We're going to be watching Marvel and Star Wars content 'til we die.
So fucking bleak.
I hear you talking bout we a lot, oh you speak French now? 😎
Don't sorry anyway. I'm writing a book about magic wielding adventurers who come from collective socities covertly teaming up with violent anarchist revolutionaries to fuck over the nearby kingdom. It's gonna be lit, they'll make movies about it and it will become the next episodic, subscription based hit bought out by Disney to occlude Star Wars that I always dreamed of.
Disney has infected the entire world with an addiction to cape-movies. Avengers:Endgame was a smash hit throughout the Muslim world as well.
Capitalism's most potent weapon.
I remember when people were talking about superhero fatigue a few years ago but this shit is a fucking superhero blitzkrieg.
I just want more mid budget films man. No more 100 million+ films I beg.
There have been talks about superhero fatigue going back to 2012 when the first Avengers and that shitty Zack Snyder Superman movie came out.
There was talk again about the fatigue around the time Batman v Superman came out and was universally mocked. Back then, you could say it was a shitty movie without having to worry about a legion of pissed off nerds and fan boys rushing to tell you how it was really genius and you're too stupid to understand what Zack Snyder was writing. "Release the Snyder cut" started as a small minority over the Justice League movie and it gradually grew and grew until the point we are getting a 4 hour long cut of his awful movie.
Steven Speilberg and some other big names in Hollywood criticized the superhero movies a few years back and it wasn't so much a big deal. But by last year, when Martin Scorsese wrote that op-ed criticizing them, that seemed to be a weird turning point. He set off a nuclear bomb that incited nerd rage and caused all these major publications to write retorts back at him, ripping him to pieces. Ironic thing is, his criticisms were echoed way back in 2008-2009 by the Red Letter Media guys in their Avatar review.
We've been bombarded with this shit for so long now, it's become normalized and engraved in our culture. We'll be seeing these movies appear in the top 100 best movies of all time lists not far into the future.
Birds of Prey was lots of fun and it in my top 10 this year lol. (not too many films this year). It's a mid-budget movie so it can actually be inventive and take risks, I respect it a lot for that. If more superhero films were along those lines I wouldn't be such a curmudgeon.
Marvel films are so mediocre that all their characters can be divided into three categories.
- Wacky manchild who learns about the importance of taking responsibility- Iron Man, Star Lord, Post-Ragnarok Thor.
- Character who is supposed to be smart but is actually a useless fucking idiot- Spider-Man, Hulk.
- The serious one- Captain America, All the women characters.
This seems like a really dumb thing to do honestly. You are going to simply split your consumers amongst the different shows so that each one is less profitable that it otherwise would be. Then you are going to run out of content in 5 years time when all of these shows wrap up and everyone is tired of it. Its absolutely going to be a boom-bust cycle
Remember guitar hero? That franchise had like 7 games in a year. Killed it permanently.
Holy shit, 2009:
Guitar Hero 5
Guitar Hero: Smash Hits
Band Hero
Guitar Hero: Metallica
Guitar Hero: Van Halen
Guitar Hero On Tour: Modern Hits
Guitar Hero Arcade
Guitar Hero III Backstage Pass
So technically 8 games in 2009. And that was after 6 games in 2008. Mind blown.
That's not even including the 'Rock Band' franchise that released their The Beatles edition
It is a very good example of capitalist overproduction. I stole it from jim sterling.
I remember on tour that shit was so ass
You had to have like a grip that you put on top of your DS, and it only had like four buttons
Terrible game
You know, I've actually been playing guitar for over a decade now because of that game. Thanks guitar hero.
also, owning the first two/three games just made everyone in your extended family go “well that’s cute, but why don’t you learn a REAL instrument” causing everyone to drop the series like a hot potato out of embarrassment in order to pick up 4 months of guitar lessons, then quit that too.
Saw this too in my teen years over Guitar Hero. For about a year, all my friends suddenly wanted to play guitar, then they gave up after the summer.
I kinda had a soft spot for the first game, cause before that, I was just a Metal head. Guitar Hero introduced me to David Bowie, The Ramones and Edgar Winter. Suddenly I had these awesome classic rock songs I was hearing which led me to go and look for albums by Bowie and others, which radically steered my musical interests in new directions and learned stuff outside heavy metal on guitar.
Guitar Hero also had to compete with Rock Band at the time; a game franchise that took their formula, expanded it into multiple instruments and did everything much better.
This seems like a really dumb thing to do honestly.
For Star Wars, it's just escalation of commitment at this point. They tried to replicate the economic success of the MCU by milking their IP as hard as they can, but they never cashed out as much as they had hoped to, and their solution to that is to just dump more and more money into the franchise. If you figure in the marketing costs (which nowadays usually run as high as the movie's actual budget), Solo was a massive flop, and the last two main movies did pretty meh as well. If you combine that with the billions they paid Lucas for the IP, it looks like a real shitty investment they made. I could see it working out for them in the long run if they focus on using shows like The Mandalorian to prop up Disney +, and the merch revenue is obviously nothing to scoff at, either, but more Star Wars movies in theaters seem like a giant money sink to me. Playing it safe and giving the people a normal Star Wars movie that hits all the beats you expect from a normal Star Wars movie and doesn't dare to focus on unexplored parts of the setting and the lore doesn't work any longer, it's too obviously boilerplate and everybody but the most fanatic fanbois is fed up with that.
The problem is, Star Wars is such a limited IP. it truly is a small universe when it's all said and done. The original trilogy was written entirely around Joseph Campbell's set up of The Hero's Journey. It does a great job with that. Lucas made the universe small by setting the prequels just 20 years before the first movie, and the prequels are absolutely god awful movies. It wasn't until 2015 we started seeing all these articles pushing "actually, the prequels are good!" before that, they were universally mocked for being so poorly written, and rightfully so. But the bottom line is, the entire Star Wars universe revolves around one dysfunctional family, a few of their friends and their drama. Take the Skywalkers and Solos out of it, and it's just generic Sci Fi with cool looking aesthetics here and there.
Star Wars fans love to scream about how the universe is supposedly so big, but all the good Expanded Universe stuff follows the same tropes - Jedi, lightsabers, tie fighters, super weapons, mysterious underling to Palpatine we never heard about, etc etc. I loved the first KOTOR game, but it follows all the tropes and themes of the original trilogy beat for beat, right down to having a Vader-esque villain with a mask and a big Death Star-like superweapon at the end. Maybe that's why KOTOR worked so well, it understood Star Wars and didn't try to be something it wasn't, like the god awful prequels.
I think this is going to backfire on them hard and cause serious burn out. One of the spinoff projects is literally out of another spinoff - the Andor character out of Rogue One. I completely forgot he existed cause those characters were so one dimensional and poorly written.
Star Wars really is just a small IP though at the end of the day. You can only do so much with lightsabers, tie fighters, x-wings, Jedi, Sith, smugglers, bounty hunters, Empire and Rebels.
They could do more with Star Wars, but that would require them to actually create something different that wasn't related to the originals, and creativity ain't exactly their forte
Love how capitalism can allow these multimedia conglomerates to accumulate billions of dollars and a huge workforce but they still can't manage to shit out an original idea with all those resources because it all has to be focus grouped I guess
KOTOR 2 will always be my favorite star wars game for the villain's motivation being "it's kinda fucked up that we keep having massive wars with millions dead every time a dozen Jedi have an argument, what if we just killed the Force?"
Then she dies and Disney makes a hundred movies
I really don't understand people that still LOVE Star Wars...like, it was HUGE for me as a kid. I had toys, books, games, I ate, drank, and slept Star Wars. But now that I've grown up, I just don't care about it anymore. It's not part of my identity because that's incredibly sad. I could care less what happened to Luke. I haven't even bothered to watch the last movie in the new trilogy. Rogue One was cool because it felt at least different.
Idk, it's just weird to me that people are so obsessed with this thing that at this point is so divorced from what originally made it good and is so clearly designed only to pump out as much cash as possible.
IP and its consequences have been a disaster to the human race
The new trilogy went off the rails pretty quick for me
I can't believe they had no plan
I wonder if people will ever stop seeing this shit. How long did the western last? Two decades? I wonder if after fifty years and Spiderman 87 Aunt May's Titty Bang people will just stop paying money for his stuff or if humans can quite literally watch cheap hero mythology forever.
The aesthetic will change a bit over time, but at this point Hollywood has pretty much nailed the beats of a story that make a human brain respond. I wonder if there is a template or style guide, or if everyone still pretends they are writing something new.
I do wonder how many cute droids/creatures will be cannon before they have to reset the universe. BB8, the one from the 9th movie I didn't see, baby Yoda.
Maybe they do a pre-evolution like Pokemon and we'll get the Pichu of Baby Yoda
The difference being I don't think people will still be watching Infinity War the way they watch The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
I will never, ever get tired of capeshit. Shovel that shit into my mouth daddy Disney I'm a fucking slop shoveling consoomor and I love it my brain has 2 neurons and they only spark for capeshit gimme it.
Before Toy Story 3, 1 of 10 pixar films were sequels. Since Toy Story 3, 7/12 have been sequels lol
