I have no desire to see either of these, even for free. I’ll say this though, I’ll bet you can hear the dialogue in one of the films. The other was done by Nolan.
Like it or not, Avengers Endgame was bigger. But so stoked to see the movies intersect with culture so hard right now, especially after covid. Shame the studios are shooting them selves in the foot with their greed and can’t ride the wave.
I feel like studios don’t know what to make post Covid, and they are still releasing pre Covid shit. There is this strange space where studios don’t know what to do, then this happened.
They never really recovered from the 2008 financial collapse. That’s when everything became a sequel/prequel/reboot. Technology and streaming didn’t help but I remember it happening really fast after 2008.
Matt Stoller has a good article on how vertical integration led to this situation, but I gotta go to bed. The article talks about how Back to the Future and Ghostbusters couldn’t be made today, if anyone wants to go looking for it. It’s very good.
It’ll be interesting to see how they process this, because it’s such in-your-face evidence that their whole theory of the the new business model is completely ass-backwards.
People don’t want tons and tons of mediocre crap, they want a few great things. They don’t want endless rehashes and drivel, they want things that are interesting and challenging. They don’t just want small screens to keep them company while they do laundry, they want actual cinema in a communal setting. The value doesn’t come from convenience or volume, or algorithms, it comes from artists.
I know that they’ll do anything to avoid recognizing these truths, but it’ll be odd to watch.
I think the ideal arrangement is one of choice, where you have the option to enjoy movies in isolation and I have the ability to show up to a crowded theater and pay $25 dollars for the experience of having people ask to take a picture with me because I’m wearing a homemade costume made out of shipping boxes to see the fifth reboot of a film adaption of a cartoon adapted from a line of '90s toys.
Not to downplay the quality of the movies, but one is a biopic and one is a toy adaptation; one could easily throw in “finally an original movie that’s not a superhero, sequel, biopic, or toy adaptation.” They’re good movies. Good movies can come in any form, superheroes, sequels, and remakes included.
Not hard at all. I can already tell you I liked Everything Everywhere All at Once (this year’s BP winner) way more than Dances with Wolves.
1991 is a uniquely weak year for the Academy though. You might have had a stronger argument with 1994 or 1995, but I can still think of plenty of movies released in the last decade that I would rank up there with Schindler's List or Pulp Fiction.
The studio system broke down in the late 2000s, between China becoming a market and the massive, MASSIVE flood of money from lotr, HP, marvel and other similar copypasta franchishes the pressure for sequels and the like exploded, and independent directors lost a lot of their room to experiment.
Streaming is the second half, everybody wants something with a long tail, ie you can recognize it from the Netflix catalog, which pushes harder for sequels and franchises
I think what people are asking for right now is for studios to take risks and be creative. They want to experience something different. Superheroes and remakes have been done to death to the point that some (myself included) are just saturated.
But between that, the sequel trilogy, the hobbit trilogy and whatever the hell the Harry Potter sequels were, plus the disaster that is the DC universe, we need a decade off to clear our palates of all this recycled bs.
Then we can start again slowly like iron man did in 2008, but we are still way hungover from endgame.
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