By Leo Dublin
The year is 2024. I enter my local Cinemark. The projector whirs. Lee Isaac Chung’s Twisters starts playing. And I leave disappointed. Next movie. Guy Ritchie’s The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. I feel nothing.
There was a time when viewers could enter a movie theater and have faith they would see a great film. If not, then surprising, but not a problem.
Now when I see a new movie, I have to pray that it’s at least passable. If so, I’m thrilled. If not, I’m left empty. Just another bad movie added to the growing list from recent years.
The reason for this quality drop: money.
Of the highest-grossing films of all time, 39 out of the top 50 are sequels or franchises (not counting the first of each) – nearly 80%.
Hollywood knows what makes cash: franchises and sequels, devoid of originality.
Take Avatar with its inventive 3D. Avatar: The Way of Water, though? A 2.5 hour slog. It’s still number 3 on the highest-grossing list, because of Avatar’s name and the power of nostalgia.
Sequels and franchises can be commendable. The MCU has winners, but they drown in the pathetic sea of slop like Quantumania or The Marvels. But they make money, because audiences want big pictures of vapid nothingness.
Creativity is lost because Hollywood doesn’t want to lose money, even at the expense of risk.
As film critic James Phyrillas says: “Disney doesn’t need to try.” This pessimism applies to Hollywood as a whole. They haven’t stopped trying, but if they did, it would take time to notice.
Hollywood’s becoming so unoriginal that if they stopped risks, they could churn out multiple movies before we even noticed. Risks are still happening (like Challengers or Longlegs), but they’re lost in sequels, reboots, and remakes.
Filmmakers that dare to take risks are even punished. Director Jane Schoenbrun made the audacious films We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow, covering LGBTQ+ issues in an unprecedented way.
Schoenbrun’s unique risks were penalized; grossing under $375,000 with IMDb scores of 5.4 and 5.9. Schoenbrun took a risk, and the world is so jaded to novel experiences that they completely rejected something outside the norm.
To discover why, I interviewed Alissa Wilkinson, a film critic for the New York Times since November 2023.
“There are more movies than ever before,” she says. “Good movies feel more sparse just because there’s more junk.”
The cause? Streaming services. Wilkinson explains how during the pandemic, streaming helped because people couldn’t go to the theater. It benefited creators looking to reach the masses without a huge production. But that waned because “streaming is not a great business model,” she said. Eventually, most of the indie creators lost jobs because the websites were bleeding funds, and didn’t want to take risks that might cost money.
Another factor Wilkinson notes is the “superhero boom.” Despite superhero movies making significant money, they’re also costly to produce. To make back those funds, the movie has to sell as many tickets as possible. “The more people you try to appeal to, the less good your product often winds up being.”
Many 90s films are beloved because they didn’t try to appeal to a wide audience, and by taking this chance, they became cinematic classics without costing much. The death of the “mid-budget movie” as a result is causing the industry to lose potentially huge films because they aren’t guaranteed to make revenue.
“A great movie shouldn’t have to be for everyone,” says Wilkinson. When art tries to appeal to everybody, it ends up appealing to nobody. Excellent films are meant for a specific group, and others like them because they’re unexpected to outsiders.
The movie industry has always been art vs. commerce. In the 1970s, executives would take wild risks and greenlight something that the company didn’t think would sell (heard of The Godfather?), and now that almost never happens in the big companies like Paramount. “There’s less room for that when you have a risk-averse industry,” Wilkinson notes.
There was a time when moviegoers could see The Shawshank Redemption, Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction, and The Crow within months, and those were just 4 of the masterpieces released that year. Now, when I enter a theater, I am anxious not knowing if this will be decent or another entry into the skyrocketing list of depressing and pathetic movies tacked onto Hollywood’s growingly mediocre wall.
Leo Dublin lives in Livermore, CA and is the full-time Arts & Entertainment Editor for the Opinion.
