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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30380 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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Red Letter Media just did a review of Guardians of the Galaxy 3. In their usual tangent at the beginning of the video, Mike read off an online article of the 34 biggest movies coming out this year. Of the 34, 28 are sequels/remakes/reimaginings of existing properties. Of the remaining 6, 3 are based on real-life people (ex. Oppenheimer). That leaves three major movies in all of 2023 based entirely on original ideas, and all three are made by big, established filmmakers with lots of studio clout. This is a trend people have been recognizing for at least the last 5 years, if not the last decade.

EDIT - the RLM guys actually got a few of these wrong and the numbers are even worse than they thought. At least one of the 6 supposedly original films are based on a book (Scorcese's next project) and another is based on a true story (Taika Waititi's next film).

My question is -

Is there any historical precedence for this? Has there been a time and place where popular culture so heavily converged on recycling products that the flow of new products was stymied.

I don't want to be too doomer about this. There are still new, original, interesting movies being made, but they have been shuttled off to low-budget indie and streaming avenues. These days, if a movie is big enough to get a wide release, it is almost certainly not original. It's hard to imagine a new Star Wars (the original) or anything like it coming out today - a big, bold, truly original vision with a budget.

(Alternatively, maybe most of the cinematic creativity is flowing into television where for a variety of technical and cost reasons, interesting stuff can still be made on a big budget (ie. HBO).

This is happening in video games as well. Of the top 10 video games that have been released this year, 8 are ports, remakes, or remasters, while one is a DLC and the last one is a sequel.

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Note : this is a uniquely Hollywood problem.

British TV media seems to be as creative as ever. Indian movies are in a golden age of new IP. Salman's lousy pseudo sequels and RRR overshadowing Bahubali's thunder proves that. Japan seems to be in the midst of a creative revival too. Major long running shows are ending, all the lazy soft-sequels are stumbling out of the gate (Boruto) and the newer IPs are crazier than anything that has come before (DANDADAN, Chainsawman).

maybe most of the cinematic creativity is flowing into television

This is my guess too. It has allowed creative directors to get bigger budgets than they could've imagined. Directors cast 1 big name for the thumbnail, and the rest of the mini-series gets filmed indoors. Great way to make a good buck, get more $$ over longer view times and if viewer numbers are tied to thumbnail/trailer impressions anyway, then that's all you need.

Some have mastered this model. Mike Flanagan managed to make money off Midnight mass. Would have been impossible in any other era. TV shows like Bear should have been a movie, but they managed to turn it into a nice 8 episode T series and get an unusual project greenlit.

Speaking of Japan's pop culture, Gundam, one of the oldest franchises around, has actually been doing stupidly well recently thanks to the Witch From Mercury series. The trick? They tried something new, and it's paid off to the point that the Gunpla has been flying off the shelves and it's brought in new fans just like Iron-Blooded Orphans did.

What's historically unprecedented is that so much of culture is owned.

It's natural and even desirable for writers to reuse existing characters. The audience doesn't need to be introduced to them and you can get on with the story.

Traditionally writers used gods, demigods, saints, historic figures, etc.

Nowadays everyone is locked down by copyright and trademarks. Studios like that. Re-using old characters is also good for keeping out foreign competition.

It's hard to imagine a new Star Wars (the original) or anything like it coming out today - a big, bold, truly original vision with a budget.

The original Star Wars had a relatively low budge for the time. No one else was pushing VFX at the time so Lucas could recruit top talent cheaply. Also he understood the technology and built his script around cool shots that were possible.

If people liked more original stuff, it would get bigger budgets. Capitalism works pretty well with entertainment. The only real flaw happens when people demand that the biggest productions that are advertised everywhere also fit their desired preferences specifically. If you don't like the mainstream stuff, there is endless smaller stuff to fit anyone's preferences if they spend some time looking.

Original stuff does quite well when it is good. See, for example, Inception. The thing is that doing good original things requires talent, and the ability to have make bold choices. Sequels and the like can coast off brand recognition so long as its not absolutely horrible (Star Wars has been teetering on the edge of this question as of late).

Original stuff does quite well when it is good.

Sequels do even better when they're good, like Avengers

Indeed, just like you will likely sell more pizza when you have a killer pizza recipe than you will sell equally banging arancini.

What I wonder - have we done this sort of check for any years well into the past? Yes, Star Wars was a classic, but what other movies were released that year, and how many were original? I recall hearing about music, many say older music is better because they only remember the smash hits from some particular year 3 or 5 decades ago, but that was one hit, when there were maybe 500 released that year, and 90% of the rest were relatively mediocre pop. Is the same true for movies?

FWIW, having picked 1964 at random it seems like only one of the ten top-grossing films that year could be classed as 'original', otherwise we have two Bonds, two pink panther films and the others based on books, musicals etc.

I actually picked 1963 at random for my test (by accident, I was going for 1964!) and there seemed to be a bit more of original stuff there.

It should be noted that even Star Wars started as a clever rework of Hidden Fortress with other plot elements and characters added in rewrites wrapped in nostalgia for Flash Gordon.

The appeal to the audience is not "I saw Hidden Fortress/Flash Gordon, so I'll see this", so it shouldn't count. Every work cribs from previous works in some fashion.

That poster messaging is literally an appeal to the audience of "you saw Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers as a kid, this will make you feel like that again". Hence the tag line "it'll make you feel like a kid again" after invoking the earlier two properties.

That poster messaging is literally an appeal to the audience of "you saw Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers as a kid, this will m

There are shades of this. Being named the same as a previous movie that came out two years ago except you have a number on the end of your title is high on the scale. Being inspired by a property that hasn't had a hit in a while is lower on the scale. Being inspired by a genre which contains hits rather than by one and only one specific hit is lower. So is having the reference only appeal to some of your audience (the overlap between the whole Star Wars audience and people who've seen Flash Gordon is a lot less than the overlap between the audience for Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and Guardians of the Galaxy 3).

I think that Star Wars is overall low on the scale, even if you can certainly point to some elements that are derivative.

You could frame the whole Renaissance as basically recycling the Greek/Roman culture, if you wanted to. Recycling is not bad by itself. I don't mind somebody making another Sherlock Holmes movie or a remake of Herbert Wells stories. Or even Hamlet, for that matter. Yes, it's not original, but it doesn't mean it's necessarily worthless.

But I think the decline in originality may be because the production is now controlled by a limited set of big corporations, and they would necessarily favor safe, data-driven approach. Can you prove, with data in your hands, that your new original crazy idea would make more money than Superheroes 28, take 17? Probably not. Superheroes it is.

It doesn't mean the new thing can't happen now and then, on shoestring budget just through the power of it's own creativity. Possible. But on the volume, it would be one such thing per several years, while 99% is the safe, data-driven shlock. And once that new thing comes up, it will be milked for the next two decades, turning it inevitably to the shlock too.

You have the wrong culprit. It isn’t because of the studios or data per se. The problem is international revenue as a percentage of the total. Asia pacific alone is like 2x the domestic market. Big studios make movies that are accessible/salient to China, India, the US, and maybe to a lesser extent, Europe. The largest common denominator is MCU, which doesn’t really have gay people, dialog, romance, or Taiwan. Both the problems and solutions are violence. Why doesn’t Thor solve homelessness or Wakanda fix fentanyl? Because neither exist of course, just like actual injuries from all of that play fighting.

Maybe with the reemergence of revanchist Russia, we can make movies were they are the baddies again. Rambo, volume 8, back in the USSR!

Given Russia's performance in Ukraine, it wouldn't even be a stretch to depict them as a massive, terrifying force comprised of incompetent jobbers and cannon fodder, much like Nazis in popular fiction.

I love this comment as a glittering example of "Comes so close to noticing but then the crimestop kicks in"

To wit: don't you think it a little... suspicious... that the """reports from IRL""" that your news media pipes you from Ukraine, map so neatly into the tropes you've been fed for decades from your entertainment?

Does that not strike you as a little, err, improbable to be an organic occurrance?

(So no-one accuses me of not speaking plainly: I am forwarding this as circumstantial evidence that Western reporting from the Ukraine War is very, very contaminated by Western attempts to narrative craft it into the pre-prepared slot in the Western psyche of "Just like my Indiana Jones movies".)

I would like to state for the record that my impression of Russian incompetence is, as HaroldWilson kind-of touched on, driven less by Western reporting and more by evidence surfaced by internet randos (i.e. Twitter people and Channers) looking for the dankest, funniest, you-literally-could-not-make-this-shit-up-if-you-tried bits of intel that trickle out of the area.

With that out of the way, I want to reiterate that we are talking about fiction. I suppose that if I had phrased my post as "the modern Russian army has now ascended to the tier of Enemy-faction-that-is-safe-to-use for fiction creators," maybe I would not be writing this post now. I can acknowledge that the reality isn't quite as popular image makes it seem. The Nazis were genuinely more threatening than certain hero-fantasy media (e.g. Rat Patrol, Indiana Jones, Wolfenstein) makes them out to have been. Similarly, the Russians aren't a complete laughingstock and still represent an undefined, nebulous threat.

But, in the ragged parlance of our sitting President, come on, man. Again, alluding to my first paragraph, some of the reports about the reality of Russian capability in the beginning of the war and beyond* were so out there that any fiction writer who depicted them as such before the war would have been slammed and roasted by no end of YouTube rantsona channels, armchair generals, and 4Chan pedants. However, we clearly live in the Dank Timeline, and I will never not be amused by the idea of future generations using the 2022 Russians in the manner described above.

*(using insecure commercial radios instead of actual encrypted military radios; tires that fell apart from lack of maintenance, making Russian trucks incapable of necessary off-roading; a Russian plane that avoided starting WWIII only because a missile failed to launch from, again, lack of maintenance; the Cope Cage)

Clearly journalists do have to construct a kind of narrative around every ongoing event they report, whether it be election campaigns, sporting events or indeed wars, but there's nothing wrong with that (that is what every historian will try to do in their own way after the war is over after all, journalists are just doing it in real time) as that's the only way to comprehend anything, and I don't think they really are crafting that narrative to fit in a pre-prepared slot. After all, what other interpretation can there be except that Russia has so far failed emphatically? And most Western reporting, while certainly emphasising Russian failure, doesn't seem to me to have gone in particularly hard on Russian incompetence, tending to focus on the role of Western support and the effectiveness of Ukraine defence.

What’s with the triple quotes? That’s the bit which sets off my speaking-plainly alarms.

As for the quality of news reports, there are two facts that matter:

  • Russia is occupying parts of Ukraine

  • Russia has not occupied all of Ukraine

Neither of these are really in dispute, and they’re the ones that put Russia into “Saturday morning cartoon villain” territory. The news could be lying about everything else—they’re certainly inclined to spin it—and Americans would still pattern-match it to Indiana Jones. It’s not a complex narrative.

Ironically, the NATO tweet invoked just about everything but Indy: https://twitter.com/NATO/status/1628687961477750790#m

Rambo, volume 8, back in the USSR!

John Rambo fathered a half-Chinese kid during one or another adventure, they link up to fight...somebody, maybe the Dalai Lama? It needs a Creed type pass the torch bit.

Yes, what an excellent suggestion! Rambo teaches RamboCreed how to kill real hard while looking manly.

Wasn't Rambo a story about a guy experiencing homelessness and undergoing a mental health crisis, then lashing out against the man who thought it was his duty to "protect" the others from Rambo by using violence against him?

I think a story like this will not look out of place in 2023.

It was. It hasn't been about any of that since Rambo 2.

Just like Rocky was a story about a guy not winning the heavyweight belt. Until Rocky 2 when it became a story about the guy winning the belt. Then each one became about winning, again.

I don't think your explanation necessarily contradicts mine. A set of smaller studios could target different markets and it'd be fine for a small studio to ignore China - US market is enough for it, and you don't need to squeeze every last dollar to pay for it, there's plenty of market for many small players. For a megacorp, you need mage-movies with mega-budgets and you can't pay for those without China.

As for Russia, I foresee some trouble for the wokes to explain why Russians are actually bad. Surely, they have an oppressive uni-party regime where there's no free speech and your rights depend on whether you agree or not with the ruling party. But that'd only make the wokes to envy them, not despise them - freedom is a red-tribe word. Of course, Russians hate gays and transes, but I don't think we're ready for a movie where Russia invades Wakanda to kill all gay people there, and the heroic Rainbow Transvengers push them back and perform the pride parade in the Red Square. Not yet at least, give it time. In the times of the Cold War, it was simple - Russians are commies that hate Our Way Of Life (TM). But now we know that Our Way Of Life (TM) is racist, colonialist, patriarchal and long overdue for deconstructing and dismantling. And the communists (if under slightly different names) are sitting on the board of every academic institution and are proudly represented in Congress. So where exactly is the good/evil line? I don't think Hollywood would be able to articulate it better than "they are bad because they are against us, and we are good!" - especially while at the same time releasing 50 movies about how we're actually very very bad.

I foresee some trouble for the wokes to explain why Russians are actually bad.

This is a strange take to me. Have you heard much in the way of woke takes on foreign policy? Wokeism can easily pin any invader as bad. It fits neatly into the broader oppression dynamics as well as the hatred of imperialism. They also vaguely see Russia as fascist, and many comfortably assert that red tribe and/or Trump has a love affair with Russia, which is reason enough to hate them, and has broadly built a "current thing" alignment against Russia for years. I have constantly been seeing woke people disavow tankies in spaces where they were previously tolerated or at least seen as a lesser evil. The real question is whether they will be willing to acknowledge the importance of the US's place in the world if that's what it takes to stand against something like Russia.

There was a lot of drama in my woke spaces over games like Call of Duty portraying poor innocent Russia as bad, back in 2019. These kinds of arguments were very common and have suddenly become extinct.

Wokeism can easily pin any invader as bad.

Russia invaded a number of places before Ukraine, and nobody had any trouble with that. Georgia, Moldova, Syria, Central Africa...

They also vaguely see Russia as fascist,

Well, Russia is fascist, but I don't see anybody on US political scene daring to officially recognize the fact, even among the wokes. For the wokes though, "fascist" is a bad word to call everybody they hate, not a political taxonomy term, so they can't hate somebody for being fascist - they call somebody fascist after they already hate them. And since everybody by now knows the link between Trump and Russia is wholesale fake (it doesn't mean they wouldn't LARP as if they believed it's true, but they know it's false) - unlike the link between Russia and Clintons, say - again, they link Trump to Russia because they hate Trump, not the other way around. In Obama years, people who thought Russia is a threat were laughed at. In Trump years, people who thought Europe needs to beef their defenses against Russia were laughed at. So we back to the question why would they hate Russia enough, per se. They don't hate Iran and North Korea and China - at least no more than political expediency requires them to perform - despite those being no less oppressive than Russia (though currently not invading their neighbors). Is the invading the only thing? So if Russia is beaten back to their pre-Feb-2022 borders, would the hate go away?

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I'm not saying they admire Soviets or Russians (though some of them definitely did when Russians were Soviets) - what I am saying is it'd be hard for them to cast Russians as a convincing movie villain without undermining their own message. "They are villains because they restrict homosexuality" is not going to make you a billion dollars in movie receipts I'm afraid.

It’s not just about raw power, it’s about they have a vision of what the good looks like and they want to make it a reality. Just like communists, conservatives, libertarians, liberals, etc.

Oh no, there's actually a huge difference, but that'd take us way off topic I think.

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Well, starting from communists, for them it is about power. It's not only about power, but the classic communist revolution must result in the dictatorship of the proletariat. No setup where it's not the case can be recognized by a communist as legitimate, and any such setup must be overthrown. Now, when they have the power, there's still much work to be done, and that's where communists go Judean People's Front vs. People's Front of Judea and splinter into various *isms. But that's after the power has been captured.

Conservatives are probably the closest ones to your description - they need power to prevent people from doing bad things and to force them to do good things. As long as that's what is happening, the application of power is unnecessary.

The classical liberals and libertarians, on the other hand, are probably the farthest, because they reject application of power to force people to behave in certain ways, unless that behavior comes into immediate conflict with a narrow set of natural rights (such as murder, bodily harm, theft of property, etc.). Applying power just to make sure people don't do something you think is not good, even if it does not violate their rights, is contrary to this mindset. Here, the power is to be used as little as it is possible to keep the whole system from collapsing into chaos (anarchists would claim this minimum is actually zero).

Now modern liberals, they are somewhat similar to conservatives towards application of power, but with couple important twists. First, good things are never enough - the standards evolve and change constantly, and the continuous application of power is necessary to keep up, what was perfectly good a year ago, is an appalling bigotry today. Second, there's a class of natural standard-setters, who define and re-define these constantly evolving and changing standards, and those people are the only legitimate candidates for holding power (not all of them will hold power, but all power holding should be done by them only, or it is illegitimate and should be resisted by any means). Also, since their vision involves forcible redistribution of resources from people who have them to people who "deserve" them (standard-setters identify those) but don't have them, this again requires constant application of power. So while the power is not the end in itself, their vision necessitates constant control and exercise of power.

There’s another wrinkle, which is the international market, and especially the billion Chinese consumers and so if you want to capture sales in another culture, you can’t be too out there because that doesn’t always cross cultural lines the way an apolitical action-adventure featuring a Norse god, a goody-two-shoes and a guy with anger management issues does. It’s not very specific to us and our cultural moment. Taxi Driver and Joker cover the same descent into madness because of social ills territory, but because Joker is at least familiar to modern audiences, and pretty apolitical as well (this isn’t America, it’s a fictional city, and Arkham Asylum is known to be terrible) it’s an easy sell to audiences outside the USA and even inside the USA because it’s not really a call out of a real policy, it’s “Batman’s dad won’t help a crazy guy who thinks he’s related.”

Is there any historical precedence for this? Has there been a time and place where popular culture so heavily converged on recycling products that the flow of new products was stymied.

Well, there's "literally every point in history except between the Enlightenment and now", as a starting point. The culture of the 1420s was not exactly fresh and original compared to the 1410s. Hell, pretty much everyone believed that history writ large was cyclical before then, not just culture.

(Alternatively, maybe most of the cinematic creativity is flowing into television where for a variety of technical and cost reasons, interesting stuff can still be made on a big budget (ie. HBO).

Then again, your main analysis is probably too doomer and I think it's more likely this. Due to some strange pathology in specifically Hollywood blockbuster financing, movie moguls like rehashes this season. You don't see the same trend in TV, or in literature, or in any other center of cinema production (Bollywood? China?), so I don't think it's time to start sounding the horns of the apocalypse.

Bollywood isn't big on cinematic universes, but that's because the majority of movies are so fucking formulaic and derivative that you wouldn't be able to tell!

Movie industry has long ago peaked. Unless you are repackaging IP content like Marvel, financing a movie does not make sense.

What you have to understand is that the truly talented people have long ago left the industry for greener pastures.

Across history, talent always follows the money. Just like when musicians were the hot thing. Then came dramaturgy. Then literature until the end of 19th century. Then movies which peaked in the 90's. Now we are waiting for the new artform of the future. Maybe it is youtubers, or AI is the new thing.

Talent will go there. As it always has.

Well, in some sense, there's already so incredibly much fiction out there that it doesn't make too much sense to try to reinvent something for film. You have an entire industry preselecting the stories that appeal to people, why would you not use that?

1939 is widely considered to be the best year for motion pictures in history. But nearly all of the films (Gone with the Wind, Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights, Of Mice and Men, etc) were based on a novel or other previously published material. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is the one of the few notable original works. I suspect that truly original works have always been the exception rather than the rule, but it is the exceptions that stand out. I suspect that the number of sequels/reboots has increased while the numbers of films based on written media has declined, rather than cutting into the original works. But just a guess without digging into it.

Or take 1999, another "great movie year". What were the top-grossing movies?

  • Star Wars ep. 1 - existing IP

  • The Sixth Sense - original

  • Toy Story 2 - existing IP

  • The Matrix - original

  • Tarzan - existing IP

  • The Mummy - original

  • Notting Hill - original

  • The World Is Not Enough - existing IP

  • American Beauty - original

  • Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me - existing IP

50% of the highest-grossing movies use existing IP, 40% are sequels.

What were the best movie award nominees at the Academy Awards that weren't in the top 10?

  • The Green Mile - existing IP

  • The Insider - existing IP

Best director award nominees?

  • The Cider House Rules - existing IP

  • Being John Malkovich - original

A cult classic that wasn't initially liked neither by the audiences nor by the critics?

  • Fight Club - existing IP

  • Office Space - it's a stretch, but existing IP

  • Ghost Dog - original

The Mummy - original

This only strengthens your point, but I think The Mummy was a remake or reimagining of an older film from the 30s.

I think using a source novel is distinctly different from what we're seeing now, where an IP is stretched for dozens of movies which are themselves the source material.

Yeah, a lot of Kubrick's movies were really just novel adaptations, and much of Kubrick's body of work are considered classics. Markedly changed from their source material a lot of the time, sure, but adaptations nonetheless.

I don't think that 28/34 fraction means a whole lot, necessarily. Sequels can be different from predecessors while being even better sometimes (The Godfather: Part 2 comes to mind, along with Terminator 2 and Aliens), and that's even more the case for spinoffs within the same universe (e.g. Rogue One being a spinoff of the Star Wars films). Remakes/reimaginings can also be perfectly good and creative depending on how they're handled - e.g. I haven't watched either Scarface film, but I've been told the remake from the 70s was even better than the original from the 30s. And if that 28 includes adaptations of stories from other media, then there's just no issue; making a film version of a written story is a new creative endeavor in itself, and there are countless examples of great, creative films that have come from adapting existing stories.

So the fraction might not be indicative of anything, but I do think there's something going on with the lack of creativity in Hollywood the past decade. The rise of the soft reboot (e.g. Jurassic World to Jurassic Park, The Force Awakens to A New Hope, Ghostbusters to Ghostbusters, and even arguably The Incredibles 2 to The Incredibles if you squint) does show some lack of creativity; these aren't remakes/reimaginings that try to present a fresh take on the same story, they do the exact opposite by dressing up the same stale core with minor cosmetic changes. And there are the Disney live-action (CG) remakes of their old cartoons, which they're pumping out at astonishing rates and which either add nothing to the original story (e.g. The Lion King which also took away a whole lot including one of its best songs) or just miss the entire point or "soul" of the original story (e.g. Mulan where the titular character literally had The Force magical chi powers, or Pinocchio where the titular puppet never makes any mistakes and is also rewarded for lying by having his nose grow long in a way to help him get the key to his cage). These show both a lack of creativity and a lack of understanding of what made the original works so beloved. Then there's Marvel, where every character feels like they're trying to imitate Iron Man with their sarcastic quips and every film has the same tone due to that.

Perhaps there's some truth to the idea that these studios have gotten very risk averse in part due to how much these high production films cost to make. Maybe there's something to it; after all, The Force Awakens and The Lion King both made a billion dollars. But I also have to wonder if that's the kind of trick you can only pull off so many times before the audience catches on, and Hollywood isn't adapting all that quickly. My hope is that with the rise of generative AI, we'll see the costs drop so drastically that indie studios - perhaps even dedicated hobbyists - would be able to put together 2-hour long films with the production values - encompassing everything from the visual effects, sound effects, set design, costume design, acting quality - of a modern Hollywood blockbuster. Hollywood still owns most/all of the well-known brands, and they also have the industry expertise to use these tools better than most, so they could still thrive in such an environment. But more independent filmmakers making something equivalent to Avatar 2 in production values could mean more creative and imaginative films in the landscape in the future.

It seems far more likely that Hollywood adapts imo. They've seemingly realised that low budget horror movies can be very profitable and low risk. It seems like a fairly small step to producing other kinds of low budget movies with "AI" effects. In fact, a lot of modern TV kind of is this.

It doesn't seem like a massive step for this to graduate to the big screen. Make things like "The Northman" on 10 million instead of 70-90 and you'll have big financial success even if it only makes back half as much.

I wonder. A narrative like this benefits from selection bias—RLM has no reason to write about years with perfectly normal amount of new IP!

Not that it’s implausible. I’d point the finger at COVID, which definitely traumatized the theater industry. It’s easy to see how that could shake up pricing or risk aversion.

I am, as always, tempted to wax poetic about the shrinking of the world. Drink from the firehose of all human creative endeavor, and it gets harder and harder to be surprised. Pushing the boundaries of the medium helps, but that leads to postmodernism. Push the limits of technology, instead, and blow people away with the novelty. Avatar has to be the poster child for such an approach.

Could Star Wars succeed without a novel edge? Move it to today, after decades of sweet practical effects and unbelievable refinement of CGI, and I don’t think so. You’d get a cult classic at best.

Could Star Wars succeed without a novel edge? Move it to today, after decades of sweet practical effects and unbelievable refinement of CGI, and I don’t think so. You’d get a cult classic at best.

I think on this exact question somewhat often.

Star Wars benefited because Lucas, as he fully admits, borrowed from Samurai and Western films and the success of cheesy Space Adventure series like Flash Gordon.

If made today, it'd be much further removed from those original inspiration sources and have audiences, probably, much less receptive to those tropes? In that sense it would be an even more novel release amidst the current film landscape since it doesn't have as clear a line of succession from previous works.

And let us also assume that Lucas actually deigned to use practical effects, physical sets, miniatures, and minimal CGI in creating the series, so that it actually stands out further from the competition. Would audiences be more or less receptive to a film that eschewed becoming a CGI-fest and harkened back to a much older era of filmmaking tropes to boot?

It's probably as you say, it'd be a cult classic, and more than likely the RoTJ never ends up getting made. It'd probably be regarded close to how Firefly is today.

I would argue that there's something intrinsic to Star Wars, related mostly to the general atmosphere, worldbuilding, and aesthetic, that really does make it unique and both a fun and accessible universe to tell stories in, and thus it really, really lends itself to having a large fandom. Just not clear that it could carve out a space for itself in the current crowded media landscape.

One fun example — almost the entirety of narrative literature in the ancient world is based on a shared mythological and historical corpus, in many cases the exact same telling and retelling of same stories. The Trojan Cycle, the Theban Cycle, and legendary Roman history (eg the Aeneid) dominate. Notable exceptions include comedic drama, Roman elegy, and a few weird works like Apuleius’s Golden Ass.

I think Ancient literature is pretty good, FWIW, so a relative fixed narrative repertoire is at least compatible with decent storytelling.

I don’t think that diminishes Shakespeare’s place in the canon.

...although it should. 35/37? What a hack.

This seems likely to be more the norm than the exception, historically. Spin offs and retellings of King Arthur, Robin Hood, St George, Coyote, Tarzan, or whomever is probably normal, with an actually new story every decade or so.

At the same time, I agree that whatever's going on now feels like something of a wasteland.

Maybe this has to do with the tendency to mine the same stories too quickly. But I used to binge read King Arthur anthologies, and the entire Wizard of Oz collection, so I'm not sure that's it, either. Maybe something more basic, like that the stories are just not good stories, for various reasons. I'm on board for an Ant Man story, but not the one they have, by report, actually produced. I'm on board for a How Raven Stole the Sun retelling, but not as a three hour CGI fest. If someone with the aesthetics of Miyazaki decided to retell it (that would be odd, but supposing an equivalent folktale), I would absolutely be on board. I don't so much feel inundated with retellings, as that there's a specific "memberberry" version of those retellings that's insufficiently universal, pandering too much to specific target demographics. A war movie about Judith and Holofernes could be fine and interesting, but not the way it would probably be produced in actuality. Companies are recycling too narrowly, from their own slate, rather than from the broader catalogue of world civilizations.

Yes. I fully agree with these criticism of the modern movie industry. That said, I think TV is getting interesting again; after the Golden Age of the 2000s (The Wire, The Sopranos, The West Wing, Six Feet Under) and the Silver Age of the early 2010s (Breaking Bad. Mad Men, early Game of Thrones), we’ve had a rocky few years, with far too many streaming services chasing too few eyeballs. But The White Lotus, Ted Lasso, and Severance are both excellent and are new IPs, if I’m not mistaken.

Ted Lasso

Is Ted Lasso still good? Cause I've heard awful things about the last season (I was going to binge after it ended) and this doesn't inspire confidence.

Shit. That accords very well with the Atlantic review I saw that claims it's confused itself for prestige TV.

The show has no time slot to worry about, and none of the formal or thematic constraints of network television. Perhaps that’s why its episodes have settled into such supersize lengths, with “Sunflowers” running an ungodly 63 minutes.

I can't fathom how anyone thought that was a good idea.

Perhaps the natural extension of treating prestige TV as a movie alternative?

Perhaps. Exceedingly silly idea to take something that makes sense for Game of Thrones and apply it to a comedy.

Do you mean season 3? I haven't watched season 3 yet (because I haven't felt like being sad), but my brother has been watching and said he has been enjoying it same as usual.

A reason for why people feel like there has been such a decline in visual storytelling I think is due to how it has declined.

Firstly, while some kinds of "prestige" shows and movies have been made throughout this entire period but in contrast to earlier eras some genres have been practically abandoned, like comedy.

Secondly, I feel like the some current trends just are much shallower creative wells than earlier trends. The most prominent example of this is irony, meta commentary and deconstruction. This is further exacerbated by a ton of things effectively being serials, which do run out of steam eventually, even if the underlying concepts doesn't.

I don't think the lack of new epics is the major issue, it is the amount of material published. There isn't that much novel material to create or genuinely new material to create. Yet Hollywood pumps hundreds of movies a year. I think one of the reasons for crazy cultural shifts is the fact that people are desperately trying to come up with something new. When millions of people go to university, we need armies of PhDs to teach them. There probably aren't that many people genuinely capable of contributing something major to their field and there probably aren't that many good project proposals. The result is autoethnographies and trying to re-read classics according to some theory.

It is hard to write a movie script that is actually unique as well as high quality. Most theaters throughout history just ran with the same scripts year after year. A movie production compay has to re-write the script annually. It isn't surprising that they end up writing more or less the same script.

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