long shot for awards, as all of the actors in it are fantastic, but there aren’t any standout roles because everyone in it is so good already, and none of the characters are redeeming in any way, so it’s a hard watch for most folks.
Spike Jonze did get an Oscar nomination for Being John Malkovich, and it was his feature film directing debut. The writer, also in his respective feature film debut (for writing), Charlie Kaufman, also wrote Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Ticket sales are the wrong metric for artsy stuff like that, imo.
Ebert said it best:
> Roger Ebert awarded the film a full four stars, writing: "What an endlessly inventive movie this is! Charlie Kaufman, the writer of Being John Malkovich, supplies a dazzling stream of inventions, twists, and wicked paradoxes. And the director, Spike Jonze, doesn't pounce on each one like fresh prey, but unveils it slyly, as if there's more where that came from... The movie has ideas enough for half a dozen films, but Jonze and his cast handle them so surely that we never feel hard-pressed; we're enchanted by one development after the next". He concluded: "Every once in a long, long while a movie comes along that is unlike any other. A movie that creates a new world for us and uses it to produce wonderful things. Forrest Gump was a movie like that, and so in different ways were M*A*S*H, This Is Spinal Tap, After Hours, Babe and There's Something About Mary. What do such films have in common? Nothing. That's the point. Each one stakes out a completely new place and colonizes it with limitless imagination. Either Being John Malkovich gets nominated for best picture, or the members of the Academy need portals into their brains."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_John_Malkovich
Malkovich, Malkovich. Malkovich!
I'm surprised they call out the Conclave as an example of a good movie. It's not a bad movie, but the final twist (I'm not going to spoil it) is way over the top and almost absurdly Hollywood.
It wasn't just the ending. Any time a priest casually breaks the seal of the confessional and nobody bats an eye, it creates this weird surreal effect where you can't even tell if the author is aware of what he's doing.
Without spoiling the twist, I question whether it’s “over the top.” The specific kind of anxiety alluded to by Conclave about popes is almost a thousand years old and has resurged several times.
The guy is actually way too unspecific about the details there to make much sense of the canonical relevance, which renders the resulting anxiety rather comical.
This spoiler-dogeing (pun intended) makes this comment too unspecific to respond to unfortunately, as it's not clear what you found unspecific. It's understood enough by the person he's telling it to, and it makes sense to be beating-around-bush about a topic that could get the person who's telling it in trouble.
Fine, Caesar 7 then for spoilers.
Ilupalg pz buzwljpmpj hivba opz tlkpjhs jvukpapvu. Dl kvu'a slhyu dolaoly pa'z joyvtvzvths huk dolaoly opz vbaly nlupahsph hwwlhy uvyths. Npclu ovd shal pu spml ol optzlsm kpzjvclylk pa, dl jhu hzzbtl aoha aol ylza vm opz ivkf pz mbssf thsl, pu dopjo jhzl aolyl dvbsk ohcl illu uv pyylnbshypaf -- sla hsvul hu ptwlkptlua -- opuklypun opz vykpuhapvu av aol wyplzaovvk.
Aol hbkplujl pz zbwwvzlk av mlls opz zavyf ohz obnl ptwspjhapvuz, dolu pa'z ylhssf uv tvyl ylslchua aohu opt ohcpun h aopyk rpkulf.
Great acting, great filming, awful ending.
I see few Americans in the credits. Did you mean absurdly following in the Hollywood style, or are the handful of Americans involved in that film enough to make it "Hollywood"? Genuinely asking. Is Hollywood a place, a process, or a result?
Very little of "Hollywood" is about the place today. Movies are often filmed outside of it for tax purposes. Referencing it is almost always about either the style or the clique of people who engender the style.
Is this "new" literalism, or just storytelling as it has always been in movies? I've been on a Billy Wilder kick lately, and there are still a lot of scenes in these 70 year old movies where the subtext gets spoken out loud.
Yesterday, I showed my kids the original Planet of the Apes. It literally ends with the main character going "oh no humanity you killed yourself may you be cursed for eternity".
It's a fantastic movie, and it's as literal as it can be, so I'm not sure this complaints about movies being literal now makes much sense.
We always had more literal and more abstract movies. To stick to classic SF: Barbarella, Quintet, Zardoz, 2001, They Live.. they all exist on the same "literal-abstract" continuum, they are just placed at different points.
Well I think that movie is great for reasons other than being abstract.
There's a disconnect somewhere in the industry, because as I writer I can guarantee you one of the things readers get most annoyed with is on the nose dialogue.
My screenplays are heavily influenced by Japanese Anime (which I have researched to a great degree[0]). Some animes have _a lot_ of that kind of dialogue. Sometimes it's just bad writing, but other times it is actually extremely useful.
The times where it is useful are crucial to make a film or show, especially live-action, feel like anime. Thought processes like those presented in the article make it seem like all on-the-nose dialogue is bad and in turn, make my job much harder.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igz7TmsE1Mk
> Some animes have _a lot_ of that kind of dialogue. Sometimes it's just bad writing, but other times it is actually extremely useful.
I think this is going to need unpacking; anime has its sub-genres, many of which are marketed at children, hence the simpler writing. When is it useful to be on the nose? How much speaking like a shonen protagonist do we really need?
The problem is that it permeates writing in so many places. For example, games get more and more littered with this sort of nonsense, too. And worse, it is often also used as a vehicle to convey all sorts of ideologies. Many people don't care about these ideologies, but they get annoyed fast if someone shouts them into their face like a zealot. Plus it feels just fake, completely artificial.
The other problem with it: To me, as an adult, it feels like whoever wrote this made the assumption I'm stupid. This sort of writing is ok, up to a certain degree, for kids. But for adults? A lot of anime are aimed at the younger generations. Anime written for adults are done very differently.
The Matrix is heavily influenced by manga / anime, which you see in quite a few scenes in how they are shot. But many of the explanations that are done are part of the development of Neo, so they never really feel out of place.
Cyberpunk 2077, which does have on the nose dialogue here and there as part of random NPCs spouting stuff. But by and large it tells a story not just through dialogues but also visually. And the visual aspect is so strong that some reviewers completely failed at reviewing the game, they were unable to grasp it. Which is a huge issue, because we are talking about adults here.
> Many people don't care about these ideologies, but they get annoyed fast if someone shouts them into their face like a zealot. Plus it feels just fake, completely artificial.
Unfortunately this is a real problem even if you agree with the message. People won't let a pro-diversity story speak for itself, they have to fit in a PSA like the ones stuck on the end of He-Man episodes.
Mind you, they feel they have to do that because of all the "wait, Superman is woke now?" commentary idiots.
I noticed American shows and movies demographically aimed primarily at kids often slip in cultural references and subtle dirty jokes aimed at keeping older people engaged. Was or is this still a thing in your domain?
Readers actually enjoy "on the nose" dialogue...depending on the genre.
A drama? Biography? Subtlety is desired.
Action? Comedy? Streaming? On the nose dialog is not only enjoyed, but in many cases required. (For non-prestige shows and movies, Netflix strongly encourages the character dialog state the actions/emotions the actors are visually portraying on screen, with the understanding that much of their lower-tier content is watched in the background while people are doing something else.)
> watched in the background while people are doing something else.
There are these devices called "radios"* and this stuff called "music."
There's no point to "watching" a show if it's not being watched, it sort of ruins the whole purpose of it. Dividing attention lessens almost everything. It's like "reading" a book while moving your eyes over the words faster than you can read them. SMH. It's kind of like the cliché of the Banksy couple staring into their screens across from each other, or people who have intercourse while staring at their phones.
* That have been replaced with apps like Spotify and Tidal.
It's a bit odd to declare that there's no point in doing something a lot of people do, especially if it involves entertainment where the only possible point is the enjoyment of the person doing it, and not any sort of objective outcome.
Gonna take this opportunity to recommend Sovereign.
Imho it's the best of the movie of the year, and one big reason is because it is NOT this.
I wonder how much of the problem is the massive influx of streaming platform money to occupy talented directors, writers, and other people who make films. Why risk a Hollywood release when you can get prepaid for your work?
This. Also, long-form high-budget "tv" on streaming services is a better way to tell longer, more interesting stories. See eg "The Expanse" (based on the phenomenal novels by James SA Corey).
You don't really need a critic to see that it has spread everywhere. People not just adore, they demand to be given a three paragraph summary and a moral of the story for everything, no matter which era, which genre, or how much magnificent embroidery was presented to them. So-called Web 2.0 review platforms have succumbed under the weight of people complaining about not being given clear instructions by the authors, and people trying to invent those clear instructions on “understanding” the work themselves. It seems that the simple truth that the whole point of work of art is how it starts processes in your very own head is a secret which is well hidden from those who expect that others can do thinking in their stead, and just state the “results”.
Of course, from that perspective, modern society hasn't changed much for centuries, they just had different excuses back in the days. However, it doesn't happen by itself; the construct of the presumed movie-goer (or reader, or listener) affects the public. When author has high expectations of a recipient, many of them can find themselves growing to that level, when the lowest common denominator is targeted, everyone's average drops. Writing by committee and directing by committee inevitably results in watching by committee, when no one cares because there is enough ways to find out which opinion you “should” have about the movie, and the only thing left is to check the box for visiting the cinema (the obvious democratisation of an old cliche of rich nobles being bored at the opera).
A lot of auxiliary apologetic nonsense is written about “pop culture” today — its “consumers” need to be told how to look at themselves. A vaccine against that would be finding something so bright and delicate that it can't be stuffed into one of predefined expected reactions. A lot of much stronger criticism have already been written, too. One might point to such “hits” as Vladimir Nabokov's “Strong Opinions” and lectures on literature, although the suit of renowned writer and lecturer was perhaps a bit too bronzy, while in reviews read by a small circle of Russian-speaking emigrants in Europe (collected in “Think, Write, Speak...”) or in satirical passages in fictional works he was a bit more open.
The industry should be so lucky as to be plagued with something as well-defined as "literalism". Right now the industry is plagued with writers who would fail Writing 101. Which I mean fully literally. Failing grade, please retake the class, no credit.
And don't give me "oh, they know their craft so completely that they're breaking the rules they deeply understand". No. Hollywood is not putting out a whole bunch of Memento-caliber movies. They're putting out movies written by writers who would instantly experience a jump in quality if someone gave them an all-expenses paid trip to Los Angeles Community College for them to take Writing 101.
That said, I don't entirely blame the writers. I do blame them, because they really are terrible. But the real blame lies at the executive level. For decades Hollywood executives have used the terrible metrics we all made fun of them for, like thinking all we care about is which actor is in a movie or thinking that we like a legitimately good film because it was full of explosions or something. But the executives tended to get away with it, because sitting under them, however uncomfortably, was a studio system that still respected talent, and good talent could get good movies out even so. The executives could say "Give us lots of explosions and use Will Smith!" and the talent could at least sometimes make good movies under those constraints.
But the executives despised that system, failed to understand it, have now successfully disassembled that system, and what's left is disintegrating rapidly. It boggles my mind to see them pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into movies with catastrophically broken scripts, then pouring hundreds of millions more into reshoots, when any halfway decent TA grader from the aforementioned Writing 101 could have given a decent set of notes about the deficiencies of the original script. The execs seem to give no attention to the scripts, when they are by any measure one of the most foundational elements of a movie.
It's not literalism. The writers aren't good enough to be pursuing "literalism". It's just terrible writing, and executives too out-of-touch and ignorant to realize that's the problem, and if they did, too out-of-touch and ignorant to have any clue how to fix it.
Somewhere in the 2000s a lot was lost, after all the best selling movies at the time were literally children's tales.
Somewhat related, there have been cases where Netflix executives chastised their movie and show writers for "not being second screen enough [0]; that is, since many people put on a show as essentially white noise in the background while they scroll on their phones, the content cannot be too cerebral and require dedicated attention.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jan/17/not-sec...
I just wish they'd cease using the two-strip Technicolor orange-and-blue.
It’s kind of disingenuous to lead with an example from Megalopolis like it represents something about the culture.
I read the first three paragraphs and thought it was an homage to McSweeny's Internet Tendency. But apparently those are real scenes. While writing this reply I kept coming up with examples from decades past, but realized I was confusing obvious subtext with literalism. Hard to avoid. I'm willing to embrace this as a new art form challenge: how LITTLE metaphor can a writer use until the final composition it inverts itself and becomes something completely new? Like Dogme95 but for the text: no tense, no adjectives, no indirect objetcts. I mean, the writing is the equivalent of first-grade reading texts (See Jane Run), but can that many artists really avoid generating something meaningful behind the text? I'm drunkenly optimistic this evening.
Eh, People on their phones can’t be bothered with following plot lines everything has to be telegraphed
> everything has to be telegraphed
Or, in the case of recent Netflix executive missives, everything happening must be literally spoken and explained aloud, moment to moment.
Not that I was lacking reasons to nit resubscribe to Netflix but wow...
Or, people who want complex plots dont watch blockbuster films; they watch indie movies.
The same way that if you want a literary novel, you aren't reading the latest YA best seller.
The super mainstream stuff is always going to go for broad appeal. There is nothing wrong with that, but the people who want something different are going to have to step outside the bestseller box the way they always had to.
Fry: Clever things make people feel stupid, and unexpected things make them feel scared.
Futurama nailed it.
I am confused by the use of the term, telegraphed or signpost. I am not even sure I understand what this literalism is about.
Coming from a martial art background, telegraph means reading the subtle signs that comes before an action in order to anticipate, intercept, and counter it within the same tempo. It can also mean exaggeration of the signs, letting slip one’s intentions as an error in execution, or deceiving someone by falsely telegraphing intentions. They all come before the action, whereas the examples in this article seems to talk about things coming after the action.
"Telegraph" is a bit of an unfortunate word because when used metaphorically it has come to have two almost diametrically opposed meanings. I think that's what's tripping you up.
I think it is just as likely the other way around
People are on their phones because the slop they are being served is so shallow and meaningless that they can't be bothered to pay attention to it
If that were the case, people would watch classic movies, read novels, etc.
No, I’m pretty sure social media has seriously hurt the average person’s attention span.
The idea of sitting down and watching a two hour movie is really quite daunting when you’re used to videos that are at most 30 min and often less than one.
> The idea of sitting down and watching a two hour movie is really quite daunting when you’re used to videos that are at most 30 min and often less than one.
Whenever I watch a modern Netflix/Hulu/etc show: I'm on my phone 2 minutes into the show. Half paying attention to both.
Whenever I watch a modern BBC-ish (anything British really) show: I literally can't look away for more than 10 seconds because I will miss something crucial. If someone distracts me, I rewind the show and rewatch the last few minutes.
What's different? The Brits (at least the stuff that makes it into syndication) focus on content you're going to watch. The Americans focus on filling air between commercials.
Product placement counts as commercials for the purpose of this comparison.
> If that were the case, people would watch classic movies, read novels, etc.
They literally do. Have you ever tried reaching out people NOT on social networks?
> The idea of sitting down and watching a two hour movie is really quite daunting when you’re used to videos that are at most 30 min and often less than one.
Average movie length is increasing every year.
Observe somebody browsing Tiktok/Instagram/YouTube Shorts. People compulsively swipe on to the next reel if the one they're watching doesn't hook them in within the first second.
> attention span.
This gets repeated ad nauseum, but IMHO people are short on patience, not attention.
Parents probably understand this the most: try to find an 80s movie to show to your kids, you'll have a pass at it first to properly remember what it's about, and it will painfully slow.
Not peaceful or measured, just slow. Scenes that don't need much explanation will be exposed for about for 10 min, dialogues that you digest in 2s get 2 min of lingering on.
Most movies were targeted at a public that would need a lot of time to process info, and we're not that public anymore (despite this very TFA about how writers make their dialogues dumber)
Old movies are kind of slow but I'm much less frustrated because they are short: an hour, at most two. That's more than enough to tell a story. Modern movies are two hours at minimum with some crossing over three with absolutely nothing to tell (e.g Babylon 2022, completely pissed me off).
I don't think the reason is "public needed time to process info", more likely both the length and the intensity (of changing sights, not of meaning) were ultimately determined by production costs. Filming two hours is more expensive than one hour. Filling an hour with 60 one-minute cuts is more expensive then 30 two-minute cuts because of all the setup and decorations.
Production is now cheaper thanks to CGI, box offices are larger thanks to higher prices and the global market. You no longer have to be frugal when filming, the protection against sloppy overextended movies is now taste and not money. And taste is scarce.
Go to a restaurant and watch any "romantic" couple, what they do. Pay attention to each other, talk? Nah, stare at their own screens, and every two minutes or so show each other a cute cat video and go "awww!"; pathetic.
Haha, the real reason is that people can’t get a joke. One classic I saw is that pg made some comment about philosophy and some other guy went “Looks like you had a bad philosophy class” to which pg replied “I’ve had many”.
Well, that’s funny in a classic pub humour way. Except the guy didn’t get it (and neither did many others) who went on to say “Many bad philosophy classes you mean”
Like, dudes, what did you think that was? Except the whole internet is full of this. Even the slightest of puns needs a second character arriving afterwards who repeats the punch line but with some obviousness baked in.
It’s just that people aren’t literate. And I’ve got to be honest, a lot of such casual wordplay is just beyond Americans (who are generally superior to the British in every other way). They kind of need to be looking at a guy with a microphone to pick up on the joke. Probably the Germanic influence.
For the less enlightened of us, what is the joke?
There doesn't have to be a joke. If you're rich enough people feel like they have to laugh at your jokes whether or not they are funny. That's the saddest thing about Elon Musk.
I could never explain to NFT fanatics that I wouldn't make NFT art because I couldn't stand producing a product for people who had no taste and would like my worst output as much as my best.
I think the concept of "functional illiteracy" is key. Almost everybody we interact with these days (aside from small children) is technically literate. That is, they can be given words on a page and read them aloud, or they can hear spoken words and write them down. This is especially true online, where this is still pretty much a basic requirement for participating in discussions.
Which it turns out is not the same thing as being given words on a page and understanding them, or turning thoughts into words which convey those thoughts to the reader. That is a substantially rarer skill, especially for anything with any complexity.
People just don't have any media literacy anymore it seems. Every now and then you get some indie project that doesn't treat the audience as stupid, but then the discourse around it demonstrates that the audience in fact may very well be stupid.
A recentish example I've run into is a song from Hazbin Hotel: Poison. They lyrics go on about how bad it is:
> 'Cause I know you're poison
> You're feedin' me poison
> Addicted to this feelin', I can't help but swallow
> Up your poison
The visuals are largely about the protagonist putting on a brave face under sexual assault. This song isn't putting on any kid gloves. But it's also a catchy pop song. The incongruity is the point. You're supposed to feel weird about liking this song.
But I guess a lot of people can't separate format and content so the discussion in the fandom is about how messed up it is for the authors to "glamorize assault".
Just look at how often political campaigns use songs that sound like upbeat patriotic anthems, but are the total opposite if you actually listen to the words. Using "Born in the USA" for a "woo America!" rally is rather awkward. And of course it's not a new thing; Reagan used that song four decades ago.
1. People are indeed stupid. I don't understand why there's so much belief in human intelligence while there's so much proof of the contrary
2. Sometimes intelligent people don't want to engage with the media. Attention is a finite resource, and when I'm tired after 8 hours of work, 30 minutes of recommended daily exercise, two hours of house chores and one hour of depressive thoughts, I just don't have the energy to engage with your song about a topic that's completely irrelevant to my daily life.
3. Quite often media that's supposed to be good is actually quite shitty. Good media should have layers: surface-level literal fun catches your attention, then you discover there's some depth to it, and then you start digging and you realize it's actually very complex and interesting. The problem is that lots of media either just grab my attention for nothing, or start right from the beginning with difficult topics, and then it's "woo the audience is stupid because they won't engage with my media" no bro, I just think your media is boring.
I think there's a combination of causes for this: People looking at their phones and only half-watching most of the movie, "streamlining" the English in movies to make translator's lives easier, a big smile from Mr. 10tril AUM for making it accessible, and of course good-old "enshittification" (if everyone becomes accustomed to lazy plots, they won't notice as they get even lazier)
Special case of bad writing, which is what really plagues today's movies. I often blame comic book films but I'm not sure that's the explanation. I don't know what the explanation is.
Literalism is bad writing. A movie that feels like it's punching you in the face with its moral themes is bad writing. "Ruined by woke" where it feels like minority characters are shoehorned in is actually just bad writing. Plots that don't make sense or are full of holes are bad writing. And so on.
I've been reading more books for the past several years. Of course books have the opposite problem to movies: oversupply. Writing a book is, like software or music, not capital-intensive, though doing it well is time-intensive. There's a lot of good books but they can be hard to find in the sea of mediocrity and now often AI-generated slop.
Oh nooooooo sincerity bad. Got it.
(Counterexample: "Sorry, Baby", which literally just came out.)
What do you mean by "sincerity"?
Most movies are pretty bad. Always have been. I feel like I got scammed for paying to see 28 Years Later.
What did you expect from 28 Years Later, and what have you got?
The threequel zombie movie lacked too much subtlety for you?
Quadquel?
There is another (and supposedly final) in January 2026.
It's actually a sort of standing joke that trilogies are sometimes 4-fold. Trivial Pursuit used that answer as one of their copyright test questions (if your game replicates our bad answer, you stole our product).
Weird, I thought it was one of the best movies I've seen in the last few years. Wasn't at all what I expected to see, but was incredibly memorable and impactful.
F1 on the other hand was maybe the worst offender as far as literalism is concerned.
> F1
Let me guess, an old man Brad Pitt enters the movie screen and says something like: “I’m gonna, I’m gonna… I’m gonna WROOOM! I’m WROOMING!!”?
Most of this writers points are ideas recently circulating around twitter.
It's almost as if when one person is reacting to a trend, other people are also reacting to it!
Then one would hope they have a new point to make. I don’t need them to read twitter for me