Rolling Marvel Cinematic Universe thread (+ a poll: Classic or Dud?)

no big screen play outside of five major cities. it's a fucking shame.

That’s also not the fault of any movie company. That’s the fact of living outside of major markets. People can stay at home now and watch all kinds of bullshit. Okja is on Netflix! We’re going to be OK.

(And candidly, ulysses, I feel a little condescended to for you to point me toward "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" of all things... but I'll survive ;)

Paramount just had two big flops w/Gemini Man & Terminator; but here are some films they were releasing deep in the MCU era, tell me they weren't taking risks:

November 11, 2016 Arrival
December 16, 2016 Fences
December 23, 2016 Silence (a Marty S. joint!)
September 15, 2017 Mother
October 27, 2017 Suburbicon
December 22, 2017 Downsizing

Granted, it's now two more years down the road, and Br4d Grey (who championed this stuff) is no longer there (or anywhere); but you get the idea.

And we're also never going back to the '70s, no matter how easy anyone rides, or how the bull rages... lamenting the loss of such a unique era feels like pissing in the wind

Okay, let's talk about that then.
the oscar nominations are meant to be the height of the intersection of art and commerce, films that are critically acclaimed and that tend to do notably well at the box office. Weinstein's svengali magic trick was that for a long time he was often very good at figuring out how to have one inform the other so that the whole country is going to see fucking Shakespeare in Love... but i digress. A quick bit of googling suggests that 870 films were released in North America last year. Those Oscar noms represent maybe 2% of those. The top 10 2018 hits (of which only Incredibles 2 and Black Panther cross over to the Oscars) equal nearly 25% of the total domestic box office for the year... about 3.5 billion of about 12. That means that 95% of the films released in america fit into neither category. that's over 800 films that don't take up a month in your local multiplex, that don't get marketing and press support from a major studio and that don't get screen time to impact the culture. before marvel proved that you could more or less lock up 25% of theaters with what is essentially the same movie playing for a full year, that space was filled with other stuff! Scorcese is bemoaning that loss, not that no other films play at all but that the margins are so slim and that most studios are opting out of the middle ground and ceding it to streaming.... which may not matter if you don't think that seeing a film on a big screen is any different than watching it at home but it is it is it is it IS different

jeez, we went six different directions in the time it took me to type that! i have a cold, i'm goin' to bed.

btw, i never even knew there was a bbc adaptation of easy rider raging bulls until recently, it's a fun watch if you haven't seen it even it it only skims the book

goodnight! I enjoy rapping w/you

http://media0.giphy.com/media/XtihHK45Buhpax98BN/giphy.gif

anyways, my point - which i may have made too awkwardly to land - is that the top 5% of film in america represents basically everything that does boffo box office or gets nominated for statues. the remaining 95% is increasingly squeezed out due to a mix of evolving media landscapes, the de-emphasis of appointment viewing in theaters for anything but corporate approved cultural touchstones, winner-take-all business practices and an entire generation of disposable income carrying manbabies willing to see a three hour popcorn movie five times so that they can say they did their part to unseat Avatar.
Scorcese is absolutely an imperfect deliverer of this message. And as an official manbaby myself i'm hardly above gorging on occasional garbage and finding it both tasty and nutritious. The thing to guard against in these kinda conversations imo is to assume there are right or wrong answers here and that a bunch of yahoos on the internet know more and are in a better position to figure out how to untangle the mess that is the dying days of big screen movies before marty fuckin' scorcese does.

i enjoy rapping with you too... even when i'm not entirely sure where you're going with your argument! but that's likely the robitussin talking.

which may not matter if you don't think that seeing a film on a big screen is any different than watching it at home but it is it is it is it IS different

― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Monday, November 4, 2019

of course it is! if it weren't audiences wouldn't choose to stay home in such decisive numbers instead of going to the theater!

and yeah, it's a shame for cinéma but on balance i'm okay living in a world where idk Kevin Smith's DOGMA doesn't get the honor of a theatrical release.

speaking of brokeback mountain, ang lee somehow keeps getting theatrical releases. take that, marty!

considering marvel gave him the keys to the comics, it's a small miracle that the world was never subjected to a kevin smith marvel movie and, given the stakes and his reputation, I think we've likely dodged that bullet forever

if you'd like a good example of some non-highbrow filmmakers whose work would've likely flourished in a world where the primary options aren't billion dollars or straight to video, I'd point straight to Benson and Moorhead.

some interesting Irishman scuttlebutt from Deadline:
https://deadline.com/2019/11/terminator-dark-fate-linda-hamilton-harriet-motherless-brooklyn-weekend-box-office-1202774477/

The unfortunate fact of the matter is that there are some films which won’t work at the box office, given their economics. Studio development execs continually huddle to debate what’s marquee enough. No one in town was going to make a 3 1/2 hour, slow-moving gangster movie with three near 80-year-old actors at a $160M-$200M budget.

Plus, what box office could be made from such an endeavor? Irishman would have likely tanked, and to bring it back to rival distributors, the pic’s release would have boxed some holdovers (maybe as many as two titles a venue) out of the theater. Meantime, despite Motherless Brooklyn not finding an audience, the pic was priced at a reasonable cost in regards to what its B.O. prospects would be.

Netflix in its $5B-plus grossing quarterly revenue, was able to make Irishman, while rival studios didn’t want to gamble. Again, we live in a world where producers have to be agnostic when it comes to the medium their films are made for.

the remaining 95% is increasingly
Streaming.

I feel extremely strongly that streaming music is just basically napster plus tips, i.e. barely better than just stealing music, but I think streaming film and TV content is somehow far fairer to the creators. Maybe because funding movies and shows means paying the rates up front?

Kevin Smith would have obviously made a terrible Marvel movie, is why - it seems pretty clear that "is an enormous comics fan" really wasn't an attribute that Marvel was looking for in its directors?

I thought I read it on this thread but I can't find it - the workhorse doing the most to move Netflix over to the next, respectable, phase of its plan is one Martin J Scorsese, who's going to get it some Oscars.

xp it's easy to say that now but i honestly think if fox had given the 03 daredevil movie to smith to write/direct (and he had just recently come off a "marvel saving" run on the book: http://sequart.org/magazine/52690/kevin-smith-joe-quesada-daredevil/), it ABSOLUTELY would've done better financially and critically than what actually got made. from there, maybe marvel looks at smith for some help on making the iron man movie, possibly brings him in to help craft the long term plans. he coulda been a contender!

anyways, shame on me for forgetting that kevin smith is actually currently writing an animated Howard the Duck series for hulu, so nevermind
https://www.thewrap.com/howard-the-duck-animated-series-marvel-hulu-netflix/

Was gonna say. It's...disheartening.

It's a really nice opinion piece, not least of all because he is humble and honest. He is very honest that he is old, and that he has old ideas about cinema. And... I just think his ideas about cinema are askew (way too much focus on character and narrative, BORING!) and his ideas about distribution and economics are spot on, but aren't helped by his ideas about cinema. And it's worth disconnecting the two.

So, in conclusion, fuck Disney.

Anecdotally, I have to say that the broader cinematic wasteland for which Disney et al are being blamed these days (not without justification) feels very like the cinematic wasteland that small town USA has been for decades. From the time that I first felt sparks of interest in something more than big dumb blockbusters, I was forced to dig and scrape like a motherfucker in order to discover anything that skewed from the mainstream (although I at least had a guide inasmuch as I was lucky enough to come of age at a time when Film Threat was inexplicably available on podunk grocery store magazine racks). If I hadn't made a great deal of use of that Morbs-approved resource of choice, the public library, I would have been at least well into college before I ever saw anything independently-distributed. Hell, even in college we had to drive for an hour and a half to the one theater which was screening that obscure art film Being John Malkovich. I get that there's been an unsavory shift in the market, and particularly to the extent that Disney is being an evil megadick wrt the Fox acquisition, but I honestly wonder how much that shift is even registered outside of metropolitan areas. If anything, it's a helluva lot easier these days to see non-mainstream fare even if you don't have many theatrical options available to you.

"And... I just think his ideas about cinema are askew (way too much focus on character and narrative, BORING!)"

lol as if you could come up with anything better

xp I was super into “indie film” in hs/college (early ‘90s), but I was seeing almost all of it on home video. I didn’t need to resort to the library like Old Lunch; the cool little video stores around (pre-Blockbuster hegemony) had all that stuff. It was a big deal when I was interning near NYC in ‘95, and could, like, take the train to see Amateur at the Angelika.

Maybe that’s why I can’t lament the “home viewing is the only option for most ppl outside NYC/L.A.” angle — I came up watching movies on much crappier screens than exist today.

"And... I just think his ideas about cinema are askew (way too much focus on character and narrative, BORING!)"

lol as if you could come up with anything better

― xyzzzz__, 5. november 2019 15:02 (thirty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Fp'ed you for that, and I know the theory is to just fp and otherwise ignore these kinds of unprovoked personal attacks, and just assume that you're having a bad day, and has to sort through some issues, that you just want to take out on somebody else, but seriously. Go fuck yourself, and stop trying to make other people feel as bad as you do. It's so shitty behaviour.

sometimes when we touch
the honesty's too much

Can't decide whether Martin Scorsese or Fred has better ideas about cinema

No wait I can tbh

Fred I thought you blocked me so you couldn't see my posts?

Yeah, then decided you were getting better. But you're apparently still a trolling piece of shit, so back on you go.

I was hoping to just snipe at your shit with no consequences. Now that I've been flagged I don't know how I'll sleep tonight.

Also, why the fuck would you write that crap directly aimed at me, if you didn't thought I would be able to read it? What the fuck is wrong with you?

Like, seriously, are you sick or something?

Tell me why
Everything turned around
Packing up
Shacking up is all you want to do

get a fucking room you two, this is the thread for alternately despairing about the dismal state of current cinema and ruminating on hailee steinfeld's casting as kate bishop

And cornbread
Delicious cornbread

When it comes to assessing ILXors I feel like sickness is maybe the logical starting point

A Chicago metal quartet, Disturbed has been driving fans in the Midwest wild with their frenetic, theatrical live show. On their debut album, The Sickness, the band combines an over-the-top metal groove appealing to the underground with radio-friendly melodic hooks that grab hold of mainstream rock fans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIcm7WzjC2k

Also Epstein didn't kill himself

well, yeah

I really liked that piece. Just seeing Fred talk about ideas and being all patronising -- especially given what given what he posts on here -- was just too much for me.

And Epstein didn't kill himself

Horshack, on the other hand

take it to the watchmen thread buddy

Took me a second but A+

Unlike Epstein, cinema killed itself

has the coroner weighed in on cinema's hyoid bone yet

Otherwise known as Happy Madison productions