Hacker Cinema
Madame Web
2024 · Film · 117 min
Directed by SJ Clarkson
Forced to confront revelations about her past, paramedic Cassandra Webb forges a relationship with three young women destined for powerful futures...if they can all survive a deadly present.
4 negativefrom 4 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
They are also showing movies people don't want to see because they have contracts with the studios who are doing nonsense with the numbers to move money around on their books.
Madame web was a great example, it was in theaters for months, and being heavily advertised, and no one was going. At the time I thought it was Sony trying to ruin Marvel's reputation, but it makes more sense that they needed a loss on the books, and most of the money they spent went to companies they had a piece of.
Meanwhile, you have movies that are in and out in a single weekend that go on to become cult classics because they never had a chance.
> Personally, it feels like taste only buys you time and taste is easy to copy.
No offense, but only someone without taste would say this ;)
Taste is not easy to copy. If that were true then there would be no bad major Hollywood movies in established genres; yet despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the formulaic superhero genre, we still get stinkers like Madame Web or Kraven the Hunter.
If you actually try looking at places where people show off their taste--scrolling through the latest songs on Soundcloud being a great source--you realize that people just pump out terrible stuff without realizing it's terrible. This was true pre-AI, and AI it hasn't made it any less true.
It's similar to the transition from live instruments to the DAW in the music world. The DAW eliminated all physical training requirements for making music, and opened up massive new worlds for the types of music that could be made. The end result was a handful of great things amidst a sea of garbage.
Saying movies are inherently a superior product to TikTok shorts is incredibly untrue. I would rather watch 90 minutes of the dumbest TikTok crap imaginable than sit through Madame Web again.
High budget artistic vision does not translate to financial success though; it's ultimately a tradeoff.
That said, good films don't need high budget.
I don't agree with your last take, either; the MCU was when the superhero movie formula was perfected. We're now in a post-MCU phase where what is being produced just can't reach the same appeal anymore. Morbius and Madame Web are outright flops. They seem to be rebooting Fantastic Four for the 4th time. Any sequel to established MCU characters seem to be independent / standalone films, sometimes a bit gimmicky like Sam Raimi's Doctor Strange horror crossover episode or Thor's 80's glam rock direction.