Literalism is bad writing. A movie that feels like it's punching you in the face with its moral themes is bad writing. "Ruined by woke" where it feels like minority characters are shoehorned in is actually just bad writing. Plots that don't make sense or are full of holes are bad writing. And so on.

I've been reading more books for the past several years. Of course books have the opposite problem to movies: oversupply. Writing a book is, like software or music, not capital-intensive, though doing it well is time-intensive. There's a lot of good books but they can be hard to find in the sea of mediocrity and now often AI-generated slop.

  - Identify some problem pervading modern pop media? Check
  - Cherry pick examples? Check
  - Misrepresent or misunderstand an example that actually supports the opposite claim? Check
  - Paint a vague picture of how much better it was before [trend], without making any real statement? Check
  - Don't use any actual data or evidence? Check
  - Draw a line from dumb blockbuster trends to Trump/Nazis/[insert hot-button political issue]? Check

And don't give me "oh, they know their craft so completely that they're breaking the rules they deeply understand". No. Hollywood is not putting out a whole bunch of Memento-caliber movies. They're putting out movies written by writers who would instantly experience a jump in quality if someone gave them an all-expenses paid trip to Los Angeles Community College for them to take Writing 101.

That said, I don't entirely blame the writers. I do blame them, because they really are terrible. But the real blame lies at the executive level. For decades Hollywood executives have used the terrible metrics we all made fun of them for, like thinking all we care about is which actor is in a movie or thinking that we like a legitimately good film because it was full of explosions or something. But the executives tended to get away with it, because sitting under them, however uncomfortably, was a studio system that still respected talent, and good talent could get good movies out even so. The executives could say "Give us lots of explosions and use Will Smith!" and the talent could at least sometimes make good movies under those constraints.

But the executives despised that system, failed to understand it, have now successfully disassembled that system, and what's left is disintegrating rapidly. It boggles my mind to see them pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into movies with catastrophically broken scripts, then pouring hundreds of millions more into reshoots, when any halfway decent TA grader from the aforementioned Writing 101 could have given a decent set of notes about the deficiencies of the original script. The execs seem to give no attention to the scripts, when they are by any measure one of the most foundational elements of a movie.

It's not literalism. The writers aren't good enough to be pursuing "literalism". It's just terrible writing, and executives too out-of-touch and ignorant to realize that's the problem, and if they did, too out-of-touch and ignorant to have any clue how to fix it.

The Gladiator II example is just lampshading. If you just wrote "the prisoner grabbed the weapon the guard brought in to the cell, and then killed the guard with it" the very first thing someone's going to ask is "well why did the guard bring a weapon in?" and then the writer says "oh well he didn't consider it a usable weapon" and then "but clearly it is, so that doesn't really solve anything" and rather than coming up with a better escape method the writer just leans into the absurdity of it - the on the nose dispensing of folksy wisdom establishes that the guard is just an idiot rather than leaving the audience to contemplate the contrived situation.

For Megalopolis, “What do you think of this boner I got?” [he shoots her] isn't exactly a compelling scene when reading it. It makes a lot of sense to punctuate the scene with some emotion to make it make some sort of sense. Can this emotion be shown on film without dialogue? Possibly, but the writer can't be sure how it'll actually look, and they need to convey to both the actor and director what emotion needs to be conveyed. It sounds like placeholder dialogue which could be cut or changed as needed.

For the Apprentice, again the writer likely doesn't know exactly how the scene is going to turn out. Is "Trump Tower" going to be clearly legible on the model as the scene is shot? Do you even want to spoil it by showing the name on the model? The point is this is supposed to be a reveal.

In all three cases, these lines very well could be great with proper setup and delivery, or perhaps could have been reworked into great lines. The issue is just these are mediocre films. None made any serious attempt to polish their scripts. It's not a deliberate tactic to dumb down movies or deal with poor attention spans, it's just the makers of the movie saying "eh, good enough."

(Counterexample: "Sorry, Baby", which literally just came out.)

man never thought I'd see that meme continue to live on, or get cited in the New Yorker

I still silently and slowly read novels, but as of now, that's a different media experience. Its slow pace is also enjoyable in a different way.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jan/17/not-sec...

I do agree that the dialogue from Gladiator II is awful, but what did we expect? The movie shouldn't have been made at all, Gladiator didn't need a sequel.

As for literalism: it's always been there in mainstream movies, I think. That we got so many (non-auteur) movies that are not so literal is surprising, actually.

Younger me would go to Blockbuster Video and search the new release section for non-blockbuster movies. "Ghost World" was found this way with other cult films.

With the decline of purchasing physical media it makes it hard to bring in revenue to produce obscure art. Even big blockbuster movies that failed in theatres would often be uplifted from media sales.

Imho it's the best of the movie of the year, and one big reason is because it is NOT this.

Bizarre.

Of course, we have a term for this, luxury beliefs.

It's the degradation of our media, in the sense that it's factory-produced, which is in stark contrast to the media folks were consuming 40 years ago. I'm not dogmatic that it's fundamentally worse (despite my framing), but it does lack the depth of older media, IMO.

Of course, from that perspective, modern society hasn't changed much for centuries, they just had different excuses back in the days. However, it doesn't happen by itself; the construct of the presumed movie-goer (or reader, or listener) affects the public. When author has high expectations of a recipient, many of them can find themselves growing to that level, when the lowest common denominator is targeted, everyone's average drops. Writing by committee and directing by committee inevitably results in watching by committee, when no one cares because there is enough ways to find out which opinion you “should” have about the movie, and the only thing left is to check the box for visiting the cinema (the obvious democratisation of an old cliche of rich nobles being bored at the opera).

A lot of auxiliary apologetic nonsense is written about “pop culture” today — its “consumers” need to be told how to look at themselves. A vaccine against that would be finding something so bright and delicate that it can't be stuffed into one of predefined expected reactions. A lot of much stronger criticism have already been written, too. One might point to such “hits” as Vladimir Nabokov's “Strong Opinions” and lectures on literature, although the suit of renowned writer and lecturer was perhaps a bit too bronzy, while in reviews read by a small circle of Russian-speaking emigrants in Europe (collected in “Think, Write, Speak...”) or in satirical passages in fictional works he was a bit more open.

Can’t read the article because of paywall, but citing The Substance here from all possible movies is… weird? I agree with the title, and although there’s some literalism in The Substance, there’s also tons of subtext in it, so that’s a pretty terrible example. I’m guessing the rest of the article is extremely elitist, and no movie is good enough for the author except for obscure Eastern Europe movies from the 60s?

Or, in the case of recent Netflix executive missives, everything happening must be literally spoken and explained aloud, moment to moment.

The same way that if you want a literary novel, you aren't reading the latest YA best seller.

The super mainstream stuff is always going to go for broad appeal. There is nothing wrong with that, but the people who want something different are going to have to step outside the bestseller box the way they always had to.

Coming from a martial art background, telegraph means reading the subtle signs that comes before an action in order to anticipate, intercept, and counter it within the same tempo. It can also mean exaggeration of the signs, letting slip one’s intentions as an error in execution, or deceiving someone by falsely telegraphing intentions. They all come before the action, whereas the examples in this article seems to talk about things coming after the action.

People are on their phones because the slop they are being served is so shallow and meaningless that they can't be bothered to pay attention to it

I read through the whole article looking for something that is insightful, but it feels as if the author is beating a dead horse the way the examples does the same. Maybe experiencing that is the point, but I can't help but thinking it was all a waste of time.

(I'll only mentions stuff from the 21st century because otherwise I'd sit here for days)

I love japanese cinema so I'm very biased towards films from there.

- The Taste of Tea (2004) from Katsuhito Ishii

- Nobody Knows (2004) from Hirokazu Kore-eda

- Tony Takitani (2004) from Jun Ichikawa

- Memories of Matsuko (2006) from Tetsuya Nakashima

- Departures (2008) from Yojiro Takita

- Still Walking (2008) from Hirokazu Kore-eda

- Tokyo Sonata (2008) from Kiyoshi Kurosawa

- One Million Yen Girl (2008) from Yuki Tanada

- Haru’s Journey (2010) from Masahiro Kobayashi

- Story of Yonosuke (2013) from Shuichi Okita

- Shoplifters (2018) from Hirokazu Kore-eda

- Drive My Car (2021) from Ryūsuke Hamaguchi

Two korean film I've really liked

- The Handmaiden (2016) from Park Chan-wook

- Pieta (2012) from Kim Ki-duk

A chinese film I've seen recently and it was pretty good

- Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014) from Diao Yi-nan

Iranian films are incredibly good and crazy what they could make despite the situation there

- A Separation (2011) from Asghar Farhadi

- Taxi (2015) from Jafar Panahi

- The Salesman (2016) from Asghar Farhadi

- There Is No Evil (2020) from Mohammad Rasoulof

- My Favourite Cake (2024) from Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha

Some european films I've enjoyed

- Enter the Void (2009) from Gaspar Noé

- Leviathan (2014) from Andrey Zvyagintsev

- Alcarràs (2022) from Carla Simón

- Fallen Leaves (2023) from Aki Kaurismäki

And last but not least some actual Hollywood films that I think are pretty good

- The Tree of Life (2011) from Terrence Malick

- Cloud Atlas (2012) from Lilly Wachowski and Lana Wachowski

- First Reformed (2017) from Paul Schrader

- Nickel Boys (2024) from RaMell Ross

Whenever I watch a modern Netflix/Hulu/etc show: I'm on my phone 2 minutes into the show. Half paying attention to both.

Whenever I watch a modern BBC-ish (anything British really) show: I literally can't look away for more than 10 seconds because I will miss something crucial. If someone distracts me, I rewind the show and rewatch the last few minutes.

What's different? The Brits (at least the stuff that makes it into syndication) focus on content you're going to watch. The Americans focus on filling air between commercials.

Product placement counts as commercials for the purpose of this comparison.

This gets repeated ad nauseum, but IMHO people are short on patience, not attention.

Parents probably understand this the most: try to find an 80s movie to show to your kids, you'll have a pass at it first to properly remember what it's about, and it will painfully slow.

Not peaceful or measured, just slow. Scenes that don't need much explanation will be exposed for about for 10 min, dialogues that you digest in 2s get 2 min of lingering on.

Most movies were targeted at a public that would need a lot of time to process info, and we're not that public anymore (despite this very TFA about how writers make their dialogues dumber)

They literally do. Have you ever tried reaching out people NOT on social networks?

> The idea of sitting down and watching a two hour movie is really quite daunting when you’re used to videos that are at most 30 min and often less than one.

Average movie length is increasing every year.

This people though has been catching up on a century of classic films. There are plenty of lists around on the internet if you wanted to get started. The AFI Top 100 is a gentle introduction to the (American-only) classics. There are deeper cuts when you are ready to saddle up for "1001 Movies" instead. (Warning, you could be starting down a journey that will involve the next eight years of your life.)

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FS7MH5oeW74

LOTR is a fascinating counter example; each book is quite dense but was able to be made into a single (albeit long) film. Part of that I think is because a lot of the density of those books is exquisite detailing of the animated natural world of the books; a picture is worth a thousand words may be obnoxiously overused but apropos in this case. The movies seemed to understand the animate life force of the visual landscape and so were able to say a lot visually.

I just don't see Dune: Part II as a true sequel in the traditional sense of the term (though perhaps the literal sense of the term, despite literalism being apparently despised by the articles author).

Happy-end with sequel hook?

I miss the days of the slideshows that would play while people where getting seated for the film. I loved the occasional trivia slides.

Makes me want to only go to that theater.

I mean, unless you have two comedic geniuses who can really sell yelling down the stairs to ask the partner what they want for dinner, getting met with "HUH???" inching a little closer, and having repeat this three times until you finally just go down and ask in a normal voice. In the right hands that could be comedy gold on screen.

But by in large, we don't consume media because it represents the banal reality of everyday life.

Internet access was widely available.

Blockbuster video was a thing in almost every town.

Netflix mail service was getting big, making huge back catalogs available.

DVD players often included S/PDIF out for surround sound, which was becoming a more common part of home theaters.

Plasma TVs were becoming far more common, dramatically improving picture quality and size versus CRTs.

HBO and other premium channels had already gone digital with set top boxes (that also often supported surround sound), and the death of analog broadcast TV was (theoretically) scheduled for 2006.

So while I probably couldn't find any single specific reason for a peak in 2002, we had a whole series of tech improvements in place that were slowly chipping away at the edges in quality and content availability.

DVD adoption (and later Blu-Ray) was certainly a huge factor in the gradual changes and 2002 was when people really started amassing them at home https://i.imgur.com/OHZ9H69.png. I'm sure piracy has a role as well too, but most of the deltas listed were also gradual changes which had their start prior to 2002, same as piracy. The only thing special about 2003 is it's the year the momentum changed, not that it's the year something brand new was introduced.

Much like videogames, the answer seems to be to look for indie and foreign works with less pressure on them to be easily consumable.

Am I willing to hold the idea that a movie might be good in a way that goes over my head? Yes - take books, I'm never going to read James Joyce, I won't study the historic texts it references, I won't learn the Dublin colloquialisms, I won't understand his wordplay, and I accept that the people who do will get a lot more satisfaction from reading it than I would get from the few scraps I might make sense of.

But if you tell me the painting of a blue rectangle is worth millions, and I just don't understand because I'm a simple pleb and you're a true art connoisseur, and that the art house movie just has more sophisticated culture that a low-brow wouldn't understand, I go back to saying that if you stare longer at the clouds you will see more patterns in the clouds. If you are sharper and more imaginative you will see more patterns in the clouds. If you enjoy finding patterns in clouds you will find more of them. That doesn't mean some clouds have more meaning in them.

And if it's you telling me I can join your club of exclusive film afficionados if I pay the member's fee and spend hours watching the film, or that I can read your educated critical thoughts on 2025's Cloud Patterns in your review column in Cinema Monthly magazine, well that's sounding more like a racket.

Two different people recommended Severence to me [it's a streaming series about people who have their brains severed so when they are at work they cannot remember the outside, and outside they cannot remember their workday]; I find it boring. Is that because I'm a simpleton who can't appreciate social commentary and can't follow unusual storylines, or is it because I've read a lot more SciFi and spiritual self-help mumbo-jumbo than either of those people have, so the ideas are less novel and exciting to me? Sure there are objective things like "this lighting and camera technique was pioneered in $FILM" which I can't see and you might get enjoyment and satisfaction from noticing, but is that really different to me commenting that they have CRT/desktop computers harking back to the IBM XT instead of going with a Star Trek LCARS style flat UX, or that the Data Reduction team shouldn't be able to work with encrypted data because good encryption would not give any information about the plaintext content, or that using the computers to show numbers-as-text is really broken because computers are a tool for turning numbers into human-friendly graphs, sounds, pictures, and by showing the computers as dull numbers machines the writers are revealing society's lack of deep computer understanding and we've all missed the point of Jobs' "computer as bicycle for the mind"?

And there are more subjective things to say about media e.g. "this is Plato's Cave" but is it really, or are you seeing Plato's Cave in the clouds because you were hunting for Classic Memes or because you have spent more time studying the Classics so the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon kicks in and you notice more of the things you know about?

Sure, sure, "all art is the same, nobody is any better" says the intellectually sterile internet commentor. Sure, sure, you're just a higher calibre of person and it's not that everything in life is a status game and you're positioning yourself as higher status by self-declaring that the things you spent more time on are the better things. Yes, people are smarter than me, people know more than me, people see more connections in films than me - but the medium through which I learn those things, the way that message gets to me, is very suspect; why am I reading a newspaper column where you take a broadcast position and get paid to tell me that you see more meaning in a film than me? Why are you, the sublime intellect, spending your life watching films and commenting about them on the grubby pig-mud internet while claiming deep meaning, instead of fixing the world or sitting ZaZen on a mountain top? Why am I hearing about this from a Film Professor whose income depends on people believing that film is deeply meaningful, or from a Film Studies graduate whose self-image is partly supported by the idea that their expensive degree is about more than just simple entertainment? The medium is the message, and the mediums are not truth-finding, they are marketing and entertainment.

It's not that people "are less willing to believe there is stuff they don't understand", it's "people are fed up of being marketed to by centuries of con-people trying to spin the idea that they understand something deep and insightful that we don't, and we need to turn to them for help with it".

And isn't nature wonderful, but is this art?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVmw3ZhdzEs - Steamed Hams, in the style of the banned Soviet film Glass Harmonica.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ynyv3oHDRg0 - Steamed Hams, but it's French New Wave cinema.

There's no curiosity that Steamed Hams might be more than what you saw it to be. Sad times.

https://featureassets.gocomics.com/assets/318702d0df96013172...

last year i thought Hundreds of Beavers was a lowest common denominator movie but it turns out to be cult and im 0/5 on any of my family members liking it at all. a few movie nerd friends love it like i do. after that i decided normys must only like watching families hug on screen. i guess EEAAO has that, i just see the Swiss Army Man inside of EEAAO and think of the whole thing differently

most likely i have no grasp on what normys like

'Black Panther was a fine movie but its politics were a bit iffy. wouldve been way better if at the end the Black Panther turned to the camera & said "i am communist now" & then specified hes the exact kind of communist i am'

Some writers are certainly taking cues from the criticisms that tweet was mocking. Or were the same people making those criticisms.

Oppy did incredibly well because of it's memed Barbenheimer marketing wave. i dont think the 3 hour great man movie was lowest common denominator movie. sure, you and i might think it was basic and laughed when Einstein showed up, but my bar for lowest common denominator is a Happy Madison production

Even just saying "watch" feels off as so much of my kids time is spent with franchises in Roblox or other online games.

I suspect that, like google's notorious killing of products with "only" tens of millions of users, this is a problem of internal structure. I bet that ranking of who gets into that row is a reflection of the social hierarchy between producers at Netflix whose compensation depends on it.

> They are hampering discoverability.

At some point Netflix really focused on this, then like google throwing away search, they lost it.

The people in the Matrix aren't trans -- they are the same people in the same bodies whether they are in or out of simulation.

It's OK for a trans person to make a movie with no trans content that doesn't only make sense from a trans perspective.

Second guy says he's had a bad philosophy class, implying it's a bad, naive, amateur, or uninformed take on the philosophical subject at hand.

First guy says he's had many, implying he's actually studied philosophy extensively, perhaps majored in it in college or obtained a degree, refuting the idea that the original take was amateur or uninformed.

It's pretty straightforward really - for example I saw Fruitvale Station as a movie fan. I thought it was great and so Coogler was on my radar. I thought the Rocky franchise was ripe for a reboot, so when I heard he was doing it I was in. And the movie was fine. As was Black Panther (considering Marvel flicks for what they are, no judgment either way). So OF COURSE I was downright excited for Sinners. With no assumption that it had to be the best thing ever - and I had a blast.

Another good example is that I'm currently watching the John Wick series for the first time. I didn't know anything about them, but had heard them positively referenced on Kill James Bond. Well, if you meet it where it is and realize it's just "what if you made a comic book into a movie?" and don't expect more of it, you can appreciate it for whether it does that well or not.

Catch Me If You Can

Gangs of New York

The Pianist

City of God

Yes, yes they were lol. It is almost hard to believe those all came out in the same year.

Imagine in 2025 having to pick if you want to see The Pianist or City of God? It is just so unthinkable

The first two I agree with, the third one is a stretch. The quality of programming that HBO was putting out in the mid 90s and 00s is far higher than any streaming series that has ever been released.

This can’t be real. Surely no one does this. Do people do this?

That could maybe be argued for music which is released as music. This song isn't stand-alone, it's part of a musical. You can't take it out of its context and then complain it doesn't make sense.

> This song makes you, unambiguously, feel good.

Maybe it makes you feel good. It makes me feel conflicted.

> From lyrics alone, I would assume the protagonist is voluntarily part of abusive relationships.

I mean that's part of the point. Angel thinks they themselves are to blame for the situation they find themselves in. Which isn't true of course, but that's how it goes with abuse.

> I did not found sexual assault visuals

Well look closer then. Angels whole thing is that he puts on an act of liking all the shit happening to him. But it's pretty clearly an act in the video.

> They are about wanting this bad thing to happen, despite it being bad thing.

Part of angel DOES want some of those things to happen. There's clearly an element of glamour he likes about it. That doesn't make the relationship any less abusive.

> I do not mean it as kind of major criticism or the song ... but it is kids gloves song about abuse and feelings that make someone stay in such relationship.

I agree it's a song about why someone would stay in an abusive relationship. That doesn't mean it's glamorizing abusive relationships though. I don't really care if people dislike the song, it's parsing the song as somehow being pro-abuse where I get annoyed, because it clearly isn't. It's a realistic portrayal of how some abusive relationships work. Obviously people in them feel like they want or need to stay in them or... they wouldn't.

The pan-and-scan DVDs seemed to die out long before everyone had 16:9 TVs. Consumers seemed to decide they preferred letterboxing over cropping.

As someone who is blessed to live in a city where multiple cinemas screen old movies and therefore go to the cinema very often, I must say I can’t disagree more. The experience of watching a movie in a cinema is to me incomparable to watching on a tv.

It’s not only the bigger screen and better sound system. The act of sitting yourself in the cinema with other people to actively engage with a movie transforms the experience.

Sadly, I have to say I agree with the article however in that 95% of the movies produced in the USA during the past two decades could as well not exist. Thankfully, the rest of the world still exist.

Dresden, Germany

We don't watch streams, as my wife constantly talks over it. Which she cannot in the movies

A ticket is less than $15 during the expensive times, and $10 off peak. Where in the world are you seeing movies?

I get it, I don't go to the theater anywhere near what I used to, but the nice one near me with a bar and a player piano in the lobby is still nowhere near $75 for two tickets.

Well, the longer the movie, the more people feel the need of snacks to get through it. So maybe the theaters are pushing longer movies rather than shorter, because they make more money that way.

Just an off-the-cuff hypothesis...

I take it you really mean "so why wasn't 2003 the peak year instead of 2002" to which I'd say "I'm not trying to explain one needs a 55" widescreen 4k TV before you'll ever consider going to the movie theater less often, rather that this kind of difference over time is why you can't say movie theatre ticket sales in 2002 were higher so people must therefore have watched more movies then."

Or the bean counters in charge target the largest common denominator, shaving off the long tail of above-average sophistication with every mediocre release.

Beatles songs are around 164 seconds long on average.

https://www.aaronkrerowicz.com/uploads/6/5/4/3/6543054/durat...

An 2005 compilation of Johnny Cash’s greatest songs averages just a little over three minutes per song.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Johnny_Cash

Gerry and The Pacemakers did not have long songs either.

https://www.discogs.com/master/369149-Gerry-And-The-Pacemake...

Neither did the Kingston Trio.

https://www.discogs.com/release/666498-Kingston-Trio-The-Kin...

Before recording, popular forms of folk music typically has just one fairly short melody. You can repeat it over and over with different lyrics but the “core” is simple and short . Sing “Oh Susana” or “Kalinka” or “Scarborough fair” to yourself and count the seconds before you the melody repeats.

Frankly, “popular songs being over three minutes long” is likely an anomaly in the history of humanity. What we are seeing with shorter songs is probably just a regression to the mean.

We have more boredom today than ever before in the past, and the richnesses of our lives are gutted with the continuous striving against the specter of boredom.

It's all been bread and circuses since before the fall of Rome. We only strive to make something happen until we reach the point where we have everything we ever wanted, and then we don't have the first clue what to do with it.

People consider the 80s to early 90s the golden age, not 90s/00s it isn't something I just made up. On average there is an undeniable drop in animation quality and story quality compared to past eras.

I supposed they could email customers an excel document. But short of that, they have to make choices about what to do with the pixels on their page, and those choices represent filtering what they show you. How is "hampering discovery" different than what they are physically forced to do?

At the time, did you think the quality of that DVD was about the same as the experience you got in the theater?

The parent post is arguing that the gap in experience between home theaters and theater theaters has shrunk immensely. Right now I have a 85" wide OLED in my living room - That's not a thing that existed in 2002

The VAST majority of movies that have been made in the past (when the real indicator, % of population going to movies, peaked) deal with ordinary, realistic human stories. Murders are incredibly popular, of course, but so are fraught romances, coming-of-age, and grounded hero-quest movies (which even Bachelorette Party borrows from).

But your point is otherwise completely valid. They found out everyone likes cake, and converted their buffet restaurant to all-cake all-day!

Modern movies try to appeal to everyone. Can't be too edgy or too opinionated, don't want to sick rabid hordes of haters on themselves.

And there's a huge segment of the Western population teetering on the edge of death or living in misery in various ways who are a literal matchbox waiting for a spark, no megaconglomerate film company wants to be responsible for setting them off, to the point where it's safer to sell mediocre and milquetoast movies rather than push an opinionated one and risk blowback.

Look at the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice or the Craft 2. Both movies built on a previous proven winner, both original movies had something to say.

Beetlejuice was not only a quirky romp through the afterlife but also a story about aboriginalism vs colonialism and whether it is right for the aboriginals to do horrible things to protect what is theirs, and also a story about how embracing change can help cross generational divides and how accepting people who are different from you can enrich your life.

It was very opinionated and had a lot of great subcontext. Same with the Craft.

The Craft was, on its cover, a story about what teenage girls would do if they got magical powers, which then turned into a series of biopics of the deep emotional damages caused by indifferent and hateful people. The movie dealt with racism, sexual assault, murder, mental illness, self esteem, and self acceptance all in the context of a teenybop horror movie.

Then you look at their sequels.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice introduced 3 antagonists, Beetlejuice's wife, the boy, and Lydia's boyfriend.

It started three potential plotlines, the soul sucker, the life swapper, and the gold digger, and brought Beetlejuice in to deal with all three of them.

And then, 80% of the way through the movie, it threw all three of the antagonists and plot lines away and then rehashed the climax of the original movie with a slightly different set of clothes on.

What deeper meaning did Beetlejuice Beetlejuice have? None. No one had any value or made any sense. No one in the entire plot was irreplaceable. No one learned any lessons or grew in any measurable way. Nothing actually happened. They all woke up like they had a bad dream after Lydia's father's funeral, the mother died, the gold digger died, and then the story was over. If the movie had not happened nothing would be different for the characters except that maybe the gold digger would have dug more gold or something.

Then, the Craft 2. It's not a horror movie. It's a teenybop movie where girls get magic and do things with it. They have a trans person in it but she doesn't use her magic to address her transness in any way. There's only a tiny drop of racism, and no one has any real deep issues to resolve.

So, instead, they get David Duchovny in to play as some guy who embodies toxic masculinity, but who is also ineffective and purposeless all the way to the very end of the movie, when all of a sudden he goes murder rapey and then gets easily beaten by the power of feminism and witchcraft.

No one learned anything except GIRL POWER. Nothing really changed for anyone. There were no edges in the movie to explore. It was pointless.

Either sequel could have been much more poignant by touching on real issues that people experience. The Craft 2 could have touched on social media and the need to look like you have a perfect life. They could have touched on what a trans woman would do if she could remold her body with magic permanently or semi permanently like the girl did in the first movie. They could have made Nancy a bigger part of the movie and have her deal with David Duchovny instead of it being a girl power movie, and then Nancy could have taught the girls the things she knows being a former vessel of Manon with 25 years to learn and grow from the experience. It could have gone into a demonstration and discussion on how young women have so much to learn from women even 20 years their senior, and how working together and tearing down walls both of age differences but also gender differences can make the world a better place.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice could have made a really fun story out of any of the three protagonists and plot lines if it had picked and chose one of them to run with and made the others the sub plots. The gold digger plotline could have been about accepting what is different about you and not allowing others to convince you to mask your weirdness. The life swapper plot could have been about learning how to accept that you're a normal person who grew up in a weird household, and how that doesn't make you weird and that it is possible to make both sides work together as long as each side values the other. The soul sucker plotline could have been played for laughs as at the end we could have seen Beetlejuice about to win Lydia only to be thwarted by his actual wife and dragged off into the underworld by the leg by her (and end up happy in the end, maybe seeing him slowly reinflate after she sucked the soul out of him, he he sex joke). All of those options were thrown out of the window and instead we get a meandering pointless movie that would have been fine if it had never existed.

Good movies have an opinion and something to say. Napoleon Dynamite is a perfect example of this. It's a bad movie in every measurable way. It's boring. It's slowly paced. It has no plot. It's like a 2 hour slice of life Jello movie. But then, the point of the movie gets driven in, that everyone has value.

It's a simple message told in a long and occasionally humorous manner, but because they didn't try to piledrive the message into you when it hits it hits hard.

Bad movies ramble even more than I do and never make a point for fear of popping a bubble. And media franchises know this and choose to make them anyway rather than be at risk of any blowback. After all, most movies released by a large franchise are profitable by default. The number of AAA movies that did not make their cost of production back in the last 10 years is vanishingly small, to the point where movies that only make 150% of their production costs are considered box office bombs and franchise killers. (Like the Golden Compass, that made $370+ million and won academy awards on a $180m production cost and was considered enough of a failure to end the entire series)

They know how to make good movies. They know how to tell satisfying stories that keep people wanting more. They know how to make a lot of money doing it.

So why do they keep not doing it?

I believe it's 2 things.

1: Fear of offending people and having massive blowback because of it.

The outrages over stupid things like the Little Mermaid being black is a good example of this. Who cares what color her skin is? She's a fish. If the story is good and told well then what does it matter?

But I get it, you can't convince someone who wants to be upset and outraged as a distraction for their own personal problems to focus on their personal problems instead of screaming about DEI or whatever 4 letter flavor of the day they have to rage about. This much is understandable. But still, that's no excuse for making a bad movie, they could have far more easily found the rage points and dealt with them and left the rest of a good movie alone.

But that brings me to my second point.

2: It's on purpose.

I've been thinking about this for a while, but I'm starting to believe that megaconglomerate media companies are intentionally making unsatisfying movies that are highly titillating for the same reason that Doritos flavors their chips in just such a way that you never get satisfied of eating them, that final burst of zest and flavor that would put you over the edge always just out of reach.

It's like the torture of Tantalus, satisfaction always being just outside of arms reach, but knowing that it's close, and occasionally actually satisfying the itch (like any good skinner box) keeps us diving in, spending money, buying merch, showing our love and support for the franchises that once scratched the itch for us in hopes that it will scratch it again next time.

They're doing it on purpose because they know that if you didn't get what you wanted out of this movie, you'll go watch another, or a TV show, or read a book, or play a game, something, because you came to get satisfaction. And if they blue ball you just right, you'll keep spending money until you can't afford to spend any more in hopes that you'll finally get what you're looking for.

I think it's on purpose and I think it will keep getting worse until it cannot get any worse, and then it will be replaced with something else that will be massively satisfying for a while at least.

Well stillsuits are supposed to collect and preserve moisture and shield from heat in extremely harsh environment. I would sort of expect that 8k years in the future some tech for that would be close to the skin, rather than waving thin layers like bedouins or touaregs use.

Often during a three hour film I've ran out of refreshments and would like to buy a drink or something for the last hour.

And while maybe not amazing, they were wonderful at the time. Do you remember folks being amazed at the graphics on the PS1 or heck, even the N64? Those weren't good, really, but at the time? Yeah, it was good enough. Late 90's started seeing bigger tvs and sound systems. DVDs brought options to see all that stuff on the sides if you wanted. You didn't "make do" if you are out there buying modern tech - maybe you made do with whatever brands they sold at walmart - but then again, they sold game systems so it really wasn't "store brands only" or anything like that.

I'm not sure where you lived, but absolutely no theaters around me showed classics, save for something like Star Wars or Disney movies. One played second run movies - the ones in the space between theater release and home video release. So no, no one went to things like that. I graduated high school in the mid 90s, and both local theaters were pretty run down places that treated employees badly. The ones in smaller surrounding towns, if they had it, usually only played a handful of movies and were old places. And this seemed pretty normal for Indiana, outside of perhaps Indianapolis or a few richer areas.

The quoted section was in response to the claim movie watches are down on the basis ticket sales are down compared to the past:

> And this is highly relevant for things like this. People often argue that if movies were so bad then people would stop watching them, unaware that people actually have stopped watching them!

Hence the next line after the quote "Box office ticket sales say people go to the theatre less often, not that people watch movies less often."