Movies and Cold Pizza
Watched Solo the other day.
One Word: Safe
Two Words: Nostalgia bait
Three Words: Waste of time
Now, I’m not going to rip into Solo. There are many articles you can find that will do that. Rather I’d like to discuss the trend of movies today.
Once upon a time, movies were hard to make. They cost a lot of money. But more than that, they cost a lot of time and effort. A painstaking amount, compared to today.
What that did was make it so people who made movies, really had to love them. They had to care for them. Nurture them to become living things.
The process was painful, so only the really motivated chose to be filmmakers.
And what motivated these people was love of story. They loved the stories they had to tell and were welling to invest life blood into making them great.
With this type of passion, movies, on a whole, were more varied and had more heart.
Today, things have changed. Making movies is easy.
Seriously. Just spend tons of money. Want to make a good movie. Spend more money.
The problem is when you spend so much money, you want to make it back. So then only movies that guarantee high returns get priority. Those movies get made; they make money. And this vicious cycle gets created, where now only movies that can economically survive are movies that cost over $100 mil. (and cheap horror, but we’ll talk about that in a different article.)
Franchises, basically.
The thing about franchises is that by definition, they aren’t looking for greatness. (Is McDonald’s anyone’s favorite burger?) What they are gear for is consistency. Or as I like to call it “Cold Pizza” filmmaking: Good enough.
Once upon a time, the goal was to make great movies. The thing is if you are striving to make greatness, you risk failure. The movie industry, today is terrified of failure.
It has no balls.
Which coincidently is my Four Words for Solo.
my one word about your article .... excellent :)
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Your article is pretty inspiring. The movie trend you explained about is marvellous. You are suvh a genius. The pizza is also good. The report is worth reading and praising.
I actually can't believe you are saying this because you saw Solo. The fact that you truly believe it is easy to make movies now a days is absurd. Have you watched any interviews with Christopher Nolan, Tom Cruise, Kevin Fiege? The heart and dedication they put into their movies are unprecedented. You are blinded by big superhero movies, yes spending money on those big blockbuster will help in the long run. Go watch Andy Serkis talk about his new movie "Mowgli" and see how much time, work, and dedication he has put into making that movie.
To talk about the financial aspect of movie making. "A Quiet Place" took 17 million to make and grossed 325 million. Yes it is very difficult to break into Hollywood with a low budget movie, but there have been plenty that rise through the ranks.
You just cannot sit here and bash the people who put in so much time and effort into making a movie just because you watched one with CGI in it.
Also check out MovieCoin, helping people invest in smaller movies.
Unless it is a Star Trek movie or one of the main storyline Star Wars movies, I don't bother seeing movies in the theater anymore. It is just too expensive. I feel like the return on investment is just not there. I haven't seen Solo yet, and I probably won't for a while, but I can see where you are going. I think a lot of studios that are doing films like that try to focus more on making sure they get the key catch phrases in vs the overall production and script.