They can't compete with what they once were, so they bury the past. I suspect many industries are like this. If classic movies were played alongside new Hollywood releases, the new movies would probably be choked out. Accordingly, Disney will even restrict the availability of their old movies on DVD. They can't stand competing with their former great selves.
I don't think Disney can quite be put in the same breath. (disclaimer: shareholder, though not in any grandiose quantities) I always imagine Disney as basically 3 apparatuses:
1. A squeaky-clean princess printing machine that reliably churns out 50 billion dolla- I mean, a new Disney Princess franchise every 5-10 years. No expense is spared on making the movie a lavishly animated, voiced, scripted, and instantly treasured addition to any childhood. (Because they know every dollar there will throw off a thousand in merchandising and Disney World tickets)
2. Weird creative stuff. Pixar is in this bucket, imo. Soul and Inside Out and such were amazing, amazing movies but they're obviously not going to put merchandise on the shelves. But they still sell out theaters and help build (maintain) brand prestige.
3. An oracle-tier legal/financial arm that is essentially independent of 1 and 2 that just views itself as having a giant stack of copyrights and money and it needs to turn it into more money.
So while (imo, this is subjective obviously) I think 1 and 2 are roughly as good as they ever were (and remember that Disney almost died multiple times due to not actually being very good for decade long stretches), 3 doesn't care about that and if some tactic with DVD supply or whatever will help juice sales, they'll do it because it's their job.
Disney gets a lot of flack, and rightly so! They're a big reason why copyright in the US is so fucked up, and I do hate them for that. But at the same time, I think they honestly do contribute more to artistry and enduring culture in the West than lots of other companies with even-worse legal departments do.
> An oracle-tier legal/financial arm that is essentially independent of 1 and 2 that just views itself as having a giant stack of copyrights and money and it needs to turn it into more money.
This is the main thing I think of when I think of Disney (I think of other things as well, but none of them are positive). That's why I give them the fewest dimes I possibly can.
> But at the same time, I think they honestly do contribute more to artistry and enduring culture in the West than lots of other companies with even-worse legal departments do.
Counterpoint: they saturate the market with so many MCU, Star Wars and other high-profile (Avatar!) content that it is all but impossible for anyone else to get enough people into cinemas or onto streaming.
Like, people only have so much money and time to set aside for entertainment, cinema is one hell of an expense as it is [1] and now, when alone the MCU pumps out four movies a year, there is no budget left for anyone but them. Streaming? The same. There's an insane amount of high quality content on Disney+, and they got all the "cool and popular" stuff.
On top of that, Disney's treatment of, say, VFX studios is fucking up the market there as well: the more market share Disney has on the client side, the less choice studios and other suppliers have. Either they accept the sometimes disgusting behavior from Disney (especially ridiculous deadlines) or they don't have other clients and shut down.
Between the Mouse just gobbling up everything they can, Netflix pushing for a washed-down uniform standard [2] and small cinemas closing down left and right, entertainment is in for dark, dark times. Disney needs to be broken up and since the movie industry didn't get the hint from the music industry that rightsholders should take care of offering access to multiple streaming services, government has to mandate that as well. The lack of competition hurts everyone.
[1] a typical MCU movie for two people will be anything from 50-100$, including tickets, 3D surcharge, long-duration surcharge, popcorn, soda, parking/public transport
Counterpoint: As with books and music, the blockbusters pay for the entire rest of the ecosystem. The MCU, Star Wars, and Avatar movies keep people going to theaters, which keeps the movie theaters alive for all the "creative" arthouse films that the movie hipsters keep trying to foist on us. Most people simply choose not to watch these other films.
And last year, Paramount was the top-grossing studio until Avatar was released at the end of the year.
Sadly, I share this pessimism. It's why I've started collecting DVDs of movies that I know I'll want to see again. Mostly used, because so many aren't even available on disc anymore.
I see the day coming when these movies will simply be unavailable to me, and so need I need to archive them myself.
With movies, I find it to be the opposite. I might recognize the old movies as better in many ways, but their pacing is excruciatingly slow compared to modern movies. It takes a layer of appreciation to get through many of them.
That only speaks of how severely the attention span of the average person has plummeted in recent decades. It's impossible to sit through a movie without enough dopamine-inducing distractions or MTV-style jump cuts every few seconds.
Definitely disagree with this take. I'd argue that all it means is that filmmakers have learned to make more exciting films. Cinema is a young art form and hasn't even been around for 200 year, it's no surprise to me that the movies of today are fundamentally different and more engaging than movies from last century.
> filmmakers have learned to make more exciting films
Filmmakers have learned how to optimize for a very specific kind of "excitement", but I disagree that movies are more exciting now than they used to be.
The most exciting and engaging movies I can think of are all pretty old.
There's a fun little fact most don't know. The typical meme is that modern movies suck, but they're being made that way to pander to "the masses." But the numbers don't support this! When you see headlines like record breaking sales, it's measured in gross revenue. When you actually look at tickets sold, movies have been dying for decades. Here are the data (US only): https://www.the-numbers.com/market/
Peak movies in terms of both tickets sold and total real revenue was 2002. Everything since then has been a rapid decline, paired with lots of inflation and ticket prices going up even faster than inflation. I'd also add that those data don't consider another aspect. Since 2002 the US population has increased by more than 45 million. Seeing ticket sales plummet alongside this is especially telling!
So, while you may personally find what passes for a movie now a days as "more engaging", even "the masses" would beg to differ!
> The typical meme is that modern movies suck, but they're being made that way to pander to "the masses." But the numbers don't support this! When you see headlines like record breaking sales, it's measured in gross revenue. When you actually look at tickets sold, movies have been dying for decades.
Alternative read: the industry is dying so they double down on pandering in an ultimately futile attempt to bail out the sinking ship.
Consider anime: It has been a dying art ever since Japan's economic stagnation/recession in the early 90s. So the anime industry (generally, with some exceptions) turned hard into pandering to their most base fans, lonely dudes. Lots of waifu characters designed to sell body pillows and trash like that. This hasn't improved quality and sales continue to slump, but they're still trying.
Oddly, the rate of change seems to be a fairly consistent rate of change at around 3 frames per shot per year since 1930[1], with changes like MTV, the reduction of the role of the studio in the 60s and more creative freedom having not much change in the overall rate. Non-English films have also for some reason only had a 40% decrease in shot lengths over the same period. My hunch is that video literacy has increased as people are exposed to video with faster cuts than their parents, and we'll reach a bottom eventually. A rough comparison can be made to the word count of NYT best seller books steadily decreasing.[2]
They are more dumb tho,
scripts and dialogues are so much simple. They rarely give you the feeling of once a lifetime seeing experience. Most of them have too much CGI and sometimes not even looking rea at all.
Sorry, but you are just generalizing based on the top blockbuster movies. Films have never been more diverse in their style and quality and, in my opinion, offer something for everyone.
If you are looking for movies that focus on strong dialogue and character work those movies are still being made and are fantastic.
Mind if I pick your brain? I enjoy compelling era pieces, though some fantasy or sci-fi is also great. I dislike identity politics and infantilizing exposition. By contrast I enjoy subtle metaphor and stories with nuance.
My favorite films would include Das Boot, I Claudius, and Seventeen Moments of Spring. For something more contemporary, I also enjoyed The Expanse. Any recommendations? Films or series in any language are okay.
Your post has it all in just two sentences: Maximum cynicism, "kids these days", "movies these days", randomly bringing up MTV, whinging about attention span, bringing up dopamine.
Really .. can you at least try to not be so cynical about the present? Everybody's walking around with a star trek device in their pocket that has all of the world's knowledge, can remote call anyone on earth, and can translate any language into any other.
Oh yes, and some movies suck. I bet if you look at the past few years of releases you'll find some you like, too.
you’re right, we are living in an era of incredible technology, and there are still plenty of good films nowadays, but you’re arguing with an imaginary figure you’ve invented. pretty much all they said was that attention spans are shorter nowadays - observably true - and that modern films cater to that - which the profit motive ensures
that isn’t “maximum cynicism” or “whinging” or even an attack on modern life
why are you jumping to such an argumentative posture? is this a debate you’ve had elsewhere that infuriated you?
There is definitely an element of conditioning here. People have grown accustomed to frenetic action and the studios like it because it’s easier than hiring good writers – especially since they’re hoping for global sales and humor, subtly, and nuance are hard to translate – but that’s a learned preference based on what dominates the market. If different things came back on the market people would get used to them, too.
Older movies are full of filler too, but it's generally less exciting filler - looooong shots of a car driving through the countryside or plot beats that could be 1 minute stretching to 10 without having any reason to be as long as they are. Over time movies have learned to cut a lot of fat.
It's about conveying atmosphere and mood, not conveying plot-points as rapidly as possible.
Same reason a book might spend two pages describing a lazy dog laying on a porch swatting flies with his tail, instead of cutting straight to who said/did what.
I strongly disagree, I don't think movies have gotten better in any regard except for the cost of special effects (cheaper than ever before, and so, used more often and generally with less thought and care.)
I guess it would behoove this stance to put some sort of limit on the span here - are you saying that first movie of the horse running is equally effective as the latest A24 art-house horror flick, because I doubt it, so I'd like some bounds on these sort of statements that movies have not improved?
Also, keep in mind survivorship bias - we largely ONLY think of the great movies from the 50's and 60's but have plenty of bad examples of modern cinema to easily draw from.
I have gotten more enjoyment out of watching some silent-era movies than modern release movies. Particularly, the 1916 20,000 Leagues is great. In general I don't think there is any real relationship between the age of a movie and the quality of a movie; quality movies are more or less evenly distributed through time. Sometimes film makers strike gold through some fortunate coincidence of inspiration, talent and luck, and most of the time they don't. And yes, that means most old movies aren't good; but most new movies aren't good either.
The passage of time doesn't play a role, because even though individual directors/actors get more experience with age, they also age out of the industry and get replaced with new guys. And besides, it is very often the case that movies get worse as a director ages. Compare The Godfather to anything Francis Ford Coppola has made in the past 30 years. Or Michael Mann's Thief and Manhunter to anything he's done in the past 20. Or Ridley Scott's filmography. There are many examples like this; experience counts for something but old men often lose their edge.
This is strongly contradicted by how frigging long movies have gotten. Old action movies are often in the 90-120 minute range. New action movies - that are supposedly lacking that old filler - are often 3 hour slogs.
But here again we're looking at Marvel movies and saying that's the entirety of what's being offered in cinema's these days. It's not, but it feels like it.
In the mid 00s or so I would have said that movies were getting shorter. If anything, movies are getting longer again.
But there is no general relationship, direct or inverse, between the length of a movie and the quality of a movie. Some movies should be short and some movies should be long. It really depends on the movie in question.
A lot of great modern movies have pacing similar to those older ones you don't like. It's not that they "leveled up" into some new form and obsoleted what came before—the other sorts of pacing remain entirely valid and in heavy use.
I'm not saying no one uses long shots or takes anymore and they aren't totally ineffective - I just watched Mandy over the weekend and it has plenty and they are used effectively but it's also a move that seems to have people regarding it in extremes - it's really a love or hate because of the choices they make.
But what I'm trying to say is there are other tools in the toolbox now - I haven't heard anyone say that Everything Everywhere All At Once was bad, it's a great movie, absolutely full of deliberately chosen mood, and it never has to resort to extremely long shots that take the wind out of the story's sails.
Ah, OK—I may not have followed what you meant re: pacing in older movies, then.
I can think of a lot of older movies I'd not touch the pacing on. I don't think it'd improve the film. Then again, I admit I've bounced off a couple because of extremely-flat cinematography and slow-as-molasses pacing (the original Oceans Eleven comes to mind—I don't drop many movies that I start, but I'm not sure I even made it to the 20 minute mark on that one).
Maybe I'm misjudging what you mean by "old"—I'd kinda assumed you meant "before digital editing", say, 80s and earlier. I don't think films from the '70s tend to feel terribly different from modern ones (we've developed new and more-chaotic ways to assemble very bad action scenes, but that aside, not much different) for example, but would grant that it's probably possible to divide cinema into silent/middle/modern period as far as the feel or what's asked of the viewer, and that the former two do feel pretty different from modern films—but I'd say we were already transitioning out of "middle" and into "modern" in the '60s, so you've got to go pretty old to get into what I'd judge to be notably different.
Now, film films do tend to look very different from modern movies, even as recently as the 90s, but that's because easy digital color grading hadn't ruined the artform yet. :-)
> (the original Oceans Eleven comes to mind—I don't drop many movies that I start, but I'm not sure I even made it to the 20 minute mark on that one).
Some movies were just never very good in the first place, I'd put the original Oceans Eleven in that category. On the other hand, compare the original The Italian Job to the remake. The remake has faster 'modern' editing but it's definitely a much worse movie than the (excellent) original.
The opposite, really: they’re relying on non-stop action and familiar franchises to keep viewers from thinking about how thin the setting is or noticing the holes in the world building.
I feel like most of the arguments against modern cinema can be boiled down to "I don't like the new superhero movies". There's worlds of modern entertainment out there that's not created by Marvel or staring the Rock.
I'm not saying it's true 100% of the time, but I've noticed that older movies tend to have more fat and when they do it's more egregious.
Throughout this discussion I've realized that this whole conversation is fraught with survivorship bias - we imagine generic marvel movies or the fast and the furious stuff when we think of modern movies, but when we think of the past we really only consider the classics. We haven't yet seen what modern movies will qualify as classic.
The 80/20 rule holds here: 80% of everything is crap. That applies to movies now, and it also applies to movies in the past.
There's also the very real thing of changing tastes. Movies are made to appeal to the taste of audiences in the time they're made. Modern tastes are different than the tastes of yesteryear.
I think it's not right to say that modern tastes are better or worse than older ones. They're just different -- but it makes sense that the ones aimed at different tastes will be a less popular.
> especially since they’re hoping for global sales
On top of that, a lot of actually interesting content has the potential to cause shitstorms. Like, especially anything LGBT and women's rights won't fly in China, Russia, Arabia and lots of Asian countries. Black lead actors lead to massive shitstorms from the far-right in the USA and parts of Europe [1] - and so, producers leave all that "potentially troubling for sales" content out.
Everything "mainstream" is just the same bullshit now, white- and dumbwashed.
[1] Black Panther and the 3rd Star Wars trilogy were surrounded by some of the most vile harassment campaigns I've seen, for example
> [1] Black Panther and the 3rd Star Wars trilogy were surrounded by some of the most vile harassment campaigns I've seen, for example
Or, movie studios have exaggerated the impact of (real, but not very numerous) internet trolls to protect their own egos from valid criticisms. The third Star Wars trilogy was an incoherent mess. And for reasons I still don't understand, the end of Black Panther was released in a rough half-rendered state. But the people making these films don't want to hear criticism of their baby, so online critics get dehumanized as "trolls". Rare instances of real trolling from the likes of 4chan get highlighted and blown out of proportion as a defense mechanism.
I agree that the SW trilogy was a mess, but that does not excuse Black actors being blasted with n-bombs and other slurs on Twitter and other social media, nor does it excuse the amount of sexist comments against Daisy Ridley.
For BP, it was the same. The whine from the far-right about "who wants to see <N-word>s in movies", "we're being ethnically replaced", "this is our future" etc. was unacceptable.
> but that does not excuse Black actors being blasted with n-bombs and other slurs on Twitter and other social media,
I'm not denying, much less excusing that. What I am saying is that such trolls are an irrelevant minority who's voices are amplified by those to whom nutjobs are a convenient excuse for their own failures.
Black Panther sold many millions of tickets in America, and had maybe a few thousand 4chan-style trolls complaining about it. Am I really expected to believe those few thousand trolls were the reason the movie got less than flawless glowing reviews from critics, rather than flaws in the movie itself being to blame? And if the Star Wars trilogy failed to perform as Disney expected, it certainly wasn't the fault of trolls. Star Wars fans outnumber trolls a million to one. If the Star Wars trilogy under-performed, it was because the Star Wars trilogy was flawed. Trolls are just a convenient excuse for the people involved in the production who don't want to face the facts about the quality of their product.
For the targets of hate campaigns, even a few thousand nutjobs on the Internet is way more than enough to ruin their quality of life. People have been driven to suicide because of that.
The worst thing are the stalkers that don't leave it at comments on Twitter but cross into real world intimidation (e.g. invasive photos, ordering pizzas, ...) to outright violence - you never know when they are gonna hit.
Thanks for expanding that idea - completely agree, and this doesn’t need anyone at the studio to be a villain, it’s just standard corporate paperclip maximization at work.
Obligatory counterexample, comedies. A quickfire screwball classic like "His Girl Friday" has lots of smart lines per minute where recent Hollywood ones will have two jokes in 90mins that they've had to put into the trailer, and slow build ups so that everybody can get the lame joke.
Google actively forgets everything in order to encourage new content and paying customers.
Not to mention, many products hit their peak of usability, and then the publishers go ahead and make it a little worse each year just so some product person can look like they did something.
Movies probably not. But I wonder what would happen if a band like the Beatles ever showed up again. Would they suck the air out of the room? Would they get trapped on a five year tour after two albums? Would they get ignored?
This seems to be happening with many works of fiction.
They can't compete so they remake or redo things with modern audiences sensibilities. These usually fail because people liked those works of fiction for their historical sensibilities.
Even Roald Dahl is having his works censored and rewritten.
If things are more localized, you can build up more momentum as a home team kind of competitor and gain skills.
If you have to compete on an even playing field with everybody else in the world from the word go, it wildly distorts things and produces really weird results. It's still optimized, but it's optimized for a mass audience that is SO huge, and applies more pressure on anything that doesn't comply.
That's what the Angry Birds thing is like. The original has to compete on the grounds of 'produce more money', not just proliferate. As such it's cannibalizing stuff that produces more money.
When you are competing with your own greatest hits, I think that exemplifies "peak content".
People have so much content, they don't even need or want new things from your.
They are satisfied, and have enough.
Disney is a WEIRD choice here. Nobody is releasing their own old movies and pushing them on all possible markets and marketing them as much as Disney does.
If you're buying a DVD for your child, but only have the budget for one, would you buy Snow White, or Snow White 5: The Slushening? In most cases, the classic original is the no-brainer. The sequels to Disney movies are pale cash-grab imitations with far less cultural significance.
once again, I agree with your sentiment - this culture of simulation and replication is extremely tiresome - but as a case in point, Disney doesn’t fit the bill
to illustrate, the realistic choice would be to choose between Snow White and Frozen and Moana.
to be clear, this isn’t me blindly supporting Disney: I don’t watch their films, I don’t work for them, I don’t own their stock. moreover, I in fact have swathes of scepticism for colossal nation-shaped megacorps; nevertheless it’s a bad example weakening a good hypothesis, and this I have a problem with
But they've been doing it long before Streaming services became a thing, as long as it makes financial sense and doesn't dilute/diminish brand image they're game
I was going to make a snarky comment about how when comparing the present to the past the past has the advantage because you can just ignore all of the garbage that wasn't worth remembering but then I thought, that would actually be a pretty neat (if not particularly practical) experiment. Setup two theatres in the same area, have one just be a regular theater and the other be a theater that only features all of the movies that would have been in the theaters exactly 45 years ago and see how they compare.
