Why 99% of (Mainstream) Movies are Garbage

gorfias

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So we had one movie that was critically acclaimed, another that was liked by audiences more than critics and both pulled in ridiculous amounts of cash.

There is no rational metric by which this can be considered a failure by anyone other than an armchair accountant. The Star Wars fan base has been a chaotic mess since the prequels, with damn near everything this franchise has done being treated like World War 3 by a loud, obnoxious minority. These are the same people who were all too happy when Disney bought the franchise from Lucas only to declare him their lord and savior when they were once again dissatisfied with what they got (not that it actually mattered).

As for merchandise, sales have actually been up despite there being no Star Wars movie since 2019.

https://screenrant.com/star-wars-movie-show-toy-sales-2020-increase/
As I wrote, TV may be able to save this thing (why toy sales are up). I'd credit the Mandalorian, which is causing further havoc with the fan split. But really, I have to think that stuff like Luke's appearance at the end of Mando Season 2 shows they can unite the fans if they want to do so.
As for the topic at hand, I do not think 99% of mainstream movies are garbage. I think at worst, most are really just average.
I liked Kong vs. Godzilla, for instance. But there was so much money and talent on that screen. How could it have such staggeringly ill fitting story points?
Godzilla blasts a hole to the heretofore unknown under world? And it is on lazer target? Worse: Godzilla beats Kong and walks away? It really doesn't work. How does that happen with so much money and resources out there?
 

Thaluikhain

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When something proves to be financially successful, those who hate will always come up with any reason as to why it made money and ignore the obvious answer that the majority of people liked it.
To clarify, I'm not saying it was awful. I don't think the sequels were very good, but they are worth getting on DVD and rewatching, as long as you don't buy them when they are still full price (never buy films for fill price).

But their success owes a lot to the franchise backing them up.
 

TheMysteriousGX

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Wait, what? The majority of people liked it? And this is after Rotten Tomatoes no doubt manipulates this to look better than it really is.
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You don't think that an IP bought for $4 billion should have wanted to do much more? These movies could have made double, triple what they made. This was a softball pitch that could have resulted in adoration, merchandise sales, successful theme parks. Instead, you have a number of stalled, delayed or outright canceled projects, merchandising crashing and failing theme parks. It resulted in 1/2 the fan base thinking this nothing but an incompetent open hate letters to men, boys, and star wars fans in general. Maybe the TV shows can repair the damage.
And money is not the only measure of success. Game of Thrones, for instance, was huge. But it botched the landing so badly that it badly harmed its place as part of the cultural conversation. More stalled projects. I'm not sure that one can ever be fixed.

To his credit, Christopher Nolan states that when making the Batman movies, he approached each on to be a success on its own. Sure, Begins ends with Batman looking at a Joker card, but it is meant more as an Easter egg than a teaser for a sequel. But the Snyder JLA? It is dying for a sequel but I have to think, it just threw a ton of crap against the wall with no idea how it would fit into anything. They'll have to work in reverse, for instance, to explain why Batman would need the help of the Joker to stop Darkseid.

Well planned sequels can work though. Much of the MCU, particularly Infinity War and End Game mostly pulled it off.

Where does Hollywood go from here? The MCU, for instance, is moving toward getting into the Multiverse. I'm looking forward to seeing where that takes us.
I mean, there's an entire cottage industry of YouTube channels that needed The Last Jedi to fail so badly that they invented conspiracy theories as to how Disney needed to massage the numbers to avoid the movie looking like a flop. I mean, "1/2 the fan base thought the movie was an open hate letter to men, boys, and Star Wars fans in general"? Of the many reasons I could see somebody disliking TLJ, that one's just internet culture war bullshit. Might as well seriously suggest that BB-8 was a little white cuck ball.

Review bombing is a thing.
 

BrawlMan

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I mean, there's an entire cottage industry of YouTube channels that needed The Last Jedi to fail so badly that they invented conspiracy theories as to how Disney needed to massage the numbers to avoid the movie looking like a flop. I mean, "1/2 the fan base thought the movie was an open hate letter to men, boys, and Star Wars fans in general"? Of the many reasons I could see somebody disliking TLJ, that one's just internet culture war bullshit. Might as well seriously suggest that BB-8 was a little white cuck ball.

Review bombing is a thing.
I remember all the crappy hot takes coming up in my feed. When I didn't ask for them, nor did I view any of them. It was after Double Toasted's mostly positive review.
 

gorfias

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I mean, there's an entire cottage industry of YouTube channels that needed The Last Jedi to fail so badly that they invented conspiracy theories as to how Disney needed to massage the numbers to avoid the movie looking like a flop. I mean, "1/2 the fan base thought the movie was an open hate letter to men, boys, and Star Wars fans in general"? Of the many reasons I could see somebody disliking TLJ, that one's just internet culture war bullshit. Might as well seriously suggest that BB-8 was a little white cuck ball.

Review bombing is a thing.
I think you can have such channels, and still be talking about something really bad. I've thought the same when watching a channel review the series, "Batwoman". The commercial trailers have been horrible. I can understand them being aweful. But why keep reviewing them if you know they're going to be this bad? If they're great, you lose a hook for your channel. But as I noted earlier, I have to think they could have made a sequel trilogy that everyone likes, rather than split the fan base, which in my circles, they did. Hard.
 

Ringo

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The 2010's were one of the worst decades film has ever had. People don't care about the medium anymore. It's about franchises upheld by legions of nostalgic grown children.
 
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gorfias

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The 2010's were one of the worst decades film has ever had. People don't care about the medium anymore. It's about franchises upheld by legions of nostalgic grown children.
Since around 2000, movies have had a new challenge. TV has become better for adults than the theater. And they can do things you cannot do in a 2-3 hour movie. What would a "Mad Men" or "Breaking Bad" 2-3 hour movie look like? Breaking Bad did have a 2 hour sort of sequel movie but even that was not as good as the series as whole.

And now I've got a home theater. Hard to write what will get me out to the theater... except I do like to get out on occasion.
 

Gordon_4

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The 2010's were one of the worst decades film has ever had. People don't care about the medium anymore. It's about franchises upheld by legions of nostalgic grown children.
It will be a cold day in hell that when presented with either Walter White or Steve Rogers as a choice, I’m going to feel bad about choosing the superhero.

If movies are franchises being held up by children or nostalgic adults then television is glamourised misery and despair being held promoted as better than we deserve.
 
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TheMysteriousGX

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But as I noted earlier, I have to think they could have made a sequel trilogy that everyone likes, rather than split the fan base, which in my circles, they did. Hard.
You say that, but that's literally never happened for Star Wars.

At least, not in the moment. Empire was too dark and the bad guys won. Jedi was too goofy and had the incest thing. The hate on the special editions and prequels were legendary. My brother *loves* Rise of Skywalker and I think it barely rates above the Holiday Special.

All the fan reaction did was guarantee that the next set of movies will be bland enough to cross over with the MCU. You already see it happening with the TV shows, everything crossing over and referencing everything else. It's a "we can't just make some money, we need to make ALL the money" blended mayonnaise situation.
 

gorfias

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You say that, but that's literally never happened for Star Wars.

At least, not in the moment. Empire was too dark and the bad guys won. Jedi was too goofy and had the incest thing. The hate on the special editions and prequels were legendary. My brother *loves* Rise of Skywalker and I think it barely rates above the Holiday Special.

All the fan reaction did was guarantee that the next set of movies will be bland enough to cross over with the MCU. You already see it happening with the TV shows, everything crossing over and referencing everything else. It's a "we can't just make some money, we need to make ALL the money" blended mayonnaise situation.
I do think the sequel trilogy comes as close to a set of movies one could reasonable quantify as terrible and showed nearly criminal negligence.
Star Wars (Now called a New Hope) did not have a split fan base. I recall some disappointment but not outrage with Empire (My sister was disappointed that the movie quickly divided up our heroes, sending them in 2 different directions). In the day, I was shocked that it ended on a down note. Jedi deserves some shade as it got a terminal case of "the cutesies". I've seen some of the behind the scenes and it is cringe inducing. But again, not divided. And there were some great aspects to it. But the sequels? An open hate letter.
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I don't think anyone loved the prequels. I too thought them wrong headed.

But I hear you regarding what $ can do to film making. I'd heard of a exec explaining to new Asian backers that they figure x number of movies will be huge hits, x will do OK, but x will fail to which the backers asked, "why not just make movies that become huge hits?"

Playing it safe can be dull. But having Cap actually be secretly Hydra? Have Batman be a sexual predator between exercises in fighting crime? Punisher is a cross dresser in his down time?

I did read one edgy thing Rian tried to do but failed: end the light vs dark polarization. In the end, they didn't do it. That, along with making a Storm Trooper with a conscience front and center of your story could have produced some interesting things.
 

TheMysteriousGX

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I do think the sequel trilogy comes as close to a set of movies one could reasonable quantify as terrible and showed nearly criminal negligence.
Star Wars (Now called a New Hope) did not have a split fan base. I recall some disappointment but not outrage with Empire (My sister was disappointed that the movie quickly divided up our heroes, sending them in 2 different directions). In the day, I was shocked that it ended on a down note. Jedi deserves some shade as it got a terminal case of "the cutesies". I've seen some of the behind the scenes and it is cringe inducing. But again, not divided. And there were some great aspects to it. But the sequels? An open hate letter.
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Log off. Seriously, if that's "an open hate letter", you need to detox from the internet. EDIT: Like, I was 15 when Phantom Menace came out and was an "open hate letter to the fans". And it wasn't. It was just kinda bad with some cool explody scenes.

The $300,000,000 internationally released big budget blockbuster isn't an attack on 49.9% of the human race *or* its own fans. At worst it's just dumb with some explody bits and a generic "rich arms dealers bad" subplot.
I don't think anyone loved the prequels. I too thought them wrong headed.
You'd be wrong. They played pretty great with the target audience of kids.
 
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BrawlMan

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Log off. Seriously, if that's "an open hate letter", you need to detox from the internet. EDIT: Like, I was 15 when Phantom Menace came out and was an "open hate letter to the fans". And it wasn't. It was just kinda bad with some cool explody scenes.
I never got the open hate letter argument. The people who use that statement are making excuses of why they did not like it, and are not being honest about why they dislike the film. BTW, I was 9 when Phantom Menace released. I had a classmate where him and his dad saw it on a Thursday night at midnight.
 
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TheMysteriousGX

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I never got the open hate letter argument. The people who use that statement are making excuses of why they did not like it, and are not being honest about why they dislike the film. BTW, I was 9 when Phantom Menace released. I had a classmate where him and his dad sawing on a Thursday night at midnight.
It was dumb. I was dumb. Took a decade for me to realize that I was internet poisoned and being dumb.

Hell, I even know it was internet poisoning because I *loved* Phantom Menace walking out of the theater. Sure, I probably would've cooled off a bit on my own after thinking about it, but I probably would't've gone down the "George Lucas hates the *real* fans" rabbit hole without plenty of help from people on the internet.

And relating back to the topic of the thread, while I can rant for hours about all the flaws I see in Rise of Skywalker, up to and including the opinion that JJ Abrams has zero idea how to actually write a story with an ending and should be relegated to the realm of TV/movie pilot projects and nothing more, at the end of the day it's just kind of bad, like most movies. The only reason I care is because I wanted it to be a good movie.

But TLJ or Rise of Skywalker or Twilight or Ready Player One or Wonder Woman 1984 aren't exactly Birth of a Nation.

They're just, if you don't like them, bad movies.
 
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Samtemdo8

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I have thought movies have been sucking lately.

Mediocre,Bad,Average, and Obscure.
 
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BrawlMan

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It was dumb. I was dumb. Took a decade for me to realize that I was internet poisoned and being dumb.

Hell, I even know it was internet poisoning because I *loved* Phantom Menace walking out of the theater. Sure, I probably would've cooled off a bit on my own after thinking about it, but I probably would't've gone down the "George Lucas hates the *real* fans" rabbit hole without plenty of help from people on the internet.
As for the Phantom Menace, I never hated it. To me, it was always a 6/10 movie. Attack of the Clones is boring and I can't stand. Revenge of the Sith I like and see it as a 7/10.

And relating back to the topic of the thread, while I can rant for hours about all the flaws I see in Rise of Skywalker, up to and including the opinion that JJ Abrams has zero idea how to actually write a story with an ending and should be relegated to the realm of TV/movie pilot projects and nothing more, at the end of the day it's just kind of bad, like most movies. The only reason I care is because I wanted it to be a good movie.

But TLJ or Rise of Skywalker or Twilight or Ready Player One or Wonder Woman 1984 aren't exactly Birth of a Nation.
  • TLJ - I though as good, but flawed. I hate Admiral Po and she's a waste of space. That will never change. I love the brief team up with Rey and Kylo.
  • RoS - It's average, but I feel no need to see the film again. Too much retconning and never follows up on any of the plot points set up or conclude in a dumb way. Disney had no overall plan for any of the new trilogy and it was really apparent by this film.
  • Still hate Twilight, but none of the actors deserved harassment or so much unnecessary scorn.
  • WW84 - Not as good as the first movie, but still great and enjoyable.
  • RPO - Enjoyed for what it was, but I have no need watch it again.
They're just, if you don't like them, bad movies.
Correct. The most appropriate response. None of this extra shit, because of insecurity or some jack ass on the Internet told you to hate the movies for petty reasons.
 

gorfias

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Makes me wonder, what is the last theater movie that really awed you. One that will stay with you well into the future.
For me, 1917. I've rewatched Infinity War and End Game a ton. I think I will do so again. Thor Ragnarok? Eh. I liked it. I have Disney + and still won't rewatch it any time soon.