Are modern audiences suffering from a case of lowered expectations?

[Yukaphile]

I mean, you got the new Star Wars movies, stuff like the Transformers films, and you gotta wonder... what happened in the last 50 years? How did we go from the golden age of cinema to... this? Is it possible that our expectations just kept drastically shrinking with every passing year?

[Karha of Honor]

I mean, you got the new Star Wars movies, stuff like the Transformers films, and you gotta wonder... what happened in the last 50 years? How did we go from the golden age of cinema to... this? Is it possible that our expectations just kept drastically shrinking with every passing year?

There were plenty of not masterpiece moving flooding the cinemas 50 years ago.


Less movies go to theaters so the people who like dumb movies spend it on 1 movie instead of 5 or 20.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Factors like tentpole filmmaking and conversion to digital effects.

With digital I don't think it's a matter of quality, but quantity as more studios are enticed to make this kind of stuff.

[ChiggyvonRichthofen]

With decades of marketing info to go off of, big studios can fine tune their films to hit a bunch of obligatory notes to maximize box office profit. In some cases it can turn into a rote, soulless collection of scenes, cynically arranged to garner a certain audience reaction but without any real care or thought put into the story of the work.

Critics/people who prefer the more artistic, "boring" movies (e.g. movies by a Tarkosvky or a Bergman) are often dismissed as snobs by casual audiences, especially if those people incessantly criticize popular movies. Snobbery certainly does cause some to illegitimately reject quality movies just because they make a lot of money. At the same time, people who spend a lot of time watching/analyzing movies can better recognize insincere, rote beats borrowed from other films, and the popular blockbuster they criticize really deserves that criticism.

All that is to say, that yeah, sometimes general audiences enjoy unoriginal, hacky films that aren't very good by their own merits, and to some extent they've been conditioned that way. Of course there's nothing inherently wrong with enjoying those movies, and there's a lot of middle ground between an artistic masterpiece and a total hackjob. None of the MCU are masterpiece films, but they've all done better than I thought they would as far as striving to actually be decent films and surprise audiences on occasion. Star Wars: TFA is really well-made in some respects, but in others is too derivative and calculated for my liking. I think Rian Johnson really went after it to make TLJ a truly creative and original film, so I give him props for that... unfortunately, the film fails, imo.

With ALL of that said, bad/formulaic movies aren't a new thing, and in other senses modern audiences are tremendously spoiled. If a film doesn't meet fans' expectations, entire groups start to throw hissy fits and vociferously attack anyone associated with the work.

[Admiral X]

Ever notice that a lot of modern movies tend to be very heavy on references? Seems that way to me.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I think Rian Johnson really went after it to make TLJ a truly creative and original film, so I give him props for that... unfortunately, the film fails, imo.

I read a recent article where Luke Skywalker was saying that what they did with the character still doesn't sit quite right with him. He talked about how he felt kinda bait and switched given that they killed off Han in the first movie and him in the second.

Particularly he didn't feel that Jedis just give up and retreat like he did. He also talked about how when he's introduced to Rey's team he was originally just going to walk by 3po and he objected to that to have them embrace.

With ALL of that said, bad/formulaic movies aren't a new thing, and in other senses modern audiences are tremendously spoiled. If a film doesn't meet fans' expectations, entire groups start to throw hissy fits and vociferously attack anyone associated with the work.

Yeah I remember pointing this out in my contemporary lit class. Like, history does try really hard to preserve the good movies to the point where people often feel by default that today's slop is somehow peculiar from yesterday's.

[clearspira]

I think Rian Johnson really went after it to make TLJ a truly creative and original film, so I give him props for that... unfortunately, the film fails, imo.

I read a recent article where Luke Skywalker was saying that what they did with the character still doesn't sit quite right with him. He talked about how he felt kinda bait and switched given that they killed off Han in the first movie and him in the second.

Particularly he didn't feel that Jedis just give up and retreat like he did. He also talked about how when he's introduced to Rey's team he was originally just going to walk by 3po and he objected to that to have them embrace.

With ALL of that said, bad/formulaic movies aren't a new thing, and in other senses modern audiences are tremendously spoiled. If a film doesn't meet fans' expectations, entire groups start to throw hissy fits and vociferously attack anyone associated with the work.

Yeah I remember pointing this out in my contemporary lit class. Like, history does try really hard to preserve the good movies to the point where people often feel by default that today's slop is somehow peculiar from yesterday's.

To the last point, its like how people say ''oh, the [[pick year]] had SO MUCH BETTER music than today!'' whilst forgetting that the reason for that is that radio only plays the best music from the era and discards the rest.

[Madner Kami]

Can't remember ever hearing... say... Covenant, VNV Nation, Chiasm or GoldPile on radio. Clearly they are not playing what is the best music, but instead playing what they think most people want to hear.

[Admiral X]

^Yeah, I'd say that's more on the nose. I'd say people who enjoy the music of the era tend to look into it more and have probably listened to more than what the radio station might play when they say stuff like that. Or you have people like me who enjoy modern synth that's only made to sound like something from the 1980s.

[ChiggyvonRichthofen]

Besides the weeding out of a bad films, there's also a self-selection bias among fans/critics at play. As with literature or music, there's a tiny selection of films that are (nearly) universally recognized as classics- usually the movies that have been shown and reshown on tv over decades, like The Wizard of Oz or It's a Wonderful Life. But no one is going to say that the 40s were a golden age of film on the basis of just It's a Wonderful Life. Someone who would go out of their way to say that is probably someone who actually goes out of their way to watch movies from that era.