1badmf wrote on Jul 15, 2023, 16:14:
off the top of my head, christopher nolan's the only one doing big films with any fresh ideas. everyone else is just chasing the tail of past glories; esp. the comic book films. the writers do the best they can but it's the big wigs that are completely risk averse and only green light past profits that are really responsible. they really shoulda fired kathleen kennedy a long time ago for all the mediocre garbage she approves. it's done irreparable harm to the quality of star wars and all the old lucasfilm IPs.

I guess I'd argue that George Lucas didn't do any better with the prequels than Disney has since it bought the franchise. The best moments Star Wars has had is when they're doing new characters and trying different things, but Disney wants to put faces on kids' backpacks and sell toys to make future fans spend money on it 20 years from now. It's not that big of a change; George Lucas kind of pioneered that entire concept.

The problem with all of it is that most of the entertainment industry is owned by a few big companies who aren't trying to make the next Star Wars, they're just trying to find new ways to market the IP's they already own. Studios putting up tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to get films made was never a long-term sustainable way of making original content, so they buy franchises rather than trying to make new ones. The strike right now is a turning point for the same reason; actors and writers making movies as we know them could easily go the way of the dodo if those big studios can start re-selling IP's they already own with stars they own the likenesses of. Arnold Schwarzenegger or Liam Neeson might not be able to star in Taken 38: More Takener at 85 years old, but an AI generated likeness of their 1980's self could. They're already paying programmers for CG everything, if they can cut out the cost of sets and actors and residual payments to mass produce fast-food McBlockbusters for a third of the price they will, especially with streaming favoring quantity over quality.

It's not just movies, though. It's hard to even find good original books these days that aren't derivatives of something that was done better decades ago. There's a sea of cheap content out there, and as often as not the deciding factor in what gets read is how much of a budget went into marketing it and putting it front and center where you notice it over something else. I don't think the problem is the writers, it's that publishers only want a certain thing done in a certain way because something else just like that already made them money, same thing with movies, and TV. Every now and then something new and original will sneak out as a labor of love, and then it'll get franchised and have four sequels in ten years until everyone is sick of it and the cycle repeats.