Part of it for me is im not paying for anything anymore. Avengers endgame was like the last thing I bought and that was mostly just wanting to finish off the story. To much rehashing and to much individual little streaming fifedoms and such.
People want the familiar. That’s why mom & pop stores lost out to chain retailers, why your dad just wants to go to chilies again instead of trying out that new place that just opened.
For various reasons I have mainly moved from watching movies/series to audio books, one plus is that there are way more books available than movies, and most of the time the book is better than the movie. Its also much easier to read a book in many parts, compared to watching a movie in parts.
It’s always been lowest common denominator content that’s made the most money. I always ask people about movie preferences and an ever increasing common theme “Life is already tough, I don’t want a serious movie, I just want mindless entertainment.” Sequels provide that, you know the characters, you know the stakes, sprinkle in jokes and you have a mindless money maker.
Look, I don't want to give the impression that I'm a film snob with my head up my ass or anything. I enjoy a good comic book movie, a mindless action film, all sorts of stuff. Hell, depending on what day you ask, I'd say Rogue One is the best Star Wars film (on the other days, it's Empire). Unpopular opinion - I think 2001 is overrated. It might be art, but I don't find it entertaining. And I agree with M500 - I loved San Andreas. It knew what it was, I could switch my brain off for a couple of hours and quietly snark at it with a friend. Good times.
I just don't want that to be all there is. And the more films like this fail to make hundreds of billions of dollars, the less the lawyers in charge of the studios are going to risk on them in the future. That's the tragedy for me.
There's the corporate side of it, which other comments have covered, but consumer mentality is a big piece, too. Seems like we're so awash in content there's a widespread jaded expert mentality that's taken hold. A lack of naive willingness to try new things, possibly paired with or caused by a feeling of being overtaxed financially from all sides and having too many things demanding our time.
A lack of willingness to spend time or money on something we don't already identify with as being good, on both the sides of consumers and producers.
Late stage capitalism has changed us all. Feels like there's a lot less room for experimentality in this huge carefully curated experience. We've all seen too much.
edit to add: Maybe the popularity of reboots are us yearning for simpler times. We can't reboot society so we reboot our movies, music, shows, etc. Meanwhile, constantly rehashing old plots prevents the renewal we really want.
The only minor complaint i have is when they showed an obscure barbie thing and the character in the movie had to say out loud: "that was a real thing."
Or when the director had to put in her commentary saying that the barbie actor was a bad example because how pretty she is. It felt so unnecessary, if it was so bad, cut it out.
I knew nothing about the movie when i watched it and even i knew or highly assumed that everything in the movie is a real barbie thing, so i didn't see the point of one of the main character pointing it out. It just felt off to me. Kinda like: don't blame us, the movie makers, it was a real thing. And i nean that specifically, not the part where they freeze framed the clothes and accessories and named them.
Like i found the barbie living in the tree house hilarious, but thanks for letting me know that it's a real thing that you could buy, and thank god that lady knew everything and anything about barbies to tell us.
Maybe it would be funnier if the Mattel guys were barbie nerds who would point out stuff like that. Idk, it didn't make the movie bad or worse, it just feels dumbed down, for no reason.
As much as I was fed up with “Batman: Hulks Revenge - Infinity Multiverse Edition, a Groot and Thanos Love Story” ten years ago, I can’t deny that they’re popular titles. I just hope that movie makers will shift back to originality at some point.
But for now, due to the shift in how media is consumed, they’re unlikely to go for anything that is not a safe choice, which sadly means that they’ll stick to sequels or renoots of established brands.
I don't think they ran out of ideas. The thing that i hate about modern movies or the industry behind it is that they make a movie, let's take op's movie for example, which cost 80million to make, everything included. It made 100million dollars and is considered a failure. Any normal ass company is glad to pay their workers and make some money. Just imagine joe's plumber shop working for 9 month on a project that cost him 80k in labour and materials and he makes 100k, which means 20 k profits and he's like: oh no, what a shitshow, i didn't even make half a million.
I get your point, but 20k USD profit for a 9 month project could be an absolute shit show. Businesses need enough to cover costs during the bad times as well as the good, so 20% profit wouldn't cover for very long if projects dried up the next year.
Nah it's not that they ran out of ideas. It's that the market has changed and there's no room for risky mid-budget or high budget movies. Back in the day they could make a substantial chunk off of home video sales rather than just the theatrical release. Now streaming is not nearly as lucrative and they have to compete with a ton more forms of media. So when you're dropping hundreds of millions to make a movie you have to be damn sure it's gonna draw people to the theaters. So you take fewer risks and make things as wide as possible to appeal to everyone worldwide.
There was a really good 1 hour long YouTube video posted recently that broke it down
Ryan’s performance was worth the price of admission alone. I reccomend the film on that.
From a story POV, as seen by me, I saw Barbieland as a deliberate mirror to the real world, but the gender roles are flipped, everything then stems from that perspective. I never owned a Barbie so my perspective is biased to seeing the world as a metaphor, maybe it just is that way.
For starters, I think Ken is the protagonist of this film, as he is the one that goes through the journey of character growth. Where Barbie and the Barbie’s are pushing to go back to the status quo, ken and the kens are pushing to go forward (misguided as they may be). I joked when I got home that Barbie is the antagonist of her own movie. If you see Ken as the protagonist, his character growth is facing gender equality in himself and the world he finds himself in, Barbie is the narrative enemy to that. The otherway doesn’t exist however, Babrie’s existential character growth of who she is in the world is never hindered by anyone narratively except herself.
For social commentary, just as the world’s are a mirror I saw the social causes too as a mirror. The message is not good. Ken is shallow and wants change for petty reasons, both criticisms leveled at feminism. The solution the film presents to gender inequality is, “don’t push change might happen over time”, the ken’s might even get a judge one day. There is a joke that the right always critises social messages for going too far, and the left will always say it doesn’t go far enough… So I don’t say Barbie celebrates conservatives for being a limiting factor on social change, but the film does celebrate conservatives for limiting social change… This relies on me seeing Ken’s cause as the alagory to feminism, being that I saw the world as a mirror, it was natural to me.
I didn’t see the point in the CEO’s except to present corporate executives in a more sympathetic light. Allen was wasted potential, he seemed meta aware that could have been fun to explore, he was funny though.
I should say, I was willing to meet Barbie wherever it wanted to go. If it wanted to be a fun romp of “the Barbiemobile is broken, hijinks ensue in fixing it” I would have turned my brain off and went for the ride. If the film wanted to purely examine Barbie’s place in the world, but with jokes, I would have met it there and viewed it through that lens instead. The film instead has the real world social commentary of “patriarchy bad” but with jokes, so viewed it through that lens. Jokes where ok, the message was meh, Ryan was phenomenal, go see it
Totally agree on Ryan Gosling’s performance although I saw both Ken and Barbie as the protagonists when I watched it. Where they both acted as mirrors of each other until the end when they meet in the middle.
Almost like a Man (B+K) vs Self (B+K) conflict as opposed to a Man (B) vs Man (K) style conflict.
Cody Johnson put it very well when he talked about how movie executives saw that Barbie was a smart and funny movie with a good message and decided that meant they needed to make more movies about Mattel toys.
Executives don’t even like movies very much. They just want to make money and they do whatever they think will make money, not make good movies.
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