Comment by awongh
8 hours ago
Can't it be both? In Marvel movies the plot, story, and characters are irrelevant and it's still the current greatest American cultural export.
8 hours ago
Can't it be both? In Marvel movies the plot, story, and characters are irrelevant and it's still the current greatest American cultural export.
You may want to watch again the movies that created the franchise.
All the successful Marvel movies are completely based on the characters.
A lot of the best Marvel movies are really other genres wearing a marvel skin
Look at Captain America: The First Avenger. It's a pulpy world war 2 film, really. If you took Captain America out it would still be a fun film. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a spy thriller
Ant Man is a heist movie, like Oceans 11. Guardians is a sci fi comedy.
After a while they started to all just become "Marvel Movies" and that's the point they stopped being nearly as fun imo
A lot of them are only "Marvel Movies" in their final act, which still leaves a lot of room for fun genre-surfing and -bending, before they have to get back to the business of, "This is part of a franchise." But even on that note, I don't think they get enough credit. Phases 1-3, Marvel et al. managed to wrangle a dozen films of varying genres, working through the stories of just as many main characters, into a single series with a coherent, overarching narrative. It was the biggest spectacle ever created in the Spectacle Industry, yet with a handful of examples of genuine cinematic sublimity (if not entire films, at least a few scenes), to boot.
And people would rather hate than just ride the wave.
Right, most of the context of who the original characters were and represented in the comic books are washed away in the movie versions- it's just a marketing thing that draws people in.
Batman and the different actors and directors over the different versions of the franchise is another example.
There will be some creative people that can now tell stories they couldn't before with AI, but I think by and large the major use case is to create short form video clips to get attention on the internet (advertising). I don't foresee a "movie" (meaning narrative story told via visuals and sounds in 1-3 hours) renaissance happening, in part because I think the form is fully mature and there's not really much more that can be done with it. It's essentially gonna be where Jazz music is today in 40 years, it will have its fans, and there will be talented practitioners, but every year it will be more and more culturally irrelevant.
It could be "film" as a medium is dead- but most likely 1+ hour video fictional story telling as a medium is just a very broad category and will probably continue to exist as a format that people enjoy.
It could be that in 20 years the Oscars are like the Jazz awards (the Grammys? - I listen to Jazz but I can't name a single Jazz Grammy winner)
You mean the Gramophone awards where they hand you a little mini gramophone statue.
Samara Joy, famously, for the past few years.
https://www.facebook.com/CBSMornings/videos/start-your-morni...
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/saturday-sessions-samara-joy-p...
They might have been in the last decade, but now it’s just yet another franchise audiences have stopped caring about.