I’ve been fighting the urge to post itt for a day, but I feel the my Star Warz hate growing inside me and I am not sure I can contain it anymore. I haven’t given up yet, but apologies in advance for any jackassy posts I might make later today.
I always love the “I’m discerning and smart because I hate the thing everybody likes” discussion.
2 Likes
2 Likes
inb4 The Beetle’s sucked Change My Mind thread
2 Likes
Except nobody is saying that and you know it.
You may be underestimating the demographic shifts that were going on at the time. There were a lot more kids in the market than there had been.
1 Like
I will at least push back at Clovis’s contention that Star Wars (1977) is a kid’s movie. It is not. In fact, it is specifically a film that can only be thematically understood by adults.
Now kids like Star Wars, but that is just because it is a good, fun, well-made, and creative movie with a broad adventure storyline and clearly demarcated good and bad guys. Also has a lot of cool monsters, robots, spaceships and lightsabers (not sure if Lucas made these up himself or stole them from some old space opera, but they are a real stroke of genius and took a lot of effort for later films to ruin).
But Star Wars is a film about remembering being a kid. Or more accurately, it is about the false memory of childhood; nostalgia. In fact, it is basically a paean to nostalgia – and a nostalgia for the nostalgia of previous generations (back when nostalgia was great.) It is a deeply reactionary, somewhat pernicious piece of art, but a serious one. Kinda philistine to ignore that tbh.
That the movie was such an immense success was because this thematic presentation resonated with adults at the time. I’m partial to the Rick Pearlstein reading of why, but suffice to say, many people didn’t want to see “70s movies.” In its own way, Star Wars was as prescient as to where our culture was headed as Network, maybe more.
4 Likes
I’m more on your side than most, but don’t think this is too convincing.
Hollywood 70s was just not a financially viable way to make movies, and I’m not sure this run could have lasted more than a few years, the dynamics would always have gone back to a more classical studio>>director power balance for big movies.
Coppola got massively lucky to not be broke after Apocalypse Now, and he lost big on the next one, after which he had to go back to making smaller movies
Cimino basically bankrupted a studio with Heaven’s gate
don’t think either of this had much to do with Star Wars…
and things have changed so much between Star Wars came out and MCU 2010s, which I guess is where your hostility mostly is directed, that again making a direct causation link is not very convincing
Finally let me be a little provocative : when it comes to blockbusters is “clearly childish slop” (Avengers : endgame) worse for the state of movies than “elevated slop” (the Barbie movie) ? I’m not so sure !
1 Like
Also Rogue One was ass, come at me
1 Like
OK, maybe you have a thesis as to why more movies you like aren’t being made, but I don’t think it’s the right one.
Hear me out: maybe the movies you like still wouldn’t be popular even if there weren’t an MCU.
We haven’t even gotten around to defining what is “bad for the state of movies.” Is an alternate universe where we have 5 movies Clovis likes per year and no comic book blockbusters better or worse than one with 10 movies Clovis likes per year and 100 comic book blockbusters? I have no idea, and I’m even granting that Clovis’s taste is the ultimate authority in what constitutes a good movie!
George Lucas may not have thought it was a kids movie when he made it but he also thought Greebo shot first. Kids were the ones going to see it over and over again and buying the dolls (“action figures”) and the comic books.
Special relativity maybe. General relativity would have taken a while. Well, at least 10 years. So they say. And the guy who did it probably wouldn’t have had his charisma so maybe it would have taken longer to catch on. On the other hand maybe that guy wouldn’t have got hung up on trying to come up with a theory of everything so 
I think he wishes that good directors would do more original stuff, but they arent being forced into IP. They like it! Greta Gerwig had a complete blank check post Barbie. She’s doing Narnia for Netflix. Coogler clearly likes franchises like BP/Creed and is rebooting the X Files with his next project.
I’d argue most people within the industry got into it because of something like Star Wars and have deep affection and nostalgia for such.
2 Likes
Right. One other assumption inherent to Clovis’s hate that he refuses to scrutinize is that the amount of movies he likes would increase if the amount of blockbusters decreases. That is very far from true if blockbusters are a tide that raises all boats, increasing the total amount of resources (money and people) availaable to and interested in making the kinds of movies he likes in addition to blockbusters.
The TikTok video I watched said a couple of years, but I will defer to your expertise haha. I don’t actually know anything
speaking of philistine. insta ban
3 Likes
I don’t have actual expertise. I have heard 10 years as an educated guess on GR. In general, I agree individuals get too much credit. Science is highly social. And not just science.
1 Like
I mean I’m pretty sure he already answered your question and mentioned explicitely that the problem is the lack of other type of movies.
I think it’s also fairly well-documented that the rise of mega-blockbusters with high ROI has decreased the number of mid-budget/mid-rentability movies.
Whether this has anything to do with Star Wars however is not clear…Actually in one of the previous iterations of this debate here, there was a post by nunnehi (iirc) claiming that the main guilty party for this was James Cameron (not sure if the claim was for Avatar or Titanic)
You’re imputing causation where I think there is only correlation. This can also be explained by the expansion of the home theater and streaming services, where people are not wanting to go out to movies they can later stream unless the audiovisual experience of the movie commands seeing it in a theater.