AI has forced a dramatic shift in my view on intellectual property. The laws as they exist only protect corporations now.
They do not protect individuals no matter how much people want to think they do. AI has proven this.
I think to level the playing field all copyright, trademarks, and patents laws should be eliminated.
If I want to make a marvel movie, I should be allowed to and profit from it.
AI let the cat out of the bag and there is no going back. We need to let individuals profit just like corporations can from what is considered theft right now.
AI art shows the philistines for who they are. It's a giant decoy to lure them away from spaces where people are making art of more substance.
I feel the same way about things like the absolutely miserable quality of Marvel, Star Wars, etc. stuff leading to films being increasingly polarized between 60 IQ blockbusters and more interesting small projects. It's what kicked off the 70s arthouse cinema in the US, and I'm hoping we get a similar renaissance soon with the success of all of the small and difference projects lately.
>doing concerts where the attendees are just other musicians
If this is how jazz musicians actually made money, they'd have all died of starvation at this point. Every jazz musician that's not a top 20 or so act makes most of their money playing whatever kind of music people pay them to make, whether it's church music, session musician gigs, etc. The entire reason they started doing (and still do!) straightahead jams is that they were tired of playing schlock all day and wanted to spice it up with and for other people tired of playing schlock.
>The only hope we have is that they're wrong, and their power to change things will be minimal.
What even is the optimistic outcome if they are right? What are we all working towards? Like do people think that these AI companies will create some superintelligence, suck up all the financial benefits of that, and then just decide to share it with the rest of us out of kindness? Because I legitimately can't see a realistic outcome that actually benefits society as a whole. It all ends with very few obscenely rich people getting even more obscenely rich. But I guess we could tell an AI to put ourselves in the new Marvel movie to pass the time since we no longer have any jobs.
The complaint isn't actually about they way they're speaking. The way they're speaking is a symptom of the way they're thinking.
In an age of the dumbest, most propagandistic narratives since the 50s, pumped out by the largest multinational corporations in history. Young people are looking at the world through shitty Marvel movie-colored glasses.
It's also not their fault, and the fictions they think they're living through are written by gen Xers being paid by boomers. It is not a youthful point of view, it is the sabotage of any emergence of a youth point of view, substituted with Disney product.
> Language shifts and evolves over time as the lives and viewpoints of speakers evolve.
This is a "things just happen" argument. Things happen for reasons.
I know about this from the film production site having worked on major Hollywood productions for over two decades.
Traditionally, big films bought new computer hardware and paid for new code as part of production. It was never particularly popular as the promise of CGI was always that it was going to lower cost, but it never did. However, the upside of all of this spending was some amazing looking visuals.
Unreal has been sold pretty hard to the film industry and affects houses are still charging as if they are buying new hardware and writing new code for every production. What they worked out is that they can use unreal save a ton of money and make more profit. That’s also why the names listed on affects heavy films are increasingly exotic as they outsource more and more of the work to the cheapest places they can find
Long story short is the effects are getting worse because they are getting cheaper while they’re being used more and more heavily meaning that the budget for them is being stretched further and further.
Marvel are responsible for a lot of this with their ridiculous production schedule for making films, which are essentially animated but treated by the public as if they are live action.
>"they're being evil for the sake of being evil, just like in my manchild Marvel/Harry Potter/Star Wars movies"
The amount of times I've seen people on reddit reply to (presumably real) Ukrainian redditors with a show of solidarity composed of some slogan from a Hollywood movie or to try to explain/compare their situation in Ukraine / on the world stage to an Avengers movie is honestly baffling. I genuinely can't believe that people live framing their existence and perspective of the world without the context of cheap power fantasy fiction. It's so cringingly out of touch that I'm almost far more willing to believe people talking like that are the Russian bots people are constantly harping on about trying to make Western public support look bad.
I understand that you are joking, but part of the problem with how people talk about this issue is that they are either not serious (you) or are imagining that this conflict is similar to things they have seen in a Marvel comic book movie (most of the rest of this thread).
This post is really funny to see written by an engineer, an entire profession dedicated to the art of measuring precisely the lowest quality we can use while still accomplishing the task.
Having discerning taste is a vice not a virtue. I actively try to limit the number of areas where my taste is ruined by high quality because it makes me noticeably worse off. My life isn't better for experiencing better quality, it's worse for the other 99% of the time.
Now I have to buy the name brand which is more expensive, now I'm focused on all the schlock-y writing of the latest Marvel movie I'm at with my friends instead of enjoying it, now I can't unsee the damn keming or blurry fonts on everyone's computer but mine. Don't be the hi-fi nerd whose ears will be put through a cheese grater any time you hear music through cheap speakers for the rest of your life. Ignorance really is bliss.
> It's really difficult for me to believe that they really got 10% top performers.
Of course there is no hard data on it, but I can say anecdotally the people I know who went on elsewhere were consistently rated at the top of whatever organization they landed at. And also, there wasn't a single person there that I would not want to work with again and would jump at that chance.
> For one, knowing the cut-throat nature of employment there, I would expect only a minority of developers would be willing to try working there, despite the awesome rewards.
On the flip side, a lot of people wanted to work there because of that culture. But you're right, some really great people wouldn't even apply, won't deny that.
> Finally, just as a cheap shot at Netflix, sorry I can't resist as a customer: they absolutely suck at the most basic stuff in their business, which is to produce good content in the first place, and very importantly, NOT FREAKING CANCEL the best content!
Actually, objectively, it's not the best content, which is why it gets cut. The way that decision is made is every piece of content is charted on a cost vs minutes watched. Then that chart is looked at by actual humans.
Some content, like reruns from the 1950s, is super efficient. It's not watched a lot but it also costs very little, so it stays. Some content, like the latest Marvel movie (before Disney had their own streaming service) was very inefficient, but it was kept because it was a big marketing draw. But some content didn't quite make it over the line because it was expensive but niche. It was popular amongst a small set of die hard fans.
I think your complaint it more about the industry in general though -- it's not just Netflix that doesn't give a show room to grow. Even the old school TV networks cut shows much quicker now than they did before.
> I won't even mention how horrible their latest big live stream was... oh well, I just did :D.
Netflix knows it didn't go well. Streaming in general used to break just as much. But the nice thing was that they gave us the resources to hire the right people and the autonomy to fix it. And so we did things like create Chaos Engineering and OpenConnect. I suspect the same will happen with live streaming.
"You can make a movie on your phone, create a song, edit images."
These are 2010-era tools. We're modernizing.
You wouldn't ask musicians today to stick to only pre-synthesizer, pre-DAW era tools to make their music. You wouldn't ask illustrators to ditch their tablets force them to mix their own cerulean unless that's what they wanted to do.
The tools that are coming are going to be fantastic and they're going to enable artists to do wild new things. That isn't subtractive, it's additive. There's more space to explore.
New tools don't even prevent folks from making music and media the old fashioned way: there are still people shooting on film to this day. And there's a vibrant community that embraces anachronistic tools to make new art.
I'm looking forward to a world where teenagers cut their teeth on making their own Marvel movies instead of just watching them. We'll have so many young Scorseses before they even graduate.
Marvel can produce so much stuff because they overwork and underpay employees like VFX artists and writers. Then those movies/shows don't do so well, so they lower the budget of the next one, and it devolves into what it is now.
Why is Marvel shady? Because they produce and market films that a lot of people enjoy?
I mean personally I mostly enjoyed Marvel until they started multiverse crap. And they made way too many TV shows that were all terrible. So I stopped watching.
The mods who run Reddit are the absolute worst part of it. I was banned permanently for making a negative review about a Marvel movie in the movies sub. The moderators are insanely biased and abuse their power. I think long-term Reddit can't grow because the more you participate in the website, you see how deeply artificial and astroturfed it all is.
Not all Marvel films are slop. But, as a fan who comes from a family of fans and someone who has watched almost all of them; lets be real. That particular film, really and most of them, contain copious amounts of what is absolutely slop.
I don't know if the utility is worse than an LLM that is SOTA for 2 months that no one even bothers switching to however - at least the marvel slop is being used for entertainment by someone. I think the market is definitely prioritizing the LLM researcher over Disney's latest slop sequel though so whoever made that comparison can rest easy, because we'll find out.
Not only are Marvel movies slop, they are very concentrated slop. The only way to increase the concentration of slop in a Marvel movie would be to ask ChatGPT to write the next one.
I think you misunderstand the nature of art. You say that creation is merely reworking past ideas. That might be true if art were mere decoration or a formal game of manipulating symbols according to rules. But the true purpose of art is to communicate human experience, which always varies from individual to individual and from one historical period to the next. Humans are always having new experiences and having new thoughts and emotions about those experiences. High-quality art seeks to say something new, original, and specific to the artist's perspective, the culture of the moment, and the deepest concerns of the audience. LLMs can't develop any of that -- AI doesn't have real experiences to reflect on and has no desire to communicate.
Obviously, I'm talking about art at its highest level -- the average Marvel movie does not have such lofty goals, and I have no doubt a machine can reproduce all the same tired tropes of a Marvel movie. If all you're familiar with is derivative pop culture, I can see how one might think that AI can do just as well. But I don't think anyone who has ever had a profound engagement with a work of art would agree.
I am sure there will be an explosion of AI-generated content in the coming months, but I suspect this will inadvertently advance everyone's aesthetic education. More and more people will be disappointed by AI-generated "art," and I think they'll start to appreciate genuine human creativity more.
It's possible the product he offers is precisely this; he throws things together randomly, carefully avoiding anything making sense, effectively making interesting noise, so that higher IQ people (i.e. vs a marvel movie) with time to kill can indulge in the leisure of trying to make sense of it.
It's interesting, if a car company is bought then they keep churning out cars (usually), if a software company is bought it's often broken. Software dev is a fragile thing relying on a network of talented individuals which is very easily broken by accountants and bottom lines. In some ways it's more like movie companies with networks of creatives that can be damaged by a takeover - Disney/Marvel immediately comes to mind.
There's a certain breed of neoliberal commenter that seems to believe that the West is financially and militarily invincible, and can simply spend any colossal amounts of money it wants to wipe strategic opponents from the map at will. I think in many cases it comes from watching too many Marvel movies.
I never said generative AI was itself capable of creativity. Generative AI is a tool, not an entity. I said it enables more people to be creative, in the same way that other tools like Photoshop enable more people to be creative. Using a sampler to create a song rather than arranging and playing all the instruments doesn’t make it less creative, or devoid of creativity. It’s just a different, more accessible form of expression, enabled by technology.
I agree that generative AI, due to its nature, trends toward the average and thus is incapable of engaging with the extremes of human experience—but not every creative expression has to be at the extreme. Every Marvel film, every shovelware game, every summer pop jam, panders to the average. There’s enormous value in having a tool that allows professional artists to work more quickly at the average—and, perhaps more critically, for everyday people to approach the average in the first place. I don’t believe it is fair to suggest that such things are valueless “not ART”, but I’m not definitely not here to engage in philosophical discussion of the definition of “art”.
As far as history goes, I did provide a citation, which I encourage you to actually look at (and it cites several dozen more books and other articles if you need more primary sources). You are objectively incorrect in your assertion that the phonograph facilitated the growth of live music(ians), but I suspect you may not even understand what is meant by “live musicians”—not because of you, but because the phonograph was so revolutionary that it fundamentally changed what it meant to be a musician—and even redefined what a “song” is[0].
It is only with the benefit of hindsight that you can state so confidently that audio recording is a net benefit to music. Many felt that the phonograph was an abomination at its conception. They claimed that the essence of music was in its ephemeral nature, that the uniqueness of each performance contained the creative expression and the sheet music itself was just a skeleton for creativity. They said mechanical recordings deprived listeners of the true experience, and that individual artists lost their autonomy. They spoke in terms exactly like you are now, and those ideas were wrong then, and they are almost certainly wrong now.
I can definitely see Netflix having four or five rows of AI movies above a ghetto section of "human-made" films. I already have to skip all the Marvel garbage. I mean, it's free to watch Twitch.
> Wringing the life is a pretty mean way to put it. They tried to use the IP to make money.
Mean or not, I'd say it's also accurate. They tried to use the IP to make money... by wringing the life out of it. There are so many Marvel/Star Wars movies/tv shows now you need a freaking spreadsheet to keep track.
You moved the subject, not everybody cares about 'quality' of movies like movie buffs (like me) do.
Marvel is popcorn fun, sometimes better, sometimes worse. These are not even planned as some art-aspiring movies, so as long as expectations are managed everybody is fine, earnings at least says so and if you don't like whole genre then simply skip them.
Actually, snobbish bashing of Marvel became such a cheap 'look at me' desperate attention grab attempt of teenagers that I don't take it seriously. In same vein as globalization protesters focus on McDonald for some reason. You have endless line of say family movies that are absolute nauseating crap from cinematography, storytelling, character development etc., among other fails of hollywood, anybody wanting to be actually taken serious would start with those 'gems'.
Then a competitor might hire all of them. If you're in the AI business you don't want that. You want to grab either all of them or balkanize them. Come on, this isn't a hard concept to grasp.
> And in the scenario where they actually think they're mad ... the script of a Marvel film
Then you hire them on a 5 year exclusive contract so they can't rejoin Hydra.
> It makes you look like the mad one
It's normal human writing style, hyperbole, sarcasm, exaggeration, wit, irony, you know. Adult writing, for adults to consume.
It's not that unpopular - I see it a lot on FB and Twitter. People really dislike modern media. Zoomers in particular watch and listen to a ton of older stuff.
With a few exceptions, movies are terribly written these days. A lot of people think the issue is "wokeness", but that's just part of it - everything is slapped together poorly. The quips, the one liners, the new archetypes, all pales to how fucking horrible dialog has become. Shoehorning in an Indian and a Chinese guy to appeal to those markets? Fuckit, add a talking dog.
Watch TV from the 90s and aughts. It's much funnier, dialog is tighter, there's subplots and overarching plots and character growth.
You know what is good? You know what doesn't have a writers room? Low-end YouTube channels, which have completely replaced TV for the actual working class. Watch TFL Truck - it's funny, human, they mess up a lot, and it's a good time. Then watch a Marvel shitfest. Repeat with streamers, with review channels, etc.
> I think you are misunderstanding what happens with the current image generation stuff out there. You give it text, it gives you something that might look plausible for what you described. It ends up full of artifacts and temporally extremely unstable.
Have you used ComfyUI with inpainting? From what you're saying, I don't believe you have, or perhaps the last time you used image generation was with Midjourney or another "type in text and get an output" tool. In reality, the field has evolved to contain entire workflows such that you can get something with no artifacts, it just takes time and effort, as with other sorts of art too.
> CGI in movies takes an extreme amount of labor and every shot out of the hundreds of thousands that go in to a film are very exacting, being directed to a detail level that people can't notice while watching a movie in real time.
Oh they can notice alright, Corridor Digital on YouTube has videos of them reacting to bad CGI. Even in discussions online I see people complaining about bad CGI, especially in Marvel media. But my point is that those films still make billions of dollars, so at some point most people simply don't care and will watch it anyway.
> *Your comment basically boils down to "what if it gets good enough, then it will be good enough". [...] Show me something where you can keep typing in text to change the image, move the lights, move the camera and have it be temporally stable.
Well, yes, that is my point, that when it gets good enough, kids will be making blockbusters in their bedrooms. I'm not a future seer though so it's not like I can give you an exact timeline, but based off what I know of the field, it's trending towards that. You could say it's incremental progress, but again, at some point it'll be good enough that most people looking won't care about artifacts, just like bad CGI as above. If you want a fully temporally coherent image when moving a virtual camera around, wait a few years.
Consider, thoroughly, the hypothetical lottery jackpot. What is it you would choose to do, pursue, aim for, if money were no object and you had nothing except your inner volition to drive you. Would you spend your days reading, exploring philosophy and knowledge? Or would you travel and see the world you've yet to traverse? Maybe you're an individual striving toward community and you want to focus on family, friendship, charity. Maybe a bit of everything?
Design, intentionally, the dream you would live if you could. My friend often responds cynically, saying if he is asked about his dream job he would be a space explorer like some Marvel movie. I hear him as flippant and he's clear he thinks it's a dumb idealistic pontificating exercise. . I go toward the path of okay, what would it take to BE that thing or pursue it...
If you can visualize and reason your way to how something might happen, you can reverse engineer it. You can think of it like chess. Position yourself with strength, understand openings midgame and endgame, but know there are many, many, undiscovered lines left in many positions. Now expand from 64,64 squares and so many moves to the infinite variability in Life. You have levers and positions you can exploit and transpose.
Circumstances will always have a hand as will pure luck, fate, or Higher Power, but... you have immense power to craft your reality and I mean this in no woo terms. You change your thoughts, your words, your actions and most crucially, your influence and environment.
This isn't how the games industry works for games at thia scale (or any other media). They are events. Millions of people having the same experience at the same time and having a common cultural touch point.
The 100s of clones would be more like fanfic. A set of people would get very into them, search out the good ones (perhaps better than the original), or revel in the terrible ones. But then the whole community still comes together to watch the latest marvel film anyway.
The main effect would be to build and maintain the community for the next commercial version.
Sure, I agree it would be exceptional and isn't particularly realistic. I just think that it is more legally and culturally acceptable in the US then forcing one company to pay another company for a good that they aren't the consumer of and they don't want to partner with. It's like forcing coffee shops to pay Disney because people exercise their free speech and discuss Marvel movies under their roof. It's actually worth cuz this bill would do the equivalent of banning coffee shops rules against discussing Marvel movies too.
The whole topic is absurd given legislative inaction on paywall bypass tools and archive sites, which blatantly steal copyrighted content.
> Is it really that hard to understand why people don't get the hype around a Jackson Pollock or Voice of Fire?
It kinda is. In the sense that no one is confused if you say you do not Understand the 400th Marvel movie without seeing the previous ones, but art, which largely exists as a conversation with the movements that happened before it, is somehow expected to be understood without context. And mocked if not easily digestible.
It is why artists like Banksy, who in my opinion offer little to nothing, cause a big stir. You do not need to understand what was happening in the art world in the 2000s to get Banksy, a instagram photo does all the work you need.
The Great Wave off Kanagawa is now considered a japanese masterpiece, but in reality is heavily influenced by Dutch landscapes and Japan at the time considered it almost foreign art. As if some european now did anime. The conversation and circumstance of that print gives it a lot of nuance, and makes it infinitely more interesting than just the wave and Fuji in the background. Similarly Pollock, as pretentious as he was, lived in an interesting time when even math and physics where shaking their conceptual underpinnings. The time they lived in was a mess, that experience, put to canvas as a rejection of Easel and figurative painting and making the process and important part of the actual finished product is interesting almost in itself, beyond the painting.
Think how many artists now show "behind the scenes" of their work, bringing people closer to the work. From Guillermo del Toro showing his monsters, to actors doing live chats, to artists publishing their doodles and sketches. Pollocks work was an attempt to merge that with the piece itself, make the action of painting it as obvious as possible, compared to art movements like the European French Academy that would knock you points if the brush strokes where visible. Their attempt at perfet painting, make the artist invisible and the subjects "greater than men", all angels and stuff is almost diametrically opposed to Pollock, that wants you to almost see where he tripped, where he was soft and where he just slammed the brush.
Sorry for the rant, just think that it is such a shame, with how interesting art can be that people reject it out of, what looks to me, just not putting the minimum amount of effort to learn about it.
Because some people grew up poor and without much access to content. Then they learned about this thing in the 90’s called the internet where you can share information with anyone for free.
So said poor person learned programming and other skills to get a tracker working so that they could give back to others who are in the same boat.
This way the poor kid (who’s family can’t afford lunch, let alone a 10€ /month Disney + subscription) can chat with their rich friends at the lunch table about the latest marvel film the week it releases and god forbid, fit in for once.
Humans also invent to make hard things easier. Glorifying toil has worked fantastically as a ranking mechanism for society so far but it is surely going to fail going forward, so too indirect democracy.
I suspect a lot of art lovers like not knowing that an artist's work has very exact beginnings and egoistic motivations al a marvel movies. Rather prefer the altruistic mystery that muses were involved curating the work out of nothing for the enjoyment of all. Maybe when you know the AI has exact origins it ruins the illusion of art for you because maybe deep down you liked to be tricked by human creativity.
Are you only going to watch certified AI/CGI free movies going forward?
Art is about more than just imitation. It’s about the meaning behind the work. I am not talking about Marvel movies, which might as well be totally AI-generated at this point.
I would suggest having some empathy for those affected. It’s not just gatekeeping, it’s people reacting to being told that the meaning they put into what they make doesn’t actually add any value.
In the Human Condition, Hannah Arendt outlines three parts of the Vita Activa. The first is labour, at the bottom of the pyramid. It is by definition consumable and has limited meaning in itself. The second is work, through which we build a world (i.e. something bigger than just the cyclical and physical properties of the ecosystem). The third is action, or politics, which ripples through the world and inspires linear change. Put together, these three parts make up what it is to be a living human. Giving meaning-making away, by replacing it with mere imitation, is tantamount to revoking those qualities which make us human.
High culture, like theatre, classical music, architecture - sure,thats one line of thought here. There are isolated examples that exist, supported by patronage, but that's not entirely what I meant.
If we look to the mainstream,the movies,music etc are all commercial. There's a reason a studio would rather make another Marvel movie than something more meaningful. That's not to say that -only- Marvel movies are made, and they are very entertaining, but the -reason- they are made at all us economic.
For software we celebrate money-raised, MRR, user numbers and engagement. We dont celebrate programs for their life-impact. We don't celebrate the software used yo design the James Webb telescope. Or the software in an MRI machine. We don't throw VC levels of funding at prosthetics, things that have value beyond just ygr monetary, even more so when the monetary value is near-nil, just like the IA.
I say all this not to change it, at a fundamental level it can't be changed, bug rather to understand it.
Investments into IP franchises like Star Wars and Marvel will diminish as children are able to generate their own ideas and universes on the fly. At scale, millions at a time.
Content houses will lose to content production tech.
Forget owning the rights to "The Office" when people can generate their own "The Office" content (memes, then episodes). And when the lawyer cats come clawing, it'll transform into "The Water Cooler" starring Jimmy Carrel and take place on Mars instead.
The value of content and ideas will become zero. The tools and distribution matter.
Oh, this is something I've been wondering about - I've had a 4K TV for years, but I don't think I've ever seen a 4K Bluray (I don't think I even know anyone who had a Bluray player).
Are you saying that streaming a movie (say a recent Marvel one) in 4K from Disney Plus will look noticeably less good than if I played the same movie from a Bluray player?
> One recent man had a lot going for him. In fact he was the most promising prospect I’d had in some time. But then he mentioned that he got his daily coffee from Starbucks, and I found it hard to imagine dating someone who liked Starbucks coffee; or even if they liked the coffee, didn’t find Starbucks so odious and soul-diminishingly ubiquitous they would never go there. I judged this a stupid reason to stop messaging him, given his other, surely more important qualities, so I continued messaging him. But then he said he mostly watched Marvel movies, and the combination of Starbucks and Marvel was too much, so I stopped messaging him, even though I judged my own judgment in this case to be ridiculously shallow and flimsy. If he hadn’t been American, I might have excused it or interpreted it differently. Or if I had met him in another context, his consumer tastes might have barely figured in my estimation of him. But he was just an overeducated, emotionally available American, with many winsome attributes and poor taste in coffee and movies; I myself didn’t even understand why I lost interest in him, and recognized it was a bug in my programming, rather than anything to do with him. Or perhaps, the obvious ominous thought goes, it wasn’t a bug but an actual feature of the programming—not mine, but the app’s.
Clearly she puts in effort by going to dates. But she’s not developing her own psychology enough. She had to fight this tooth and nail and gone on a few more dated with him. Her issue is that she thinks she can predict what a relationship will be like with him and that Marvel and Starbucks would be too bad as an experience.
More gratitude needed, more optimism needed
Dating apps aren’t the problem it’s her mindset.
Note: I go on dates 1.5 times per week myself, on average. I’m having a blast. I’m no casanova, in most cases it ends in the friendzone. I recently met one person though that might be something more and she lives on another continent. It helps that I am a digital nomad.
But yea, lots of effort but not in the right place.
The original DVD-only Netflix was amazing - it expanded my horizons, I started watching entire catalogs of French, Serbian directors, and not very popular but deep films of both U.S. and non-U.S. origin. It's not the DVDs - it's their matching engine. You wrote reviews, 1-5 stars, you could type in reviews (which I loved doing), and the matching engine was suggesting stuff and it was AMAZING.
When streaming came online, I was excited.
Everything since is a blur. All I know is, now, I spend 10 minutes scrolling stuff that is not even remotely a match for me - you don't need to be Pappa Google to know I won't like Marvel or various woke-y movies. I have esoteric tastes, but more importantly I want to discover more.
But the entire 'Silicon Valley content' culture appears to be: get stuff TO the customer, don't let the customer get stuff on their own. Which, if you recall, television used to be. Broadcast television you had to wait til 8pm for your show, and sit through endless commercials every 8 or 10 minutes. Then there was a solution: Remember TiVo?
HBO isn't any better, it just has better content. I was looking for "Stand-up comedy" and I couldn't really get that as a category, just UNSORTABLE search results. So stuff from years ago is mixed in with stuff that is recent. God forbid I look for RECENT stand-up comedy.
It's pathetic and it's a "conspiracy" in the sense that it's clearly intentional: it's a disempowering of the consumer with some vague promise of customization, AI, so forth and so on.
Marvel seems like it'd be even worse since A) the storylines all intertwine, so you feel like you have "homework" to watch before seeing the latest one, and B) they're all pretty much superhero movies.
With Star Wars, creators can ignore the tired Skywalker storyline, plus there's no genre expectations tying creators down (IMO sci-fi is not a genre so much as a meta-genre or motif). At least in theory--they've been pretty reluctant to spread their wings until recently.
Even if you are, there's the chance that the glut of the content coming out causes fatigue. I used to really look forward to new Star Wars things because it didn't come out super frequently (a new trilogy of movies every few decades, a TV show here and there), but it was enjoyable. Then they started coming out with a new movie and multiple TV shows year after year, and it just wasn't good enough to justify going out of my way to consume all of it. Marvel stuff seems the same way; I'd generally go to the movies maybe once or twice a year, so when there are half a dozen of them coming out for a single franchise within a year or two, it feels more like work than entertainment to keep up with it all. At this point, I'm not sure I'll _ever_ go to see a Star Wars movie in a theater again, which is extraordinary since even 5 or 6 years ago that would have seemed ludicrous to me.
Yeah I think there’s a big Marvel and Star Wars fatigue factor that isn’t talked about enough. Only the hardest of the hardcore fans can keep up with all that stuff. Regular people and casual fans pretty much only see the big blockbuster movies and maybe watch the Mandalorian to see what all the baby Yoda memes are all about.
Having lived in Japan for 10 years with my 11th coming up I have some perspective. I have seen almost every single marvel film that came to theaters here and it was always a packed house. However, I think the fact that the pandemic has scared people away from movie theaters has something to do with it. That, as well as, the fact more and more films have been released only via streaming here (I didn't even see it advertised as being available to watch at the theater). For me it is hard to get interested in a film that I couldn't have enjoyed in the theater and have to settle for the streamed version that I only knew about because of some ad I saw on YouTube or a google search. Plus, I think there is still the fact that movies have gotten more and more cookie-cutter to appeal to everyone with the obvious chain of development. When everything tastes the same and nothing sticks out, why would I care for it except to say I watched it?
I'm not sure what this was supposed to prove. I said the Marvel movies do well, meaning they do well at the box office. I also said that there are great movies that use CGI explosions. I did *not* say that the Marvel movies are great. They most decidedly are not IMO. You don't have to go all Chris Nolan and blow things up for real to make a good movie. Although I do like a real explosion :)
Well, unfortunately the major VFX houses today are not unionized. There used to be some, but Marvel opened the floodgates to contracting out major VFK work to non-union companies.
I imagine this will be added to the list of grievances animators historically have had with the lack of union protections in recent years, and used as a negotiation chip in the next round of strikes. After all, union films and tv shows cannot use non-union actors or crews in most cases. I imagine there will be a similar rule made that union productions cannot work with non-union vfx agencies, eventually.
This. The trend has already started, tech like this will (eventually) accelerate the transition.
People don't go to movies to see movie stars anymore. They go to see Marvel characters. [1]
I think we're at the bookend of a transitional era for movies (and for many other things). Transition started with Napster, iPod, Netflix, etc. and ended with the "mainstreamization" of Marvel. Traditional movies are dead, what's left is something that really doesn't look anything like the movie industry I grew up with. Like other art forms (opera, theater, orchestras, etc) traditional movie story telling just isn't where it's at any more, the "masses" have moved on. The industry used to be full of passionate creative types. Now it's full of people working their butts off to get their name somewhere in the 20 minutes of credits at the end of a film, for the prestige of being able to tell their friends they work in the industry. It's a self-sustaining business at this point, full of nepotism, cronyism, and people happy just to stay employed doing whatever it is they do (digital work, setting up lights, renting equipment, managing the logistics).
I've asked my cinemaphile friends if they can name a big up and coming director? Who is the next Tarantino? No one has any real answer. At best I get JJ Abrams, who (at 56) is on the tail end of his career, and if anything he's a symptom of the problem (mom and dad worked in the business). It's a group of insiders churning out jobs for their kids and a steady stream of income. Hollywood is nothing more than a brand now.
Whatever the "future" is, it's here. More Marvel, less relevance.
If they were serious about improving Reddit, they’d fire all the mods who are usually weirdos who treat their subreddits as their own personal fiefdoms and seems like they are also selling their influence over posts to corporations. If you talk negatively about Marvel in /r/movies you can be banned. The capriciousness of the mods is what kills the experience.
It makes you feel better I don’t get short form videos either. The content is, well, mostly devoid of content. But I at least conceptually understand how it might be entertaining in the same way I somewhat understand how people find Marvel movies entertaining.
A corporation making that investment wants to own all of the brand IP it creates for that money. It isn’t looking to share that value with creators altruistically which would just give the creators more bargaining power next iteration.
Similar logic in movies. Studios want to own franchises like Marvel where the value is more in the studio owned brand IP than any specific actors or directors.
Yes, that would be obnoxious ... if that's what they said :)
To be clear, I don't like it either if others consider their taste to be 'superior', but simply stating what you prefer is not - I think - implying anything.
I feel like there's a trap people fall into where they tie some of their self-worth to their entertainment choices. If you don't like the music (say) that I do, then that seems like no big deal to me.
More generally, there is the opposite situation to being a 'superfan' where people delight in putting stuff down. Ultimately if you don't like (say) Marvel movies, then just don't watch them, of course. However it's reasonable to be critical of any entertainment or art form if you can articulate why and how they could be better.
I'm not a fan of our (US + NATO) current Ukraine policy, but that isn't because I'm an isolationist. I think it's just dumb policy, on several different dimensions. The version of the criticism you're leveling right now can be inverted very easily. That the people arguing for escalation in Ukraine, that it's "the exact same thing [that] happened in 1938" (it isn't), and that unless we do things like a NFZ it leads to a larger war, have a cartoon version in their heads of war and geopolitical strategy. Where there's clear boundaries between the "good guys" and "bad guys", like this is some Marvel film where you don't really even need to watch it to know what happens (spoiler alert: the good guys win!). Perhaps they are the ones who have something, and some history, to chew on.
We also need more "public service" announcements - and not the 30 second boring ads, but actual plot points in movies and TV be centered around these common scams. If (I have no idea what's popular now, but let's say Marvel) a movie had a crypto scam as a central point, it would educate people way more than any number of government warnings.
I wouldn't at this point. I was limited to TV when I was a kid (1 hour per day, in bed by 8 pm). I didn't miss it. Part of why it was easy to wean myself off of broadcast radio, tv and cable so easily - haven't watched an MSM TV since 2010 and got off of broadcast radio in the 1990s.
I was also never allowed anything but G movies until I was 13 when my father "escorted" me to my first PG film. I didn't see an R film until my senior year of high school.
My mother also didn't allow comic books so I haven't missed the movies from Marvel or DC either nor have I ever cared about their woke destruction - never was invested and still am not.
Lately I've been considering going back to a "dumb phone" because I really don't use 90% of it - not beyond being a phone and MP3 player. I don't do social media (no FB, Twitter, et al.) because they always seemed as stupid as MSM TV only far worse.
My friend is having his first kid and it will be zero internet, zero smart phones, zero MSM TV or cable he tells me. His wife is 100% in agreement.
Twitter has the highest signal/noise ratio of any social media platform, for me. I've curated it so 1) I don't follow people I know in real life so I don't have to deal with their completely different ways of using Twitter 2) I follow mostly historians, cinephiles, and art accounts 3) I pay for the Twitter Premium service so I can rearrange the UI so as to make it hard to reach the wasteful and noisy "explore" page. I get a stream of illuminating long threads about history, tidbits about films from now and the past, and tons of art from all sorts of time periods. I also block words for topics I don't care for any more such as "Marvel" or garious political figures.
My Twitter posts are just quotes that I post mostly for myself, for the future. The hardly get any likes and I don't care if they do. People-pleasing is a dirty and dangerous business.
If I could get rid of the explore page, I suspect my Instagram would be similar too. I mute most people I know in real life except for a few treasured friends who post fun, wholesome things, who aren't trying to show off or induce fomo. My actual feed is more photographers or people who share art/design stuff. So that's all good stuff.
You might not want to, but not everyone has the luxury of a nice home theater setup. Some people only have access to quality screens and audio at a local theater.
One of my primary preferences for watching movies in a theater is my engagement while watching. When I'm at home, I can too easily become distracted. Setting aside time in my schedule and being in a different environment helps me to focus and appreciate more details.
Also, if you're in a metropolitan area with access to an art-house theater, the types of films shown is often far more eclectic than current blockbusters. They can include showing of rare 35mm/70mm prints, short films from movie festivals, foreign films that tend to get limited releases in the US, re-releases of older classics. There's a lot of content that can be very difficult, even impossible, to find on streaming services. Those types of cinemas also tend to have much more respectful audiences, making the experience enjoyable to everyone there.
One of my local theaters offers film classes which entails showing a series of films, once per week, with group discussions held after the showing. Finding other movie aficionados and getting to engage in discourse is a great way of getting more from a movie watching experience. Not everyone has social groups which want to watch films in the same way. Many of my friends are happy to hang out and watch the latest Marvel release, but generally have no interest in watching anything released from the 70s or earlier.
While I think the article is something to consider -- this could be because I'm reading David Mamet stuff just because -- I think a lot of this falls away if you have a good story which perhaps matter more than whatever CGI or not you're using.
E.g. I personally find myself dissatisfied with a lot of Marvel, probably because most of the movies are "cocky guy gets taken down a peg by someone who's kind of in the family and kind of not, but definitely wins in the end anyway."
You've convinced me. We need to open up. It's critical for people's mental health that people need to see marvel movies in theatre unmasked. dead bodies be damned.
If it were true that complex games were inherently, objectively better we would only see more and more complex games. We don't, and major hobby game producers are constantly putting out low complexity games because, spoilers, some people are playing games to goof around and have fun!
It's just like any other form of entertainment. Think about genre movies. What makes more money, the latest giant Marvel/Disney zip bang popcorn flick, or the deep and complex Oscar Favorite? Why is the Marvel movie making all the money but not winning Best Picture? Why don't complex, difficult stories consistently pull in Marvel level money?
Value is always in the eye of the end user/consumer.
Netflix has produced some good movies in recent years. Your big budget talk applies much more to disney marvel money milking the same cows with the same movie variation over and over and consistently riding the remake agenda of all their classics (which I liked tbh).
While obviously Netflix has a lot to loose here, it don’t think it’s “their fault” for dumping AAA content. The reality is that every content producer on the planet knows they’ll make more money selling their own subscription platform. Netflix can’t continue to get Marvel movies, for example, now that Disney has pulled the plug. There’s not any amount of cash Netflix could afford to pay which would be enough for The Mouse to take content off of Disney+.
This is the same for every studio out there — well-loved shows like The Office, Brooklyn 99, Parks & Rec, etc. are getting taken back by their owners. Dozens of new streaming services are appearing.
In reality, there’s not much Netflix can do about it besides double down on original content.
I think an ideal future for consumers would be federated media platforms, where all content is available in any number of media platforms, and the amount you pay is passed back to the content owners based on what you watch. But I doubt that will ever happen under current IP laws.
In capitalism, profit wins. Right now, streaming services are essentially pure profit and make money because content owners have exclusive access to their own content — who would pay for Disney+ if all of their content was available elsewhere?
> Why aren't Apple's shows (and movies?) appealing to you?
What actual content do they have?
I've seen a Beastie boys doc, Ted Lasso and The morning show * edited from Newsroom when my error was pointed out.
That's a month's worth of content. What else do they have to justify continuing a subscription?
Disney has more content with just the Simpson's episodes alone. Add on top of that the entire Marvel catalog, the entire Starwars Catalog and the entire Pixar catalog.
> The reason for that choice is simple: This is one of the first big-budget movies ever shot primarily on a digital camera, and the digital cameras of the time worked great in low-light environments but also tended to flatten the entire image in a way that more or less tugged the entire picture toward the darkest pixels within it.
I am not certain that the discussion of "Collateral" is accurate. The writer is considering the movie through the presupposition that Michael Mann was attempting to match a color grading style that could only be achieved years in the future, when Mann is more on record saying that he chose digital cameras specifically for the look that was realized in the movie. I think a case would be better made that a new style was then turned to an extreme. I also think that the colors of the costumes seem more in line with what the characters were supposed to represent in the film than with a supposed style of color grading that was being attempted.
https://filmschoolrejects.com/michael-mann-collateral-commentary/
> 28. He points out several shots in Collateral that wouldn’t have been possible on 35mm film including the one at 1:38:37 — a closeup of Vincent in the office that shifts focus to reveal Max on the parking garage rooftop across the street. “Max would either be not exposed at all, and/or he would not be able to carry the focus.”
https://uproxx.com/hitfix/on-the-digital-legacy-of-michael-manns-collateral-nearly-10-years-later/
> “We have seen an emergence of what I think is a digital aesthetic. It's a beautiful aesthetic, and it plays to the strength of that medium, which is the very open bottom of the curve. It can look into shadows; it's got an amazing range. Digital gives us the ability to work from a base of ambient light, essentially. Because of that, you tend to light in a very different way. And I do think 'Collateral' helped launch that because it played to the strengths of the format. We never set out to replicate a film look, but rather to discover a digital one…Film has a unique texture and tone, and digital has its own unique texture and tone. It would be a sad day if we lost the ability to choose between them.”
I don't see the same flatness in Collateral as I do in Marvel.
If you find this stuff interesting, I recommend watching Cryptozoo[1]. I wouldn't call it a masterpiece, but it's definitely a more interesting film than whatever latest Marvel release happens to be making the rounds.
I'm about to cancel my Netflix (Canada) I find myself going to it scrolling around and leaving finding nothing interesting. On top of that like most streaming services shows I like take nearly 2 years for the next episode to be made. And it's only eight shows for a "season". By that time I've lost interest in any of the shows.
I have been watching more Amazon Prime lately. It seems to have older shows that I find more interesting plus some new ones I like too, but the same thing of 18 to 24 months for season 2 of eight shows. But this paying to rent inside a streaming service you are already paying for is incredibly stupid.
Disney+ was so easy, I accidentally signed up it! For one month at $1.99 then jumps to $11.99. Worth it I watched Free Guy which Amazon wanted $25 to rent while paying for Amazon Prime already. now I'm going through all the Star Wars and Marvel movies and shows.
I tried to sign up for Apple TV holy what a mess. I have an Apple ID, I had a Mac but it died. Try to sign into my AppleID and my password is rejected. Try to recover my password "check your Mac" no, it died. Use your new Apple device, nope. Use someone's iPhone, no again. Make a new apple ID, nope my gmail is already in use. Recover? Text is sent (Samsung phone) but the recovery page kicked me off when I read the text. Finally got it to work and was told 7 days to recover. Got an email and was told 14 it's days to recover my AppleID password. So Nov 27 I may make some progress.
> I think CGI is coming up on "effectively perfect"
Then why does it still look ... like CGI? I've seen several of the biggest budget productions from recent years, and it seems to me like CGI is not getting any better. Take buildings with debris destroyed in recent Marvel movies for example, or almost any scene in the last film in Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy, or even Dune, which I just saw in theaters. The CGI sandworms look like CGI.
> especially with the way it has gone from a post-production thing to becoming part of the world around the actors
I can agree with you on this point. The good / unnoticeable uses of CGI are to add background details around the actors, not replace action / stunts, and use as few digital models as possible (the models are still the weak point). Mad Max: Fury Road was the one film where I'd say the CGI approximates "perfection".
There is certainly wisdom distilled into the texts, they've made it this far. I found the bit about fasting particularly interesting, because its now being studied and proven to be therapeutic, and is mentioned and practiced often in both western and eastern religions.
Funny that you mentioned population control, one could consider science a popular religion of today ;) As you said, not all religions get along.
That, and marvel is the new greek mythology, they'll unfortunately be watching those movies a thousand years from now in history class and thinking we were idiots.
Isn't that the basis of the economy with the increasing wealth gap and so on? It's not really materially different to paying Disney millionaires to go watch the latest Marvel movie.
> The question is cogent, concise, and valid -- if you're a movie maker (motivated by money/fame/whatever) why would you try to contend with complex and difficult material if you could instead, as they author asks, more easily rake in billions by having two asexual fictional character punch aliens.
I guess my confusion is stemmed from the fact that I don't think sex scenes are inherently more complex and difficult than alien punching. Perhaps more difficult to sell due to ratings, but that's a given.
I'm not endorsing the way Marvel is making movies; I think it's quite formulaic and intellectually lazy. But on the other hand, sex can easily be just as formulaic and lazy. My opinion is that Marvel didn't include sex in their movies simply because PG-13 has a bigger market and makes more money. If sex would sell better, they'll put sex in there with very little effort, and it wouldn't make those movies any less formulaic.
Of course, I'm anything but a movie expert; sex might really be more difficult to contend with, but the author hardly provided any explanation to support this claim, and thus I remain unpersuaded.
---
And as a Chinese person, I'd suggest that Marvel is successful in China, because as formulaic as it is, it simply produces far better movie than current mainstream Chinese movies in almost every aspect. Chinese film making (mainstream) has been pacing backwards for at least the last decade.
The problem, in all cases, remains the long standing oligarch families and aristocratically rooted institutions, and their captive “public service” institutions, some of which are global in scope. Not wishing to engender a flaming thread, I will simply state that certain aspects of “institutional capture” are very much du jour topics of global interest and impact.
A global reset of “free markets” via a ‘day zero of capital accumulations’ could provide a solution. Many of the established capital hordes are legacies of activities that are now understood to be anti-social at best, and predatory at the extreme.
Coupled with this, we need pedagogical guidance to inform the new generations who are not to manor born. Almost none of the new blood born to middle or lower classes are educated in the necessities of generational wealth preservation and applications of wealth towards affecting societal outcomes. At best, we have children of Marxists and pseudo-Marxists railing against “Capital” without understanding the dynamics of societal power based on multi-generational societal networks, which transcend mere capital.
Primary sources working against such a program are precisely the “entertainment” complexes owned stock, lock, and barrel by informed and purposive societal networks, which at this point in human history have fully transcended ethnic and national boundaries, and clearly aim for stupefying the masses. There is a reason you have been treated to 2 decades of Marvel comics in films.
Businesses shouldn't care about business they should only care about my own personal view point on politics.
Yeah, Hollywood is doing the same thing as Kodak. I don't have your will power though. I still watch movies, especially Marvel and Disney. But at least I admit it.
What pisses me off is a friend of mine who boycotted a company who supported China but then he still watches American movies. Like do you not realize the whole industry is sucking up to China? Either make a stand for real or don't make a stand at all, don't be a hypocrite.
*Obviously* you're not doing what my friend is doing. You're *Obviously* not a hypocrite. You must not watch any movies or TV shows at all.
>>A non-stop stream of terrible Marvel movies and TV shows
I'm always surprised when people have such a visceral reaction to anything. There's what, 20? 30? Proper big marvel movies now - are they all terrible? I literally can't believe that - yes, they are not high cinema, but there is enough variety there that surely you can't describe all of them as terrible. Unless I don't know, you just hate marvel and all their characters?
Maybe comic books didn't lead to delinquency but they sure led to something far worse. A non-stop stream of terrible Marvel movies and TV shows that seem to be mandatory viewing for everyone if you wanna be able to have a conversation with people nowadays
It depends on what you are watching. I like Asian and European cinema and shows. For me most of American/Hollywood stuff is third rate junk, including Marvel and american Comics stuff and in seldom occasions I want to watch it, I get it easier from VPN/P*bay than to subscribe to a lot of different services. If they will make me jump through hoops, I will return to the VPN/P. method.
don't know if OP is referring specifically to some anime or anime in general but the 3 of the top 5 grossing films in japan are animes and animation is a fully developed medium for story telling of all ages.
if native japanese don't know about kimetsu i guess it's the same way my parents have definitely not watched a single marvel film, and i'm not sure if they are even aware of their existence.
Social lives aren't unpredictable. They're almost comically predictable as time goes on.
Everyone in a group falls into patterns, roles. The same jokes get told, or variations there-of. You do the same thing every year. BBQ for Bob's birthday. Jill hosts a cheese/wine night a couple of times over winter. The geekier sub-group all gather to watch the first few episodes of the new marvel series. Everyone gets together for a picnic in woolaton park on the first or second sunny weekend of sunmer.
Occasionally something new gets thrown in, and if everyone likes it, it becomes the 'new' regular thing. Or something gets dropped due to changes in life or circumstances. No more games nights till 2am now 80% of my male friends have kids. No more Saturday night clubbing in the cookie club after we left our 20s.
If you want to keep doing unpredictable things, you really have to meet someone who's extremely hyper/exhausting, or keep joing new social groups (by meetups, etc.). And of course, they become predictable too, by their very nature being a scheduled meetup about a specific thing.
And it's worth it. Personally I feel the best experience in life is laughing so hard you end up crying while chatting with your friends.
IANAL but I don't think Apple is liable in this case. It sounds just like websites not being responsible for user created content. They do have to remove illegal content, and must have means to report and act on it, but you can't e.g. sue hackernews because someone posts a torrent of a Marvel movie.
1. The attention and adulation is your drug. I think there's no shortage of people who fall into this category.
2. To convert that fame into opportunities you wouldn't otherwise have; and
3. To convert that fame into money.
Obviously if you're just plain rich then (3) is moot. If you fall into (1) then money can buy you fame to a degree.
So that leaves (2). Wealth will give you many opportunities fame will but certainly not all. Or at least the costs to replicate that are truly ludicrous, like being a star in a Marvel movie, spending a year on the ISS, going to the Moon, that sort of thing.
The way I see it the downsides of fame are significant. I've heard tales from people who worked in media years ago that the very stars who now want the media to leave them alone and to respect their privacy would beg them for stories and coverage just a few years earlier.
I don't think I'd want to be ultra-wealthy (as in a billionaire+). At that point you're almost removed from society. I imagine you end up moving in circles with other ultra-wealthy people that are actually quite small. You risk being a target of the desperate, the criminally minded (fraud, kidnapping, blackmail, that sort of thing) and the mentally unstable.
And really what is the practical difference between having $20m and $2b? Sure you'll have nicer houses and more of them. You may well have a super-yacht at that point. But who cares? I know I don't.
You could say "you would if you had $2b" and maybe that's true. I'm sure I'd buy a nicer place but I think I'd still want to keep a relatively low profile.
> 2) Don't get annoyed at my significant other for wasting my time.
I mean, if your SO or anyone that you care about is talking with/to you and you could ever possibly think it's a waste of your time no matter what it is that they are saying, then I think you may need to re-evaluate a few things in the new year.
I know where it is you are coming from here, as I also had the same thought process for a long time. Honestly, you just have to find the right kinda people to be around. If you have siblings or parents, you know how it is that everything that you manage to talk about is interesting in some way and how you both know when it's not. Like, during a TV show/movie you really like, even the 'dull' parts are interesting and you are super pumped that they explored the world of the film/show just a bit more. How you want to learn everything there is to know about Star Wars, Marvel, Python 2.7, etc? Even how a Wookie sneezes or Thor shaves?
Yeah, people that you like to be around that much, those are the people to become romantically involved with. Don't become romantically involved with people that 'waste your time' when they tell you about their issues and problems.
> From what I read here, lots of our current greatest minds spend their time creating really creative marketing.
Heh, yeah, how to store or transfer bits efficiently so that shop selling Chinese-made shit doesn't go down on Black Friday, or so people can get their crisp Marvel movie on their 4K TV. Or so some bikini-clad girl can optimally promote that "detox drink" to her "followers"...
Personally I think all the time at work (AI) and literally the last thing I want to do in sport / cinema / personal life / any after work activities is think. No one go to marvel for the storyline, people just like action (and for me, seeing the adaptation of comics I read).
But this doesn't have to be a fight, you do you and I "do me". To me scorcese was indeed elitist. It's like saying classical music is better than rap or metal.. it's not true per se and honestly it doesn't reflect well on him to say something like that. Indeed more like "old man yelling at crowd"
There are only one or two Marvel or Star Wars movies a year though. Is that really worth subscribing to a streaming service for?
(Not to mention that only maybe a quarter of these movies are worth seeking out, the rest are something I’d only ever watch for free on an airplane or something. But that’s just personal taste).
Do you really believe explicit, credible death and/or rape threats for being a woman with opinions on Marvel movies or games or being LGBQ are examples of a non-discriminatory environment?
Media plays such a huge part in this. How often do we see young people saving the world versus old people? I like the Marvel movies because the protagonists are mostly reasonably aged.
I try to remind myself at times that Gaston Glock didn't design his first gun until age 52.
If you think that one through it seems like doing this for a movie would be a logistical nightmare. Most actors are pretty good about learning their lines, which means you’d couldn’t just put random changes in because otherwise their time would be wasted. I’m guessing that it’s only used for pivotal plot changes like the Roddenberry incident describe on Wikipedia. Seems like the path used these days is extreme lawsuit threats built into their contract, something you’ll see just about every Marvel star joke about during interviews.
"The Walt Disney Company to Acquire Majority Ownership of BAMTech" [1].
"The company's major clients include the NHL, HBO (for its HBO Now service), the PGA Tour, Riot Games, WatchESPN, PlayStation Vue, WWE Network and TheBlaze." [2]
"Marvel, Star Wars films to ditch Netflix for Disney service" [3]
I'd say they have both the content, technical expertise, and tenacity and perseverance to pull it off.
I stopped going to the theater for a long time until the local theaters put in large recliners, reserved seating, and cheap-ass Tuesdays. All seats for all showings on Tuesdays are $5-7 (depending on the theater). So we have started going back to the theaters on Tuesdays for spectacle movies like Star Wars and Marvel.
I bought my mum a roku (she's disabled so she spends a lot of time watching TV/movies and on the Internet) and it seriously improved her life, prior to that she only had UK digital and catch up services but now with Netflix/Amazon prime and BBC iPlayer she has more high quality TV that suits her taste than she can watch.
She's also seriously addicted to Netflix's Marvel offerings which I find somewhat hilarious.
* Clips of Bill Burr on Conan O'Brien > Men's Rights / anti-feminism videos
* Animal videos > Creepy channel where someone makes various mousetraps and sees how many kills they get a night
* Videogame longform critiques > Pro-Gamergate / Men's rights
* Movie analysis video essays > Video essays on how SJW's are ruining Star Wars / Marvel
* General psychology / self-help > Clip from a ho-hum Jordan Peterson psychology lecture > "Oh, you watched one thing featuring Jordan Peterson, you must agree with his more extreme views. Have some videos about that."
The one thing the article didn't address is exactly the pushback from regulators and corporations. They will NOT stand by and watch idly as their control is getting pulled out from their hands.
Even if such a network gets invented, I am pretty certain governments will make aggressive laws along he lines of "if your computer caches a trailer of this new Marvel movie, we can confiscate your tech for copyright infringement".
As much as I want the problems to be only technical, IMO the much bigger battle will be in courts and public hearings.
What about the engineering of Netflix? I see lots of comments here about pricing and how content distribution in Hollywood is messed, etc. If Disney has acquired a streaming facility, how will they compare to how Netflix is engineered?
Will they have apps, sub-accounts, lists of favorites, and be able to move from device to device and pick up where you left off?
I have to guess that Disney's depth of content is pretty shallow. You have kid movies, older Disney content, and then franchises they bought like Star Wars and Marvel. But those account for a handful of movies a piece. Maybe it won't be hard to technically serve that content up since it is much smaller than Netflix' library.
What about content delivery? The technical part of this is probably a very hard problem to solve, globally, where people's streams aren't interrupted or dropping frames, etc.
Just small things like when I fast forward, Netflix shows thumbnails of the content, will Disney have those small quality-of-life types of features?
Yet another issue is the actual price of a ticket at a theater.
I'm willing to spend more for something that I trust will have been made to the standards that I desire. This doesn't mean FX standards, it means a film that I can actually enjoy watching.
The current price of movie tickets means that I'm only willing to go to the theater for a really good movie. Marvel has become a brand that I associate with (in recent years) producing films that are of the archetype I expect (from the ads) when I go in, and that also have enough embellishment to the core story that I enjoy watching the film.
If it cost me 3-5 of today's dollars instead of 15 to see lesser films I might still go to some of them even if they are the usual Hollywood crap; instead of the premium product they want to trick me in to thinking they've made.
This looks like a way to break BitTorrent, as other posters have outlined.
Streaming in general (apart from via a local server) frustrates me. The entire idea is simply a way of relinquishing control to an external body. Hard drives are not that expensive, and patience is a virtue. I'm very happy that youtube-dl exists, for example, because otherwise when Google disappears I'll lose a lot of useful material I have access to at the moment.
Regardless - I'm surprised to see this here. Sci-Hub is one thing - it's an educational resource.
Mainstream media... I just gave it up rather than pirating it. I'm not 18 any more - my friends don't really care about the latest Marvel flick. The movie companies have lost even my mindshare now. Books, online reading material, educational videos, all free, all a better use of my time, all less likely to leave me wanting a fast car like James Bond.
Marvel and Doctor Who and Darth Vader aren't really related to IT though. I'm aware of all three, and seen a couple of the Star Wars movies, but that's it. By her argument, Trish would be alienating to me, a male in IT as well. People in all fields have hobbies and interests outside of work. I don't think this is a sexism or even IT issue.
Hacker Cinema
114 comments on Hacker News
AI has forced a dramatic shift in my view on intellectual property. The laws as they exist only protect corporations now.
They do not protect individuals no matter how much people want to think they do. AI has proven this.
I think to level the playing field all copyright, trademarks, and patents laws should be eliminated.
If I want to make a marvel movie, I should be allowed to and profit from it.
AI let the cat out of the bag and there is no going back. We need to let individuals profit just like corporations can from what is considered theft right now.
That's the saving grace of it for me tbh
AI art shows the philistines for who they are. It's a giant decoy to lure them away from spaces where people are making art of more substance.
I feel the same way about things like the absolutely miserable quality of Marvel, Star Wars, etc. stuff leading to films being increasingly polarized between 60 IQ blockbusters and more interesting small projects. It's what kicked off the 70s arthouse cinema in the US, and I'm hoping we get a similar renaissance soon with the success of all of the small and difference projects lately.
>doing concerts where the attendees are just other musicians
If this is how jazz musicians actually made money, they'd have all died of starvation at this point. Every jazz musician that's not a top 20 or so act makes most of their money playing whatever kind of music people pay them to make, whether it's church music, session musician gigs, etc. The entire reason they started doing (and still do!) straightahead jams is that they were tired of playing schlock all day and wanted to spice it up with and for other people tired of playing schlock.
>The only hope we have is that they're wrong, and their power to change things will be minimal.
What even is the optimistic outcome if they are right? What are we all working towards? Like do people think that these AI companies will create some superintelligence, suck up all the financial benefits of that, and then just decide to share it with the rest of us out of kindness? Because I legitimately can't see a realistic outcome that actually benefits society as a whole. It all ends with very few obscenely rich people getting even more obscenely rich. But I guess we could tell an AI to put ourselves in the new Marvel movie to pass the time since we no longer have any jobs.
It’s easy to see the conceptual integrity in good software, architecture, design and movies — or the lack of this quality in the bad ones.
Vibe coded software is the Marvel green screen movie equivalent.
The complaint isn't actually about they way they're speaking. The way they're speaking is a symptom of the way they're thinking.
In an age of the dumbest, most propagandistic narratives since the 50s, pumped out by the largest multinational corporations in history. Young people are looking at the world through shitty Marvel movie-colored glasses.
It's also not their fault, and the fictions they think they're living through are written by gen Xers being paid by boomers. It is not a youthful point of view, it is the sabotage of any emergence of a youth point of view, substituted with Disney product.
> Language shifts and evolves over time as the lives and viewpoints of speakers evolve.
This is a "things just happen" argument. Things happen for reasons.
I know about this from the film production site having worked on major Hollywood productions for over two decades.
Traditionally, big films bought new computer hardware and paid for new code as part of production. It was never particularly popular as the promise of CGI was always that it was going to lower cost, but it never did. However, the upside of all of this spending was some amazing looking visuals.
Unreal has been sold pretty hard to the film industry and affects houses are still charging as if they are buying new hardware and writing new code for every production. What they worked out is that they can use unreal save a ton of money and make more profit. That’s also why the names listed on affects heavy films are increasingly exotic as they outsource more and more of the work to the cheapest places they can find
Long story short is the effects are getting worse because they are getting cheaper while they’re being used more and more heavily meaning that the budget for them is being stretched further and further.
Marvel are responsible for a lot of this with their ridiculous production schedule for making films, which are essentially animated but treated by the public as if they are live action.
I see a lot of "mickey mouse" but if this is Disney IP, then it includes Star Wars and Marvel, no?
You can literally make your own Marvel movie now! Legally!
Judging by how bad recent Marvel movies were, I wouldn't be surprised if fans plop out far better quality.
Not an AI slop (I think?), but looks an order of magnitude better than any Marvel crap released in the last 3 years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9b7BOJyE9A
I think the first HP movie was more magical than the latter ones as they felt too "Marvel CGI" for me.
Marvel movies have become tiresome for me, too much CGI that does not tell any interesting story. Old animated Disney movies are more rewatchable.
>"they're being evil for the sake of being evil, just like in my manchild Marvel/Harry Potter/Star Wars movies"
The amount of times I've seen people on reddit reply to (presumably real) Ukrainian redditors with a show of solidarity composed of some slogan from a Hollywood movie or to try to explain/compare their situation in Ukraine / on the world stage to an Avengers movie is honestly baffling. I genuinely can't believe that people live framing their existence and perspective of the world without the context of cheap power fantasy fiction. It's so cringingly out of touch that I'm almost far more willing to believe people talking like that are the Russian bots people are constantly harping on about trying to make Western public support look bad.
I understand that you are joking, but part of the problem with how people talk about this issue is that they are either not serious (you) or are imagining that this conflict is similar to things they have seen in a Marvel comic book movie (most of the rest of this thread).
Good thing the world isn’t a marvel movie
It's true-- just like in Marvel the comic book movie, where the bad guy causes upwards of 50% casualties on the entire planet!
Agreed. Pretty epic franchise.
Someone at Disney is reading this and deciding they’ve still got many many StarWars and Marvel movies they can make.
This post is really funny to see written by an engineer, an entire profession dedicated to the art of measuring precisely the lowest quality we can use while still accomplishing the task.
Having discerning taste is a vice not a virtue. I actively try to limit the number of areas where my taste is ruined by high quality because it makes me noticeably worse off. My life isn't better for experiencing better quality, it's worse for the other 99% of the time.
Now I have to buy the name brand which is more expensive, now I'm focused on all the schlock-y writing of the latest Marvel movie I'm at with my friends instead of enjoying it, now I can't unsee the damn keming or blurry fonts on everyone's computer but mine. Don't be the hi-fi nerd whose ears will be put through a cheese grater any time you hear music through cheap speakers for the rest of your life. Ignorance really is bliss.
> It's really difficult for me to believe that they really got 10% top performers.
Of course there is no hard data on it, but I can say anecdotally the people I know who went on elsewhere were consistently rated at the top of whatever organization they landed at. And also, there wasn't a single person there that I would not want to work with again and would jump at that chance.
> For one, knowing the cut-throat nature of employment there, I would expect only a minority of developers would be willing to try working there, despite the awesome rewards.
On the flip side, a lot of people wanted to work there because of that culture. But you're right, some really great people wouldn't even apply, won't deny that.
> Finally, just as a cheap shot at Netflix, sorry I can't resist as a customer: they absolutely suck at the most basic stuff in their business, which is to produce good content in the first place, and very importantly, NOT FREAKING CANCEL the best content!
Actually, objectively, it's not the best content, which is why it gets cut. The way that decision is made is every piece of content is charted on a cost vs minutes watched. Then that chart is looked at by actual humans.
Some content, like reruns from the 1950s, is super efficient. It's not watched a lot but it also costs very little, so it stays. Some content, like the latest Marvel movie (before Disney had their own streaming service) was very inefficient, but it was kept because it was a big marketing draw. But some content didn't quite make it over the line because it was expensive but niche. It was popular amongst a small set of die hard fans.
I think your complaint it more about the industry in general though -- it's not just Netflix that doesn't give a show room to grow. Even the old school TV networks cut shows much quicker now than they did before.
> I won't even mention how horrible their latest big live stream was... oh well, I just did :D.
Netflix knows it didn't go well. Streaming in general used to break just as much. But the nice thing was that they gave us the resources to hire the right people and the autonomy to fix it. And so we did things like create Chaos Engineering and OpenConnect. I suspect the same will happen with live streaming.
"You can make a movie on your phone, create a song, edit images."
These are 2010-era tools. We're modernizing.
You wouldn't ask musicians today to stick to only pre-synthesizer, pre-DAW era tools to make their music. You wouldn't ask illustrators to ditch their tablets force them to mix their own cerulean unless that's what they wanted to do.
The tools that are coming are going to be fantastic and they're going to enable artists to do wild new things. That isn't subtractive, it's additive. There's more space to explore.
New tools don't even prevent folks from making music and media the old fashioned way: there are still people shooting on film to this day. And there's a vibrant community that embraces anachronistic tools to make new art.
I'm looking forward to a world where teenagers cut their teeth on making their own Marvel movies instead of just watching them. We'll have so many young Scorseses before they even graduate.
Marvel can produce so much stuff because they overwork and underpay employees like VFX artists and writers. Then those movies/shows don't do so well, so they lower the budget of the next one, and it devolves into what it is now.
Why is Marvel shady? Because they produce and market films that a lot of people enjoy?
I mean personally I mostly enjoyed Marvel until they started multiverse crap. And they made way too many TV shows that were all terrible. So I stopped watching.
Seems pretty low on the sketch scale to me.
The mods who run Reddit are the absolute worst part of it. I was banned permanently for making a negative review about a Marvel movie in the movies sub. The moderators are insanely biased and abuse their power. I think long-term Reddit can't grow because the more you participate in the website, you see how deeply artificial and astroturfed it all is.
Not all Marvel films are slop. But, as a fan who comes from a family of fans and someone who has watched almost all of them; lets be real. That particular film, really and most of them, contain copious amounts of what is absolutely slop.
I don't know if the utility is worse than an LLM that is SOTA for 2 months that no one even bothers switching to however - at least the marvel slop is being used for entertainment by someone. I think the market is definitely prioritizing the LLM researcher over Disney's latest slop sequel though so whoever made that comparison can rest easy, because we'll find out.
Not only are Marvel movies slop, they are very concentrated slop. The only way to increase the concentration of slop in a Marvel movie would be to ask ChatGPT to write the next one.
Agreed on everything, but calling the marvel movies slop…I think that word has gone too far.
I think you misunderstand the nature of art. You say that creation is merely reworking past ideas. That might be true if art were mere decoration or a formal game of manipulating symbols according to rules. But the true purpose of art is to communicate human experience, which always varies from individual to individual and from one historical period to the next. Humans are always having new experiences and having new thoughts and emotions about those experiences. High-quality art seeks to say something new, original, and specific to the artist's perspective, the culture of the moment, and the deepest concerns of the audience. LLMs can't develop any of that -- AI doesn't have real experiences to reflect on and has no desire to communicate.
Obviously, I'm talking about art at its highest level -- the average Marvel movie does not have such lofty goals, and I have no doubt a machine can reproduce all the same tired tropes of a Marvel movie. If all you're familiar with is derivative pop culture, I can see how one might think that AI can do just as well. But I don't think anyone who has ever had a profound engagement with a work of art would agree.
I am sure there will be an explosion of AI-generated content in the coming months, but I suspect this will inadvertently advance everyone's aesthetic education. More and more people will be disappointed by AI-generated "art," and I think they'll start to appreciate genuine human creativity more.
It's possible the product he offers is precisely this; he throws things together randomly, carefully avoiding anything making sense, effectively making interesting noise, so that higher IQ people (i.e. vs a marvel movie) with time to kill can indulge in the leisure of trying to make sense of it.
It's interesting, if a car company is bought then they keep churning out cars (usually), if a software company is bought it's often broken. Software dev is a fragile thing relying on a network of talented individuals which is very easily broken by accountants and bottom lines. In some ways it's more like movie companies with networks of creatives that can be damaged by a takeover - Disney/Marvel immediately comes to mind.
There's a certain breed of neoliberal commenter that seems to believe that the West is financially and militarily invincible, and can simply spend any colossal amounts of money it wants to wipe strategic opponents from the map at will. I think in many cases it comes from watching too many Marvel movies.
> nothing interesting happens anymore, not that there is absolutely nothing.
Sorry, are you talking about the heat death of the universe or the last five Marvel movies?
I never said generative AI was itself capable of creativity. Generative AI is a tool, not an entity. I said it enables more people to be creative, in the same way that other tools like Photoshop enable more people to be creative. Using a sampler to create a song rather than arranging and playing all the instruments doesn’t make it less creative, or devoid of creativity. It’s just a different, more accessible form of expression, enabled by technology.
I agree that generative AI, due to its nature, trends toward the average and thus is incapable of engaging with the extremes of human experience—but not every creative expression has to be at the extreme. Every Marvel film, every shovelware game, every summer pop jam, panders to the average. There’s enormous value in having a tool that allows professional artists to work more quickly at the average—and, perhaps more critically, for everyday people to approach the average in the first place. I don’t believe it is fair to suggest that such things are valueless “not ART”, but I’m not definitely not here to engage in philosophical discussion of the definition of “art”.
As far as history goes, I did provide a citation, which I encourage you to actually look at (and it cites several dozen more books and other articles if you need more primary sources). You are objectively incorrect in your assertion that the phonograph facilitated the growth of live music(ians), but I suspect you may not even understand what is meant by “live musicians”—not because of you, but because the phonograph was so revolutionary that it fundamentally changed what it meant to be a musician—and even redefined what a “song” is[0].
It is only with the benefit of hindsight that you can state so confidently that audio recording is a net benefit to music. Many felt that the phonograph was an abomination at its conception. They claimed that the essence of music was in its ephemeral nature, that the uniqueness of each performance contained the creative expression and the sheet music itself was just a skeleton for creativity. They said mechanical recordings deprived listeners of the true experience, and that individual artists lost their autonomy. They spoke in terms exactly like you are now, and those ideas were wrong then, and they are almost certainly wrong now.
[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/phonograph-changed-music-forever-180957677/
I can definitely see Netflix having four or five rows of AI movies above a ghetto section of "human-made" films. I already have to skip all the Marvel garbage. I mean, it's free to watch Twitch.
> Wringing the life is a pretty mean way to put it. They tried to use the IP to make money.
Mean or not, I'd say it's also accurate. They tried to use the IP to make money... by wringing the life out of it. There are so many Marvel/Star Wars movies/tv shows now you need a freaking spreadsheet to keep track.
Making all those awful Marvel and Star Wars movies and taking our money anyway was pretty mean too.
You moved the subject, not everybody cares about 'quality' of movies like movie buffs (like me) do.
Marvel is popcorn fun, sometimes better, sometimes worse. These are not even planned as some art-aspiring movies, so as long as expectations are managed everybody is fine, earnings at least says so and if you don't like whole genre then simply skip them.
Actually, snobbish bashing of Marvel became such a cheap 'look at me' desperate attention grab attempt of teenagers that I don't take it seriously. In same vein as globalization protesters focus on McDonald for some reason. You have endless line of say family movies that are absolute nauseating crap from cinematography, storytelling, character development etc., among other fails of hollywood, anybody wanting to be actually taken serious would start with those 'gems'.
> Or just… not hire all of them. Much easier.
Then a competitor might hire all of them. If you're in the AI business you don't want that. You want to grab either all of them or balkanize them. Come on, this isn't a hard concept to grasp.
> And in the scenario where they actually think they're mad ... the script of a Marvel film
Then you hire them on a 5 year exclusive contract so they can't rejoin Hydra.
> It makes you look like the mad one
It's normal human writing style, hyperbole, sarcasm, exaggeration, wit, irony, you know. Adult writing, for adults to consume.
It's not that unpopular - I see it a lot on FB and Twitter. People really dislike modern media. Zoomers in particular watch and listen to a ton of older stuff.
With a few exceptions, movies are terribly written these days. A lot of people think the issue is "wokeness", but that's just part of it - everything is slapped together poorly. The quips, the one liners, the new archetypes, all pales to how fucking horrible dialog has become. Shoehorning in an Indian and a Chinese guy to appeal to those markets? Fuckit, add a talking dog.
Watch TV from the 90s and aughts. It's much funnier, dialog is tighter, there's subplots and overarching plots and character growth.
You know what is good? You know what doesn't have a writers room? Low-end YouTube channels, which have completely replaced TV for the actual working class. Watch TFL Truck - it's funny, human, they mess up a lot, and it's a good time. Then watch a Marvel shitfest. Repeat with streamers, with review channels, etc.
> I think you are misunderstanding what happens with the current image generation stuff out there. You give it text, it gives you something that might look plausible for what you described. It ends up full of artifacts and temporally extremely unstable.
Have you used ComfyUI with inpainting? From what you're saying, I don't believe you have, or perhaps the last time you used image generation was with Midjourney or another "type in text and get an output" tool. In reality, the field has evolved to contain entire workflows such that you can get something with no artifacts, it just takes time and effort, as with other sorts of art too.
> CGI in movies takes an extreme amount of labor and every shot out of the hundreds of thousands that go in to a film are very exacting, being directed to a detail level that people can't notice while watching a movie in real time.
Oh they can notice alright, Corridor Digital on YouTube has videos of them reacting to bad CGI. Even in discussions online I see people complaining about bad CGI, especially in Marvel media. But my point is that those films still make billions of dollars, so at some point most people simply don't care and will watch it anyway.
> *Your comment basically boils down to "what if it gets good enough, then it will be good enough". [...] Show me something where you can keep typing in text to change the image, move the lights, move the camera and have it be temporally stable.
Well, yes, that is my point, that when it gets good enough, kids will be making blockbusters in their bedrooms. I'm not a future seer though so it's not like I can give you an exact timeline, but based off what I know of the field, it's trending towards that. You could say it's incremental progress, but again, at some point it'll be good enough that most people looking won't care about artifacts, just like bad CGI as above. If you want a fully temporally coherent image when moving a virtual camera around, wait a few years.
Consider, thoroughly, the hypothetical lottery jackpot. What is it you would choose to do, pursue, aim for, if money were no object and you had nothing except your inner volition to drive you. Would you spend your days reading, exploring philosophy and knowledge? Or would you travel and see the world you've yet to traverse? Maybe you're an individual striving toward community and you want to focus on family, friendship, charity. Maybe a bit of everything?
Design, intentionally, the dream you would live if you could. My friend often responds cynically, saying if he is asked about his dream job he would be a space explorer like some Marvel movie. I hear him as flippant and he's clear he thinks it's a dumb idealistic pontificating exercise. . I go toward the path of okay, what would it take to BE that thing or pursue it...
If you can visualize and reason your way to how something might happen, you can reverse engineer it. You can think of it like chess. Position yourself with strength, understand openings midgame and endgame, but know there are many, many, undiscovered lines left in many positions. Now expand from 64,64 squares and so many moves to the infinite variability in Life. You have levers and positions you can exploit and transpose.
Circumstances will always have a hand as will pure luck, fate, or Higher Power, but... you have immense power to craft your reality and I mean this in no woo terms. You change your thoughts, your words, your actions and most crucially, your influence and environment.
Good luck, oneironaut.
This isn't how the games industry works for games at thia scale (or any other media). They are events. Millions of people having the same experience at the same time and having a common cultural touch point.
The 100s of clones would be more like fanfic. A set of people would get very into them, search out the good ones (perhaps better than the original), or revel in the terrible ones. But then the whole community still comes together to watch the latest marvel film anyway.
The main effect would be to build and maintain the community for the next commercial version.
It may be that I’m a potential supervillain, but the very first thing I thought of was that this could be used as a weapon, like in a Marvel movie.
Sure, I agree it would be exceptional and isn't particularly realistic. I just think that it is more legally and culturally acceptable in the US then forcing one company to pay another company for a good that they aren't the consumer of and they don't want to partner with. It's like forcing coffee shops to pay Disney because people exercise their free speech and discuss Marvel movies under their roof. It's actually worth cuz this bill would do the equivalent of banning coffee shops rules against discussing Marvel movies too.
The whole topic is absurd given legislative inaction on paywall bypass tools and archive sites, which blatantly steal copyrighted content.
> Is it really that hard to understand why people don't get the hype around a Jackson Pollock or Voice of Fire?
It kinda is. In the sense that no one is confused if you say you do not Understand the 400th Marvel movie without seeing the previous ones, but art, which largely exists as a conversation with the movements that happened before it, is somehow expected to be understood without context. And mocked if not easily digestible.
It is why artists like Banksy, who in my opinion offer little to nothing, cause a big stir. You do not need to understand what was happening in the art world in the 2000s to get Banksy, a instagram photo does all the work you need.
The Great Wave off Kanagawa is now considered a japanese masterpiece, but in reality is heavily influenced by Dutch landscapes and Japan at the time considered it almost foreign art. As if some european now did anime. The conversation and circumstance of that print gives it a lot of nuance, and makes it infinitely more interesting than just the wave and Fuji in the background. Similarly Pollock, as pretentious as he was, lived in an interesting time when even math and physics where shaking their conceptual underpinnings. The time they lived in was a mess, that experience, put to canvas as a rejection of Easel and figurative painting and making the process and important part of the actual finished product is interesting almost in itself, beyond the painting.
Think how many artists now show "behind the scenes" of their work, bringing people closer to the work. From Guillermo del Toro showing his monsters, to actors doing live chats, to artists publishing their doodles and sketches. Pollocks work was an attempt to merge that with the piece itself, make the action of painting it as obvious as possible, compared to art movements like the European French Academy that would knock you points if the brush strokes where visible. Their attempt at perfet painting, make the artist invisible and the subjects "greater than men", all angels and stuff is almost diametrically opposed to Pollock, that wants you to almost see where he tripped, where he was soft and where he just slammed the brush.
Sorry for the rant, just think that it is such a shame, with how interesting art can be that people reject it out of, what looks to me, just not putting the minimum amount of effort to learn about it.
Because some people grew up poor and without much access to content. Then they learned about this thing in the 90’s called the internet where you can share information with anyone for free.
So said poor person learned programming and other skills to get a tracker working so that they could give back to others who are in the same boat.
This way the poor kid (who’s family can’t afford lunch, let alone a 10€ /month Disney + subscription) can chat with their rich friends at the lunch table about the latest marvel film the week it releases and god forbid, fit in for once.
Humans also invent to make hard things easier. Glorifying toil has worked fantastically as a ranking mechanism for society so far but it is surely going to fail going forward, so too indirect democracy.
I suspect a lot of art lovers like not knowing that an artist's work has very exact beginnings and egoistic motivations al a marvel movies. Rather prefer the altruistic mystery that muses were involved curating the work out of nothing for the enjoyment of all. Maybe when you know the AI has exact origins it ruins the illusion of art for you because maybe deep down you liked to be tricked by human creativity.
Are you only going to watch certified AI/CGI free movies going forward?
Art is about more than just imitation. It’s about the meaning behind the work. I am not talking about Marvel movies, which might as well be totally AI-generated at this point.
I would suggest having some empathy for those affected. It’s not just gatekeeping, it’s people reacting to being told that the meaning they put into what they make doesn’t actually add any value.
In the Human Condition, Hannah Arendt outlines three parts of the Vita Activa. The first is labour, at the bottom of the pyramid. It is by definition consumable and has limited meaning in itself. The second is work, through which we build a world (i.e. something bigger than just the cyclical and physical properties of the ecosystem). The third is action, or politics, which ripples through the world and inspires linear change. Put together, these three parts make up what it is to be a living human. Giving meaning-making away, by replacing it with mere imitation, is tantamount to revoking those qualities which make us human.
According to this logic marvel superhero movies will soon be the only existing form of art.
My local cinema does that DRM-free movie on USB key thing... even if you do not watch the movie first !
(As you can imagine, it doesn't show any Marvel movies or the like...)
High culture, like theatre, classical music, architecture - sure,thats one line of thought here. There are isolated examples that exist, supported by patronage, but that's not entirely what I meant.
If we look to the mainstream,the movies,music etc are all commercial. There's a reason a studio would rather make another Marvel movie than something more meaningful. That's not to say that -only- Marvel movies are made, and they are very entertaining, but the -reason- they are made at all us economic.
For software we celebrate money-raised, MRR, user numbers and engagement. We dont celebrate programs for their life-impact. We don't celebrate the software used yo design the James Webb telescope. Or the software in an MRI machine. We don't throw VC levels of funding at prosthetics, things that have value beyond just ygr monetary, even more so when the monetary value is near-nil, just like the IA.
I say all this not to change it, at a fundamental level it can't be changed, bug rather to understand it.
Investments into IP franchises like Star Wars and Marvel will diminish as children are able to generate their own ideas and universes on the fly. At scale, millions at a time.
Content houses will lose to content production tech.
Forget owning the rights to "The Office" when people can generate their own "The Office" content (memes, then episodes). And when the lawyer cats come clawing, it'll transform into "The Water Cooler" starring Jimmy Carrel and take place on Mars instead.
The value of content and ideas will become zero. The tools and distribution matter.
Oh, this is something I've been wondering about - I've had a 4K TV for years, but I don't think I've ever seen a 4K Bluray (I don't think I even know anyone who had a Bluray player).
Are you saying that streaming a movie (say a recent Marvel one) in 4K from Disney Plus will look noticeably less good than if I played the same movie from a Bluray player?
What about a Bluray torrent?
> One recent man had a lot going for him. In fact he was the most promising prospect I’d had in some time. But then he mentioned that he got his daily coffee from Starbucks, and I found it hard to imagine dating someone who liked Starbucks coffee; or even if they liked the coffee, didn’t find Starbucks so odious and soul-diminishingly ubiquitous they would never go there. I judged this a stupid reason to stop messaging him, given his other, surely more important qualities, so I continued messaging him. But then he said he mostly watched Marvel movies, and the combination of Starbucks and Marvel was too much, so I stopped messaging him, even though I judged my own judgment in this case to be ridiculously shallow and flimsy. If he hadn’t been American, I might have excused it or interpreted it differently. Or if I had met him in another context, his consumer tastes might have barely figured in my estimation of him. But he was just an overeducated, emotionally available American, with many winsome attributes and poor taste in coffee and movies; I myself didn’t even understand why I lost interest in him, and recognized it was a bug in my programming, rather than anything to do with him. Or perhaps, the obvious ominous thought goes, it wasn’t a bug but an actual feature of the programming—not mine, but the app’s.
Clearly she puts in effort by going to dates. But she’s not developing her own psychology enough. She had to fight this tooth and nail and gone on a few more dated with him. Her issue is that she thinks she can predict what a relationship will be like with him and that Marvel and Starbucks would be too bad as an experience.
More gratitude needed, more optimism needed
Dating apps aren’t the problem it’s her mindset.
Note: I go on dates 1.5 times per week myself, on average. I’m having a blast. I’m no casanova, in most cases it ends in the friendzone. I recently met one person though that might be something more and she lives on another continent. It helps that I am a digital nomad.
But yea, lots of effort but not in the right place.
The original DVD-only Netflix was amazing - it expanded my horizons, I started watching entire catalogs of French, Serbian directors, and not very popular but deep films of both U.S. and non-U.S. origin. It's not the DVDs - it's their matching engine. You wrote reviews, 1-5 stars, you could type in reviews (which I loved doing), and the matching engine was suggesting stuff and it was AMAZING.
When streaming came online, I was excited.
Everything since is a blur. All I know is, now, I spend 10 minutes scrolling stuff that is not even remotely a match for me - you don't need to be Pappa Google to know I won't like Marvel or various woke-y movies. I have esoteric tastes, but more importantly I want to discover more.
But the entire 'Silicon Valley content' culture appears to be: get stuff TO the customer, don't let the customer get stuff on their own. Which, if you recall, television used to be. Broadcast television you had to wait til 8pm for your show, and sit through endless commercials every 8 or 10 minutes. Then there was a solution: Remember TiVo?
HBO isn't any better, it just has better content. I was looking for "Stand-up comedy" and I couldn't really get that as a category, just UNSORTABLE search results. So stuff from years ago is mixed in with stuff that is recent. God forbid I look for RECENT stand-up comedy.
It's pathetic and it's a "conspiracy" in the sense that it's clearly intentional: it's a disempowering of the consumer with some vague promise of customization, AI, so forth and so on.
God, I am angry at Netflix after all.
Marvel seems like it'd be even worse since A) the storylines all intertwine, so you feel like you have "homework" to watch before seeing the latest one, and B) they're all pretty much superhero movies.
With Star Wars, creators can ignore the tired Skywalker storyline, plus there's no genre expectations tying creators down (IMO sci-fi is not a genre so much as a meta-genre or motif). At least in theory--they've been pretty reluctant to spread their wings until recently.
Even if you are, there's the chance that the glut of the content coming out causes fatigue. I used to really look forward to new Star Wars things because it didn't come out super frequently (a new trilogy of movies every few decades, a TV show here and there), but it was enjoyable. Then they started coming out with a new movie and multiple TV shows year after year, and it just wasn't good enough to justify going out of my way to consume all of it. Marvel stuff seems the same way; I'd generally go to the movies maybe once or twice a year, so when there are half a dozen of them coming out for a single franchise within a year or two, it feels more like work than entertainment to keep up with it all. At this point, I'm not sure I'll _ever_ go to see a Star Wars movie in a theater again, which is extraordinary since even 5 or 6 years ago that would have seemed ludicrous to me.
Yeah I think there’s a big Marvel and Star Wars fatigue factor that isn’t talked about enough. Only the hardest of the hardcore fans can keep up with all that stuff. Regular people and casual fans pretty much only see the big blockbuster movies and maybe watch the Mandalorian to see what all the baby Yoda memes are all about.
Marketing. I also suspect that alot of Disney's most core userbase don't make up enough volume to make this profitable.
I consider myself an ardent Star Wars & Marvel fan and I just couldn't keep up anymore, so I axed Disney+.
Netflix still drops enough documentaries that I keep it around.
Having lived in Japan for 10 years with my 11th coming up I have some perspective. I have seen almost every single marvel film that came to theaters here and it was always a packed house. However, I think the fact that the pandemic has scared people away from movie theaters has something to do with it. That, as well as, the fact more and more films have been released only via streaming here (I didn't even see it advertised as being available to watch at the theater). For me it is hard to get interested in a film that I couldn't have enjoyed in the theater and have to settle for the streamed version that I only knew about because of some ad I saw on YouTube or a google search. Plus, I think there is still the fact that movies have gotten more and more cookie-cutter to appeal to everyone with the obvious chain of development. When everything tastes the same and nothing sticks out, why would I care for it except to say I watched it?
I'm not sure what this was supposed to prove. I said the Marvel movies do well, meaning they do well at the box office. I also said that there are great movies that use CGI explosions. I did *not* say that the Marvel movies are great. They most decidedly are not IMO. You don't have to go all Chris Nolan and blow things up for real to make a good movie. Although I do like a real explosion :)
A marvel movie body is made through injecting steorids.. not living healthily.
Well, unfortunately the major VFX houses today are not unionized. There used to be some, but Marvel opened the floodgates to contracting out major VFK work to non-union companies.
I imagine this will be added to the list of grievances animators historically have had with the lack of union protections in recent years, and used as a negotiation chip in the next round of strikes. After all, union films and tv shows cannot use non-union actors or crews in most cases. I imagine there will be a similar rule made that union productions cannot work with non-union vfx agencies, eventually.
This. The trend has already started, tech like this will (eventually) accelerate the transition.
People don't go to movies to see movie stars anymore. They go to see Marvel characters. [1]
I think we're at the bookend of a transitional era for movies (and for many other things). Transition started with Napster, iPod, Netflix, etc. and ended with the "mainstreamization" of Marvel. Traditional movies are dead, what's left is something that really doesn't look anything like the movie industry I grew up with. Like other art forms (opera, theater, orchestras, etc) traditional movie story telling just isn't where it's at any more, the "masses" have moved on. The industry used to be full of passionate creative types. Now it's full of people working their butts off to get their name somewhere in the 20 minutes of credits at the end of a film, for the prestige of being able to tell their friends they work in the industry. It's a self-sustaining business at this point, full of nepotism, cronyism, and people happy just to stay employed doing whatever it is they do (digital work, setting up lights, renting equipment, managing the logistics).
I've asked my cinemaphile friends if they can name a big up and coming director? Who is the next Tarantino? No one has any real answer. At best I get JJ Abrams, who (at 56) is on the tail end of his career, and if anything he's a symptom of the problem (mom and dad worked in the business). It's a group of insiders churning out jobs for their kids and a steady stream of income. Hollywood is nothing more than a brand now.
Whatever the "future" is, it's here. More Marvel, less relevance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj8JK6c5x3M
If they were serious about improving Reddit, they’d fire all the mods who are usually weirdos who treat their subreddits as their own personal fiefdoms and seems like they are also selling their influence over posts to corporations. If you talk negatively about Marvel in /r/movies you can be banned. The capriciousness of the mods is what kills the experience.
It makes you feel better I don’t get short form videos either. The content is, well, mostly devoid of content. But I at least conceptually understand how it might be entertaining in the same way I somewhat understand how people find Marvel movies entertaining.
And I'm fairly confident in saying that AI will never be able to generate a Marvel movie! (Not in our lifetimes, anyway.)
A AAA game costs how much?
A corporation making that investment wants to own all of the brand IP it creates for that money. It isn’t looking to share that value with creators altruistically which would just give the creators more bargaining power next iteration.
Similar logic in movies. Studios want to own franchises like Marvel where the value is more in the studio owned brand IP than any specific actors or directors.
Yes, that would be obnoxious ... if that's what they said :)
To be clear, I don't like it either if others consider their taste to be 'superior', but simply stating what you prefer is not - I think - implying anything.
I feel like there's a trap people fall into where they tie some of their self-worth to their entertainment choices. If you don't like the music (say) that I do, then that seems like no big deal to me.
More generally, there is the opposite situation to being a 'superfan' where people delight in putting stuff down. Ultimately if you don't like (say) Marvel movies, then just don't watch them, of course. However it's reasonable to be critical of any entertainment or art form if you can articulate why and how they could be better.
Just my two cents.
I'm not a fan of our (US + NATO) current Ukraine policy, but that isn't because I'm an isolationist. I think it's just dumb policy, on several different dimensions. The version of the criticism you're leveling right now can be inverted very easily. That the people arguing for escalation in Ukraine, that it's "the exact same thing [that] happened in 1938" (it isn't), and that unless we do things like a NFZ it leads to a larger war, have a cartoon version in their heads of war and geopolitical strategy. Where there's clear boundaries between the "good guys" and "bad guys", like this is some Marvel film where you don't really even need to watch it to know what happens (spoiler alert: the good guys win!). Perhaps they are the ones who have something, and some history, to chew on.
We also need more "public service" announcements - and not the 30 second boring ads, but actual plot points in movies and TV be centered around these common scams. If (I have no idea what's popular now, but let's say Marvel) a movie had a crypto scam as a central point, it would educate people way more than any number of government warnings.
I wouldn't at this point. I was limited to TV when I was a kid (1 hour per day, in bed by 8 pm). I didn't miss it. Part of why it was easy to wean myself off of broadcast radio, tv and cable so easily - haven't watched an MSM TV since 2010 and got off of broadcast radio in the 1990s.
I was also never allowed anything but G movies until I was 13 when my father "escorted" me to my first PG film. I didn't see an R film until my senior year of high school.
My mother also didn't allow comic books so I haven't missed the movies from Marvel or DC either nor have I ever cared about their woke destruction - never was invested and still am not.
Lately I've been considering going back to a "dumb phone" because I really don't use 90% of it - not beyond being a phone and MP3 player. I don't do social media (no FB, Twitter, et al.) because they always seemed as stupid as MSM TV only far worse.
My friend is having his first kid and it will be zero internet, zero smart phones, zero MSM TV or cable he tells me. His wife is 100% in agreement.
I find weird how is always assumed the popular movies or shows are "for stupid" and "bland".
What has happened recently? Is that "popular" movies/shows ARE much better and in MORE quantity than before.
Just tackling the usual suspect (Marvel), it pretty clear that the bar is raised from the past.
And then, the "artsy" movie/show has a greater problem to be above the median, because the median is higher.
And to bot: the blockbusters of today is ALSO more fun!
Twitter has the highest signal/noise ratio of any social media platform, for me. I've curated it so 1) I don't follow people I know in real life so I don't have to deal with their completely different ways of using Twitter 2) I follow mostly historians, cinephiles, and art accounts 3) I pay for the Twitter Premium service so I can rearrange the UI so as to make it hard to reach the wasteful and noisy "explore" page. I get a stream of illuminating long threads about history, tidbits about films from now and the past, and tons of art from all sorts of time periods. I also block words for topics I don't care for any more such as "Marvel" or garious political figures.
My Twitter posts are just quotes that I post mostly for myself, for the future. The hardly get any likes and I don't care if they do. People-pleasing is a dirty and dangerous business.
If I could get rid of the explore page, I suspect my Instagram would be similar too. I mute most people I know in real life except for a few treasured friends who post fun, wholesome things, who aren't trying to show off or induce fomo. My actual feed is more photographers or people who share art/design stuff. So that's all good stuff.
You might not want to, but not everyone has the luxury of a nice home theater setup. Some people only have access to quality screens and audio at a local theater.
One of my primary preferences for watching movies in a theater is my engagement while watching. When I'm at home, I can too easily become distracted. Setting aside time in my schedule and being in a different environment helps me to focus and appreciate more details.
Also, if you're in a metropolitan area with access to an art-house theater, the types of films shown is often far more eclectic than current blockbusters. They can include showing of rare 35mm/70mm prints, short films from movie festivals, foreign films that tend to get limited releases in the US, re-releases of older classics. There's a lot of content that can be very difficult, even impossible, to find on streaming services. Those types of cinemas also tend to have much more respectful audiences, making the experience enjoyable to everyone there.
One of my local theaters offers film classes which entails showing a series of films, once per week, with group discussions held after the showing. Finding other movie aficionados and getting to engage in discourse is a great way of getting more from a movie watching experience. Not everyone has social groups which want to watch films in the same way. Many of my friends are happy to hang out and watch the latest Marvel release, but generally have no interest in watching anything released from the 70s or earlier.
While I think the article is something to consider -- this could be because I'm reading David Mamet stuff just because -- I think a lot of this falls away if you have a good story which perhaps matter more than whatever CGI or not you're using.
E.g. I personally find myself dissatisfied with a lot of Marvel, probably because most of the movies are "cocky guy gets taken down a peg by someone who's kind of in the family and kind of not, but definitely wins in the end anyway."
You've convinced me. We need to open up. It's critical for people's mental health that people need to see marvel movies in theatre unmasked. dead bodies be damned.
If it were true that complex games were inherently, objectively better we would only see more and more complex games. We don't, and major hobby game producers are constantly putting out low complexity games because, spoilers, some people are playing games to goof around and have fun!
It's just like any other form of entertainment. Think about genre movies. What makes more money, the latest giant Marvel/Disney zip bang popcorn flick, or the deep and complex Oscar Favorite? Why is the Marvel movie making all the money but not winning Best Picture? Why don't complex, difficult stories consistently pull in Marvel level money?
Value is always in the eye of the end user/consumer.
Netflix has produced some good movies in recent years. Your big budget talk applies much more to disney marvel money milking the same cows with the same movie variation over and over and consistently riding the remake agenda of all their classics (which I liked tbh).
While obviously Netflix has a lot to loose here, it don’t think it’s “their fault” for dumping AAA content. The reality is that every content producer on the planet knows they’ll make more money selling their own subscription platform. Netflix can’t continue to get Marvel movies, for example, now that Disney has pulled the plug. There’s not any amount of cash Netflix could afford to pay which would be enough for The Mouse to take content off of Disney+.
This is the same for every studio out there — well-loved shows like The Office, Brooklyn 99, Parks & Rec, etc. are getting taken back by their owners. Dozens of new streaming services are appearing.
In reality, there’s not much Netflix can do about it besides double down on original content.
I think an ideal future for consumers would be federated media platforms, where all content is available in any number of media platforms, and the amount you pay is passed back to the content owners based on what you watch. But I doubt that will ever happen under current IP laws.
In capitalism, profit wins. Right now, streaming services are essentially pure profit and make money because content owners have exclusive access to their own content — who would pay for Disney+ if all of their content was available elsewhere?
It really sucks for consumers.
> Why aren't Apple's shows (and movies?) appealing to you?
What actual content do they have?
I've seen a Beastie boys doc, Ted Lasso and The morning show * edited from Newsroom when my error was pointed out.
That's a month's worth of content. What else do they have to justify continuing a subscription?
Disney has more content with just the Simpson's episodes alone. Add on top of that the entire Marvel catalog, the entire Starwars Catalog and the entire Pixar catalog.
> The reason for that choice is simple: This is one of the first big-budget movies ever shot primarily on a digital camera, and the digital cameras of the time worked great in low-light environments but also tended to flatten the entire image in a way that more or less tugged the entire picture toward the darkest pixels within it.
I am not certain that the discussion of "Collateral" is accurate. The writer is considering the movie through the presupposition that Michael Mann was attempting to match a color grading style that could only be achieved years in the future, when Mann is more on record saying that he chose digital cameras specifically for the look that was realized in the movie. I think a case would be better made that a new style was then turned to an extreme. I also think that the colors of the costumes seem more in line with what the characters were supposed to represent in the film than with a supposed style of color grading that was being attempted.
https://filmschoolrejects.com/michael-mann-collateral-commentary/ > 28. He points out several shots in Collateral that wouldn’t have been possible on 35mm film including the one at 1:38:37 — a closeup of Vincent in the office that shifts focus to reveal Max on the parking garage rooftop across the street. “Max would either be not exposed at all, and/or he would not be able to carry the focus.”
https://uproxx.com/hitfix/on-the-digital-legacy-of-michael-manns-collateral-nearly-10-years-later/ > “We have seen an emergence of what I think is a digital aesthetic. It's a beautiful aesthetic, and it plays to the strength of that medium, which is the very open bottom of the curve. It can look into shadows; it's got an amazing range. Digital gives us the ability to work from a base of ambient light, essentially. Because of that, you tend to light in a very different way. And I do think 'Collateral' helped launch that because it played to the strengths of the format. We never set out to replicate a film look, but rather to discover a digital one…Film has a unique texture and tone, and digital has its own unique texture and tone. It would be a sad day if we lost the ability to choose between them.”
I don't see the same flatness in Collateral as I do in Marvel.
If you want to see how capitalism kills art, just watch one of the latest Marvel movies.
If you find this stuff interesting, I recommend watching Cryptozoo[1]. I wouldn't call it a masterpiece, but it's definitely a more interesting film than whatever latest Marvel release happens to be making the rounds.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptozoo
I'm about to cancel my Netflix (Canada) I find myself going to it scrolling around and leaving finding nothing interesting. On top of that like most streaming services shows I like take nearly 2 years for the next episode to be made. And it's only eight shows for a "season". By that time I've lost interest in any of the shows.
I have been watching more Amazon Prime lately. It seems to have older shows that I find more interesting plus some new ones I like too, but the same thing of 18 to 24 months for season 2 of eight shows. But this paying to rent inside a streaming service you are already paying for is incredibly stupid.
Disney+ was so easy, I accidentally signed up it! For one month at $1.99 then jumps to $11.99. Worth it I watched Free Guy which Amazon wanted $25 to rent while paying for Amazon Prime already. now I'm going through all the Star Wars and Marvel movies and shows.
I tried to sign up for Apple TV holy what a mess. I have an Apple ID, I had a Mac but it died. Try to sign into my AppleID and my password is rejected. Try to recover my password "check your Mac" no, it died. Use your new Apple device, nope. Use someone's iPhone, no again. Make a new apple ID, nope my gmail is already in use. Recover? Text is sent (Samsung phone) but the recovery page kicked me off when I read the text. Finally got it to work and was told 7 days to recover. Got an email and was told 14 it's days to recover my AppleID password. So Nov 27 I may make some progress.
> I think CGI is coming up on "effectively perfect"
Then why does it still look ... like CGI? I've seen several of the biggest budget productions from recent years, and it seems to me like CGI is not getting any better. Take buildings with debris destroyed in recent Marvel movies for example, or almost any scene in the last film in Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy, or even Dune, which I just saw in theaters. The CGI sandworms look like CGI.
> especially with the way it has gone from a post-production thing to becoming part of the world around the actors
I can agree with you on this point. The good / unnoticeable uses of CGI are to add background details around the actors, not replace action / stunts, and use as few digital models as possible (the models are still the weak point). Mad Max: Fury Road was the one film where I'd say the CGI approximates "perfection".
There is certainly wisdom distilled into the texts, they've made it this far. I found the bit about fasting particularly interesting, because its now being studied and proven to be therapeutic, and is mentioned and practiced often in both western and eastern religions.
Funny that you mentioned population control, one could consider science a popular religion of today ;) As you said, not all religions get along.
That, and marvel is the new greek mythology, they'll unfortunately be watching those movies a thousand years from now in history class and thinking we were idiots.
Isn't that the basis of the economy with the increasing wealth gap and so on? It's not really materially different to paying Disney millionaires to go watch the latest Marvel movie.
> The question is cogent, concise, and valid -- if you're a movie maker (motivated by money/fame/whatever) why would you try to contend with complex and difficult material if you could instead, as they author asks, more easily rake in billions by having two asexual fictional character punch aliens.
I guess my confusion is stemmed from the fact that I don't think sex scenes are inherently more complex and difficult than alien punching. Perhaps more difficult to sell due to ratings, but that's a given.
I'm not endorsing the way Marvel is making movies; I think it's quite formulaic and intellectually lazy. But on the other hand, sex can easily be just as formulaic and lazy. My opinion is that Marvel didn't include sex in their movies simply because PG-13 has a bigger market and makes more money. If sex would sell better, they'll put sex in there with very little effort, and it wouldn't make those movies any less formulaic.
Of course, I'm anything but a movie expert; sex might really be more difficult to contend with, but the author hardly provided any explanation to support this claim, and thus I remain unpersuaded.
---
And as a Chinese person, I'd suggest that Marvel is successful in China, because as formulaic as it is, it simply produces far better movie than current mainstream Chinese movies in almost every aspect. Chinese film making (mainstream) has been pacing backwards for at least the last decade.
The problem, in all cases, remains the long standing oligarch families and aristocratically rooted institutions, and their captive “public service” institutions, some of which are global in scope. Not wishing to engender a flaming thread, I will simply state that certain aspects of “institutional capture” are very much du jour topics of global interest and impact.
A global reset of “free markets” via a ‘day zero of capital accumulations’ could provide a solution. Many of the established capital hordes are legacies of activities that are now understood to be anti-social at best, and predatory at the extreme.
Coupled with this, we need pedagogical guidance to inform the new generations who are not to manor born. Almost none of the new blood born to middle or lower classes are educated in the necessities of generational wealth preservation and applications of wealth towards affecting societal outcomes. At best, we have children of Marxists and pseudo-Marxists railing against “Capital” without understanding the dynamics of societal power based on multi-generational societal networks, which transcend mere capital.
Primary sources working against such a program are precisely the “entertainment” complexes owned stock, lock, and barrel by informed and purposive societal networks, which at this point in human history have fully transcended ethnic and national boundaries, and clearly aim for stupefying the masses. There is a reason you have been treated to 2 decades of Marvel comics in films.
Modern research doesn't consist of magical researchers discovering new things in isolation.
This is not some marvel movie.
If someone has won the Nobel prize they've been changing and contributing in a huge way to their field of interest for many years.
Businesses shouldn't care about business they should only care about my own personal view point on politics.
Yeah, Hollywood is doing the same thing as Kodak. I don't have your will power though. I still watch movies, especially Marvel and Disney. But at least I admit it.
What pisses me off is a friend of mine who boycotted a company who supported China but then he still watches American movies. Like do you not realize the whole industry is sucking up to China? Either make a stand for real or don't make a stand at all, don't be a hypocrite.
*Obviously* you're not doing what my friend is doing. You're *Obviously* not a hypocrite. You must not watch any movies or TV shows at all.
Granted, not all the Marvel movies are terrible. Yet They have gone from a freshly squeezed orange drink to a canned energy drink.
>>A non-stop stream of terrible Marvel movies and TV shows
I'm always surprised when people have such a visceral reaction to anything. There's what, 20? 30? Proper big marvel movies now - are they all terrible? I literally can't believe that - yes, they are not high cinema, but there is enough variety there that surely you can't describe all of them as terrible. Unless I don't know, you just hate marvel and all their characters?
Maybe comic books didn't lead to delinquency but they sure led to something far worse. A non-stop stream of terrible Marvel movies and TV shows that seem to be mandatory viewing for everyone if you wanna be able to have a conversation with people nowadays
It depends on what you are watching. I like Asian and European cinema and shows. For me most of American/Hollywood stuff is third rate junk, including Marvel and american Comics stuff and in seldom occasions I want to watch it, I get it easier from VPN/P*bay than to subscribe to a lot of different services. If they will make me jump through hoops, I will return to the VPN/P. method.
> peddle their crappy action movies so much so that you get in contact with them whether you like it or not
Marvel?
> I can’t remember the last time 14 year old boys initiated an outrage mob.
Gamergate?
> Demon Slayer
yes.
don't know if OP is referring specifically to some anime or anime in general but the 3 of the top 5 grossing films in japan are animes and animation is a fully developed medium for story telling of all ages.
if native japanese don't know about kimetsu i guess it's the same way my parents have definitely not watched a single marvel film, and i'm not sure if they are even aware of their existence.
Social lives aren't unpredictable. They're almost comically predictable as time goes on.
Everyone in a group falls into patterns, roles. The same jokes get told, or variations there-of. You do the same thing every year. BBQ for Bob's birthday. Jill hosts a cheese/wine night a couple of times over winter. The geekier sub-group all gather to watch the first few episodes of the new marvel series. Everyone gets together for a picnic in woolaton park on the first or second sunny weekend of sunmer.
Occasionally something new gets thrown in, and if everyone likes it, it becomes the 'new' regular thing. Or something gets dropped due to changes in life or circumstances. No more games nights till 2am now 80% of my male friends have kids. No more Saturday night clubbing in the cookie club after we left our 20s.
If you want to keep doing unpredictable things, you really have to meet someone who's extremely hyper/exhausting, or keep joing new social groups (by meetups, etc.). And of course, they become predictable too, by their very nature being a scheduled meetup about a specific thing.
And it's worth it. Personally I feel the best experience in life is laughing so hard you end up crying while chatting with your friends.
IANAL but I don't think Apple is liable in this case. It sounds just like websites not being responsible for user created content. They do have to remove illegal content, and must have means to report and act on it, but you can't e.g. sue hackernews because someone posts a torrent of a Marvel movie.
So I only see three reasons to be famous:
1. The attention and adulation is your drug. I think there's no shortage of people who fall into this category.
2. To convert that fame into opportunities you wouldn't otherwise have; and
3. To convert that fame into money.
Obviously if you're just plain rich then (3) is moot. If you fall into (1) then money can buy you fame to a degree.
So that leaves (2). Wealth will give you many opportunities fame will but certainly not all. Or at least the costs to replicate that are truly ludicrous, like being a star in a Marvel movie, spending a year on the ISS, going to the Moon, that sort of thing.
The way I see it the downsides of fame are significant. I've heard tales from people who worked in media years ago that the very stars who now want the media to leave them alone and to respect their privacy would beg them for stories and coverage just a few years earlier.
I don't think I'd want to be ultra-wealthy (as in a billionaire+). At that point you're almost removed from society. I imagine you end up moving in circles with other ultra-wealthy people that are actually quite small. You risk being a target of the desperate, the criminally minded (fraud, kidnapping, blackmail, that sort of thing) and the mentally unstable.
And really what is the practical difference between having $20m and $2b? Sure you'll have nicer houses and more of them. You may well have a super-yacht at that point. But who cares? I know I don't.
You could say "you would if you had $2b" and maybe that's true. I'm sure I'd buy a nicer place but I think I'd still want to keep a relatively low profile.
> 2) Don't get annoyed at my significant other for wasting my time.
I mean, if your SO or anyone that you care about is talking with/to you and you could ever possibly think it's a waste of your time no matter what it is that they are saying, then I think you may need to re-evaluate a few things in the new year.
I know where it is you are coming from here, as I also had the same thought process for a long time. Honestly, you just have to find the right kinda people to be around. If you have siblings or parents, you know how it is that everything that you manage to talk about is interesting in some way and how you both know when it's not. Like, during a TV show/movie you really like, even the 'dull' parts are interesting and you are super pumped that they explored the world of the film/show just a bit more. How you want to learn everything there is to know about Star Wars, Marvel, Python 2.7, etc? Even how a Wookie sneezes or Thor shaves?
Yeah, people that you like to be around that much, those are the people to become romantically involved with. Don't become romantically involved with people that 'waste your time' when they tell you about their issues and problems.
> From what I read here, lots of our current greatest minds spend their time creating really creative marketing.
Heh, yeah, how to store or transfer bits efficiently so that shop selling Chinese-made shit doesn't go down on Black Friday, or so people can get their crisp Marvel movie on their 4K TV. Or so some bikini-clad girl can optimally promote that "detox drink" to her "followers"...
Personally I think all the time at work (AI) and literally the last thing I want to do in sport / cinema / personal life / any after work activities is think. No one go to marvel for the storyline, people just like action (and for me, seeing the adaptation of comics I read).
But this doesn't have to be a fight, you do you and I "do me". To me scorcese was indeed elitist. It's like saying classical music is better than rap or metal.. it's not true per se and honestly it doesn't reflect well on him to say something like that. Indeed more like "old man yelling at crowd"
Star Wars and Marvel movies are stuffy?
There are only one or two Marvel or Star Wars movies a year though. Is that really worth subscribing to a streaming service for?
(Not to mention that only maybe a quarter of these movies are worth seeking out, the rest are something I’d only ever watch for free on an airplane or something. But that’s just personal taste).
Do you really believe explicit, credible death and/or rape threats for being a woman with opinions on Marvel movies or games or being LGBQ are examples of a non-discriminatory environment?
Media plays such a huge part in this. How often do we see young people saving the world versus old people? I like the Marvel movies because the protagonists are mostly reasonably aged.
I try to remind myself at times that Gaston Glock didn't design his first gun until age 52.
If you think that one through it seems like doing this for a movie would be a logistical nightmare. Most actors are pretty good about learning their lines, which means you’d couldn’t just put random changes in because otherwise their time would be wasted. I’m guessing that it’s only used for pivotal plot changes like the Roddenberry incident describe on Wikipedia. Seems like the path used these days is extreme lawsuit threats built into their contract, something you’ll see just about every Marvel star joke about during interviews.
"The Walt Disney Company to Acquire Majority Ownership of BAMTech" [1].
"The company's major clients include the NHL, HBO (for its HBO Now service), the PGA Tour, Riot Games, WatchESPN, PlayStation Vue, WWE Network and TheBlaze." [2]
"Marvel, Star Wars films to ditch Netflix for Disney service" [3]
I'd say they have both the content, technical expertise, and tenacity and perseverance to pull it off.
[1] https://www.thewaltdisneycompany.com/walt-disney-company-acquire-majority-ownership-bamtech/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAMTech [3] https://www.cnet.com/news/marvel-and-star-wars-films-will-ditch-netflix-for-disney/
I stopped going to the theater for a long time until the local theaters put in large recliners, reserved seating, and cheap-ass Tuesdays. All seats for all showings on Tuesdays are $5-7 (depending on the theater). So we have started going back to the theaters on Tuesdays for spectacle movies like Star Wars and Marvel.
I bought my mum a roku (she's disabled so she spends a lot of time watching TV/movies and on the Internet) and it seriously improved her life, prior to that she only had UK digital and catch up services but now with Netflix/Amazon prime and BBC iPlayer she has more high quality TV that suits her taste than she can watch.
She's also seriously addicted to Netflix's Marvel offerings which I find somewhat hilarious.
Some examples I've noticed personally:
* Clips of Bill Burr on Conan O'Brien > Men's Rights / anti-feminism videos
* Animal videos > Creepy channel where someone makes various mousetraps and sees how many kills they get a night
* Videogame longform critiques > Pro-Gamergate / Men's rights
* Movie analysis video essays > Video essays on how SJW's are ruining Star Wars / Marvel
* General psychology / self-help > Clip from a ho-hum Jordan Peterson psychology lecture > "Oh, you watched one thing featuring Jordan Peterson, you must agree with his more extreme views. Have some videos about that."
The one thing the article didn't address is exactly the pushback from regulators and corporations. They will NOT stand by and watch idly as their control is getting pulled out from their hands.
Even if such a network gets invented, I am pretty certain governments will make aggressive laws along he lines of "if your computer caches a trailer of this new Marvel movie, we can confiscate your tech for copyright infringement".
As much as I want the problems to be only technical, IMO the much bigger battle will be in courts and public hearings.
What about the engineering of Netflix? I see lots of comments here about pricing and how content distribution in Hollywood is messed, etc. If Disney has acquired a streaming facility, how will they compare to how Netflix is engineered?
Will they have apps, sub-accounts, lists of favorites, and be able to move from device to device and pick up where you left off?
I have to guess that Disney's depth of content is pretty shallow. You have kid movies, older Disney content, and then franchises they bought like Star Wars and Marvel. But those account for a handful of movies a piece. Maybe it won't be hard to technically serve that content up since it is much smaller than Netflix' library.
What about content delivery? The technical part of this is probably a very hard problem to solve, globally, where people's streams aren't interrupted or dropping frames, etc.
Just small things like when I fast forward, Netflix shows thumbnails of the content, will Disney have those small quality-of-life types of features?
Yet another issue is the actual price of a ticket at a theater.
I'm willing to spend more for something that I trust will have been made to the standards that I desire. This doesn't mean FX standards, it means a film that I can actually enjoy watching.
The current price of movie tickets means that I'm only willing to go to the theater for a really good movie. Marvel has become a brand that I associate with (in recent years) producing films that are of the archetype I expect (from the ads) when I go in, and that also have enough embellishment to the core story that I enjoy watching the film.
If it cost me 3-5 of today's dollars instead of 15 to see lesser films I might still go to some of them even if they are the usual Hollywood crap; instead of the premium product they want to trick me in to thinking they've made.
This looks like a way to break BitTorrent, as other posters have outlined.
Streaming in general (apart from via a local server) frustrates me. The entire idea is simply a way of relinquishing control to an external body. Hard drives are not that expensive, and patience is a virtue. I'm very happy that youtube-dl exists, for example, because otherwise when Google disappears I'll lose a lot of useful material I have access to at the moment.
Regardless - I'm surprised to see this here. Sci-Hub is one thing - it's an educational resource.
Mainstream media... I just gave it up rather than pirating it. I'm not 18 any more - my friends don't really care about the latest Marvel flick. The movie companies have lost even my mindshare now. Books, online reading material, educational videos, all free, all a better use of my time, all less likely to leave me wanting a fast car like James Bond.
Marvel and Doctor Who and Darth Vader aren't really related to IT though. I'm aware of all three, and seen a couple of the Star Wars movies, but that's it. By her argument, Trish would be alienating to me, a male in IT as well. People in all fields have hobbies and interests outside of work. I don't think this is a sexism or even IT issue.