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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27509 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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The more interesting question is what the next big Hollywood trend is going to be.

I don't think there will be another trend. Two hour movies at the movie theater are now deprecated. They are increasingly irrelevant to the culture zeitgeist. My prediction is that there will never be another major popcorn movie franchise at the level of Star Wars, MCU, or Harry Potter. That time in history is now over.

In terms of general trends in video, then AI has to be the next frontier. I was just watching some prehistoric planet thing on Netflix narrated by Morgan Freeman. It seems like the technology is already available to replace a person with an AI generated voice. And it'd be a lot cheaper than Morgan Freeman.

It's seems like it might be movie/TV adaptations of other properties that are actually competently made.

There are some early successes here and if studios shift away from superheroes this might be the next thing. You both get the brand brand recognition of a pre-existing property and get around the "franchise fatigue" stuff. You also have a product line ready to sell stuff from. It works kind of like how anime works for the manga industry, it's often not really intended to make a big profit on it's own, it's marketing. You could even integrate the streaming services to directly sell stuff from the shows/movies.

I could easily see there being ten+ years until ai stuff really takes off in a transformative way for media production in such a way that these kinds of trends don't matter as much but until then this could fill the void.

I think honestly, the writing is 99% of the problem. The reason these franchises suck is that they’re badly written, have no actual thought behind them, and no characters that people actually care about. A simple test here. If the first thing you’d ever seen of your franchise were the most recent three entries, would you even care? It’s a quality problem. The stories are poorly constructed, poorly thought out, full of plot holes, and have nothing to say that hasn’t already been said.

This does sound convincing. I remember as a child eagerly awaiting the release of "The Wizard", a glorified commercial for Super Mario 3. At the time, I would have also been happy to watch an actual 90 minute Super Mario 3 commercial.

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