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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   3396 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 2, 2023

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The box office is not doing well now, despite it being the summer

All of Hollywood is keeping an eye on the weekend when Barbie and Oppenheimer come out.

My mom is a massive Harrison Ford fangirl, and I managed to successfully talk her out of gracing the skinwalker wearing the skin of the Indiana Jones franchise with her money by pointing out that the whole movie is a soapbox to dunk on Tired Old White Males.

Shame that Phoebe Bridgers is involved, I liked her in Fleabag.

Shame that Phoebe Bridgers is involved

Is that a joke?

Not really, I only knew her in Fleabag.

The creator of Fleabag is Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Phoebe Bridgers is an unrelated indie rock singer-songwriter. (Don't worry, you're not the first person to mix them up.)

Oh dear. Thanks for the correction!

Shame that Phoebe Bridgers is involved, I liked her in Fleabag.

She probably leveraged her connections from producing Killing Eve and co-writing No Time To Die.

Modern TVs are marvellous. A huge 4k screen with stunning colours and high contrast is now easily affordable. Going to the cinema for the big screen experience is no longer as justified.

Expensive: Movie tickets are expensive and are an easy item to cut back on when impacted by inflation.

The abundance of entertainment. There is no longer a single song, movie or book that can define a generation. There availability and choice is to great for there to be a must see movie. The same goes with sport. The question did you see the game last night is less clear when people can stream whatever sport they want. Many people saw "the game" just so that they could fit in. When "the game" no longer is the topic of conversation fewer people will watch it causing a death spiral

At least in India, movie tickets are comparably priced to the costs of buying or renting a new film, so if you don't have the best home theater experience, nostalgia for the theatres or consider it a family bonding thing like I do, it's still perfectly fine to go and see something new there every once in a while. (Just don't buy the popcorn) I also don't have a home theater setup that can match a decent cinema hall.

Of course, I'm an absolute cheapskate who pirates everything and only buys the things he can't pirate (sigh, would that I could download more RAM), I usually watch only particularly good movies anyway unless dragged there by family or friends.

My wife and I thought about going to the movies the other day, briefly. She was having a tough day at work and texted me saying "Hey let's do something fun, let's go see a movie." So I looked up movie showings, there was one that I'd maybe consider seeing (that Jennifer Lawrence raunch-comedy) showing at 5:00, 7:15, and 9:40. 5:00, no chance, I'm not off work yet. Well I ran a little late, would have had to get ready in five minutes. That's not practical. Now we're trying to go the 9:40, but that throws off the next day, I'm up until midnight for this movie, throws off my morning workout and all. Less appealing.

So instead we streamed Crazy Rich Asians on our colossal HDTV in our living room.

As streaming options get better and better, and big TVs trickle down to lower and lower prices, the standard a movie theater needs to reach to make me actually leave the house gets higher and higher. At this point a 70" tv runs $500, a Bose soundbar is $200. Combine the two and that's $700 for a damn good home theater experience, certainly plenty good for a comedy, not bad for an average action movie. And that's not just competing against however many movie tickets, it's probably something most people buy anyway for sports/tv/etc.

The value add has to be so high for me to schedule my night around it, it's pretty tough.

And as the value add has to get bigger, ticket prices have to climb, which has a further inflating effect on minimum value add.

I will now reveal my normie tastes in movies...

Looking at the lists, in addition to Avatar II doing well, Mario Bros also did really well, suggesting that people just don't want to see Elemental or the new Indiana Jones all that much. I watched Mario Bros on streaming (and enjoyed it), but might have gone to the theater if circumstances lent themselves. It has about the right combination of nostalgia for those who grew up with the games, actual fun and an alright plot, Jack Black making a fool of himself, and no particular wokeness. Everyone likes super talented Peach, it's pulled off well, with humor and fondness.

The rumors are, Indiana Jones is about setting the franchise up for Harrison Ford to be replaced by a younger woman. I don't know if this is true or not, since I haven't watched the movie, and don't plan to, but it certainly doesn't make it sound fun. I also didn't see Black Widow, because it sounded like it was about setting it up for Florence Pugh to take over from Scarlett Johansen, or that series about the guy with the metal wings taking on the mantel of Captain America, or the special about a woman taking over for Hawkeye. In general, movies about someone taking up the cape of someone else sound boring, it's much better when they just show up with swagger and without much explanation, like 007. This seems to be a common failure mode of long running hero shows. Assuming the rumor to be true, I don't think the recent trend of replacing older male heros with younger female heros is necessarily about wokeness per say, but more about stodgily following the tropes of the moment, even when people are tired of them and they've become stale.

Elemental looks... probably fine? Kind of like Zootopia, but for elements? I liked Zootopia, though not enough that I would have bothered seeing it in theaters. I haven't heard any rumors about it, it just seems kind of basic. Looking at a mainstream review, it sounds like they tried making a ham fisted racial allegory, but it didn't really fit, only fleshed out two of the four elements, and even the mainstream reviewers don't like ham fisted racial allegories. That's kind of how Bright was -- there was an attempt made, and Will Smith is fun enough to watch, but it was also kind of a mess. I'll probably watch it in a year when it comes out on Disney+, but will wait until I'm subscribing for a month for other reasons. I'm not sure if it makes sense to shorthand this to "woke," since the complaint is coming from the mainstream reviewers -- interracial love story (but with elemental spirits! who are not particularly magical, and basically just New Yorkers) probably just not a great concept, and would be really hard to do so well that a mass of people will go to the theater to see it immediately.

As an aside, I see that Spider Man: No Way Home did really well, and having watched it: why? It's terrible! So bad! Apparently fan service, done right, does bring in the cash.

As an aside, I see that Spider Man: No Way Home did really well, and having watched it: why? It's terrible! So bad! Apparently fan service, done right, does bring in the cash.

The same brain-dead Marvel fans who threw money at the first animated Spider-Man, like all movies in the MCU, had no problem doing the same for the sequel.

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That's a shame, I enjoyed the first animated Spider-Man and I was thinking of seeing that one. Life's just been too busy lately.

Beyond the Spiderverse, which is the sequel to the animated one, is pretty damn good.

though I would suggest that "stodgily following the tropes of the moment" is actually a key part of wokeness in organizations -- it's the movement of the hour, and so organizations follow it because it's what creatives seem to like and they don't see the elements (heh) of it that sometimes alienate audiences.

Maybe that's the problem. When it takes 18 months or more to make a movie, by the time your movie comes out the movement of the hour is last year's news. Even if the idea was fresh in the planning stages, it is completely played out by the time it is screening in the movie theater.

That's a shame, I enjoyed the first animated Spider-Man and I was thinking of seeing that one. Life's just been too busy lately.

I disagree, and happen to think that the second movie was just as good as the first. Catch it in theaters if you still can.

I liked it a lot, but I wouldn't say it's crazy to skip the theatrical release. Vague spoilers:

IMHO nobody's really seen the whole second movie. We've only seen the "Across the Spider-Verse" half, and that part has too much of a cliffhanger to be properly called a complete movie. I enjoyed this half-a-movie, cliffhanger and all, but now I'm stuck waiting for March 2024 for the rest, and how can you safely pass judgement on a movie before it's even resolved more than half of its central conflicts? Sometimes the resolution of this sort of pseudo-trilogy makes the penultimate part much better in hindsight (Back to the Future III...); sometimes much worse (The Matrix Revolutions...).

I mean, the part that did come out was worth watching, and while the ending was cliffhanger, I'd say that two good movies in a row at least raises my expectations enough to watch the next!

COVID-19 and streaming services training people to stay home and wait for a streaming release instead of going to the theater. Folks tightening their belts due to the economy and inflation and spending less on entertainment in general. Competition with Youtube, Twitch, TikTok, Steam, Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo, Spotify, etc. Crowded release schedule. Particular IPs and/or franchises overstaying their welcome (DCEU, Indiana Jones, Disney Remakes). Certain diversity castings not going over well (The Little Mermaid possibly). People tired of mediocre films.

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