Dear Disney and Warner Brothers...

 

Stop making Star Wars, Marvel and DCEU films.

Just STOP.

I'm not the only one who used to look forward to those films with mounting eagerness in my heart.

I'm sure I speak on behalf of a growing number of former fans who have become exhausted with a never ending pipeline of movies, streaming shows, animated series, "hawt toys," and other ancillary bric a brac.

Some protest, "But muh Mandalorian!"  "But muh Joker!"  "But muh Wandavision!"  "But muh Peacemaker!"

No.  No, no, no, NO.

Not all the Baby Yoda / Grogus in the world will stop the decay of these behemoths.

The antics of James Gunn and Taika Waititi are getting very old, very fast

There's only so many Joker films Todd Phillips can crank out.  Joker was just refried Taxi Driver / King of Comedy if you're honest about it.

For myself, I honestly thought that musicals would be the next trend in popular filmmaking, but neither In the Heights nor refried West Side Story made any waves.  Lin-Manuel Miranda!  America's Golden Boy!  The genius behind Hamilton, couldn't get his cinematic freshmen effort to win any notice.  Steven Spielberg?  Well, that dinosaur has seen better days.

I'd say look to the indie film scene, but it's just depressing shit like Sound of Metal, which only made me feel anxious about losing my hearing.  Nomadland was about a perennial homeless Amazon employee who travels around in a camper van and shits in a bucket.  Unique?  Yes.  Thankfully so.  I hope no one gets the idea of making a movie remotely similar to that cinematic funeral dirge.

And then to add salt to the wound, Nomadland's writer / director Chloë Zhao moves on to direct Eternals - a Marvel movie! - and uses a palette of dull grays, blues, and browns when the color scheme should be a range of brilliant CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black for you uninitiated).

There are some bright spots, like Kenneth Branagh's Belfast.  There is Everything, Everywhere, All at Once which stars martial arts legend Michelle Yeoh.  All at Once is a multiverse story that is everything Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness tried to be but failed.  Then there's The Northman, directed by Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse) who drinks from the same stream as Shakespeare did and created a bloody Norse revenge tragedy which would make Hamlet the Prince of Denmark run to the warm bosom of his mother Gertrude.

However, those films barely made a cent.  They were in theaters and out twice as fast.  Covid had nothing to do with it.

Gina Carano made a splash with Terror on the Prairie.  Conservative pundit Matt Walsh raised some hackles with his documentary What is a Woman?

Yet those are not blockbusters.  Terror on the Prairie is not Unforgiven.  What is a Woman? is not Roger and Me.  Or maybe I'm just out of the loop.  I haven't had my finger on the pulse of indie film making in a long time.

Hollywood tries to bury these films, not realizing that they're seeds.

My hope is that films like the ones I listed will punch their way into the mainstream as Marvel winds up Phase Bore and Taika Waititi continues the fine tradition of ruining Star Wars with his own additions.

Even slated "high fantasy" projects like The Lord of the Rings:  The Rings of Power and House of the Dragon show evidence that Jeff Bezos and George RR Martin don't know what the fuck they're doing.

"So stop watching these blockbuster movies," says Captain Straw Man McObvious.

I try to.  Sometimes I succeed.  The thing is that it's not that easy.  The fact that these leviathans occupy our movie theaters means there's less room for something new to touch the hearts and minds of the general public.

This is not a well thought out blog entry.  This is a rant, and it's tiring me.

See ya round.

- JJB