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Notes -
The top ten highest grossing movies in 1990 looks very different from today. IPs have always been a thing. Slop has always been a thing.
But you used to have smaller-scale movies like American Beauty be one of the biggest movies of the year, you used to have more variety in your action slop so you'd get a Gladiator along with your Marvel and Bruckheimer slop, and that movie could credibly win Oscars without it being a pity nomination like with current comic book films like Black Panther.
If anything, the American audience has proven itself capable of watching more complex stuff. Not just in the past but on TV today. Part of the problem is the opposite: films have an even larger global market they need to appeal to today. The slop is extra bland because they need to squeeze juice out of every disparate community in the world.
Is that what happened to the zombie genre?
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