Much has been made about franchise fatigue over the years. And I think I'm finally starting to feel it a bit. It's really just the average of how many of these movies are released in a year, and how many of them are bad, or even mediocre. Not mediocre in an "it was fine, I could watch it on cable on an afternoon" way, but in the "that was meh" kind of way.
And we just keep getting more and more cause they are the movies that make money.
Now, consumers do inform these decisions, though. But when tickets and popcorn can add up to $30 for a single person, you're only gonna see a couple movies a year. So if you have to be picky, you're gonna choose to see the big special effects movie that looks better on a big screen and a crowd versus a smaller drama that you can wait to watch one it's available to stream. And that was before the pandemic made it even more of a decision to go to a movie, let alone a space with other people.
And it's not just choice that I'm getting tired of. It's the storytelling itself. Most of them follow the same formula with very few deviations. The only one I can think of that made different storytelling choices and switched it up was Birds of Prey, a movie I enjoyed quite a lot.
All the fighting for the rights to intellectual property and older movies to be remade because it's a proven entity is taking all the risk of success or failure out of movies. It also turns fans of the old thing into righteous defenders so when a new take on a story or criticism of the original is an attack on the thing you love. And that's as far as I'm willing to go into the "Marvel movies are cinema" discourse.
I do like the Marvel movies, and this year was able to see Shang-Chi, Eternals, and Spider-Man: No Way Home in a theater safely with decent crowds. But I would have loved to see things like Passing and The Power of the Dog. Or even see people turn out for a different kind of blockbuster, a big musical like In the Heights or West Side Story.
I just want more people to see the truly extraordinary films that are getting made, and the people who make them are able to make more and not have to join the superhero industrial complex in order to get a good paycheck and clout to greenlight their next smaller-budgeted project. A project those who live for superhero movies probably won't see.
