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It’s the inevitable consequence of design by committee.

By layering on requirements unrelated to “fun”, eventually fun becomes incompatible with all the different needs and wants.

“Must cater to lucrative Chinese market.”

“Must have at least one of each race represented — even if they’re a single family from one village.”

Etc… eventually the singular vision is just one of many items on a long checklist.

The only good new Disney show is Andor, which was notably made by a small team with a small budget and hence little interference from “corporate”.

Thinking about it, all of the media I’ve enjoyed in the last decade — my middle age — were made with a single “dictator” in charge instead of a committee in charge. E.g.: I like Christopher Nolan or Ridley Scott movies precisely because their personal vision and style is apparent and beautiful.

Corporate committees have only one vision: taking your money.

That’s what comes through. That’s what you’re picking up on subconsciously.

Andor had a quarter billion dollar budget. What kept it free from exec interference was Tony Gilroy wrote a “here’s what you won’t let anyone make, that you should make” manifesto and they didn’t have any choice but to give him control if they wanted to work with him.

> Thinking about it, all of the media I’ve enjoyed in the last decade — my middle age — were made with a single “dictator” in charge instead of a committee in charge. E.g.: I like Christopher Nolan or Ridley Scott movies precisely because their personal vision and style is apparent and beautiful.

Agree with this totally. Two recent examples of that, that I really liked, were Succession (where Adam McKay ruled the production with an iron fist and scrutinized every detail), and Hamilton, where Lin-Manuel Miranda not only wrote the music and the lyrics and played the lead, but also had a hand in the choreography and probably in more stuff. And both of these things were considered some of the greatest, or the greatest, works in their respective genres in the last God-knows-how-many years!

After Oppenheimer I realized that Christopher Nolan is only able to make one movie. That movie is a movie about a damaged man who must find the solution to something and he is special in some way which either will allow him to find it or demonstrate that no one can. Which made me think about who does Christopher Nolan see himself to be in all these films? The protagonist? Maybe this is all critical nonsense.

People are lucky if they have one good idea in their life.

This may be Nolan’s single theme, but it’s a complex one that might take 1,000 movies to exhaust.

I’m grateful for watching all these explorations.

Complex men suffering is not unique to Nolan (e.g., king Lear). He simply seems to be able to create compelling versions of that theme. But actually I'm wondering what would be different if there was creative boundaries on Nolan and what he would create instead.

It’s certainly not unique, nor does it need to be, nor has anyone claimed Nolan invented the concept.

I share your curiosity and maybe we’ll see one day. But I’m also happy if we just see 30 more movies exploring the same theme.

While Nolan isn’t truly unique in history, I think he’s rare and not many are telling stories like he is.

Ridley Scott made g.i.jane and the Gucci movie. He's not always auteristic. Haha.

Linus Torvalds also wrote a dive-computer app with maybe a few thousand users.

That doesn’t detract from his other successes!

Because art isn't a product: it's a process, like science. Art is a form of human expression, where someone makes something they have in their head and want to see brought it life.

If you design movies, or other things, through a committee that's checking boxes on a template intended to meet the requirements for another entertainment product, it's not really art anymore. It's a cynical product.

We've seen a shift from directors like Tarantino or George Lucas, auteurs who were meticulous about ensuring every aspect of the production lived up to their personal vision, to a rotation of glorified line managers serving a committee and being swapped out from film to film. The fact that we call them franchises, the same word we use for cookie-cutter fast food restaurants under the same umbrella, should be a clue.

As much as people disparage George Lucas, he is Star Wars, and the idea that someone else can make Star Wars, or that the idea can be sold, is a bizarre and laughable concept. It's like saying "I exchanged money in the right way, so I'm William Shakespeare now. My upcoming six Hamlets are 'canonical' successors."

That’s just survivorship biases of artists thinking there has been a shift in Hollywood. Hollywood has always been a commercial enterprise studded with artistic egos, some deserved some not. CGI had just made mainstream action movies balloon is price, so they have all become financial endeavors.

I think that's too cynical. This is why I like interviews with Orson Welles talking about what it takes to make a movie. When he made citizen Kane he had never made a movie so he didn't know the camera was noisy so put it in a box, or that actors were used to acting in a stage play like environment (watch Philadelphia story and citizen Kane back to back, both amazing, but for entirely different reasons). And he didn't have some kind of belief that he had some magic, just the advice of his director of photography that you need about half a day's training to learn how to make a movie and the rest of it is making a movie.

And that's the truth. Go to your local art house cinema and watch whatever they are playing. There are people trying to create something that's their vision. But none of them work in Hollywood.

Also, people criticize George Lucas for the star wars prequels but he captured lighting in a bottle again with those movies. He created a believable CGI character in jar jar, as much as everyone hates him nobody complained about the CGI. He created the green screen movie that even these dumb new wrap around things are simply emulating but for the actors sake since they complained so much. He remade what cinema was again. None of the prequels were a critical masterpiece like empire strikes back. But they did change the way movies were made.

I've become the "grump" at my workplace for disliking Marvel movies. The entire reason is they're formulaic, predictable, cheesy, etc.

The push-back on my grumpiness is usually along the lines of "No they're not, they're awesome!" -- for which I can't really debate: if the person really likes them then it's just a matter of opinion. But often another opinion is to dismiss my critique as a "Who cares? If they [fans] enjoy it, then so what? They enjoy their thing and you enjoy yours?"

But it reinforces your point that these things have just been watered down for the most mass audience possible. There's no "art" in them anymore. And whatever originally made them special has been distilled to a formula so that "they" (the fans, maybe not the original fanbase though) can just enjoy the formula. The popcorn-movie aspect of them.

It isn't just comic movies and Star Wars/Trek, but also things like The Fast and The Furious movie franchise too.

In recent years Martin Scorsese had been vocal against Marvel movies [1], and he's received hate from Marvel fanatics since [2]. But I agree with him.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/opinion/martin-scorsese-m... 2. https://www.avclub.com/martin-scorsese-versus-marvel-superhe...

I am not a comic book person by any stretch, but I do visit Fantagraphics in Seattle once and awhile. What strikes me about the movies that they got stuck in this formulaic loop, where in many comics, the protagonist or antihero make an amazing personal transformation.

What I have seen of the new animated/rotoscoped spiderman, it looks pretty good in terms of arc.

the medium could be utterly amazing and touch on things you could never do in normal live action movies.

I am totally ok if others like these things. But it's more like sports than it is like art. If you like sports that's fine, it takes an amazing amount of talent and experience and money to put together a professional team whether you are a player, coach, or manager. But the end result will always be some dudes on a field chasing a ball.

And there's nothing wrong with that. Many people enjoy that. But it's not art (as defined as something that challenges the audience) and it doesn't claim to be.

Nothing about a modern franchise challenges me in any way. There's nothing socially conscious, critically new, or ideologically challenging in any marvel or star wars whatever these days.

> But it's not art (as defined as something that challenges the audience)

That’s a pretty restrictive definition of art. While I appreciate that you’ve defined your terms, I think this definition is nonstandard.

Duchamp allowed us to define art as whatever we want it to be. I don't think I'm outside of his boundary conditions.

Also, there's the fact that there are so many grand stories to tell in a fictional universe. If "epic" events are happening in it all the time, then they're actually humdrum, and the stakes are pretty low, so the audience has no reason to care. At the extreme, you enter soap opera or monthly comic book territory, where the writers have to come up with new storylines for decades on end, and the result is that nonsense and self-parody becomes normal, because you've exhausted every possibility in the space of reasonable stories. Characters become empty costumes with no personality (because every possible story with their original personalities has been done), the same sequence of beats gets recycled over and over with new characters and props slotted in (the Star Wars sequel trilogy is a notorious example of this), etc.

And all this happens because, at the margin, new content is still profitable to make, but every piece of new "content" (gag) drains a little bit of the magic out.

What if han solo, get this, still owed people money and was running around trying to avoid them and pulling little scams or whatever. But now he's like 65. That doesn't sound awesome to you?

Yeah, and maybe he owes a fortune to a crime boss who's very large and disgusting, maybe shaped like a big floating orb. That pulsates, or something. Just as long as it's not a slug-like being, because then we'd be recycling old material.

What about a centipede snake thing that lives in the water that never comes up again?

I was talking about this with my gf last night, that Harry potter is much more interesting when it's not about some epic Voldemort whatever. That hearing small stories about these characters we like as they go to a magic school is actually interesting. Why does everything need to be so stressful?

It's created to appeal to the broadest possible market, AKA total shit.