And, most of us would see that trailer, or it's 90s equivalents that you bring up, and state our intentions of watching it as stoned as we could possibly get.
I've lost count of how many times I've watched this trailer. I'm ridiculously excited about the movie.
Marvel spent 10 years trying to come up with anything can capture the same magic as the original Avengers, only to hire everyone back in different roles. Pure "throw shit at a wall" strategy. They even got rid of black Captain America lol.
It’s exactly that. Hollywood will always stick to their one and only true tradition of riding things out until the living fucking end. In a perfect world, “Endgame” would cap off all the stories, and then these performers and filmmakers will move on to other projects and focuses. No, what we need is MORE superheroes. MORE Star Wars. MORE zombies. To a point where something like “The Boys” is released and the reaction is “It’s such a relief and so original to not have a NORMAL superhero story!!!” Look at old photos of movie marquees from the 80’s or 90’s and you will see MULTIPLE awesome movies in theatres at the same time back then. Nowadays you might get me interested to go to the movies twice, maybe three times a year.
The “Infinity Saga” was very well handled overall, and is a contained storyline. The problem is, I got burned out with it and took a break…but now I don’t have time to catch up. So I’ll watch all these movies, but it’ll take me years to get to the point where I can even consider seeing a new Avengers movie,
I have a friend that works in entertainment law and I asked about why movies are just general slop now. He said because of streaming, margins are so razor-thin that they need to squeeze every penny out of every project, so there is not a lot of risk tolerance in studios in terms of investment. They just continue to capitalize on something that makes a lot of money until its sanitized and diluted down to just corporate marketing. To your point - these are the movies that came up in the summer of 1982: ET, Star Trek 2, Rocky III, Conan the Barbarian, Blade Runner, The Thing, Tron, Road Warrior, Star Wars, Poltergeist, etc. There just won't be many chances taken if people are staying home. And forget anyone willing to make an R-rated blockbuster at this point. Fury Road was the exception.
Something else I heard that makes sense too is a lot of people opt for the ad free packages on streaming services because why wouldn’t you? But theres more money to be made when people pay less because advertisers will earn them more than just a slightly higher monthly fee. It’s why we don’t get 22 episode seasons of shows anymore. And also why there’s so much unwatchable garbage on all the streamers.
There was a good stretch where Streaming services were excellent. Now its just a sea of garbage while the prices go up and commercials are forced in. I don't exactly want to pay a streaming service to watch one show, then another one to watch a different one. It's a worse model than cable in some ways. I guess thats what Plex + Sonarr is good for.
I did a bunch of testing for a website that I operate because the users wanted an ad-free premium subscription. But as it turns out, financially it's not even close - a lot of the more active users would generate an order of magnitude more revenue via ad impressions than would be reasonable to charge in a subscription. Far worse if there's no cost savings, which there increasingly isn't if you need to cobble together several services. Heck, my in-laws pay like $150/month for their cable but it includes 5-6 streaming services like Paramount+, HBO Max, Peacock and Disney+, and they still have the convenience of nearly all of the shows being accessible from a single interface, plus being able to DVR and fast forward through commercials. Streaming music works because any service I subscribe to has basically all of the music I want to listen to. I have virtually no reason to pirate music. TV shows and movies being scattered across various services, regularly having their rights renegotiated, pulled and moved, gives me no reason to pick any of them.
My in laws still have cable and it’s bundled with internet and home security. They pay like $330/month. And they only watch like 3 channels and then watch everything else on Netflix or prime. I don’t have cable at all but I find the offerings in the streamers to be of diminishing quality. I hardly watch anything anymore aside from a few shows I know are good. There’s just so much unwatchable trash everywhere. So many shitty movies and series, it’s hard to sift through to find anything worth watching. Apple TV had a show called the The Last Frontier. I gave it a shot because Apple TV typically doesn’t miss. The worst thing I’ve seen in a long time. Didn’t even finish the season.
It's such a shitty evolution path. Cable sucks because of diffuse/garbage content >> streaming services provide on demand access to full shows and movies >> streaming services prove to be lucrative, more become available >> competition for viewers increases and subscriber numbers plateau >> streaming services are publicly trading and cant let revenue flatten quarter-to-quarter + studios profits decline since services cannibalize movie theaters and DVD/Blu-Ray sales >> increase subscription fees and include ads to boost revenue generation >> licensing fees get too expensive, streaming services add tiered services and begin package deals with other services >> back to the shitty problems we had with cable, but worse and more expensive for consumers.
It is the problem with "the system". You can't just have profits, you have to show increase in profits.
I've really reduced using new TV shows as a time waster, and have switched instead to only watching it when I have something I deliberately want to watch, usually something that's been highly recommended. A lot of my time-wasters have been redirected to reading, podcasts, or educational YouTube videos (STEM, cooking, etc.). It wasn't really a deliberate decision. Just a natural output of so much trash media around - I don't have the patience to sit through a season of garbage, or get invested in a show that gets cancelled halfway through the story. It's definitely a vicious cycle; lots of bad media begets a lack of audience investment which results in capricious viewers who don't stick around and thus shows get abandoned. But it's not my problem and there are plenty of good books to keep me occupied in the meantime. Our entire society would be better off if companies could just stick to making a profit without expectations of infinite growth or ever-increasing profitability.
It’s funny you say that. I’ve been reading about a book per week the last few months because it feels like a better use of my time.