I think it’s because of the new Best Picture criteria for the Oscars. This is the kind of movie that no one would watch unless it gets nominated. Unfortunately, COVID fucked it up for them.
I think most commercial films not going for Oscar cred won’t put too much focus on this. Sure, they’ll want to be inclusive in their casting to appeal to a wider audience but I care more about a proper PLOT and filmmaking than all this virtue signaling SJW bullshit and I think they may actually focus on the former now that they have no one to fight against and they know that most people on their “side” don’t align with the Far Left.
I’m fine with superhero movies as long as they get good DIRECTORS, not some fucking diversity hire like they did with Birds of Prey and Mulan. Jesus Christ how could anyone watch The Zoo Keeper’s Wife and decide it was a good idea to give the same director a 200 million USD movie(Mulan) to direct?
The only Korean stuff I’ve seen is Parasite and A Bittersweet Life (which I liked, especially the Stechkin assembly scene). I’m gonna check out some more. I think at this point foreign and independent films are more interesting to me than the usual formulaic Hollywood garbage. IMO a lot of the good stuff now tends to be low budget but with new concepts and original stories (Whiplash, Nightcrawler, Parasite, etc). All these movies cost ~$11m or less but to me are far more interesting than the big $300m superhero/Star Wars things that come out every year like clockwork.
Screw the Star Wars movies. But when we’re talking about Marvel, they get good directors and make good movies.
Thor: Kenneth Branagh(Shakespeare dude)
Guardian of the Galaxy: James Gunn(Slither, Super)
Doctor Strange: Scott Derrickson(Sinister)
Infinity War/Endgame: The Russo Brothers(Winter Soldier)
And they cast REAL actors: RDJ, Benedict Cumberbatch, the dude that played Black Panther, Mark Ruffalo, Mickey Rouke, Samual L Jackson, Josh Brolin, Jeff Bridges, Don Cheadle…
Even DC leanred their lesson:
Aquaman: James Wan(The Conjuring)
Parasite was excellent but the woke Oscars just cheapened the win even though it deserved it. They fucking nominated Black Panther the year before for the love of God. Infinity War should have fucking swept the oscars if Black Panther was fit to even be nominated. And it was competing against ROMA!!! Fuck them. FUCK.
I don’t know, because not focusing on SJW stuff seems to draw a lot of controversy now, even if you’re not an Oscar contender. For reference I’m not that old (28) and already in my lifetime I’ve seen a pretty dramatic shift towards SJW stuff in movies. For example, Tropic Thunder came out when I was in high school, with RDJ being in blackface for the whole movie. Can you imagine any movie like that coming out now? There would be a social media firestorm and everyone involved with it would be instantly #cancelled.
The latest ones have flopped. Birds of Prey, Charlie’s Angels, Terminator Dark Fate etc. The last Star Wars movie even tried to pretend The Last Jedi didn’t exist lol but they couldn’t undo the damage already done.
Hollywood’s about making money. I think they’ll pull back on the woke nonsense.
FWIW, and clearly I can’t speak for any successful directors, but I would speculate that it was clear from the outset that Disney didn’t have any vision for this movie and they were trying to make a quick return on an investment by applying the same live action remake formula they’ve been using, and consequently couldn’t get any good directors interested in being involved
It’s a generational thing. Millennials nurtured it but they will only consume so much of it. And Gen Z seems to think it’s all pretty dumb. So there won’t be much of an audience for it in the long run.
Come to think of it a lot of millennials think its dumb too.
Possibly, and I certainly hope so. It could be an elastic effect - they go way too far in one direction, everyone eventually gets sick of it and then it pulls back to a new equilibrium. I think it will take some time though, because social media amplifies the effect of the vocal minority and turns every minor issue into “this is liiike literally Hitler.” Hollywood helped make this bed so now they have to sleep in it.
The thing is movies are planned and produced like 2-4 years in advance before release. So the ones we got were probably made because they thought Trump would have such an adverse effect on the audience that the SJW shit would serve as escapism for them. Remember how crushed younger millenials and gen z were after 2016?
It was all just virtue signaling and pandering to what they perceived their demographic wanted to see. They got it wrong. See how they reedited the last Star Wars movie.
I’ll bet a lot of them are now frantically reediting upcoming major releases to tone down the SJW nonsense right now.
Apparently it went through multiple test screenings and it didn’t sit well with the audience. Since a lot of fans got burned by The Last Jedi, I’m assuming it’s because of too much woke shit. The final product acted like lots of major events in The Last Jedi didn’t exist like “Rey’s parents being nobodies”, which was some woke anti-Exceptionalism bullshit. So Rey had super Jedi powers because she was a descendent of the emperor or something and not everybody can have Jedi powers, which completely revised the ending of The Last Jedi when the unrelated kid with the broom was almost going to do an Electric Boogaloo.
I can’t remember the rest. I’m not even a Star Wars fan. I just watch these movies to look at the spectacle and effects. The only big budget movies I like were from Marvel.
Even if they tone it down it’s not enough, because they have no ideas to replace it with.They’re just out of touch and they don’t even know who to pander to.
What we need are for more anti-woke voices to get involved, probably in the comedy genre, like imagine if Mike Judge made a comedy about the present cultural climate, or maybe Bill Burr
They can just hire good screenwriters to write good stories and good filmmakers to direct them.
You know like… perhaps based on MERIT, not diversity, gender and shit.
Mad Max: Fury Road* was a fucking feminist/progressive manifesto but it was AWESOME. It was by George Miller who did the Road Warrior and the original Mad Max and Lorenzo’s Oil.
If you focus on making the movie GOOD, go ahead and throw in some woke stuff and people won’t mind. But if you’re doing it backwards, i.e, writing it to fill a fucking checklist of woke stuff that you need to put on screen then thinking about how to come up with a plot to fit it all in like Captain Marvel, then you come up with crap.
The problem is that the checklist starts before the writing for the movie even begins - it starts from hiring progressive screenwriters to work on projects. I think there probably isn’t some explicit quota on SJW stuff for movies (e.g. studio saying “you must hire x amount of black people and y amount of gays on this project”). It’s just that a lot of writers/directors are progressive, so they will write and cast parts with their own inherent biases. If you hire trans writers you’re likely to get stories about trans people and so on. So it’s not that Hollywood just needs to remove some artificial SJW quota and things will go back to normal - they have to remove all the progressives at every level of the industry (and there are a lot of them). That’s not going to happen without some massive fundamental change.
Like I said, I don’t mind progressive movies as long as they put storytelling and characters first.
Wonder Woman is a good example of this. So is Fury Road. So even if you have a good screenwriter who’s progressive, you’ll get a good product if you give the guy or gal some degree of creative freedom.
But if you do it backwards like say you want to include all these SJW themes in a movie and tell someone to write a plot around these themes, you get shit. Which is what Captain Marvel was.
Let’s not even talk about Hollywood.
Parasite was woke as fuck lol. It’s like 9/10 on the wokeness scale. But it was an excellent film. Why? Because it was a first and foremost a character driven film that also dealt heavily with social class and mobility issues faced by modern day South Korean society. They didn’t beat you over the head with SJW messages. They used lots of visual motifs, camera techniques and both subtle and overt metaphors to depict them.
You go watch the movie again and you’ll realize almost every camera angle is specifically chosen to represent something or make you feel a certain way, but it never takes precedence over storytelling. All this shit stays in the background but your brain somehow manages to piece it all together subconsciously. That was the genius of it and you leave the theater with empathy for the characters, not feeling like you’ve been preached to for 2 fucking hours that you MUST side with the characters or you’re a terrible person.
You can make a good woke movie. Just focus on the MOVIE part, not the WOKE part first.
When I was working in Saudi Arabia the local Arabs were bitching 24/7 against Korean dramas.
Apparently, UAE TV stations started broadcasting them to give local women another pastime besides shopping and torturing their Filipino servants. They became ridiculously popular and apparently - per locals - gave the women some preposterous ideas about “hopes”, “dreams”, “personal decisions” and women behaving as if they’re actual people.
I’ve been bitching about them for years. The ones my wife watches are specifically engineered with the sole purpose of making schoolgirls and housewives cry. I can’t sit through more than 10 minutes of any of them.
And then there are the ridiculous plots that have no basis in real life existing just to give people some form of catharsis from seeing some much elitism at play.
CEO of MNC gets sacked. One month later he’s shining shoes in the subway tunnel. WTF LOL.
It’s important not to ignore confounding variables. A movie that fails might fail because of poor acting, a poor script, poor marketing, or a host of other reasons. While it’s dumb to think making a film more progressive is going to make it more successful, it’s equally asinine to think a “woke” movie that fails at the box office failed because it was woke.
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
A successful movie needs many elements in place to be successful, but only one bad element to fail. Wokeness might be incidental.
My mother-in-law watches Turkish soap operas.They’ve changed so much under Erdogan - from the usual romantic bullshit “two young people fall in love but their families hate each other due to a decades-old feud” to state propaganda - “it’s WW1 and Turkish soldiers are in the middle of a bayonet charge against machine guns”, with hundreds of extras, a lavish production and very professional shooting.
Russian soap operas are hilarious - they usually start with a tragic event - a young misguided woman starts dating a black man/an Ukrainian/an American/all three in the same person or it is heavily implied that a wayward son was lured into an “alternative lifestyle” by Western liberals before a wise village priest sets everything straight (pun intended)
If we’re going to start randomly quoting Tolstoy, I’m game.