russian heel, do you live somewhere where there are only a few movie theaters within 30 miles of you, all of which show nothing except blockbuster films? I’m wondering because I can see a large variety of movies within 20 miles of me. If I were to limit myself to just the films shown at the 8-screen theater that’s a half mile from me, it might appear that the films I could see are very limited too.
So am I. The existence began arguably in 1978 with Superman, or maybe 1989 with Batman.
I disagree with your assessment. Back in the late 2000s / early 2010s, YA overshadowed superhero movies by a fair margin.
Here’s a list of 66 movies I either really like or love from the 2010s, mainly from just trying to remember them over the past 24 hours. I’m sure I could easily double the size of this list if I put in more research. Generally speaking, if a movie has bad ratings or reviews but I included it anyway, it’s because it’s one of my favorite movies ever. (Horns, Mr. Right, etc…)
Movie title links go to IMDb. The three numbers that follow are:
-
IMDb user rating
Tends to start off high and deflate a bit over time, so the older the movie the more likely it is to have resolved to its “real” rating. -
Rottentomatoes critics aggregate
I only included the critics “fresh rating;” audience score isn’t included. -
Cinemascore
Poll results from moviegoers at major movie releases on opening night. Many movies in this list have no cinemascore because the movie wasn’t released to at least 1500 theaters.
The lists are alphabetical, as are my somewhat arbitrary genre categories.
Apocalypse
2017 It Comes at Night 6.2/87%/D
2012 Seeking a Friend for the End of the World 6.7/56%/C+
2013 These Final Hours 6.7/82%/?
2013 This Is the End 6.6/83%/B+
2015 Z for Zachariah 6/78%/?
Comedy
2011 Bridesmaids 6.8/90%/B+
2011 God Bless America 7.2/67%/?
2017 Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle 7/76%/A-
2010 Kick-Ass 7.6/76%/B
2010 Scott Pilgrim vs The World 7.5/81%/A-
2018 The Spy Who Dumped Me 6/49%/?
2015 Trainwreck 6.2/85%/A-
Drama
2011 10 Years 6.1/60%/?
2018 BlacKkKlansman 7.5/96%/A-
2015 Carol 7.2/94%/?
2014 Fury 7.6/77%/A-
2011 Killer Joe 6.7/79%/?
2016 Manchester by the Sea 7.8/96%/?
2015 Me and Earl and the Dying Girl 7.8/81%/?
2012 People Like Us 7.1/53%/B+
2013 Short Term 12 8/98%/?
2012 Smashed 6.8/83%/?
2015 The Revenant 8/78%/?
2017 Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri 8.2/90%/?
2014 White Bird in a Blizzard 6.4/54%/?
2010 Winter’s Bone 7.2/94%/?
2011 Your Sister’s Sister 6.7/83%/?
Fantasy
2013 Horns 6.5/40%/?
2017 mother! 6.6/69%/F
2012 Ruby Sparks 7.2/79%/?
2012 Safety Not Guaranteed 7/90%/?
2015 The Lobster 7.1/87%/?
2014 The One I Love 7.1/81%/?
Horror
2015 A Christmas Horror Story 5.7/81%/?
2018 A Quiet Place 7.6/95%/?
2017 Get Out 7.7/98%/A-
2018 Hereditary 7.3/89%/D+
2017 It 7.4/85%/B+
2014 It Follows 6.9/96%/?
2015 Krampus 6.2/67%/B-
2013 Oculus 6.5/74%/C
2018 Overlord 6.7/81%/B
2014 The Babadook 6.8/98%/?
2011 The Cabin in the Woods 7/91%/?
2015 The VVitch 6.8/90%/?
2010 Tucker and Dale vs Evil 7.6/84%/?
Romantic Comedy
2013 About Time 7.8/69%/?
2015 Mr. Right 6.3/44%/?
2015 Sleeping with Other People 6.5/64%/?
2013 What If 6.8/73%/?
Science Fiction
2013 +1 (Plus One) 5.5/75%/?
2018 Annihilation 6.9/88%/C
2016 Arrival 7.9/94%/B
2013 Coherence 7.2/87%/?
2014 Edge of Tomorrow 7.9/90%/B+
2014 Ex Machina 7.7/92%/?
2013 Gravity 7.7/96%/A-
2013 Her 8/94%/?
2010 Monsters 6.4/73%/?
2012 The Brass Teapot 6.4/32%/?
2015 The Martian 8/91%/?
2014 Time Lapse 6.5/76%/?
2018 Upgrade 7.6/87%/?
Suspense/Thriller
2016 10 Cloverfield Lane 7.2/90%/B-
2015 American Ultra 6.1/43%/B-
2015 Green Room 7/90%/?
If we remove all the “?” cinemascore titles using the logic that they either never made it to a theater near the OP or only showed up for a weekend or two, then yeah, I can totally see the OP’s point. I personally don’t go out to the theater to watch movies, preferring to watch from my couch, so I don’t much care about theater availability.
I like superhero films and I do not want the trend to end. If anything, the movies are getting better written and more diverse, so I have high hopes moving forwards.
The graphs on these two sites may illuminate the discussion a bit:
Distribution of films by genre, 1908-2012
Genre trends in global film production 1998-2017 (scroll down for more graphs)
The second site has dozens of articles analyzing trends in the movie industry, some of which may be relevant to this discussion.
So… Fury Road isn’t a thing? A movie with very little actual writing that uses every inch to its full effect to create a post-apocalyptic wasteland that lives and breathes and feels real?
Black Panther, with its nuanced villain and complex plot is “boring predictable crap”?
Your Name’s touching body-swapping time-jumping love story is “lazy”?
Avengers: Infinity War doesn’t raise an eyebrow or two by functionally turning the villain into the protagonist of the piece, and ending with the kind of gigantic twist ending you just don’t get away with any more?
Maybe the problem is that you’re watching the wrong movies.
I mean… I never got into Marvel comics in any meaningful way, but Black Panther blew me away as a stand-alone movie. As did all three Captain America movies. And Thor: Ragnarok. Don’t let that stop you - this is absolutely entry-level superhero stuff with the convoluted continuity stuff playing backseat for the most part.
One of the major themes of Thor: Ragnarok involves recognizing that a country’s colonialist past is a sin to be reckoned with. Not only that, but the movie comes down on the side of “this cannot be fixed; the only solution is to burn it down and start over”. Seriously!
I mean, yeah, like most Marvel movies, it’s all childish fun and spectacle… if you never look past the surface to the actual themes being explored. And… yeah, you can totally do that and still have a good time, and I bet plenty of people do. But to act like the movie doesn’t have anything interesting to say is a little silly.
Anyways, just for shits and giggles, here’s some movies from the past 9 years:
- Inside Out
- Black Swan
- Django Unchained
- Shutter Island
- The Wolf Of Wall Street
- Grand Budapest Hotel
- Ballad of Buster Scruggs
- Whiplash
- The Revenant
- Arrival
- Logan
- John Wick 1-3
- The Artist
- The Raid & The Raid 2
- Prisoners
- Creed
- Roma
- The Shape of Water
- The Martian
- Moonlight
- Get Out
- Her
- 12 Years A Slave
- Argo
If you can’t find something on that list that appeals to you, the problem is not this decade of movies.
But really, the idea that “this is the worst decade” is something that’s basically impossible to quantify ahead of time. Hey, question - who here remembers any of the movies on this list? Hell, who remembers Mortal Engines? That came out last year. In 10 years, nobody is going to remember that 2018 had movies like Mortal Engines or Geostorm or the 2018 Robin Hood or the 2018 Superman. They’re going to remember it as the year that had Black Panther in it.
Any decade looks good if you only remember the hits and forget the misses. And, by corollary, any decade where we haven’t yet forgotten the misses will look kind of shitty by comparison. That’s how this always works. Remember - the hottest hit in 1969 wasn’t by Hendrix, Joplin, or Dylan - it was by The Archies.
So let me close this by saying that if all you took away from Captain Marvel is a “glorified cartoon”, you probably weren’t paying attention. There’s plenty of other people who didn’t miss them.
I never claimed that. I take Star Wars dead seriously, I think Terry Pratchett was a an extremely intelligent, profound writer, and my D&D campaigns can be surprisingly deep.
Just because something “presses all my geek buttons”, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t also have something intelligent to say. In fact, I’d say that to me, the ideal movie is one that appeals to *all *aspects of my personality, old and young, serious and silly.
Okay I snipped the quote short:
“Is it serious, adult entertainment? Not really[…]”
That’s what I disagree with. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to see Thor: Ragnarok as serious, adult entertainment. Much like most of the Marvel movies, it’s a character-driven action movie with some pretty deep themes and excellent writing.
I guess where I get confused is, what makes entertainment “adult”? I think it’s about taking themes which matter to adulthood and displaying it with a level of emotional maturity in storytelling that does the theme justice. Like, to reach for my favorite example… Guardians of the Galaxy 2 is a phenomenally silly movie with a fairly consistent lightness of tone that most kids will fucking love, make no mistake… But there’s enough there for one of the best movie analysts on youtube to make a 40-minute video analyzing its themes of egotism, depression, mental illness, surrogate family, et cetera.
Old people are confused and angry about modern media. #shocking
Budget Player Cadet, it may be that Infinity War doesn’t raise any eyebrows for making the villain the protagonist or executing a twist ending because it didn’t do either of those things. Like, not even close, nor was it even trying. I mean, yeah, Thanos thinks of himself as the protagonist, but then, most villains do. And if you compare to, say, Black Panther, Killmonger thinks of himself as the protagonist because he’s attempting to correct real injustices that have plagued human history for centuries, while Thanos thinks of himself as the protagonist because he’s insane.
I mean, I like the Marvel movies too, overall, but that’s really the wrong one to pick to try to make the point.
It’s not about his actions or his emotions (obviously the vast majority of villains think they’re right, unless they’re on Captain Planet), it’s about screenplay structure.
Thanos is the one character in the movie who undergoes a full arc. The movie is about him, his goals, and his sacrifices to achieve it. The focus is on him fairly consistently. His hero’s journey is twisted, but it is present. That’s how they made the gut-punch at the end work so well.
Actually, no. Thanos isn’t thinking of himself as a protagonist “because he’s insane.” He’s actually trying to address a serious issue, one highlighted by Malthus over 200 years ago. His SOLUTION shows not that he’s “insane”, but rather that he’s got a criminal mind: he thinks it’s okay to end the lives of living beings simply to solve a societal problem. That makes him evil, but not insane.
Killmonger’s “real injustices” that he’s attempting to solve are no more “real” or worthy of solution than Thanos’. The fact that Earth hasn’t quite reached the point where some solution to the Malthusian dilemma is imperative doesn’t make Thanos’ worries less relevant. For all we know, Zen-Whoberei really needed something done to solve over-population, for example.
Part of the difference between Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame is that, in the former, Thanos is actually treated as someone who we can identify with (just as we can sympathize with Killmonger), while in the latter, earlier-Thanos is simply treated as a jerk with no redeeming factors. To me, that cheapened the second movie a bit, but I suppose it was not that important, since in Endgame, Thanos is simply there to provide an obstacle to the effort to undo the Snap.
It appears that russian heel has no intention of returning to this thread.
I’ll grant that Thanos was sympathetic in Infinity War, though only by virtue of a Herculean acting job by Josh Brolin. But he’s definitely insane. Both his perception of the problem and his solution to it are clearly at odds with reality.
As for him being the character who gets the most focus in the movie, that’s simply a consequence of there being only one bad guy but fifty bazillion good guys. Even if the good guys collectively get more screen time than him, they don’t get thirty times as much collective screentime as him.
Aquaman alone drags this decade’s movies way down below the average.
Really? the thread was started yesterday. Some people have a job, responsibilities and other things to do.
I’ll pinch hit for the OP because I overdid some house projects and am waiting for some OTC pain killer to kick in.
IMO the OP is commenting on the block-buster movies. I agree with the assessment that they are formulaic in nature and lack the creative content that should drive the revenue streams we’re seeing.
The same thing is happening in the music industry but lets focus on moves. Big budget movies require a larger audience to make money. In order to avoid llosing large amounts of money they need to reduce the risk involved. It cost 220 million to make the last Avengers movie. It’s no accident they used the same structure as the previous movies. If they lack substance it’s because time and money was invested in other aspects of the movie such as CG imaging. That in itself wouldn’t lessen the movie but, IMO, they have been doing so at the expense of the traditional cinematic efforts of good scripts, acting and photography.
Using Avengers Endgame as an example there was something like a 30 minute cartoon toward the end that replaced all of the conventional components of a movie. Or put another way, it was a 30 minute McDonald’s Big Mac. A beloved formulaic hamburger that billions of people enjoy.
I don’t think the days of cinematic excellence are gone but nobody should expect a cultural experience from big-budget movies that are risk averse. The upside of this is it’s pretty easy to spot them from their commercials. The downside of this is we shouldn’t expect high quality movies with big budgets that don’t conform to risk-based formulas.
The same structure as which previous movies? The Marvel ones? They’ve had a wide variety of different structures.
And while Aquaman wasn’t great, neither was it terrible. You could probably find a worse movie in theaters in any given week at random, any time since movies became mainstream.
Right - that’s the trick that makes it work. The Avengers are not really our protagonists. They’re the heroes, but in terms of story structure they’re basically Thanos’s gallery of rogues, a series of challenges for him to overcome. That’s how the movie gets away eith flitting so frantically between them.
Thanos doesn’t have to be right or even sympathetic for this to work.
big budget movies of similar genre that use CG imaging in lieu of scripts and acting.