yeah iirc the legends as I've heard is that when the half-written crap during it made the same money the producers realized they didn't have to give any fucks at all
Definitely noticed the data even if I couldn't explain the full reason why. I started noticing it when I was asking "am I getting older or are movies sucking?" and then I'd watch a foreign film - even something as coked out as Baahubali - or an anime and get genuine feels out of it.
I'm like "oh. This is what movies are supposed to be like. The foreign meatbags still know how to write an actual story."
It's probably why I also give Nolan a lot of leeway. You can tell a real effort and craft goes into his movies and he writes them to really try and tell a story, to explore new ideas and be about things. (Heck I don't even like Tarantino but I respect him for the same reason.)
Warning: Long, Gay Post
Yeah so to expand on my previous sperg a
bit metric fuckton:
So in 2007-2008 the WGA went on strike. The reasons which I'm not going to get into are a mix of legitimate grievance and the Union attempting to expand its power in the face of logic. Both sides were full of douchebags, but its abundantly clear the studios were the bigger douches in this exchange. Betting on hollywood studios being the bigger douches in any exhange is a safe bet.
When the WGA went on strike, it demolished shooting schedules, production schedules. I've sperged about this in previous posts but Hollywood's secret to world domination is
das juden the fact they have movies in every stage of production at once, in fact usually two or more running simultaneously. When (not if) you have something go wrong with one movie, you just need to slightly adjust other project's schedules and its fine, you still hit your numbers. That pipeline gets disrupted, you are boned as you are looking at 3-5 years minimum to get something from concept to release. (There is a whole lot more to be said about forecasting etc, but its boring and mostly irrelevant and this shit will be long enough without that tangent).
The WGA strike did more damage than Hollywood let on. They fucked up the intake pipeline, and that means -even though you never saw it - after the strike, everyone was in panic mode to get the production pipelines filled up again as well as trying to salvage 2-teir shit they did greenlight to keep everything from grinding to a halt.
The studios swore "never again".
And a situation was brewing that would ensure it never would.
In the lead up to this, the studios had been discovering an pair of interesting facts around the dot-com crash, first which was Faggot Media was no longer poisonous - that is you didn't need to spin up a whole new studio and distribution company in fear of boycotts when you released the Crying Game anymore. The second factor was Faggots were devouring anything with a Gay label slapped on it. Anything.
Standards were low; homomedia had long been relegated to foreign & indie films: low budgets, inexperienced writers, and they weren't trying to tell complex stories with well rounded characters. It was mostly gay wish fulfillment with a previously straight character turning teh ghey and hooking up with the gay character (so you could either pretend that was you coming out, or the straight friend you were fantasizing about might suddenly decide to turn gay). But it sold, it was cheap to produce, and more imporantly, no one making it had any power and had to do what they were told.
Studios realized when greenlighting these projects that the director and crew were signing away their souls to get their gay cowboy love story
in theaters direct to VHS. These were passion projects, they were going to change the world, so it was worth giving up your share of the gross as long as it got made! And studio execs, masters at exploiting optimistic young people, started to realize they had a fucking golden opportunity on their hands.
-Create something at least one postive to positive-neutral gay character
-Pitch a chance to work on that show to new, green writers so they'd have a chance to "make a difference" and "fight bigotry"
-Try not to laugh as they signed nearly exploitative contracts with none of the provisions and clauses they had to put up with from experienced writers.
- No matter how terrible, it would sell a minimum number of units because of all the "buy anything pro-gay" movements.
(There is also an effect from the number of gay celebs forced to keep on the "D/L", but that is a secondary effect and largely outside of the scope of this post. )
And that's where we are today. Studios realized that they put in 50% of the effort and get 90% of the money, and laughed all the way to the bank as they let writer pools trade money and influence for believing they were making a difference. In fact its even better, since because most films were not doing as well as projected based on their well-scripted predecessors, it made it even easier to shitcan this new crop for failure to meet projections.
They then changed tact, now using their influence, lambasting anyone who disagreed with the New Woke Order as backwards and bigoted. Consume product, plebe.
But the problems with the system are starting to show up.
First, The system worked fine when you could let a project get into trouble and then call in a fixer to get shit straightened out, but all the fixers are staring aging out, and because the studios have been doing their damnest to keep writers from actually getting write actual stories and instead follow some director's woke vision, the upcoming crop don't have the skills of the people they're trying to replace.
Second, is the "imitation butter" problem: there are lots of butter substitutes that don't taste like butter, but they taste close enough to make you remember the flavor of real butter. Which is all well and good for boomers who ate butter for five decades. But you give that to a vegan hippie who never had butter in their life, they're going to spit it out and say "what the fuck is this horrible shit?". And that's what is happening now. TFA didn't really catch with young kids like even the Prequels managed to because it was corporate imitation star wars: its sort of like star wars if you really close your eyes and imagine, but if you have no previous experience TO imagine, its just bland, vaguely chemical tasting shit.
The studios have been coasting on nostalgia and memberberries for over a decade now, and the spell is starting to break: people are waking up to the fact what studios are putting out IS terrible, and realizing they don't have to watch it, and the studios are realizing that a decade of starving experienced writers didn't make them hungry, it just made them go away or stop trying.
There's a bit more to say here - such as the cost of putting out a 'summer release' means studios are unlikely to gamble which is why you see so much derivative shit and why every studio tries to make everything into a franchise, and why disney's ability to memory hold Fox's catalog is so fucking worrying - but this has rambled way too long.
But I will say, in summation, we're looking a future where studios are feeling confident in their control of streaming: you can watch movies and shows, but you don't really own them. They can be taken down, edited, deleted, at will.
I believe Disney will memory hole 4-6 into the disney vault beside Song of the South before they retcon their woke trilogy.
You might think that'd be an exercise in futility, but it won't matter if you have the Theatrical release on 4k Bluray if they stop making Bluray players.
edit: Shit and I forgot to address China. Tl;dr- Do you think given the cultural divide and shit-tier bootleg translations run through censors that ANH is any more comprehensible to the average Chinaman than EPIX? (Remember "Backstroke of the West"?) Naw, they want Micheal Bay & Marvel movies that are easy to follow and pretty to look at.
That's a future problem waiting to explode as China's domestic industry catches up in SFX to the west.
