"Film Theory #1: Is The Blockbuster Dying" Transcript

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So the Hollywood Summer movie season is drawing to a close, and the prevailing message of the summer seems to be (according to industry professionals, at least) that people are getting tired of the summer blockbuster. With a few exceptions like X-Men: Days of Future Past, Guardians of the Galaxy, and the new Ninja Turtles movie, almost every medium-to-large budgeted movie has underperformed, especially at the domestic box office.

This is leading a lot of people in Hollywood to wonder "What went wrong? Why aren’t people going to see movies anymore? And why aren’t they going to see movies more than once?" The economy isn’t nearly as bad as it was in 2009, and that was the year Avatar made almost 3 billion dollars, so what the hell is going on here?! Well, the answer is pretty simple, really. They’re not sick of fantasy movies, science fiction, comedies, horror, superheroes, westerns, disaster movies, vampires, werewolves, or giant monsters. People are sick of paying good money to see bad movies.

The first example that comes to mind is this summer’s Amazing Spider-Man 2. Back in 2002, Sony basically gave the superhero genre the shot of adrenaline it needed with Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, and followed it up in 2004 with what was probably the best superhero movie at the time: Spider-Man 2. And those movies made a ton of money for the studio, but after a bad end of the original trilogy, and a reboot that didn’t seem to have legs, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 seemed to be grasping at straws.

Okay, the movie wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t nearly as good as any of the other Marvel inspired movies that came out this year. Watching it, you could tell that Sony was more interested in building up a world that they could spin off into a cinematic universe than they were with telling a strong, engaging, cohesive story. The Rhino was horrible. Electro seemed like he belonged to a Joel Schumacher Batman movie, and the Green Goblin should have been saved until the third installment. Granted: Gwen Stacy’s final scene was fantastic and really heartbreaking, but then they had to go and ruin it with another scene with that god-awful Rhino.

And Sony: moviegoers noticed these imperfections. Why would they go again? Why would they tell their friends to go? Why should they?

You made a subpar movie that, despite some great work from Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, seemed like nothing more than a soulless cash-grab before you launched the Spidey cinematic universe.

Was it fun? Sure! Would I pay to see it again? Probably not.

So of course, now, the press is saying that people are sick of blockbusters and many saying that there is now Spider-Man fatigue. Gimmie a break, we’re not sick of Spider-Man, we’re sick of you using him as a money printing machine without actually caring about the characters in the world.

Are we sick of blockbusters? No! Are we sick of superhero movies? Obviously not, but... it’s not like it couldn’t happen.

There was a science fiction explosion after Star Wars came out in 1977; every producer and movie studio wanted to throw their hat in the ring. A few good movies came out of it (like Ridley Scott’s Alien), but there was a whole lot of crap turned out of Hollywood science fiction mass-production machine. They went from B movies to Z movies, and people got sick of it. Hollywood didn’t care about the quality of the movies, as long as they got as many of them out while Star Wars still burned bright.

Eventually, people stopped going to see these trashy knock-offs though, and Hollywood said "obviously, people aren’t interested in science fiction anymore," and they stopped green-lighting sci-fi movies. Blade Runner was a sad casualty of this: a fantastic movie that just happened to get released right around the time when audiences had had enough of the Hollywood crap-fest.

It happened again in the 1980s with slasher movies. Halloween officially ushered in the age of the slasher in 1978, followed by Friday the 13th in 1980, and A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984. So Hollywood started churning out slasher movies by the dozen, and, like the science fiction trend before them, they dropped lower and lower in quality until people stopped going to see them. They lived a bit longer because of the direct-to-video market, but... they died too.

Hollywood said that the slasher was dead... until Scream came along in 1996 and breathed new life into the genre, only to have its throat cut quickly again because of the hundred scream clones that came out in the coming years.

Horror had another Renaissance in the early 2000s with Saw, but then had countless torture porn copycats rushed to the box office, and history repeated itself yet again.

The exact same thing happened to westerns back in Hollywood’s golden age, and fantasy movies after the release of Lord of the Rings.

Has this happened with superhero movies? Hell no! Has this happened to Spider-man? Not quite yet... but I think Sony has to be careful.

It’s not that Spider-Man has oversaturated the market, it’s that the last three Spider-Man movies just haven’t been that good! X-Men wen through this a few years ago. The Last Stand made a ton of money off the goodwill from X2, but people hated it! It took almost a decade for the X-Men movies to get back into the audience’s good graces.

Over the last couple of years, Warner Brothers has been shocked that their DC adaptations haven’t blown the box office wide open. It’s not that people don’t like your characters... it’s that you don’t do a good job bringing them to the big screen.

Except with Batman. Most of the time.

The saddest thing of all of this is that it’s we, the audience, that basically gets punished for Hollywood’s mistakes. We lose out on seeing some amazing movies because Hollywood thinks that their genres aren’t "in" right now.

Science fiction, with the exception of Star Wars, has been on the outs as far as Hollywood is concerned since the early 80s, but Avatar, the highest grossing movie of all time, is a science fiction movie! Guardians of the Galaxy opened well above expectations, and is the definition of science fiction. Full-bore fantasy movies were verboten for decades, then, along came Lord of the Rings!

No matter what genre it is, if there is care put into the production, if there’s relatable characters, a great story, some real emotion, we will go see your movie. And if it’s awesome, we will go see it twice! Three, four times! Hell, I went to see The Dark Knight five times while it was in theaters, and I dragged people with me every time. We all do this if we love a movie! We tell our friends and family that they need to see it! It just has to be good. So Hollywood: start paying attention. We’re not sick of Spider-Man. Or slasher movies, or science fiction, or fantasy, or anything else. We’re sick of bad movies. Make some good ones. We’ll go see ’em.

Okay, so what do you guys think? Do you agree with me that no matter what the genre, as long as the movie’s good, people will go see it? Or do you think people really do get sick of genres no matter how good the movies are?

Like, subscribe, leave your comments below, and I will see you with a new video soon.