Hacker Cinema
Avengers: Endgame
2019 · Film · 181 min
Part of The Avengers Collection
Directed by Joe Russo, Anthony Russo
AdventureScience FictionAction
After the devastating events of Avengers: Infinity War, the universe is in ruins due to the efforts of the Mad Titan, Thanos. With the help of remaining allies, the Avengers must assemble once more in order to undo Thanos' actions and restore order to the universe once and for all, no matter what consequences may be in store.
7 positive7 negative2 mixed52 neutralfrom 68 commenters
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75 comments on Hacker News
The main issue described in all that writing is that studios are risk-averse and won't take any narrative risks. I heavily dislike recent marvel movies, but avengers endgame first movie made a bold choice, and that was the first blockbuster I enjoyed the story of in a long time (I dislike the dedramatization though, so I still think it's a below average movie).
Also, I think narrative is not the main issue with recent blockbusters. Their issues is dedramatization and impersonal stakes, which makes them weaker than movies from 20-30 years ago. I think A24 studio and the Daniels showed you can be goofy and fun while still making the audience care and even cry a bit, so this is probably a skill issue.
This is appealing for some films, but may not matter for others.
I'm glad I was in a full house for Avengers: Endgame, for example. I don't know how much it mattered, OTOH, for Oppenheimer, or Hail Mary.
I'm going with a group of friends to go see Project Hail Mary. It's the first time in years that most of us have planned ahead of time to see a movie, because it's mostly been garbage. I think the last time was Avengers Endgame, but we were all pretty disenfranchised in the series by that point.
Having a good home theater does mean I watch far more movies at home than in the theater, but almost none of them are new releases, and the ones that are are usually released straight to a streaming service.
Cinema used to be a really good shared experience. I don't go to cinema anymore because we have a newborn at home, but we used to pre-order tickets in advanced for movies we really wanted to see (like Wicked last year, Fantastic 4 this year) and the theater was almost empty at opening night for both of those.
Contrast a few years ago when avengers endgame came out, and Spiderman far from home came out shortly after that, and No Way Home a few years after that... They were lively events. People dressed up, the theater handed out free swag and merch, and it was just a really cool shared experience, almost akin to a live concert.
I don't know exactly what's changed in that time, considering No Way Home came out after Covid and it was still a spectacle of an event, but I don't think cinema will get its magic back.
A few years ago I did go to a "Stranger Things" experience and I think that might be the future of shared experiences/narratives. It was essentially a week-long pop-up event, you'd get tickets, and it was basically a "walking simulator" that took you through a narrative within the Stranger Things universe. This wasn't just a bunch of people looking at a screen, it was live actors, holographics, sound design, lights, a lot of crazy stuff for a pop-up venue.
As a fan of the franchise it was really well done. A friend of mine want to a similar "Experience" for the Bridgeton universe, which I care nothing about, but she really enjoyed it as well.
So I think if Netflix were to reimagine cinema, it would probably be in that direction.
> The IT industry is also full of salesmen and con men, both enjoy unrealistic exaggeration. Your statements would not be out of place 20 years ago when the iPhone dropped. Your statements would not be out of place 3 years ago before every NFT went to 0. LLMs could hit an unsolvably hard wall next year and settle into a niche of utility.
The iPhone and subsequent growth of mobile (and the associated growth of social media which is really only possible in is current form with ubiquitous mobile computing) are evidence it did change everything. Society has been reshaped by mobile/iPhone and its consequences.
NFTs were never anything, and there was never an argument they were. The were a financial speculative item, and it was clear all the hype was due to greater fools and FOMO. To equate those two is silly. That's like arguingsome movie blockbuster like Avengers Endgame was going to "change everything" because it was talked about and advertised. It was always just a single piece of entertainment.
Finally for LLMs, a better comparison for them would have been the 80's AI winter. The question should be "why will this time not be like then?" And the answer is simple: If LLMs and generative AI models never improve an ounce - If they never solve another problem, nor get more efficient, nor get cheaper - they will still drastically change society because they are already good enough today. They are doing so now.
Advertising, software engineering, video making. The tech is already for enough that it is changing all of these fields. The only thing happening now is the time it takes for idea diffusion. People learning new things and applying it are the slow part of the loop.
You could have made your argument pre-chatgpt, and possibly could have made that argument in the window of the following year or two, but at this point the tech at the level to change society exists, it just needs time to spread. All it need are two things: tech stays the same, prices roughly stay the same. (No improvements required)
Now there still is a perfectly valid argument to make against the more extreme claims we hear of: all work being replaced..., and that stuff. And I'm as poorly equipped to predict that future as you (or anyone else) so won't weigh in - but that's not the bar for huge societal change.
The tech is already bigger than the iPhone. I think it is equivalent to social media, (mainly because I think most people still really underestimate how enormous the long term impact of social media will be in society: Politics, mental health, extremism, addiction. All things they existed before but now are "frictionless" to obtain. But that's for some other post...).
The question in my mind is will it be as impactful as the internet? But it doesn't have to be. Anything between social media and internet level of impact is society changing. And the tech today is already there, it just needs time to diffuse into society.
You're looking at Facebook after introducing the algorithm for engagement. It doesn't matter that society wasn't different overnight, the groundwork had been laid.
I dunno, 2015, I'm a little weak on this year: It Follows, Creed, Ex Machina, Max Max: Fury Road, Sicario, The Hateful 8. I'd watch those again with someone any time, and recommend all of them often. Several on my to-watch list most of which I expect to be good, like Queen of the Desert, While We're Young, Slow West, and The Overnight, just haven't made it to them yet. Not an exhaustive list, just gleaned from some titles I have at hand.
2016: Green Room, The Nice Guys, Hail Caesar!, The Neon Demon, Swiss Army Man, Hunt for the Wilder People, The VVitch, Train to Busan, Shin Godzilla, Moana (hey, I like this one), Arrival. Moonlight's on my to-watch and is supposed to be really good.
2017 (I've done OK on catching up with these!): The Lost City of Z, Dunkirk, Low Life, Good Time, Logan Lucky (absolutely slept on, kills it as a feel-good lightweight small-stakes heist movie), Blade Runner 2049, The Death of Stalin (I liked this less than a lot of folks, but given how widely-loved it was, I'm probably the idiot here), One Cut of the Dead, You Were Never Really Here. The Planet of the Apes movie from that year, plus Phantom Thread, and The Little Hours are to-watch for me and come highly recommended.
2018: Annihilation, Isle of Dogs, Upgrade, Sorry to Bother You, High Life, Eighth Grade, the Suspiria remake. To-watch that I expect to be good include Champion (Korean arm wrestling movie—there's another movie by the same name that year), First Reformed, BlacKkKLansman, The Favourite, The Wolf House, Climax, and some others.
2019: HUGE year for the particular (small) set I'm seeing on my list, including a ton to-watch but a bunch I've seen. Uncut Gems, The Lighthouse, Knives Out, Little Women, JoJo Rabbit, Ready or Not, Parasite, Midsommar, The Art of Self Defense, maybe Marriage Story (but if you've seen one Baumbach movie, you've kinda seen them all, and I'm not sure I'd put it above The Squid and the Whale). Midway's a well-above-average war movie and pairs great with Tora, Tora, Tora! as a crazy-long double feature in a really fun way. To-watch list is nuts and I really need to dedicate a month or so to filling out my watched-list for this year: First Cow, The Irishman, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Bacurau, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Farewell, The Souvenir, Blow the Man Down, The Vast of Night, Her Smell, Funan.
It basically just keeps going like that, year after year, and I've barely even tried to dredge up good movies for most of those years, the bulk of it's just stuff that's risen to my attention one way or another, and I'm terrible at keeping up with foreign film especially. I also left off some that a lot of folks would probably include, like at least one Mission Impossible (aside from MI2, I think these are all pretty good action movies, though quality varies a bit) and Avengers: Endgame which, opinion on the rest of Marvel aside (I think it's mostly kinda lazy crap? But was basically entertained for most of them regardless, so I guess I can't complain too much) was a hell of an event. Also Black Panther, which everyone loved but I was pretty meh on (I hate the entire end fight, and it's looooong)
It seems like the big tent entertainment projects bringing people from various echo chambers have ended temporarily. 2019 was the release of Avengers Endgame and Star Wars Episode 9. I don't think the subsequent releases in those franchises were nearly as good at bringing in a wide audience
Good point, that's fair there are more use cases. IDK about architecture, typically you want more structure/determinism instead of probabilistic generation. Overall this is very cool. I like the consistency it has and it does generally amaze me nonetheless. But you gotta admit selling a billion dollars of anything is really hard. That is three times the budget of the highest budget movie ever created! (avengers endgame at 356 million). It is almost the ENTIRE budget of the biggest game ever, grand theft auto six.
>The aesthetic just does nothing for me
Like what? This is like saying the aesthetics of Hollywood films just does nothing for me. Which can be Forrest Gump and the Avengers Endgame too
This is something I wish people who blame Disney for the perceived lack of variety in theaters would get. That funky little arthouse flick is not in competition with the latest MCU entry.
I'm not sitting there trying to decide between Avengers: Endgame and some Sundance premiere. And the denigration of people who like MCU/action movies in general that tends to come with these critiques is really not helpful. I like a good indie film and a good blockbuster. My life has room for Tangerine and Black Panther.
“ Creating branches and alternate realities…isn’t that vaguely familiar with Git? As it turns out, software developers are doing their own version of time-travel in their day jobs! Let me demonstrate that in this blogpost by explaining the plot of Avengers: Endgame in five git concepts! ” never thought the movie this way. What a surprise.
> Here [2] is a table of best selling movies, inflation adjusted. No movie made in the past 25 years, including the endless men in spandex movies, is among them.
The Force Awakens (2015) is #11. Avatar (2009) is #15. Avengers Endgame (2019) is #16. And that’s just in the top 20. Not too bad for a list that covers a century of films, especially when you consider the limited entertainment options available in the first half of that century.
I liked cable, except for the price. Cut it by a factor of 3 and I'd probably subscribe again.
For movies pretty much everything I wanted to watch would eventually show up. Typically a movie would first be in theaters, then become available for purchase on disc or digital, rental, and be included in one paid streaming service. Sometime later, maybe two years after it was in theaters, it should show up on some non-premium cable channel.
The only time I couldn't wait for things to show up on non-premium cable was when "Avengers: Endgame" was coming soon. I knew that one would be hard to avoid major spoilers for once it was released in theaters so decided seeing it in theaters was a must. That meant I had to get get a month of Netflix, which had the Marvel movies then, to get caught up enough for "Endgame".
I also liked cable for rewatching TV series. I'm not sure why, but when some channel is showing "The Simpsons" or "South Park" reruns on a regular schedule I like watching much more than I do when I watch an episode on an on-demand streaming service (or on DVD).
I think it has something to do with the latter being more deliberate. I picked that episode, which somehow makes it so I feel like I need to take it more seriously. When it is just "This channel shows a couple episodes every night" then it seems a lot more casual, like listening to music on the radio. It is easier to just sit back and relax and watch.
The most popular movie today is not ten years old. They have made movies since The Avengers. (Notably, Avengers: Endgame, but less facetiously, a Super Mario movie and James Cameron's Avatar sequel were pretty popular.) I'm not asking for something inventive and genre-defying, just a game that is not literally ten years old.
Georgia has ranked #2 in US film production by some metrics, and it continues to steal hundreds of productions from California every year [1].
Last year Georgia was host to nearly 500 movies and TV shows [2], and has been extensively used for some of the biggest hits and blockbusters: Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Black Panther, Stranger Things, The Waking Dead, Ozark, Halt and Catch Fire, etc.
Disney, Marvel, and Netflix have major productions here. Winona Ryder was even my downstairs neighbor for a bit during the Stranger Things shoot.
Last year they built a fake White Castle a few blocks from me and then tore it down about a month later [3]. It was so disappointing as everyone was hoping for a real White Castle.
[1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/canada-georgia-benefit-most-from-california-runaway-productions-1235115921/
[2] https://www.gpb.org/news/2022/08/01/georgia-film-industry-sets-another-economic-impact-record
[3] https://atlanta.urbanize.city/post/white-castle-edgewood-avenue-downtown-disney-filming
After Avengers Endgame it seems Marvel put out sub-par quality films. I tried watching GotG 3 and had this feeling I was out of the loop on the multi-verse stories.
The movie alone was ok, but I honestly feel like every month there’s some Marvel show or movie premiering.
The Star Wars stuff in the pipeline is fine for me. Right amount being trickled out to the fans.
Plenty of movies start out not so much with the protagonist in a zone of comfort wanting something, but being forced into something. E.g. Iron Man 1: that cave was not a zone of comfort. You might argue that this structure applies e.g. to Avengers: Endgame, if you'd call "dealing with half of sentient life obliterated due to your failure to prevent it" a place of comfort. But frankly, I think for most of the MCU, the stories are not due to a comfortable character wanting something more.
So, to answer your question: basically all movies in the most successful franchise ever diverge significantly from this formula. As does any other movie where the antagonist drives the plot significantly.
The milestones (from the source code):
//<10 seconds 'A single frame of a film': 100ms, 'It would take light to go around the Earth': 133ms, 'A blink of an eye': 400ms, 'The time it takes light to reach Earth from the moon': 1255ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 pit stop': 1820ms, 'The fastest 1/4 mile drag race time': 3580ms, 'The fastest Rubik\'s cube solve': 4221ms, 'The fastest 40-yard time at the NFL Combine': 4240ms, 'The fastest 1 liter beer chug': 4370ms, 'A skippable Youtube ad': 5000ms, 'A full bull ride': 8000ms, 'The fastest 100m sprint': 9580ms, //10 Seconds 'The Wright Brothers first flight': 12000ms, 'The fastest 200m sprint': 19190ms, 'The fastest 50m freestyle swim lap': 21300ms, 'The Westminster Kennel Club dog agility record': 28440ms, 'A typical television ad': 30000ms, 'The fastest NASCAR lap at Daytona': 40364ms, 'The fastest 400m sprint': 43030ms, 'The fastest NASCAR lap at Talladega': 44270ms, 'The fastest 100m freestyle swim lap': 47050ms, //1 Minute '"Just a minute"': 60000ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 lap at Monaco': 74260ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 lap at Monza': 81046ms, 'The fastest 800m sprint': 100910ms, 'The fastest 200m freestyle swim lap': 102960ms, 'The fastest Kentucky Derby time': 119400ms, 'An NHL penalty box time for slashing, tripping, or holding': 120000ms, 'How long it takes to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge (without traffic)': 135000ms, 'The duration of the "Millenium Force" roller coaster': 140000ms, 'The longest Super Bowl national anthem': 156000ms, 'One round of a boxing match': 180000ms, 'The average song length on Spotify': 183000ms, 'The fastest 1,500m run': 206000ms, 'The song "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley': 215000ms, 'The fastest 400m freestyle swim lap': 220140ms, 'The fastest 1 mile run': 223130ms, 'The duration of the "Steel Dragon" roller coaster': 240000ms, 'The duration of "The Beast" roller coaster': 250000ms, 'The song "4:33" by John Cage': 273000ms, 'The longest sky diving freefall': 276000ms, 'The Any% speedrun of Super Mario Bros for NES': 294948ms, //5 Minutes 'An NHL penalty box time for fighting': 300000ms, 'The average duration of a typical sky dive': 330000ms, 'The average time for a drive-thru order': 356800ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $1 million': 402000ms, 'The fastest race car lap around the Nurburgring': 403300ms, 'The time it takes light to reach Earth from the sun': 500000ms, 'The time it takes a rocket ship to reach outer space': 510000ms, 'A typical marching band show': 515000ms, //10 Minutes 'The length of the first space walk': 600000ms, 'The longest a human has held their breath (non-oxygen assisted)': 695000ms, 'The average duration of popular Youtube videos': 702000ms, 'The time it takes an average human to walk 1km': 710000ms, 'The fastest 5K run': 757350ms, 'The average time to bake a pizza': 810000ms, '1% of the entire day': 864000ms, //15 Minutes 'A typical commute in the United States': 960000ms, 'The fastest superbike lap of the Isle of Man TT': 1002778ms, "MLK's \"I Have A Dream\" Speech": 1020000ms, 'An average baseball inning': 1200000ms, 'The song "2112" by Rush': 1233000ms, 'The first angels to appear in the movie "Angels in the Outfield" (1994)': 1275000ms, 'An episode of The Office, Seinfeld, or Rick & Morty': 1320000ms, 'The time it takes to drive the entire Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel': 1380000ms, 'The song "Octavarium" by Dream Theater': 1440000ms, 'A typical Super Bowl halftime show': 1500000ms, 'The fastest 10K run': 1584000ms, 'It takes for Bobby Boucher to get his first game snap in the movie "The Waterboy" (1998)': 1719000ms, //30 Minutes 'The average time to bake a cake': 1950000ms, 'The time it takes until the launch in the movie Apollo 13 (1995)': 2081000ms, 'It takes WALL-E to arrive at the Axiom in the movie "WALL-E" (2008)': 2164000ms, 'The shortest war in history (Anglo-Zanzibar War)': 2280000ms, 'It takes Harry Potter to arrive at Hogwarts in "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer\'s Stone" (2001)': 2381000ms, 'The album "Thriller" by Michael Jackson': 2539000ms, 'The album "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd': 2589000ms, 'An episode of Breaking Bad, House, or Firefly': 2640000ms, 'The boot camp sequence in the movie "Full Metal Jacket" (1987)': 2730000ms, 'The album "Abbey Road" by The Beatles': 2823000ms, 'It takes Simba to become an adult in the movie "The Lion King" (1994)': 2849000ms, '10% of a typical work day in the United States': 2880000ms, 'The album "Kid A" by Radiohead': 2996000ms, 'The time limit for the essay portion of the SATs': 3000000ms, 'The time it takes a standard ice cube to melt at room temperature': 3150000ms, '0.01% of an entire year': 3155692ms, 'The album "Fearless" by Taylor Swift': 3221000ms, 'The time it takes for the basketball game to start in the movie "Space Jam"': 3222000ms, 'An episode of Game of Thrones, True Detective, or The Sopranos': 3300000ms, 'It takes Harry and Lloyd arrive in Aspen in the movie "Dumb and Dumber" (1994)': 3394000ms, 'The album "Jagged Little Pill" by Alanis Morissette': 3443000ms, 'The fastest half-marathon': 3451000ms, //1 Hour 'An episode of Top Gear': 3600000ms, 'The inception of Robert Fischer begins in the movie "Inception" (2010)': 3847000ms, 'Riding the longest subway line in NYC from Queens to Inwood': 3900000ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $10 million': 4017600ms, 'It takes before Sean Connery says "Welcome to the Rock" in the movie "The Rock" (1996)': 4022000ms, 'A flight from Syracuse to New York City': 4140000ms, '5% of the entire day': 4320000ms, 'The album "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" by Elton John': 4580000ms, 'The album "Scenes From A Memory" by Dream Theater': 4626000ms, 'The movie "Primer" (2004)': 4740000ms, 'It takes to fully charge a Tesla (at 440V)': 4788000ms, 'The ferry duration from Long Island, NY to New London, CT': 4800000ms, 'The movie "Toy Story" (1995)': 4860000ms, 'A drive from Syracuse, NY to Rochester, NY (87.5 miles)': 4920000ms, 'The movie "The Lion King" (1994)': 5280000ms, 'The longest State of the Union address': 5280000, //Duplicate time... //1.5 Hours 'The movie "Mony Python and the Holy Grail" (1975)': 5460000ms, 'The movie "Monsters, Inc." (2001)': 5520000ms, 'An average duration of a soccer game': 5700000ms, 'The movie "Reservoir Dogs" (1992)': 5940000ms, 'The longest Innaugural address': 6300000ms, 'A drive from Orlando, FL to Tampa, FL (84.6 miles)': 6660000ms, 'An SR-71 flight from New York City to London': 6896400ms, 'The movie "Alien" (1979)': 7020000ms, //2 Hours //'25% of a typical work day in the United States': 7200000ms, 'The average duration of an NCAA basketball game': 7200000ms, 'The movie "Star Wars: A New Hope" (1977)': 7260000ms, 'The fastest marathon time ever ran': 7299000ms, 'The time it takes to listen to every studio album by Nirvana': 7667000ms, 'The movie "Dogma" (1999)': 7680000ms, 'The average duration of an NBA basketball game': 7860000ms, 'The movie "The Matrix" (1999)': 8160000ms, 'The movie "Fight Club" (1999)': 8340000ms, 'The movie "The Shawshank Redemption" (1994)': 8520000ms, 'The movie "Forrest Gump" (1994)': 8520000ms, 'A drive from New York City to Philadelphia (94.6 miles)': 8520000ms, '10% of the entire day': 8640000ms, 'The movie "Inception" (2010)': 8880000ms, 'The movie "Avengers: Infinity War" (2018)': 8940000ms, 'The movie "Pulp Fiction" (1994)': 9240000ms, 'It takes Voyager 1 to travel 100,000 miles': 9360000ms, 'The movie "Avatar" (2009)': 9720000ms, 'The average duration of an NHL hockey game': 9750000ms, 'The movie "Saving Private Ryan" (1998)': 10140000ms, 'The movie "The Godfather" (1972)': 10500000ms, 'The movie "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" (2001)': 10680000ms, //3 Hours 'The average duration of an NFL football game': 10800000ms, 'The total time limit of the SATs': 10800000ms, 'The movie "Avengers: Endgame" (2019)': 10860000ms, 'The average duration of an MLB baseball game': 11280000ms, 'The time it takes for a standard ice cube to freeze in a freezer': 11700000ms, 'The movie "Titanic" (1997)': 12600000ms, 'A drive from Boston to New York City (215.9 miles)': 13560000ms, 'Alex Honnold\'s free solo climb of El Capitan': 14160000ms, //4 Hours 'Half of a typical work day in the United States': 14400000ms, 'The flight time from New York City to Los Angeles': 19800000ms, 'The time limit of one session of the Bar exam': 21600000ms, 'It takes Voyager 1 to travel 250,000 miles': 23400000ms, 'The fastest swimmer to cross the English Channel': 24900000ms, //>8 Hours 'A full typical work day in the United States': 28800000ms, '0.1% of an entire year': 31536000ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $100 million': 40173000ms, 'The time it takes to assemble a car': 57600000ms, '1% of an entire year': 315360000ms, 'It takes for the Lōʻihi volcano to rise above the surface of the ocean becoming a new Hawaiian island': Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER //285,616 years
Avengers Endgame was just ok. I never saw ant man. Thor Love and Thunder was an affront to film making, and potentially a crime against humanity.
So we can agree to disagree.
I guess I'll go to bat for the multi-billion dollar megacorp since nobody else is doing it
Avengers: Endgame was great. They did a heist through time that was basically a speed run of all the other movies. Ant-Man preserved the "F You" energy from Hank Pym while keeping things just grounded enough to be fun. Thor: Love and Thunder was basically an action-packed version of a "Flight of the Conchords" episode and they ended up solving their problems by talking instead of just smashing heads in.
So far as big budget movies go, these are the best I've ever seen
The TV shows around the MCU have always been better. They still have lots of explosions. I'm in the middle of an Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. rewatch right now. The movies provide a lot of worldbuilding they would have to do in each show otherwise. They usually pepper that context in so you're not completely lost, but you would miss stuff without watching the movies.
Also, Endgame.
An individual may feel fatigue, but when the general audiences start to feel the fatigue, that’s going to actually make a difference. If there was a superhero fatigue for years, Endgame couldn’t have made nearly grossed ~2.8B USD.
Considering that Marvel movies are not making “all of the money” and are instead making “most of the money” in the eyes of its investors, they may be thinking that the head winds are changing and might want to forestall such a thing.
Of course, there were other reasons that Chapel may have been sacked as well, such as the “Dont say Gay” bill fiasco, as well as having lost their tax free status in Florida,the Mulan controversy, the previously mentioned issues at Marvel, alienating creatives (including publicly fighting one of its biggest stars),underwhelming Star Wars and Disney movies and shows, (possibly) losing the streaming rights for the IPL in India (cause Hotstar in India had a decent chunk of the streaming market in India cause of it).
> If you relieve immediately beforehand and can't hold it for 90 minutes, there is likely a medical issue (e.g. old man, or pregnant).
Avengers Endgame is 3 hours and 1 minute long.
Some of that is credits, and maybe you should be able to hold it for 3 hours anyway, but some people do have medical problems. They should still be allowed to enjoy movies.
Or they simply watched everything they were interested in watching on the first service so there was no point in keeping the subscription active. It's not like it takes any effort to cancel. They will come back to it later (it's easy at most to reactivate a dormant subscription) when it has accumulated enough new stuff.
That's what I've been doing for the streaming services that aren't bundled with something else I have for reasons other than video streaming (Prime Video because I have Amazon Prime, Hulu because I have Spotify, Peacock Premium because I have XFinity as my ISP, and Paramount+ because I have Walmart+).
For example a couple months before "Avengers: Endgame" was released I realized that I had to see it in theaters. My previous approach for Marvel movies of waiting until they showed up on some non-premium cable channel like FXX meant I was a couple years behind, and I realized there was no way I'd be able to avoid major spoilers while waiting to see Endgame that way. So I got a month of Netflix (they had all the Marvel movies back then) and caught up on Marvel, and a few other things, then cancelled.
Later I got Disney+ for a week (free trial) and caught up on Disney and Pixar animated movies (Coco, Incredibles 2, Toy Story 4, Frozen II, Onward), watched Captain Marvel, rewatched Endgame to see what I'd missed on my bathroom break when I saw it in theaters, and watched the Star Wars trilogy that starts with The Force Awakens, watched Rogue One, and cancelled.
Right now, a couple years later, I'm back on Disney+, because they sent me on offer for a month for $1.99. I've caught up again on Pixar (Soul, Luca, Turning Red), Disney animation (Ralph Breaks the Internet, Raya and the Last Dragon, Encanto), Marvel (Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, the Loki series), some Simpsons shorts, and am trying to decide if there is any new Star Wars that interests me. When the month is up I will rewatch Luca once or twice, and then cancel.
I'll be back on Netflix for a month probably next year to watch Lucifer.
I'll also probably at some point do a month of HBO Max for South Park.
While I meant this as a joke, tying USB versions to cultural artifacts would actually give folks a better idea of their age:
Oh your computer only has USB Avengers Endgame, but I’m afraid this device needs at least USB Better Call Saul Season 6.
Writing isn’t there for Marvel sure. But to me the achievement is reliably producing B grade movies. Entertaining, worth a chuckle, easy on the eyes. None deserve an Oscar, but none (or few) are really very bad. Even if that were easy to do with one movie, and I’ve watched a lot of real garbage, doing it with a string of 20 interconnected films? Culminating in Endgame? That required the steady hand of a few really solid people. It was the first of its kind by an absolute mile, a totally new achievement in cinema. Spielberg and his ilk have been obsessing over all the CGI and sleeping on the real achievements.
For reference my favorite movies would be No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Fury Road. I like The Wire, Breaking Bad, True Detective season one. But I think Marvel is a different sort of thing altogether. The sheer reliability of it is unrivaled. Which is why I say that’s what Rings of Power lacks for me. The writing doesn’t have to be groundbreaking. Just keep the thing competent despite all the cooks in the kitchen. Many pieces of media seem to fail at this.
Lately I will say the formula has worn thin. I consider their run to be from Iron Man to Endgame.
Some kinds of film are just better with a big crowd. Comedies, often. Many horror movies. I'd say just about any Troma film is much better that way, as are many B-movies and cult classics. Even a few of the Marvel films have had a lot added to them by the theater experience, and hearing/seeing audience reactions (I'm thinking especially of Infinity War and Endgame).
Probably the best Indian-as-indian-can-be movie that's released in a longtime. This is the highest grossing film of all time in Indian cinema, the Avengers Endgame / Jurrassic Park of India.
Pros
* Incredibly stylized and fresh (not derivative)
* great bro-drama
* arguably best dance scene EVER
* Not deeply cynical towards society like everything made today.
Cons:
* Long (but still somehow incredibly fast paced and dense, just a lot of arcs)
* over the top (but shamelessly so, and taken seriously)
______
RRR is a tectonic shift in how Indian cinema views itself. It is worth watching purely because of its place in the Movie movement zeitgeist.
IMO, This is the first Indian movie in 10 years that makes it to must watch territory for universal audiences (the last one being 3 idiots).
IMHO Marvel became a victim of it's own (incredibly successful) formula. Avengers EndGame was truly an incredible movie to top off a decade of great story-telling across multiple solo and team movies where both the heroes and the antagonists were steadily built up until the absolute crescendo that was EndGame.
Of course the storyline was riddled with plotholes and was logically a bit messy and the movies ranged from great to not-so-great, but it delivered that incredible build-up-and-release that everyone was waiting for (I literally screamt, laughed, clapped and cried in that one movie alongside a packed theater)
But since that high, since that chapter closed beautifully, the new "phase" of Marvel needs a lot of the same world building from zero, but now, everything feels much more formulaic. Add to it, directors getting more freedom to be stylistically seperate (eg. the new Thor is more comedy, the new Strange had elements of horror) means that the fanbase has no coherent thread to hold onto.
Finally, just a reminder that most of us are now a decade older (and hopefully wiser ;)) and don't really want to follow movies + TV series which are now critical to even understand canon (eg. I had never watched any of the earlier MCU TV series, but never missed them, but I know if someone skipped Wandaverse, then the new Strange movie will be missing a lot of context)
I don't know. 465 million seems still steep for 8 episodes TV show. I am all for it cause Disney has seemingly skimped on their CG budget for their newer shows. So more competition means more TV shows will have film quality production.
But it is a concern, if their show costs more than something like Avengers: Endgame which had some of the biggest actors in Hollywood involved in addition to the probably insane VFX budget.
Obviously COVID would have affected the budget for the show, but I have a feeling that it went way over budget than was initially intended.
Although I agree with the marquee concept. HBO had their own marquee show: Game of Thrones, though it produced a lot of quality stuff like the Pacific, Band of Brothers, Sopranos etc that can be watched for years to come. Game of Thrones on the other hand was a big disappointment for the fans and its negative reception probably made HBO wonder what they would do after it was over (hence the Targaryen origin show and the Jon Snow series are being developed... personally I'm skipping both)
That's probably the right distinction.
If copilot allows you to type
// source code of linux kernel
And you get the whole code, then I would consider it unoriginal
The same way your movie example, if you told it
Avengers Endgame
And it gave you the whole movie, it would also be. But what if you type (like with DallE) Spiderman fighting Thanos and you get something different, but that resembles some Endgame scene. Would that infringe copyright, be fair use, or what?
Well, to avoid stretching the metaphor too far, I'll just say that the movie/book/music equivalent of open source requires more than just the final product, which is essentially the compiled binary. Where you draw the line between between all production materials and the final output may vary. But if Avengers: Endgame was put under a permissive creative commons license, that would no more make it the equivalent of open source than if Microsoft allowed free distribution of MS Office & derivative works, but not the actual source code.
At this point though we're debating the analogy more than the issue, not always productive (though sometimes it is). Maybe we've (I) stretched it too far.
I think the '90s had a bit more variety than the '10s and (for now) '20s. E.g. we seem to have lost good legal procedurals, thrillers, weird fiction, and "small scale" sci-fi.
Fo example, what are the'10s equivalents of "A Few Good Men", "Seven", "Dark City" and "The 13th Floor"?
There is _some_ stuff, but less than before, replaced by a massive amount of super hero movies or long-running franchises.
As a support clue, I invite you to consider the winners of the MTV Movie Awards, which are more "popular" than other Awards:
92 Terminator 2: Judgment Day 93 A Few Good Men 94 Menace II Society 95 Pulp Fiction 96 Seven 97 Scream 98 Titanic 99 There's Something About Mary 00 The Matrix (bonus: not 90s)
compare with the 10s
10 The Twilight Saga: New Moon 11 The Twilight Saga: Eclipse 12 The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 13 Marvel's The Avengers 14 The Hunger Games: Catching Fire 15 The Fault In Our Stars 16 Star Wars: The Force Awakens 17 Beauty and the Beast 18 Black Panther 19 Avengers: Endgame
I have the feeling most "risky" movies, for lack of a better word, have moved to streaming services.
That's most things, though. There's so much crap out there, most people keep moving to the next hot thing rather than keep consuming the same thing. How many people are still watching the Avengers Endgame movie today? Or season 8 of Game of Thrones? Probably roughly the same amount (proportionately) that are still playing Animal Crossing or Among Us today.
Animal Crossing did just get a major update that was well-received and tied to a premium Nintendo Online subscription a few months ago, btw. Still popular enough for that. Definitely nowhere as huge as it was two years ago though.
Animal Crossing was the perfect thing to be released when everyone was stuck in their homes at the start of the pandemic, though, as it offered an escape and even had a 'travel to an island' theme to it. My wife and a bunch of my friends put several hundred hours into it, and I put 55 hours into it, which is about three times as much as an Animal Crossing game usually gets out of me.
Among Us still has its fans. I join a group every once in a while that sets up monthly game nights for it. That one has dropped quite a bit though. Eventually the game was unofficially made into a game mode in Fortnite, from what I hear, and I think that game mode gets played more within Fortnite now than the Among Us game does, but I'm not really sure.
It's also not too far removed and most likely inspired by social deduction board games that have existed and have been popular since the Werewolf/Mafia game from 1986, which Among Us is basically an action Werewolf with minigames and cute, marketable characters.
Tiktok is larger than ever, that seems like a bad one to include. Sourdough was legit flash in the pan, I think.
also important to remember the 1.5 hour Marvel film almost certainly took more human hours in the input side than virtually any video game
This is simply wrong.
Marvel movies (and indeed, most studio releases) are generally produced and released within a year or two. Only the biggest blockbusters have crews in the hundreds, and it is rare for a movie to have a crew in the thousands. For example, Endgame is one of the most expensive movies ever made...and production and post-production (i.e., VFX) took less than 2 years. Dune (2021) was filmed and post-produced in under 2 years. Tenet, Nolan's most technically complex film, was actually filmed and post-produced in just over 1 year. (But contrast to Avatar 2 and 3, which have been in production for over 4 years and counting.)
On the other hand, almost every AAA game of the last decade has spent years in development with a crew of hundreds for almost the entire time. For example, Red Dead 2 was in development for 7 years. Starcraft 2 was in development for over 5 years. Destiny was in development for 4 years.
Note that the above timeline does not include pre-production work (like writing the screenplay, casting, hiring crew, raising funds) because in the movie industry pre-production work proceeds very slowly (for example: Avatar 2 was in pre-production for 7 years; Gemini Man for over 20 years), but the actual production and post-production (i.e., the actual making of the movie, editing, FX) happens at a lightning pace. In the game industry, the creative parts happen in tandem with the development of the game itself.
Also note that while movies can have large crews, the different teams aren't all working at the same time; for example, film crews and other production crews rarely interact with the VFX or other post-production crew.
It's certainly a bad technical measure, but then stacks of CDROMs could all be super sparsely populated, those human capillaries going around the world are stretchy, etc. I think it's a reasonable metric for huge quantities of data when communicating to the general public - you can specify the movie to narrow it too.
So "the LHC produces 90 Petabytes of data per year, that's the same amount of data as streaming Avengers Endgame in 4K high-definition 40 million times! Bet their ISP wishes they hadn't offered them the unlimited data package!!" yadda-yadda?
Not surprising to me as I was only seriously considering seeing Shang Chi, the Eternals and Spider Man in theaters. And only because they would be great on the big screen. It’s not worth the potential risk of COVID, but really chilling on the couch with whatever drink and food I want and snuggling with the kids can’t be beat. I may go into the theater for some type of experience again (last movie I saw was Avengers Endgame and it was worth it). I guess the pandemic just helped put the nail in the coffin for my movie going experience.
Couple of thoughts:
1. I'm not really sure what making this so interactive accomplishes. The result seems akin to a listicle: "X Great Movies to Watch When You're Feeling Y", except with a lot more clicks required and, importantly, no curation. I think I would prefer to see a static list of recommendations with a "random" button and a cool blog post linked about how the recommendations were generated. Furthermore, it seems fairly safe to say (?) that the site isn't dynamically generating recommendations because the list exhausts rather quickly, after 10 or so. Just make a list!
2. The lack of curation leads to a lot of strangeness in the recommendations. For example, my first choice was feeling "weird". I got a bunch of blockbuster action films: Justice League, Avengers: Endgame, Thor: Ragnarok, Interstellar, Black Panther, Captain Marvel.
What rotten tomatoes considers the "best films of all time" is laughable across the spectrum.
Some gems from the top 10:
4. Black Panther
6. Parasite
7. Avengers: Endgame
9. Knives Out
10. Us
Its surely just coincidence that the half of the best films ever made in human history were produced in the last 5 years.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/top/bestofrt/
I can see her as a spoiled brat, especially after how she (or rather her people) framed this in the media. And at the same time I can see Disney as an evil corporation scamming people.
>I doubt very much they’d have done the same to Chris Evan’s or Robert Downey Jr.
Is this supposed to be about gender? Or what is this supposed to mean? Evans got less for the latest cape movie than Johansson got for Black Widow by the way ($15M vs $20M). She was in that same movie (Avengers: Endgame) and made the same as Evans.
Disney is an evil corporation, they will try to fuck with everybody if they think they can get away with it. I am sure if Avengers: Endgame was released now and in the way Black Widow was, they'd have tried to scam Evans and Downey Jr (and Johansson too) the same way they tried to scam Johansson now. Hollywood invented Hollywood accounting to scam people (and the state) long ago. One example of who got scammed this way is Stan Lee, who sued and got awarded $10M for Spider-Man from Marvel.
There sure is a lot of sexism in Hollywood, but this isn't it, as far as I can tell.
And for some movies, the theater experience makes it special. Either because of the visual spectacle on a large screen, or the audience reaction. Avengers Endgame on opening weekend was a special experience.
On the other hand think of the reaction people had when watching the First Star War Prequal when the opening crawl started on opening weekend(we didn't know yet), Avengers: Endgame when Tony got the Gauntlet. Watching all of the Doctors show up at the climax of the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Episode simulcast in theatre. Its a communal experience then. the first glory shot of the Enterprise in 2009, The cheer of the crowd knowing everyone else is feeling the same as you are is a amazing feel you cant get at home watching you 80 inch flat screen.
Wreck-it-Ralph kind of cheated, but... how many different styles of 3D animation did you see in that film alone? (Wreck-it-Ralph is sort of the "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" of this generation, so it makes sense. No one will say that Betty Boop has a similar drawing style to Woody Woodpecker, even if both are characters in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit")
------
Thanos (Avengers: Endgame), Shrek, Davy Jones (Pirates of the Caribbean), the Na'vi (Avatar), Spiderman (Into the Spiderverse), and the recreation of Princess Leia (Rogue One) are all 3d animation. Would you argue that they're the same style?
Hidalgo was truly a story Hopkins told and the movie was based on that.
Seriously though, I think that movie was what really broke the "based on a true story" thing for me. There's no real criteria for claiming something is based on a true story, you only need a tenuous grasp to reality.
Basically, you can make the claim that Avengers Endgame is just as much based on a true story as Hidalgo if you wanted to.
I'm a Deist, personally.
I do however believe that IF a Devil or a God or a Thanos were to show up and try to kill most of humanity (Which... if it's an actual divine being, incidentally would mean that I'm wrong about being a Deist, but I can live with that!) it would be a moral imperative to prevent them from doing so.
In that sense Avengers Endgame is a better Rapture movie than the Left Behind movies...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yn7KTOLbyfQ&t=1s
In case anyone is interested, Sean Carroll did an amazing podcast episode on the mechanics of time travel in a scientifically accurate way [1]. He sometimes works as a scientific advisor on Hollywood movies and claims to be responsible (in part) for the line "You mean Back to the Future is bullshit?" in 'The Avengers: Endgame'. He also touches on the topic of killing Hitler as well as different tropes in time travel movies. He also points out one particular movie which he thinks did time travel logic best: Bill and Ted's excellent adventures.
[1] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/11/23/124-solo-how-time-travel-could-and-should-work/
Avengers: Endgame, I feel like they did a great job bringing an end to the slow build up of all the previous movies.
>And if we really want to take it to the extreme, if it costs the country 15 bucks each hour people are not paid to work, but could have been doing something useful, Avengers Endgame must have cost the country more than it made in ticket sales. Thanos' final revenge:-)
Is there a word for when you actually agree with a reductio ad absurdem? Because man, what a waste of time movies like that are.
> If I take an extra hour commute I don't get that 15 bucks. And that commute time does not go onto GDP either. It's hard to argue the economy lost the time I was doing nothing productive.
Presumably on average you work an hour's less overtime/day while the diversion is in place, or maybe you quit your job and take a less productive one that's in decent commuting range, or so on.
> And if we really want to take it to the extreme, if it costs the country 15 bucks each hour people are not paid to work, but could have been doing something useful, Avengers Endgame must have cost the country more than it made in ticket sales. Thanos' final revenge:-)
I mean it's certainly worth thinking about how much time you're putting into things like movies and whether that's worth it to you. If something that takes 1 hour and costs $45 is more fun than something that takes 3 hours and costs $15, you might well be better off doing the former.
It matters as the total budget of a movie needs to be recouped. The vast majority of albums are likely made using a few thousand dollars [0], if there isn't a break-even the artists potentially have other avenues of making money such as gigs/concerts if not making the limelight in the future.
Movies such as that of the Mission Impossible series and the Avengers series cost $150M-$350M per movie to make [1] [2], without a theatrical release and/or a temporary pay-per-view model via Apple Movies or Amazon Prime (or most of the world being on a $20-30+/month Netflix, Disney Plus, etc. subscription, which is not the case yet), there wouldn't be much interest in financing such movies.
[0] https://sonicscoop.com/2017/05/25/budget-record-album-2017/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission:_Impossible_%E2%80%93_Fallout
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avengers:_Endgame
I definitely disagree with this, it sounds like you're only taking into account the big budget titles that the media talks (and complains) about.
My favourite story game, Life is Strange from DONTNOD, literally brought me to tears. Going through the Steam reviews, you'll find this is a common reaction. It was still in my mind weeks after I had completed it. Easily the most compelling piece of entertainment (and yes, Art) that I have ever experienced.
No movie I have ever watched has solicited that response.
Even something like the quest line in Warframe I've found more compelling than most movies (shout out to DE's writers on this one).
It's hard to say for Citizen Kane specifically, but I'd wager more people have seen Avengers: Endgame than any particular contemporary equivalent. Just as more people have played Fortnite than either of the games I've mentioned above.
You can definitely find truly powerful art in the video game medium, if you're willing to look.
This could end up being a really interesting precedent in film (not in a way I like, personally). akersten writes farther down:
> We're going to wind up in some terrible place where if you pre-order your movie ticket you can see the Target special edition of Avengers Endgame 8 that is only available in theaters for two weeks before it switches to some other version. Maybe we'll get to the point where movie theaters will just perpetually have the same film on roll and update it every couple of months with the latest patches like an MMO. Remember, your Avengers and Superman subscriptions are different.
Not sure about the last one, but you could imagine lots of possibilities:
- Regional versions of films with anything from chunks of dialog ("I'm from X") up through entire cityscape backgrounds changed depending on the theater location. With CG, even things like character appearance (e.g. race) could be regional.
- Brand placement: Top sponsor's products appear in the first two weeks of showings, then second bidder for the next two weeks, etc.
- A/B testing different versions of films with live audiences and tweaking.
- The opposite of what akersten said: introduce new little easter eggs or features regularly over the course of the film's theater run to encourage repeat ticket buying from the hardcore fans.
What else?
That's the expectation with live musicals and part of the reason why people go see them in the first place - it's a unique, evolving experience.
Movies shouldn't be that way - they should have ISBN numbers or something - if you want to re-make it, you shouldn't just be able to erase the original.
We're going to wind up in some terrible place where if you pre-order your movie ticket you can see the Target special edition of Avengers Endgame 8 that is only available in theaters for two weeks before it switches to some other version. Maybe we'll get to the point where movie theaters will just perpetually have the same film on roll and update it every couple of months with the latest patches like an MMO. Remember, your Avengers and Superman subscriptions are different.
This sure makes me feel crotchety.
I've never understood why online reviews, at least on sites as large as Amazon with a competent technical team behind the company, aren't better. First step, if I review a product, then you should immediately be weighting the visibility of all reviews by reviewers who posted a review which agrees with my own. So if I rate Avengers: Endgame bluray a single star, guess that I have similar opinions to the others that rated it the same, and when I go look at some other Marvel film bluray, if those others have reviewed it, push them to the top. As I review more and more things, the weightings should get better and better. And gaming it would be basically impossible unless you managed to tailor bot posts to match the way I rated dishware, movies, books, videogames, food products, and the dozens of other things I've rated. Fake reviews would get pushed to the bottom with almost instantaneous speed if they would do this. If they cheap out and decide to aggregate and 'bucket' reviewers rather than training a recommender engine per-customer, its performance will fall short and still be gamed, but even that would be better (and seems to be the way big companies handle the computational load per-user systems would incur... personally I'd prefer they push the calculations clientside, but they haven't gone that way).
So it's not necessarily that there were 20+ MCU movies in the span of 10 years (and from what I understand the majority were at least good and some great), it's that during that time period the MCU movies became a dominant slice of the overall movie pie instead of the entire pie growing bigger. That, overall, seems to be Scorsese's gripe, because Avengers Endgame and DC's Justice League and Joker, etc... suck up so much oxygen Scorsese couldn't find a studio to back The Irishman so now he had go with Netflix. Now I'm starting to diverge a lot from where Scorsese and Moore intersect and it becomes more about Scorsese and a matter of sour grapes.
Before I lost interest in Marvel movies altogether, I used to get annoyed at how they would show these little glimmers of creativity, only to then crush them under the boot of The Marvel Formula.
The most interesting parts of the early Marvel movies weren't the super powers or special effects, it was the little notes they gave to their protagonists to humanize them -- Tony Stark as a selfish alcoholic, Thor as a cheerfully oblivious fish out of water, Captain America as earnest but painfully naïve. They seemed to be opening up the possibility of superhero stories that were also human stories, rather than just the kind of juvenile power fantasies Moore is decrying here. But each movie would eventually put that stuff aside and build to yet another Epic Battle as climax, which was disappointing.
In retrospect, it's pretty obvious that the stuff that I found appealing was the result of Marvel, still finding its feet, allowing its filmmakers to doodle in the margins of their studio-approved blueprint a bit. Once the movies took off and the Marvel Formula was proven, they no longer needed to allow space for such divergence from the formula. So we get movies like the Avengers entries, where the entire story is just moving chess pieces around to get them into place for the inevitable Epic Battle.
The Marvel movie I always wanted to see was one that put the Epic Battles aside completely, and focused 100% on telling a character-driven story. Something like the Matt Fraction Hawkeye comics, where the point of the story is deepening our understanding of this one character, grounding him in the context of the brownstone he lives in, the ways he interacts with his neighbors, and their common problem of potentially losing their homes to an aggressive developer. Human-scale stories about human beings.
In other words, I didn't want Avengers: Endgame, I wanted My Dinner with Ultron. But once the Marvel juggernaut picked up enough steam, that was exactly the movie I was never going to get.
Your comments seem at odds with the popularity and the sales figures for Marvel movies. If their content is so "shitty" and their franchises are doing poorly, yet their profits and film attendance are huge, those seem to directly oppose your opinion.
Their films are successful, profitable and they are making more of them. The audience goes to films they find interesting. They vote with their dollars. Big budgets do not guarantee success or profitability.
Popular as boring makes zero sense. Avengers Endgame box office had international sales of $1,939,427,464 vs $858,373,000 for domestic sales. The point being it was extremely successful and profitable worldwide. Facts like box office appear to negate your supposition.
It is unclear who the publishers are that you refer to. Marvel publishes their own comic content. They decide what movies to make from their IP. They hire writers and directors to adapt that IP to movies.
Do you mean their stockholders? Or the press?
> Avengers: Endgame brought in $2.7 billion and is the highest grossing film of all time. Only 5 films ever have broken $2 billion.
> Phantom of the Opera the musical has made $6 billion, blowing Avengers out of the water. Wicked the musical has grossed $3 billion, more than any movie ever made. Same for Mamma Mia!.
> In the UK, more people watched The X Factor than Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The book Diary of a Wimpy Kid sold over a million copies in its latest installment.
> Yet none of those things enter conversations about cultural affinity in the same way movies do.
The first metric you mention is not the right one for discussing cultural impact. You'd want to compare number of tickets sold for Phantom of the Opera to number of tickets sold for Avengers: Endgame.
Weirdly, you go on to make the correct comparison for The X Factor.
I'm not convinced that popular video games haven't made their way into the conversations about cultural significance.
What's more movies get privileged in a weird way over other things. Avengers: Endgame brought in $2.7 billion and is the highest grossing film of all time. Only 5 films ever have broken $2 billion.
Phantom of the Opera the musical has made $6 billion, blowing Avengers out of the water. Wicked the musical has grossed $3 billion, more than any movie ever made. Same for Mamma Mia!.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) made $600 million in the first 72-hours, far more than any movie ever. League of Legends makes $1.4 billion a year, again more than any movie ever made. Fortnite makes $2.4 billion.
In the UK, more people watched The X Factor than Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The book Diary of a Wimpy Kid sold over a million copies in its latest installment.
Yet none of those things enter conversations about cultural affinity in the same way movies do.
The interest of an American corporation is definitionally beneficial to at least some Americans, namely themselves.
The interest of a Russian dictator is untied to the interests of any Americans.
As for how much influence Russia had, read the Mueller report. Volume One is full of examples.
Corporate influence is bad, sure, but corporations have nowhere near the amount of resources to bear on influence operations as states have. Avengers: Endgame, the most expensive movie ever made, cost about as much as one F35 fighter jet, of which the USAF has purchased 1,783 units. When a state decides to use popular media for public influence, they can wield multiple orders of magnitude more influence than any of the world's great media monopolies can.
Finding movies is easy. I just googled "Avengers Endgame" and it told me it's available instantly for $5 from Google Play, Youtube, Vudu, and Amazon. I googled "The Graduate" and it told me it's available for $4 on various platforms and free on Netflix with a subscription. I google "Seinfeld" and it told me it's availabe on Hulu and TBS with a subscription.
I would much rather pick and choose which entertainment I actually want to pay for than pay a large monthly fee for everything. It saves me money.
You are correct, but I think your prediction false. We need to remember that "Hollywood" is a specific set of entities. We're not talking about independent film producers. We're talking about the largest film publishers. And those film publishers are like publishers in any other creative endeavor - they have been almost completely eliminated in having any business reason to exist. While their empires were built upon solving the problem of distribution, that no longer has any value whatsoever. In fact, due to the ways they built their distribution networks, they are severely hampered in the ways in which they can actually do distribution compared to purely digital/online firms. Distribution, the golden goose that made them billions, is now a noose around their necks. Whereas once they funded new productions as a side hustle, something that was necessary just so they had something to distribute, their role as a source of money is now the only thing they have to offer that has any value.
Anyone can distribute a movie. A clever 12 year old who knows how CDNs work can set up global distribution in their spare time for fun. This is a problem. Being reduced to a source of funds in a creative business is almost guaranteed business death. In the past, total control over the distribution chain allowed movie publishers to manipulate things to be profitable. There is a very inconvenient fact that businesses in the creative space have to deal with (although they never admit it, not even to themselves) : the public response to any creative work is random. Truly and perfectly random. There is nothing you can do to improve your odds, they remain even. Sure it seems like there are things you can do to bend things in your favor, like use big-name stars, throw a lot of money at the project, etc. But run the numbers. It doesn't work. Not even a little. For every Titanic or Avatar you have a Waterworld or an Ishtar. The book 'A Drunkard's Walk' has a couple chapters about the creative fields, book publishing and movie publishing specifically, where they go through the research and the numbers. It's just random. The audience is different every time, so it makes sense that the end result is randomness in the theaters on opening weekend and right after publication.
So what do you do if you're a business who wants to make money, and your industry has changed from being this thing you could control and make profitable, kicking your failures aside as fast as possible and keeping your successes around for as long as possible, to being mostly a game of chance? You lean on the little control you still have, of course, and movie companies definitely do that in the theaters. Good luck catching a movie after opening weekend if not many people showed up that weekend. Maybe go see Avengers: Endgame for the third time? But that's pretty limited in how much it helps. It still hurts badly to drop $10 million filming a movie and then having to kick it to Bluray or streaming after 4 days in cinemas. What you do is play it as safe as humanly possible. You don't take any chances. You make sure the movies have big names, have big special effects, have big budgets, and you definitely don't do anything that would ever risk limiting your market whatsoever. You don't mention religion, you stay away from politics, you absolutely prostrate yourself at the feet of anyone and try to make the most broadly palatable thing you can based on aggressive focus-testing, analytics, etc. You go wholesale soulless. It's the only option, really. And it probably still won't work. It will probably still catch up to them eventually. Because you can't escape the numbers, and big chances even on the safest bets at the craps table is still gambling.
The creative work will continue to come from independent filmmakers, and their destiny is bright. Not billion-dollar Avengers: Endgame bright, but bright enough to keep yourself warm beside and make a living off of. No longer do they have to keep their fingers crossed and hope Weinstein buys the rights and puts it on a shelf somewhere to prevent it from competing against him in the box office. They can sell to Netflix or Amazon or Disney or just "publish" the thing themselves. And a niche market is fine and survivable.
> If The Great Wall had turned out to be the massive hit everyone was expecting, this process might have continued. But The Great Wall was not a hit. It was a massive flop—in China, America, and everywhere else.
OK, I don't go the the movies a lot [1] so am generally unaware of much of what is in theaters, but I do watch a lot of TV live (as opposed to on DVR) on channels that have ads and on which studios run lots of ads for the movies that they expect to be big, so I'm usually aware of what is opening that the studios are expecting to be big.
I don't recall ever hearing anything about this movie before reading that article. Was there something anemic about their advertising in the US? Or were the ads just so forgettable that I did see them but completely ignored or forgot them?
[1] My complete movie theater history for the last 20 years: American Beauty, Gladiator, second two Matrix movies, the three Lord of the Rings movies, the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Wild Wild West (by accident...was trying for Star Wars and went into the wrong theater), How to Train Your Dragon 2, How to Train Your Dragon 3: The Hidden World, and Avengers: Endgame.
I think you've got a really nice design going on already, and basic features seem to work without JS, so that's nice. I also like that you haven't polluted it with ads (I'm far more likely to donate to sites that don't have ads).
Two thoughts:
1. I think I would find a 5 star rating system too constraining. My opinions in most areas have more gradations than just 0-5. 0-100 would be entirely too many. I think IMDB's 10 point scale is really the main reason why I've stuck with that for movies. On the other hand I prefer to only thumbs up / thumbs down books, so I'm really not sure you can do anything about this in a way that would make everyone happy.
2. I think there's either a bug with your weighted average or else you're ranking using something like "we're 90% confident the true rating is at least x". But this confidence level seems entirely too high for the number of users you have on your site. For example Avengers: Endgame appears on #13 on this page: https://rate.house/chart/movie despite the fact that it has a rating of only 3.64. I would probably lower the confidence required for now, and if you 10x or 100x your users you can raise it again.
3. Would be nice to know a bit more about what features it has on the home page before signing up. Can I import my ratings from other sites? Can I export my data in some usable format like CSV? Can the information database the users create for media entries be downloaded by users? (Even IMDB offers this.) Can I get recommendations from the site once I've rated enough items? Can I get music recommendations based on my movie ratings? (That would be cool.)
I think the issue is that people got used to getting a lot of the content they wanted to watch for around $10/mo. Originally, no one realized that streaming would be such a huge thing. Owners licensed content to Netflix at cheap prices just to see Netflix streaming take over. Now they're wising up to the fact that they can't just give away their content.
Let's say that we did have a law that would force content owners to license their content. Let's say that the royalty rate would be $3 per movie stream. Companies like Netflix would have to hugely increase their monthly fees. 4 movie streams a month and you've blown through their fee considering hardware, electricity, credit card processing fees, etc. Likewise, if TV episodes cost $1 per stream, people would very quickly blow through the $13/mo fee that Netflix charges. Plus, with more content, people would watch a lot more.
Ultimately, what people want is a streaming service with most of what they want to watch at a fraction of the price that people used to pay for content. It used to be that people would pay $75 for cable tv or satellite plus $10-20/mo for one or two premium channels plus $4 every time they wanted to rent a movie from Blockbuster. Now people want that same experience for one $15 fee. I mean, would you sign up for a streaming service that had 80% of the content you wanted for $100+/mo? Do you think most people would?
Netflix and competitors want to encourage you to binge on their service now. How does that change if they have to pay compulsory license fees for every stream? What happens to content if they're getting paid a set fee-per-stream rather than a negotiated rate? We've seen in music that songs have been getting shorter because the royalty rates are per-stream not per-minute and the shorter your songs, the more royalties you'll get. We've seen a lot of clickbait video on YouTube and, frankly, Netflix is putting up more and more cheap-to-make content, knocking off every random baking show and the like. With a compulsory license, Netflix would want to make it hard to watch the shows that they had to pay-per-stream. Would they even want to make them available at all?
I think we had a few year period where content owners didn't realize how much streaming would substitute for other watching modes and made good deals for Netflix. I think any compulsory license would be higher than a service could go for at current rates. You're talking about getting rid of other large revenue streams via this compulsory licensing. Right now, they can give you a bunch of content as all-you-can-eat and then hold on to their premium content and get a lot of people to pay a separate charge. For example, I can stream a lot of Disney content, but it looks like Avengers Endgame will only be available for purchase separately. If you're getting rid of that, they aren't going to want to give up that money.
Heck, even in music, we see that the compulsory licensing rates are high to the point that places like Apple Music want to negotiate revenue-sharing agreements rather than pay the compulsory license. If you're paying $10/mo for a streaming service and they're paying $0.091 per stream and you're listening in the car on a 20-minute commute twice a day, that's 10 songs per day and 300 songs per month costing them $27.3. And that's a short commute and not taking into consideration errands, workouts, listening at work, etc.
So, even in music, the compulsory license isn't what most streaming services are relying on. They've negotiated a cut-of-revenue system to compensate artists rather than paying $0.091/stream.
I think the problem is that we want to pay the same ~$10 fee for our video entertainment, but video entertainment costs a lot more to produce and doesn't have the same re-watch/listen potential as music. A song doesn't cost $350M to write and record and, ultimately, a good song can provide hours of listening enjoyment just like the movie. It's easy to accept a cut of $10/mo when your product is a lot cheaper to produce. The problem we face is that video producers want more than a cut of $15/mo due to the cost of producing their product, but we don't want to pay more. We had the glory days of Netflix having access to cheap content. We don't want that to end.
You're not wrong about the feeling of gaming you. The problem is that people don't want to spend $100/mo, but they want all the content from services that used to cost that. So they're trying to find ways to retain the revenue while offering enough of what people want to a broad audience. They know people will balk at a $100/mo service even if many of them have been paying for cable and HBO and such. So they're trying to figure out what people will accept. Frankly, Netflix is doing that too: they're trying to figure out what content they can produce cheaply to get people to stick around without them having to license content.
I think the ultimate problem is that the video content we want costs more to make than the music content we want.
You are right in regards to building on stuff that they already own. All the movies this year that have grossed over $100 Million have been based on older content.
1 Avengers: Endgame
2 The Lion King (2019)
3 Captain Marvel
4 Toy Story 4
5 Aladdin (2019)
6 Dumbo (2019)
This is based on perception, but it is not supported by the numbers which is why I made sure to source my comments. Profits are riding on inflation alone. Only one superhero movie made it into the top 10!
Even on ticket numbers for the big movies, everything is in decline. For instance Avengers Endgame is, by far, the biggest movie in recent decades. Yet it sold 3 million tickets fewer than e.g. Titanic. This is made even more remarkable by population growth. The population since 1998 (when Titanic was released) has increased by nearly 28%. Even the US population has increased by more than 19% since then. Titanic sold 94,524,324 tickets. A population normalized comparable success would move more than 112 million tickets, and that's using just a 19% growth factor.
Avengers: Endgame, the mega-hit of the 21st century, sold 91,353,296 tickets. The industry is dying and blaming absolutely everything except their own decisions which, in turn, is likely contributing to their own demise as they refuse to accept responsibility for their own declining results. One of the countless parallels shared between Hollywood and the big budget game industry.
Kids these days have it easy with their movie credits. In my day, you had to pause the tape to work out what year the movie was copyrighted.
Die Hard: MCMLXXXVIII
Avengers: Endgame: MMXIX
*highest IMDB rated
IMDB ratings are of pretty dubious quality. They also fall victim to a recency bias - looking at their Top 250 list, Avengers Endgame is currently listed as the number nine best film ever made, which... come on.
Those aren't the numbers I see [1]. For domestic US, Endgame is in 18th place.
Why not worldwide? Even the US numbers are rickety. There are multiple ways to account for inflation, multiple ways of record counting for sales, trying to factor in re-showings, etc. Adding on multiple currencies and economies is a power of extra complexity.
> There's tons more money out there now
Yes. Money. My whole thing here has been about weighing success by monetary takings. It doesn't necessarily track. The price of a ticket has far outstripped what retail indexed inflation. Tickets, after inflation, are eighteen times more expensive than their 1950s counterparts. You only a eighteenth of the 1950s audience to gross the same.
But while we're talking about bullshit headlines, looking up Endgame renders some gems [2]. Things like "Fastest to $1bn" aren't just historically incomparable because of inflation but because distribution has changed significantly. Movies in the US used to have months of lead-time ahead of the global market. There still is for many languages. Modern studios recognise the waste and damage in this. Endgame was globally available (to over half the population) within 4 days. "Highest Opening Weekend" grossses also have the same problem.
1: https://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm?adjust_yr=1&p=.htm 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_box_office_records_set_by_Avengers:_Endgame
So if all it takes is money to make “Blockbuster films” then why isn’t anyone else doing it besides mostly Disney?
Netflix has around 150 million subscribers and they charge less in developing countries than the US. Their entire quarterly profit was $291 million last quarter. To put that in perspective, that’s half the profit that Disney made on Avengers Endgame alone and that’s not including merchandizing and home video sells and rentals.
Disney doesn’t need to get into debt for content and by the time Endgame reaches Disney+ it will have already made a larger profit probably than Netflix makes in an entire year.
The actual outcomes of cheaper distribution have been realized as less equal outcomes: the biggest hits are bigger than ever, the rest are part of an ever-increasing undiscovered long tail.
Even though distribution is cheap, when the product is consumable entertainment, you are competing on the basis of marketing for people's attention, which is a scarce resource. Capital can buy up attention through a variety of means:
* A saturation advertising blitz around release(as was realized with 1989's Batman campaign, and repeated countless times since). Rather than just release the product with a standard press kit, go all out: advertise a pre-event event, like a panel at a fan convention. Make secondary products that serve as loss leaders, each one creating a new advertising hook.
* Bundling and cross-promotional tactics(buy this new graphics card and get a free game!). When you have a large sales organization, you can afford the time and resources to negotiate complex deals of this nature.
* The inflated production values are the product: Avatar was a hit because it was a big, expensive, technically advanced production, and there are only so many of those in the world. Although it is a huge risk, this is the modus operandi of Hollywood blockbusters, AAA games, and many live acts.
* Franchise marketing: Instead of just having a piece of media, build a collection of IP adaptable to many mediums and release products for all of them, building a new hook for the brand with each release. This gives the same kind of effect as a saturation campaign, but is playing a longer game, and aims to make each release solid and more than a tie-in(e.g. why is Avengers: Endgame a record breaking hit? It's because it's the capstone to a decade of Marvel movies that build up to this moment, all using a consistent style and maintaining a similar level of quality).
While it's true that you don't have a definite formula for success, the quality of the result is a thing you can control for in some degree just by hiring people with a track record(another avenue of capital: buy the visible superstars), and then providing them with this marketing infrastructure to work within.
So I don't see an escape from these tactics without a change in the rules of how to capture human attention. Brand building for pop culture is a hugely expensive exercise, and this has made for a market that fights tooth and claw to get a small promotional edge. But like with other lines of business, waves of opportunity come and go that allow new products to get through, and Game of Thrones is one such example of the wave of "prestige TV" that appeared around the end of last decade.
It's everywhere. Avengers Endgame made sure the Audi logo was filling a nice portion of the screen the two or three times Audis (the only cars in the whole movie) rolled up somewhere.
The movies (and the major real-life assistants) tend to focus on the idea that you're talking to your computer as if it were a person, but this makes the problem an order of magnitude more difficult than it needs to be. What if we looked at it more like a vocal command prompt? What if we applied the Unix philosophy of composing programs and data transformations into more complex use-cases? You'd have to memorize the commands (though there could be vocal "man pages" too), but could finally do more than toggling lights and asking what the weather is like.
There's some precedent for this; in Avengers Endgame (I'll keep it vague), Tony gives some very precise and technical commands to the system when running a scientific simulation. He's not conversing and quipping, he's basically calling parameterized functions with his voice. I think that would be very doable today.
FYI, Shudder has "Re-animator" for streaming. No, I'd never heard of Shudder either. It's a streaming service specializing in "Horror. Thrillers. Suspense". $3.99/month on an annual subscription, $4.99 month to month.
$5 would be a bit much just to watch one movie, but if you had 3 or 4 horror/thrillers/suspense movies you wanted to watch, subscribing for a month, watching them, and canceling might be reasonable.
I suspect that is where we are headed for now. That's certainly how I plan to deal with Disney's new streaming service. There is no way that I'm going to become a regular subscriber to that, because most of the Disney movies I've watched over the last few years are Marvel stuff, Disney/Pixar animation, and Star Wars. For most of that I'm content to wait until it shows up on FXX/TNT/TBS/Freeform.
If something comes out from Disney that I do not want to wait that long for, I'll subscribe for a month to watch it, and catch up on all the others I've been waiting for at the same time, and then cancel.
I just did that with Netflix for MCU. I want to catch "Avengers: Endgame" in theaters, because I'm pretty sure that it is going to be nearly impossible to avoid major spoilers for the whole thing before it reaches non-premium cable, or even streaming, and so took advantage of a weekend stuck at home due to snow to sign up for the Netflix trial, catch up on Marvel, Disney/Pixar, and a few other things, and then canceled.