Nobody tries to make bad art. Some people don’t care if they make good art. That’s a subtle difference.
As David Chen likes to say on the filmcast, getting any film made is a major achievement and almost everyone involved was trying to do good work.
None of that changes the fact that sometimes the motives are not to make great art but to make tons of money by catering to the lowest common denominator. There is way too much of that in film now.
I don’t know the Tom and Jerry reference so can’t comment sorry.
You can probably already discern this from reviews, but The Wild Robot is truly excellent. It’s going to hit way harder if you’re a parent, but the animation and storytelling are elite either way.
Diversify thier output and target communities other than teenage white boys.
Thankfully the market appears to be forcing them to do this as more and more of these massive budget comic book films crash and burn at the box office.
If you think this is the only group the MCU hit, I encourage you to check their both their financials and filmography. Shang-Chi, Ms. Marvel, Black Widow, Captain Marvel, and oh, by the way, the MCU’s second-highest-grossing stand-alone super hero movie to date, gave lots of people characters they could see themselves as in their movies.
I also reject your notion that superhero stories are lowest common denominator. Common denominator, maybe. They are one of humanity’s oldest. most enduring, and pan-cultural art forms, many of which are regarded as some of our greatest artistic output. And it’s not like any old super hero story makes a billion dollars. People know trash like Shazam 2 and Madame Web and reject it.
The point is more that making almost anything creative generally relies on huge compromises to get it made. Each one of those compromises diminishes the original creative vision. Many of those compromises improve the work, but the original creative vision is still diminished by this.
Coppola thought he had the perfect situation to make Megalopolis exactly the way he wanted. He financed, wrote, and directed it, how could it not turn out to be exactly what he wanted? As he found out again, moviemaking is a collaborative process, and at the scale he was working at he was forced to depend on a lot of people to obtain those results at a cost he could live with. It turns out those sweet Georgia tax breaks and studio sets used by Marvel require a lot of compromise. The only way those Marvel movies work at the price points they’re made is by hierarchy and system. They’re essentially a very creative assembly line. Coppola didn’t know that going in and it caused him big problems. I still have no idea how much of his vision made it into that movie but the whole movie felt extremely compromised to me and I could see an easy stylistic path that would have made the movie much better if he’d gone that route instead of the road he ended up on (it’s related to the 2nd Unit footage he got in 2001 that was used at the beginning of the movie).
I was trying to bring you to Deitch because he had one of my all time favorite quotes about the movie business in a doc I worked on about those cartoons (they were much maligned, but I always enjoyed their bizarreness). I’ll paraphrase it here because I can’t remember the exact number he used. He essentially said, ‘if what you make is even 60 percent of your original vision, then you had a smashing success’. Hearing that made me realize how true that is really in every creative part of making anything. Almost everything in this industry is extremely compromised for one reason or another. That just happens once real money is involved and even when it isn’t. Some people are excellent at adapting to this forced compromise. Others are very very bad at it. Others use that forced compromise to enhance their original vision. Others walk away when they see their original vision can no longer be met. Sometimes they’re fired, too. It’s always described as ‘creative differences’.
I was fortunate to find two creative outlets where the only compromise is my own ability (no one is telling me what to do). I’m hitting both of those now at probably close to 95 percent of what I hoped for, and that happens with almost none of my true professional work regardless of how much other people like that work. My personal standard is probably 30 to 40 percent higher than what I could easily get approved by 98% of filmmakers (my work has been approved by most of the biggest/best living directors and probably some dead ones too, I can’t remember). I shoot for my standard (which involves not making safe choices), no one else’s, and frequently am pulled down in my own standard by other people. I don’t have a problem with that because the ultimate work is their vision, not mine. My V1s are just my vision of their vision. After that, my goal becomes helping them reach their vision. And what is that? Compromise. Welcome to Hollywood.
Since there are all or most Bonds watchable on prime I started the task to watch them in chronological order. The Connery Bonds are classics but it might be the first time I realized how obvious it is that they are filming in front of green screen or whatever you call it. In most of the car chases he is far too big to be real stunt. Today would be a huge outcry if Bond gives his women a casual slap on the butt. I finished the first Moore Bond now. I think the young Jane Seymour might the be most attractive Bond girl so far. I liked the Lazenby one with the sad ending but shame on me for having to check on imdb to realize that Diana Rigg was Olenna Tyrell as well.
Just saw my old ass finally, had been hyped to see it since I heard about it and it didn’t disappoint. Agree with all you said, Bieber scene doesn’t make sense I think other than some levity I guess? But doesn’t detract at all for me, I cried during the last scene with Aubrey
The entire big RW point against disney/mcu properties of the last 10 years is that they are too woke/not for white males. Its been a huge cultural point! Id also say theres rarely been a year where an mcu film would be top 10 for most male dominated audience.
It really isn’t at all. It truly isnt the demographic.
Teen boys aren’t lining up to see these films, they’re more likely to try to sneak into something like Terrifier 2 than watch wandavision.
I see most popular films opening weekend and can’t remember the last one I would say had even 20% men under 21. Closest would probably be when there were multiple college aged larger groups of guys for my showing of Oppenheimer? The loudest laughs for Deadpool were routinely by ~50 year old women, who love Ryan Reynolds.
The male vs female split for Gladiator 2 will be way, way worse than any recent Marvel film. I saw it with my parents but dont think there was another woman in my opening day Napoleon showing. Those types skew male way, way more than a Marvel movie where women also just like RDJ, Pratt, Evans, Reynolds, Michael B Jordan etc.
It’s true most of the audience for Marvel are white guys, but they’ve been aggressively marketing toward a more diverse audience for a while now. It just isn’t the case that white guys are the target audience for Madam Web, Across the Spiderverse, Mrs. Marvel, She-Hulk, etc. etc. New Captain America is black, new Thor is a woman and so on.
