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Notes -
Red Letter Media just did a review of Guardians of the Galaxy 3. In their usual tangent at the beginning of the video, Mike read off an online article of the 34 biggest movies coming out this year. Of the 34, 28 are sequels/remakes/reimaginings of existing properties. Of the remaining 6, 3 are based on real-life people (ex. Oppenheimer). That leaves three major movies in all of 2023 based entirely on original ideas, and all three are made by big, established filmmakers with lots of studio clout. This is a trend people have been recognizing for at least the last 5 years, if not the last decade.
EDIT - the RLM guys actually got a few of these wrong and the numbers are even worse than they thought. At least one of the 6 supposedly original films are based on a book (Scorcese's next project) and another is based on a true story (Taika Waititi's next film).
My question is -
Is there any historical precedence for this? Has there been a time and place where popular culture so heavily converged on recycling products that the flow of new products was stymied.
I don't want to be too doomer about this. There are still new, original, interesting movies being made, but they have been shuttled off to low-budget indie and streaming avenues. These days, if a movie is big enough to get a wide release, it is almost certainly not original. It's hard to imagine a new Star Wars (the original) or anything like it coming out today - a big, bold, truly original vision with a budget.
(Alternatively, maybe most of the cinematic creativity is flowing into television where for a variety of technical and cost reasons, interesting stuff can still be made on a big budget (ie. HBO).
You could frame the whole Renaissance as basically recycling the Greek/Roman culture, if you wanted to. Recycling is not bad by itself. I don't mind somebody making another Sherlock Holmes movie or a remake of Herbert Wells stories. Or even Hamlet, for that matter. Yes, it's not original, but it doesn't mean it's necessarily worthless.
But I think the decline in originality may be because the production is now controlled by a limited set of big corporations, and they would necessarily favor safe, data-driven approach. Can you prove, with data in your hands, that your new original crazy idea would make more money than Superheroes 28, take 17? Probably not. Superheroes it is.
It doesn't mean the new thing can't happen now and then, on shoestring budget just through the power of it's own creativity. Possible. But on the volume, it would be one such thing per several years, while 99% is the safe, data-driven shlock. And once that new thing comes up, it will be milked for the next two decades, turning it inevitably to the shlock too.
You have the wrong culprit. It isn’t because of the studios or data per se. The problem is international revenue as a percentage of the total. Asia pacific alone is like 2x the domestic market. Big studios make movies that are accessible/salient to China, India, the US, and maybe to a lesser extent, Europe. The largest common denominator is MCU, which doesn’t really have gay people, dialog, romance, or Taiwan. Both the problems and solutions are violence. Why doesn’t Thor solve homelessness or Wakanda fix fentanyl? Because neither exist of course, just like actual injuries from all of that play fighting.
Maybe with the reemergence of revanchist Russia, we can make movies were they are the baddies again. Rambo, volume 8, back in the USSR!
Given Russia's performance in Ukraine, it wouldn't even be a stretch to depict them as a massive, terrifying force comprised of incompetent jobbers and cannon fodder, much like Nazis in popular fiction.
I love this comment as a glittering example of "Comes so close to noticing but then the crimestop kicks in"
To wit: don't you think it a little... suspicious... that the """reports from IRL""" that your news media pipes you from Ukraine, map so neatly into the tropes you've been fed for decades from your entertainment?
Does that not strike you as a little, err, improbable to be an organic occurrance?
(So no-one accuses me of not speaking plainly: I am forwarding this as circumstantial evidence that Western reporting from the Ukraine War is very, very contaminated by Western attempts to narrative craft it into the pre-prepared slot in the Western psyche of "Just like my Indiana Jones movies".)
I would like to state for the record that my impression of Russian incompetence is, as HaroldWilson kind-of touched on, driven less by Western reporting and more by evidence surfaced by internet randos (i.e. Twitter people and Channers) looking for the dankest, funniest, you-literally-could-not-make-this-shit-up-if-you-tried bits of intel that trickle out of the area.
With that out of the way, I want to reiterate that we are talking about fiction. I suppose that if I had phrased my post as "the modern Russian army has now ascended to the tier of Enemy-faction-that-is-safe-to-use for fiction creators," maybe I would not be writing this post now. I can acknowledge that the reality isn't quite as popular image makes it seem. The Nazis were genuinely more threatening than certain hero-fantasy media (e.g. Rat Patrol, Indiana Jones, Wolfenstein) makes them out to have been. Similarly, the Russians aren't a complete laughingstock and still represent an undefined, nebulous threat.
But, in the ragged parlance of our sitting President, come on, man. Again, alluding to my first paragraph, some of the reports about the reality of Russian capability in the beginning of the war and beyond* were so out there that any fiction writer who depicted them as such before the war would have been slammed and roasted by no end of YouTube rantsona channels, armchair generals, and 4Chan pedants. However, we clearly live in the Dank Timeline, and I will never not be amused by the idea of future generations using the 2022 Russians in the manner described above.
*(using insecure commercial radios instead of actual encrypted military radios; tires that fell apart from lack of maintenance, making Russian trucks incapable of necessary off-roading; a Russian plane that avoided starting WWIII only because a missile failed to launch from, again, lack of maintenance; the Cope Cage)
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Clearly journalists do have to construct a kind of narrative around every ongoing event they report, whether it be election campaigns, sporting events or indeed wars, but there's nothing wrong with that (that is what every historian will try to do in their own way after the war is over after all, journalists are just doing it in real time) as that's the only way to comprehend anything, and I don't think they really are crafting that narrative to fit in a pre-prepared slot. After all, what other interpretation can there be except that Russia has so far failed emphatically? And most Western reporting, while certainly emphasising Russian failure, doesn't seem to me to have gone in particularly hard on Russian incompetence, tending to focus on the role of Western support and the effectiveness of Ukraine defence.
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What’s with the triple quotes? That’s the bit which sets off my speaking-plainly alarms.
As for the quality of news reports, there are two facts that matter:
Russia is occupying parts of Ukraine
Russia has not occupied all of Ukraine
Neither of these are really in dispute, and they’re the ones that put Russia into “Saturday morning cartoon villain” territory. The news could be lying about everything else—they’re certainly inclined to spin it—and Americans would still pattern-match it to Indiana Jones. It’s not a complex narrative.
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Ironically, the NATO tweet invoked just about everything but Indy: https://twitter.com/NATO/status/1628687961477750790#m
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John Rambo fathered a half-Chinese kid during one or another adventure, they link up to fight...somebody, maybe the Dalai Lama? It needs a Creed type pass the torch bit.
Yes, what an excellent suggestion! Rambo teaches RamboCreed how to kill real hard while looking manly.
Wasn't Rambo a story about a guy experiencing homelessness and undergoing a mental health crisis, then lashing out against the man who thought it was his duty to "protect" the others from Rambo by using violence against him?
I think a story like this will not look out of place in 2023.
It was. It hasn't been about any of that since Rambo 2.
Just like Rocky was a story about a guy not winning the heavyweight belt. Until Rocky 2 when it became a story about the guy winning the belt. Then each one became about winning, again.
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I don't think your explanation necessarily contradicts mine. A set of smaller studios could target different markets and it'd be fine for a small studio to ignore China - US market is enough for it, and you don't need to squeeze every last dollar to pay for it, there's plenty of market for many small players. For a megacorp, you need mage-movies with mega-budgets and you can't pay for those without China.
As for Russia, I foresee some trouble for the wokes to explain why Russians are actually bad. Surely, they have an oppressive uni-party regime where there's no free speech and your rights depend on whether you agree or not with the ruling party. But that'd only make the wokes to envy them, not despise them - freedom is a red-tribe word. Of course, Russians hate gays and transes, but I don't think we're ready for a movie where Russia invades Wakanda to kill all gay people there, and the heroic Rainbow Transvengers push them back and perform the pride parade in the Red Square. Not yet at least, give it time. In the times of the Cold War, it was simple - Russians are commies that hate Our Way Of Life (TM). But now we know that Our Way Of Life (TM) is racist, colonialist, patriarchal and long overdue for deconstructing and dismantling. And the communists (if under slightly different names) are sitting on the board of every academic institution and are proudly represented in Congress. So where exactly is the good/evil line? I don't think Hollywood would be able to articulate it better than "they are bad because they are against us, and we are good!" - especially while at the same time releasing 50 movies about how we're actually very very bad.
This is a strange take to me. Have you heard much in the way of woke takes on foreign policy? Wokeism can easily pin any invader as bad. It fits neatly into the broader oppression dynamics as well as the hatred of imperialism. They also vaguely see Russia as fascist, and many comfortably assert that red tribe and/or Trump has a love affair with Russia, which is reason enough to hate them, and has broadly built a "current thing" alignment against Russia for years. I have constantly been seeing woke people disavow tankies in spaces where they were previously tolerated or at least seen as a lesser evil. The real question is whether they will be willing to acknowledge the importance of the US's place in the world if that's what it takes to stand against something like Russia.
There was a lot of drama in my woke spaces over games like Call of Duty portraying poor innocent Russia as bad, back in 2019. These kinds of arguments were very common and have suddenly become extinct.
Russia invaded a number of places before Ukraine, and nobody had any trouble with that. Georgia, Moldova, Syria, Central Africa...
Well, Russia is fascist, but I don't see anybody on US political scene daring to officially recognize the fact, even among the wokes. For the wokes though, "fascist" is a bad word to call everybody they hate, not a political taxonomy term, so they can't hate somebody for being fascist - they call somebody fascist after they already hate them. And since everybody by now knows the link between Trump and Russia is wholesale fake (it doesn't mean they wouldn't LARP as if they believed it's true, but they know it's false) - unlike the link between Russia and Clintons, say - again, they link Trump to Russia because they hate Trump, not the other way around. In Obama years, people who thought Russia is a threat were laughed at. In Trump years, people who thought Europe needs to beef their defenses against Russia were laughed at. So we back to the question why would they hate Russia enough, per se. They don't hate Iran and North Korea and China - at least no more than political expediency requires them to perform - despite those being no less oppressive than Russia (though currently not invading their neighbors). Is the invading the only thing? So if Russia is beaten back to their pre-Feb-2022 borders, would the hate go away?
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I'm not saying they admire Soviets or Russians (though some of them definitely did when Russians were Soviets) - what I am saying is it'd be hard for them to cast Russians as a convincing movie villain without undermining their own message. "They are villains because they restrict homosexuality" is not going to make you a billion dollars in movie receipts I'm afraid.
Oh no, there's actually a huge difference, but that'd take us way off topic I think.
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Well, starting from communists, for them it is about power. It's not only about power, but the classic communist revolution must result in the dictatorship of the proletariat. No setup where it's not the case can be recognized by a communist as legitimate, and any such setup must be overthrown. Now, when they have the power, there's still much work to be done, and that's where communists go Judean People's Front vs. People's Front of Judea and splinter into various *isms. But that's after the power has been captured.
Conservatives are probably the closest ones to your description - they need power to prevent people from doing bad things and to force them to do good things. As long as that's what is happening, the application of power is unnecessary.
The classical liberals and libertarians, on the other hand, are probably the farthest, because they reject application of power to force people to behave in certain ways, unless that behavior comes into immediate conflict with a narrow set of natural rights (such as murder, bodily harm, theft of property, etc.). Applying power just to make sure people don't do something you think is not good, even if it does not violate their rights, is contrary to this mindset. Here, the power is to be used as little as it is possible to keep the whole system from collapsing into chaos (anarchists would claim this minimum is actually zero).
Now modern liberals, they are somewhat similar to conservatives towards application of power, but with couple important twists. First, good things are never enough - the standards evolve and change constantly, and the continuous application of power is necessary to keep up, what was perfectly good a year ago, is an appalling bigotry today. Second, there's a class of natural standard-setters, who define and re-define these constantly evolving and changing standards, and those people are the only legitimate candidates for holding power (not all of them will hold power, but all power holding should be done by them only, or it is illegitimate and should be resisted by any means). Also, since their vision involves forcible redistribution of resources from people who have them to people who "deserve" them (standard-setters identify those) but don't have them, this again requires constant application of power. So while the power is not the end in itself, their vision necessitates constant control and exercise of power.
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There’s another wrinkle, which is the international market, and especially the billion Chinese consumers and so if you want to capture sales in another culture, you can’t be too out there because that doesn’t always cross cultural lines the way an apolitical action-adventure featuring a Norse god, a goody-two-shoes and a guy with anger management issues does. It’s not very specific to us and our cultural moment. Taxi Driver and Joker cover the same descent into madness because of social ills territory, but because Joker is at least familiar to modern audiences, and pretty apolitical as well (this isn’t America, it’s a fictional city, and Arkham Asylum is known to be terrible) it’s an easy sell to audiences outside the USA and even inside the USA because it’s not really a call out of a real policy, it’s “Batman’s dad won’t help a crazy guy who thinks he’s related.”
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