site banner

Friday Fun Thread for January 16, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

1
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

But even when the marketing does hit?

What was the last big marketing push for a movie that you can remember in general? In the last five years, I can remember:

  • Dune (2021)
  • Oppenheimer (2023)
  • Barbie (2023)
  • Wicked (2024)

I can't even think of anything for 2025. The wicked sequel might have had something resembling hype, if you squinted.

Maybe I'm just living under a rock or something, but it really feels like movies as a cultural touchstone have just sort of fizzled out.

The promotion for Wicked and Wicked: For Good kind of blur together because there was so little time between them. It just feels like Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande have been out promoting the same movie for three years.

I think they tried to hype Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, but no one cares about the plot of Mission Impossible movies enough to get excited about seeing the second half. Going in all I could remember was that there was a submarine and and AI in the last one.

Marvel couldn't get any hype going. Captain America: Brave New World had too many well known reshoots and production problems for people to get excited.

I think Hollywood's big problem is that they locked in things like the "Representation and Inclusion Standards" for the Oscars during peak woke. The pipeline to make a movie is around 5 years.

So when some major projects underperformed in 2023-2024 followed by Trump getting re-elected, they lost faith in the movies coming out and didn't want waste a lot of money on marketing.

A Minecraft Movie managed to generate a lot of hype in the kids movie category.

Maybe F1 The Movie, heard some noise about that one.

F1 movie was itself marketing, it's a modest success based on the size of the investment but they're going ahead with a sequel because it was well received and rebates, sponsorships, and the actual involvement of F1 (and attached investor $s) saw it as good for the F1 brand.