Hacker Cinema
Blue Beetle
2023 · Film · 128 min
Directed by Ángel Manuel Soto
ActionScience FictionAdventure
Recent college grad Jaime Reyes returns home full of aspirations for his future, only to find that home is not quite as he left it. As he searches to find his purpose in the world, fate intervenes when Jaime unexpectedly finds himself in possession of an ancient relic of alien biotechnology: the Scarab.
2 negative1 neutralfrom 3 commenters
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3 comments on Hacker News
> 2023 had a lot of big-budget bombs. Ant-Man, Indiana Jones, Mission Impossible, Transformers, The Flash, Fast X, Blue Beetle, Elemental, Shazam!, and the Marvels all underperformed somewhere on the scale from "disappointment" to "disaster".
And rightly so. The so-called special effects in those superhero movies are really getting exhausting. What's the point of having superpower yet battling like a peasant in medieval times? What's the point of having super intelligence yet making so many illogical decisions? What's the point of having the best technologies on earth yet having your tribe living in dirt and fighting with rhinos and using duet to elect your leaders? I can even tolerate such plot holes if the movies have good stories or interesting characters, but do they?
2023 had a lot of big-budget bombs. Ant-Man, Indiana Jones, Mission Impossible, Transformers, The Flash, Fast X, Blue Beetle, Elemental, Shazam!, and the Marvels all underperformed somewhere on the scale from "disappointment" to "disaster".
On the other hand, aside from the massive big-budget hits of Barbie and Mario, there were also a number of mid-budget films that did very well: John Wick 4, Sound of Freedom, Five Nights at Freddy's, Cocaine Bear and M3GAN all exceeded expectations.
So it's hard to interpret this as the "middle class" of movies disappearing. I'd say it's the opposite, in fact. People have gotten sick of the big-budget crap that follows the same formula (note how most of those bombs are superhero movies). It's really the big-budget films that are falling apart.
Yeah, the audience score is in no way an accurate measure of quality because it is provided by a self-selected group of people who both paid for the movie and went online to rate it. The end result is that a lot of movies viewed as failures will have high audience ratings as long as they can reach some small passionate audience. Just looking at some current movies:
Blue Beetle: 78% critics, 92% audience
Gran Turismo: 63%, 98%
Elemental: 74%, 93%
Meg 2: 29% 73%
Haunted Mansion 38%, 84%
Indiana Jones: 69%, 88%
Little Mermaid 67%, 94%
Those audience scores are not "more accurate" in any way. People who are forced to see these movies like them less than people who chose to see it.
There also really isn't anything currently that fits into "the political correctness / marketing budget of the movie" claim of OP. It seems like they are just buying into cultural war nonsense. The closest I can find is Barbie and its critic score is 5% higher than the audience score, so not much of a gap.