I think nerds tend to become more emotionally invested in their particular franchise. So they tend to overreact when a sequel or prequel or whatever doesn’t live up to their particular expectations. Particularly if it appears like a studio is just making sequels as a cash grab (Star Wars) or just sort of half-assing to get to an ending so people can move on in their career (Game of Thrones)
Personally, I really like the MCU. For all its flaws, I like the idea that they have created a (mostly) internally consistent alternate history where all these superhero stories can take place and the history carries over from movie to movie in interesting ways.
The first Pitch Black was a solid film that remade the “Aliens” concept in a new and interesting way.
Chronicles of Riddick was also pretty solid attempt to expand the “Riddickverse”. I’ll keep watching whenever I happen across it on some random Sunday afternoon.
Riddick 3…I just thought it was “not good”.
Interestingly, in the early 2000s, Vin Diesel had the opportunity to choose one of three franchises - Riddick, XXX, and Fast and Furious - and he went with Riddick (Ice Cube taking on the Xander Cage role and not appearing in FF2).
Although I suppose it doesn’t matter now as IMDB says he’s on Fast and Furious 10, another Riddick film (Furya), and even a fourth XXX. Plus he has all that “I am Groot” money.
I never saw ToS as a utopia. The original series presented a Star Trek that was better than 1960s America. We had a crew that included an Asian, an African, and a Russian all working together but they were all fundamentally human with flaws they had to overcome. Gene hated The Wrath of Khan, a movie regarded as one of the best Star Trek has to offer, and he had some odd ideas in regards to TNG. He didn’t want there to be any conflict between any of the main characters, which is just boring, and I can’t help but notice how smug our Federation pals can be at times in a way Kirk, Spock, and McCoy never were.
In addition to all the other factors cited, there is an additional one operating. There is, out there, a group of folks who attack tv shows/films which are made with a diverse cast. And they do so regardless of any objective merit (or lack thereof) of the work itself.
Maybe “optimistic” or “hopeful” is a better word than “utopian.” The world of classic Star Trek isn’t perfect, but it is the kind of future we might actually want to live in.
I wouldn’t want it to be about conflict between any of the main characters. There are shows like that, that are pirmarily about the interpersonal conflicts and drama between the regular characters, but that’s not what I look for from Star Trek.
I wouldn’t want it to be about conflict either but you have to have some to make for an interesting story. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy were not always in agreement with one another.
Yeah, typically there was debate among the core cast (and sometimes a guest star that was on their side) in addition to the antagonist/problem of the week.
My problem with most of the movies and shows mentioned is the lack of original thought, original material. Reboots of everything, endlessly milking the original art of everything that it has, and keeping going until the box office takes drop off.
I enjoyed comic books when I was young. Does every one need a movie? Every minor character need development? Drive this shit into the ground until it is gone?
Star Trek TOS was good, TNG was good, many movies of both were enjoyable. But they will keep wringing every possible thing out of them. Star Wars universe, same thing. The writing isn’t good, the ideas aren’t good, but they will sell.
Reboot Hawaii 5.0, reboot Magnum PI, reboot every original thought because there are no more original thoughts to be exploited. No creativity, no art, no innovation, just pick something that worked in the past and recreate it in a new, worse, form.
No fucking new ideas anywhere, only old ideas to be destroyed with a reboot. Lets reboot The Godfather. We can make a movie about the backstory of every character, even the minor ones that no one cares about. There aught to be 30 or 40 movies in there.
I am afraid that someone in Hollywood will read this post and wring every last drop out of that movie.
I agree, but I also understand why they do it this way. It’s a lot harder to market something that’s completely original. If a movie or TV show is based on something that people are already familiar with, the mere fact that it’s being made will get talked about, and people will know (or think they know) what it is and why they would want to see it.
That’s a double-edged sword, because when audiences go in with expectations and those expectations aren’t met, you get negativity. But studios would probably rather have that negativity than have a movie or show that nobody watches because nobody knows or cares that it exists.
Neither. It’s just that nerd genre is now the mainstream moneymaker, therefore there is a lot more product of it out there, and amazingly half of it is below average, only one in ten above the 90%ile in quality.
Most stuff that comes out of all genres will get many giving it thumbs down. I’d submit that the product class you reference has more love thrown its way than shade.
Mind you not every product is for everyone. Peacemaker wouldn’t be everyone’s thing but it earned lots of love. Raised by Wolves on HBOMax is too weird for many but has an enthused following and not getting much hate.
Reboots and sequels though are tricky. They are done because the originals earned much love. That’s a two edged sword. It means more will give it a chance because of the love they have for the original. And it means it will be held to comparison with the original, often remembered as better than it was.
And the choice sometimes is between playing it safe to appeal to the biggest numbers, or taking chances doing something that some may love but others will hate. (See WandaVision).
This is a common refrain, but not actually true. The sad reality is there are lots of new things every year that do not do very well, especially the ones trying to do something unique. If they get a second season at all, a third is highly unlikely, and none get a satisfying conclusion.
The simple truth is, there’s safety in sequels, reboots, and adaptations.
True, Star Wars A New Hope was fantastic and lifechanging almost. But 1, 2, &3 were okay, fun and watchable, even though hardly great. No reason to pile on the hate. Sure, if you wanna rate A New Hope as A+++++ and the three prequels as C+, okay. But no reason to hate them.
For example:
No, it is not. Does it belong in the top 100? Hardly. Probably not even in the top 1000. But at worst it is mediocre.
And that list? They include GWtW, a very racist and southern apologist film, that belongs on the list of 100 worst films
I think LotR was perhaps the greatest movie trilogy ever done. And I just knew the haters were gonna hate The Hobbit, as sure as the sun sets in the West. Now, yes, making Jackson turn the Hobbit into a trilogy was a huge mistake, but The Hobbit films have many enjoyable moments, and I can fast forward through the bad parts.
No, but usually it was more friendly banter. They truly care for each other.
That’s an example of a great one. So is Doom Patrol and the animated Harley Quinn. But on the other hand I can’t stomach anything in the CW-verse, which like most CW-content is just soap opera about the relationships of improbably attractive affluent twenty-somethings with a veneer of genre painted on top.
But in a broader view, bad reviews are just more fun than good ones. Anyone remember the Battlefeld Earth reviewapalooza?
They did. But you can have conflict with people that you care about without it destroying the friendship. There was a TNG episode where Data was in command with Worf acting as his first officer. Throughout the episode, Worf kept making snide comments and undermining Data’s authority until called out on it. Data addresses this bad behavior from his first officer and says something like, “I hope this hasn’t ended our friendship.” Worf acknowledges that he was in the wrong, apologies, and says that he would like to continue being Data’s friend. It was a great character building moment for both of them and something we never would have seen if the rules about conflict between main characters was still in place.
That’s a great scene. It also puts the lie to the whole “Data doesn’t have emotions” thing. I defy you to watch that scene and tell me that Data is not royally pissed off.
These two quotes cut to the heart of it. I’ve been a nerd for a while now (I’m 49, and remember watching Star Trek in syndication long before ST:TMP came out, for example), and I think that it was just so socially unacceptable and underground that we were just happy to have ANYTHING that was relatively high profile that catered to our needs. I saw this change through the course of my childhood and adolescence; Star Wars really cracked the shell wide open- enough so that another science fiction movie (“ET”) was wildly successful, both critically and commercially- enough so to move Star Wars out of that spot. This sort of thing has continued to the present day, where science fiction/fantasy themes are so commonplace that they’re not even “genre” anymore- shows like “The Handmaid’s Tale”, “Game of Thrones”, “Killing Eve”, “The Leftovers”, “Rick and Morty”, “Black Mirror”, etc… have all been wildly popular in the past decade.
So it’s not at all surprising that when you combine this surfeit of riches with the inherent nerdy tendency to perseverate on the minutiae of a TV show/book series/movie series, that they’ll find fault. I mean, a lot of these things aren’t bad, they’re just not 100% faithful to the books or comics or whatever, and these folks have so much invested in their particular franchise that they’re very protective of it, and very critical of what they perceive as deviation from the way it should be.
I’m the same age. I don’t recall Star Trek or science fiction being “socially unacceptable”. Star Wars came out when we were 5. ST: TMP when we were 7. For our generation, I think you would be hard pressed to find people who didn’t watch at least a little bit of Star Trek or Star Wars. Now if you are talking about a specific subculture of people who collect action figures as adults and cosplay, yeah, that is something that more or less started with Star Wars and was looked at as a bit odd until relatively recently.
