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Actually, let me push back on that: the MCU was not destined to print money forever if only the writers could keep from going off the rails. Every trend, no matter how hot and moneymaking, fades eventually. There is a parallel in their source material: comics in the late 80s and 90s were extremely hot for a hot minute, and everyone was opening a comic book shop, every publisher was printing sixteen variant Collector's Item #1 covers of each new Spiderman/Superman/Spawn reboot, and Wolverine was guest-starring in cross-over stories in every damn title in the Marvel Universe.
That ended. It ended partly because of burnout, partly because of boring economic reasons, and partly because you just can't keep people excited about Wolverine forever.
Hollywood is of course a deeply and ironically uncreative industry (but then so are comic books, and book publishers, and gaming). When they see a cash cow, they will try to milk it until it's dead and they are trying to squeeze milk out of leather.
Your mention of Coppola actually speaks to my point: people think Joker 2 failed because it is an anti-profit go-woke-go-broke studio project to insult white men. If Megalopolis failed because Coppola is a megalomaniac who made a bad movie, presumably they don't think Coppola knew it was bad and didn't care, or never wanted to make money from it (though he probably would have been willing to make it anyway even if he knew it would lose money, because this was a passion project). But Coppola used his own money. I guess a very woke Coppola might have made a passion project to say fuck you to white men, but most people are not that crazy. I think it's much more likely the studios thought Joker 2 would be successful, and if it pissed off a few incels that would be an added bonus.
I agree with your post, but I want to add:
Hollywood is a deeply uncreative industry in decline. Inflation adjusted, domestic US box office peaked in 2002. They're selling about as many tickets today as in 1995, despite an additional 70 million Americans. Some more stats: 61% of Americans saw zero movies in theaters, the average American who did see a movie saw just three and change, down from 30% of Americans seeing zero movies and an average close to seven in 2007.
2007 is seventeen years ago. That's, you know, a while, but Todd Phillips was already a working director then. Bob Iger was already CEO of Disney in 2007. A lot of these guys came up in a totally different industry than the one they're working in now. It's rare for dominant industries to disappear gracefully.
This decline has little to do with the movies being made, and more to do with changes to the media environment. The rise of streaming, the rise of the $500 70" TV has made going to the theater a less interesting thing to do.
There's a great scene from Mad Men where Don Draper, thinking about the rise of rock music and how kids are tying bands into their identities, asks "When did music become so important?" In the 60s, music suddenly mattered as part of identity formation and politics in a way it hadn't been for Don growing up. Now, I'm not sure Music does matter, music mattering may have been a brief period.
Movies have mattered from just after their invention to now. I'm not sure they really do anymore. And the industry is coming to terms with it.
I think the rise of streaming certainly hurt movies, but I submit that it’s the poor quality of the films themselves that are killing the industry off completely. The writing is often boring and predictable, and the plots of most movies can be easily discernible by watching the trailers. The superhero movie is boring, nothing interesting happens in them, and so nobody gets excited to go see New Marvel or New DC because everyone knows the Brand and they know what the experience will be like long before they buy their (relatively expensive) tickets, popcorn and soda. The same can be true of other genres there’s just nothing interesting going on as movies converge on the same Save the Cat beat sheet with the same progressive philosophy and the same Joss Weaten “take nothing seriously” sensibility.
This comes about because of the insular nature of Hollywood. You want in, you have to attend film schools in one of maybe a dozen Big Name schools. You need a patron. You need to go to Hollywood where you get invited to the right parties. The expense and time sink necessary to make it pretty much precludes anyone who doesn’t come from money, and the constant need to network often accidentally on purpose weeds out anyone who isn’t on the liberal side of Woke Progressive. But since everyone involved comes from the same background with the same or similar life experiences, they cannot be creative. There’s nothing new brought in. You won’t ever hear the viewpoint of a mere middle class man, let alone a poor one. You won’t hear anything authentic to a religious person. These writers have likely never had a ten minute conversation with someone like that.
It's a process, though I haven't seen a single comic book movie since the Toby Maguire Spiderman and the last Star Wars content I consumed was The Force Awakens so I'm hopelessly behind on the question of what exactly is so bad about modern Hollywood, I've checked out.
The decline of the industry begins with the technology. No one can reasonably argue that if only we got "the viewpoint of a mere middle class man, let alone a poor one, [or] anything authentic to a religious person" that the film industry would be doing a-ok.
The shitty things we all hate about the movie industry in this thread are mostly a response to the decline of the American box office. They're hemorrhaging ticket sales, in a model built on ticket sales that still considered home-viewing an afterthought. They still haven't yet totally figured out how to make home-viewing profitable without the box office ticket sales. They settled on the big franchises and comic book movies because they thought they would still bring people out to the theaters. For the most part, the non-franchise films do even worse in theaters! Because the technology only supports the spectacle comic book films: the gap between theater and home has narrowed to the point where there's almost zero value in seeing a comedy or romance in theaters, only the big spectacle benefits from the big screen.
The preening morality plays are a natural result of a culture of retreat and failure in the industry: "I'm producing this film in a way that I can explain in job interviews next fall". They know that the industry is sinking and a lot of the films they make will be, by any reasonable metric, failures; so they become more insular, more focused on getting one of the limited number of seats before the music stops. If you fail progressively, you have a narrative to latch onto as to why it wasn't your fault. If you fail boldly, trying something new, it's just on you.
How do you fix the streaming-old-movies-on-a-75-inch-TV problem for the film industry? The answer isn't going to be thoughtful Christian values films, if the people to make those even existed. But without a good answer, the film industry isn't going to suddenly change. That's what will alter the calculus.
My point is that a lot of what we're arguing about in the movie industry is this play. It's a terrible play that went horribly wrong immediately, but the odds of winning the game were already effectively zero, so criticizing the play design is kind of pointless.
I’m not going to deny the tech has a part. But I find the writing part to be a big turn off personally. No character in any story has any sort of real arc, the beats are nearly identical with only minor variations to accommodate the plot. I think part of what made the first Joker so interesting is that the character was different than the usual comic characters and rather than a story that plods along the usual tried and true beats of a superhero movie, it went in a different direction. Authentic and interesting characters, unique stories, and better dialogue I think would help a great deal. I think it would also help a great deal if the heroes of movies and their close associates didn’t have such strong plot armor. They just don’t feel like there are real stakes for a lot of reasons. Nobody gets hurt in a serious way that lasts. The characters aren’t personally invested in the outcome. It’s just watching CGI heroes do CGI stunts and I’m often left wondering why I care.
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I think that there are different failure modes - conceptual and execution. To me it seems that Megalopolis fails as execution whereas Joker 2 was doomed as conception - if they instead have decided to just make it Natural Born Killers: the musical with Harley and the Joker amplifying each other's descent into madness it would have worked.
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I would buy that the MCU is just suffering from a natural reversion if they hadn't also changed the recipe. Sure, a lot of it was Disney+ (and, in the case of Star Wars, pure mismanagement even before that). But I don't think it was purely that. They tried to grab a new audience and fell into similar behavior as other culture war fodder IPs (including battling and haranguing their own fanbase for not liking the change). Something like Rings of Power was based on an IP in hibernation since 2003 on the film side. There was no fatigue. Yet they did the same diversity stuff.
Yes, which means less oversight. Which means we wonder less why he was allowed to go up his own ass. It's easier to imagine one autocratic artist being fooled than a whole host of overseers with a track record.
These franchises are notorious for over-management.
Sure. I'm not one of those arguing it was purely spiteful behavior. I did say the theory was that they'd make more money. I guess I just give more weight to ideology/spite than you.
I think it's a convergence of self interest and ideology. But that doesn't mean that the ideology doesn't encourage somewhat contemptuous behavior towards the legacy audience as well. Or that it is a purely rational decision on profit. If you proved to them that catering to a whitebread or stereotypical "Real American" audience would play better I think it'd take them vastly longer to flip than it would if you argued that "diversity" really does pay more. Even if this is recognized, the personnel they have may not be able to help themselves because this is now SOP (there is some evidence this is changing)
A good example of this is NPR's ill-fated push for diversity which led to a bunch of cancelled progressive shows
There clearly seem to be principal-agent problems here and echochamber issues. It shouldn't be a surprise to NPR that catering to middle of the road white folx would play better than trying to explain who Saucy Santana is to grab a black audience. But staff and leadership seem to buy in (we saw this at Disney itself, when Chapek was forced by a revolt of some execs, aided by Iger, into an utterly irrational battle with DeSantis) so they have to waste a lot of the company's money before they come to their senses.
EDIT: And everyone has made every point in this post six times over, down to the same wording, by now lol.
Sorry, kind of hijacking your post to talk about LOTR.
It was in hibernation since 2014, if you consider The Hobbit part of the IP (and I would). I don't remember them doing the diversity stuff with that trilogy, and they did make money, despite making definitely lesser cultural artefacts than the LOTR movie trilogy and pissing off core fans. I could see them being worried about not being able to please the core fans no matter what they did with Rings of Power and so are trying to reach for new audiences and I wouldn't blame them.
Core LOTR fans (me included) would have gotten annoyed at any invention of the adaptation that's not from the books. Tolkien is hard to adapt, the 2000s movies were little miracles. The Hobbit could have been adapted properly, if it had been done BEFORE the LOTR, but then it was stuck and couldn't both please the studios and the fans because they couldn't possibly release something less hype-worthy than the previous trilogy, it had to at least match the spectacle of the LOTR, or exceed it. So they had to do the neat, short and sweet children's story great violence to turn it into something that was meant to feel like a step up from the LOTR. After that though, anything new would have to work off much less in-depth material than LOTR. Outside of a few short stories that don't really fit within the context of the existing material (and as such less interesting to adapt for producers that want to build on top of the popular IP they paid dearly for) the rest is written mostly like historical records than narrated fiction. That requires much more extrapolating to adapt.
For what it's worth, I've been watching RoP. It's not terribly woke the way it's been made out to be; it's got errr... multiracial fantasy races and girlboss warrior Galadriel, but other than that, it doesn't shove any woke messaging into its story. Its failings are more mundane. A paucity of likeable characters, not knowing what to do with some storylines. Season 2 just ended and it's remarkable how little happened in it compared to season 1, it felt like there's one story thread they wanted to advance and just juggled with all the others to keep them in place.
I guarantee that if I was given the same budget I'd be able to create something which pleases the core fans. Hell, I'd be able to do it on a quarter of the budget. It isn't exactly hard to do either - mostly you just have to avoid purposefully and deliberately insulting the people who liked the property you're working on, and treat it respectfully. Even Disney is capable of doing this - X-Men '97 didn't have many of these issues to the best of my knowledge.
With a "living" IP, I would agree, but I think the main problem with LOTR is that its core fans consider it to be "dead" IP. JRR Tolkien was the writer, and outside of reorganizing and cleaning up his notes and drafts for publishing, fans don't (well, I don't, and I assume most others are like me) think anyone is allowed to fill more than the the tiniest gaps in JRR Tolkien's writing. LOTR was verbose enough that the gaps that were filled by the movies were small enough to not feel insulting. The Hobbit could have been a nice single movie with very little filling in required, but they HAD to stretch it to 3 movies and so HAD to stretch the gaps and fill them in, which fans hated. But the material Rings of Power is adapting is a couple of pages written at the zoom level of a history textbook. Making anything substantial out of it, let alone tens of hours of television, requires filling in a lot. Especially if you consider the studio needs to bring in recognizable characters from the movies to keep interested those who didn't read Tolkien but liked the movies.
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