Does anyone really miss that era of genre film that ran from like 1997-2011 where the special effects were often janky, but the stories were self-contained narratives, often loosely based off something public domain a well established concept but sometimes just wildly original and high concept, half the time they were just bad, but they were creative and weird?
You know - Independence Day, The Matrix, The Mummy, Pirates of the Caribbean, Van Helsing, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, Wild Wild West (hey I did say half the time they were just bad), Reign of Fire, Pans Labyrinth, The Covenant, Underworld... I could go on. Some of them classics that shaped cinema. Some of them absolutely forgettable (Don't lie, you forgot about The Covenant until now and most of you still don't remember it.)
That style of movie was almost entirely killed off by The Avengers. Everything had to be a franchise starter, a shared universe builder. But that didn't work, it only worked for the MCU because Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America were all workable standalone movies with a little hint of a shared universe at the end, not "the story grinds to a halt for half the movie so we can introduce Not!S.H.I.E.L.D."
I miss those movies.
Even the terrible ones.
Well.
Even the fun terrible ones.
they killed all the good media
in favor of corporate nonsense
also, fuck disney specifically
You see this trend repeated in the games industry, where everything tried to be WOW, then COD, then Overwatch, and I'm expecting a wave of knock off Baldur's Gates soon.
You see this trend repeated in publishing, where everyone trend chased Twilight, then Hunger Games, and so on and so forth.
You see this trend repeated over and over again where ever big money gets involved in creative endeavors. The executives see something make a lot of money and see a formula to how it made money they can copy. Except they never understand that the formula was not what made the thing popular, what made the thing popular was messaging, or themes, or just good storytelling. So they rush to cash in and in the process they grind it to dust where even a good example of thing won't do well because everyone's sick of the mindless cash grabs.
And its even worse now because, as @Lunasorcery pointed out when I was talking with her about it, everything can't just be a single successful thing, it has to be a franchise. It has to be a perpetual motion machine that spits out money with every rotation. Anything less than that is seen as a failure.
And as some people have pointed out there is still the indies, but indie markets are completely oversaturated - and I say this as an indie author so believe me, I didn't forget indie spaces exist. The problem is in those spaces it's hard to find the good stuff - and also there's no midrange anymore. There's no movie that's made to be a good genre flick that tells a fun story with a reasonable but not billion dollar budget. There aren't games that have a medium sized studio behind them made to appeal to a niche. And indie creators can only do so much! We are often broke or barely funded, so we won't make Van Helsing because we could never afford that level of CGI, but a modern studio wouldn't make Van Helsing because it's not going to make one billion dollars.
Marvel isn't the problem, and I don't hate them for it.
I hate them for so many other reasons.
Also, yes, fuck Disney.
