Why Hollywood is failing
Hollywood's 'virtue-signalling churn' has made modern cinema unwatchable - and threatens to render the industry redundant within decades.
Most of us secretly despair that many of the films we grew up watching would never be made today.
Not Casablanca, an old Hollywood classic so saturated with sexual love and romanticism that it makes films released 75 years later look like high school projects.
Or Forrest Gump, a heartwarming film about resilience and heroism in the face of adversity.
In fact, for a generation of young people whose greatest grievances range from "microaggressions" to incorrect pronouns, such a film today would be inconceivable.
And forget about American Pie.
With its complete lack of trigger warnings and overt male sexuality, it will much sooner be put on par with the bigotry of Mary Poppins and Gone With The Wind.
These may seem trivial.
But society has become paralysed by its fear of telling real and provocative stories.
And we are worse off for it.
For years, Hollywood has been up to its neck in box office stinkers and disappointing projects.
Even the successes of Oppenheimer and Barbie last year were not enough to save the sinking ship.
And while box office bombs are nothing new (remember, even Halle Berry in a tight leather suit couldn’t save Catwoman), the situation is now dire.
Hollywood’s sustained decline, like a car crash in slow motion, is that much more remarkable because it is entirely self-imposed.
For deluded film executives more willing to blame the pandemic and "nostalgia-crazy" audiences for declining sales, they remain uncompromising in their strategy.
They will continue to pump out big-budget sequels and contrived dreck until their film cameras are literally thrown into the ocean.
After all, Hollywood can’t do anything if filmgoers prefer to see 20 different sequels of Shrek and Fast and Furious rather than newer, fresher content.
Let them eat cake!
But this flawed logic has meant that the real reason for the industry’s decline has gone unacknowledged.
And, by extension, mired in empty theories.
For example, to blame the despair of film audiences like me on rosy retrospection or incurable nostalgia is disingenuous.
What about films like Interstellar and Dallas Buyers Club?
Rare films like these, completely untethered from established comic books or the "50-year-old reboot" circuit, come along and become box office sensations.
They break through the noise and shatter records, receiving numerous accolades in the process.
But these moments are few and far between.
Not because audiences can’t "move on" from the past.
But because we have become so starved of quality filmmaking that when we finally do get one, it’s like an oasis in a desert.
Character development. Plot. Consistency.
All the ingredients needed to make a great or even decent, film have taken a back seat in favour of big-budget, AI-generated, cookie-cutter films featuring talking animals, robots, and men in capes.
In fact, three of the highest-grossing films of 2024 so far have been Dune 2, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, and Kung Fu Panda 4.
Notice a pattern?
Trying to figure out what went wrong with Hollywood is a chicken-and-egg scenario.
Is Hollywood failing because of its obsession with producing derivative, contrived film genres?
Or because film budget inflation has meant that film studios are less willing to take risks and invest in authentic storytelling?
Or maybe overtly politicised content worsened by DEI hiring practices has meant that audiences are clobbered over the head by activism cosplaying as decent filmmaking.
The answer is all of the above.
And ironically, they are mutually reinforcing.
Take the point of contrived film genres, for example.
It’s hard not to notice that the market has become oversaturated with a tripe of the fantasy, superhero, boom-boom-ka-boom variety.
For film studios, this is what sells tickets.
And by George, they’re sticking to it! Even if it is to the detriment of truly "diverse" filmmaking.
When studios do decide to make diverse films, they simply add whatever female, ethnic, and sexual minority non-actor they can find to the "acceptable" film genres mentioned above.
That is the only explanation for the abominations of Rings of Power, Peter Pan and Wendy, She-Hulk, The Marvels, and Madame Web.
The fact that anyone involved in these productions thought they would be commercially viable just shows how deep the delusion runs in the industry.
In fact, I challenge anyone to show me a film audience more concerned with the ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’, and I’ll show you a dodo in my back garden.
But this delusion has reinforced Hollywood’s commitment to funding high-budget mega-busters, invariably worsening the problem.
Film companies committing hundreds of millions of dollars to a project makes them less willing to take risks and, by extension, deviate from the script. Who cares if cinema continues to suffer?
I am convinced that 30 years from now, no one will remember Fast and Furious 7.
Or the third installment of the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise.
But Hollywood doesn’t care.
They are going to keep cheapening cinema with this rinse-and-repeat method- robbing it of the human touch.
In fact, before long, there will hardly be any humans in films at all!
Such has the industry changed that not only are human stories fading, but so are human experiences.
No more teenage romances, coming-of-age tales, adventure stories, or feel-good romcoms.
Now we must draw parallels of the human experience with talking muskrats and androids.
To add insult to injury, the disproportionate influence of left-leaning activists on studio choices is also wreaking havoc.
On this point, it would be remiss of me not to discuss the disaster that was the 2023 Barbie film.
The film became so subsumed by its overwhelming "feminist" message that it was simply unwatchable.
How is it possible that a film about a cute doll featured the word ‘patriarchy’ over nine times?
Not to mention how much elbow grease went into masking Barbie’s completely unlikeable, snide character.
Clearly, something needs to change.
Hollywood will not survive if studios insist on churning out virtue-signalling vanity projects instead of real, thoughtful cinema.
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So true. We venture to the movies so little these days.