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The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

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231 points frogulis | 3 comments | 15 Jul 25 03:52 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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somenameforme ◴[15 Jul 25 04:23 UTC] No.44567805[source]▶
Fun fact: movie sales, in terms of tickets sold, peaked in 2002. [1] All the 'box office records' since then are the result of charging way more to a continually plummeting audience size.

And this is highly relevant for things like this. People often argue that if movies were so bad then people would stop watching them, unaware that people actually have stopped watching them!

Even for individual movies. For all the men-in-spandex movies, the best selling movie (by tickets sold) in modern times is Titanic, 27 years ago.

[1] - https://www.the-numbers.com/market/

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PaulHoule ◴[15 Jul 25 13:25 UTC] No.44570905[source]▶
In my pod we've got the theory that more people in the US like anime than domestic pop culture. All the time my son and I have random encounters with people who like Goblin Slayer or Solo Leveling or Bocchi The Rock but never find anybody who is interested in new movies and TV shows. They say Spongebob Squarepants has good ratings -- of course it has good ratings because it is on all the time. People mistake seeing ads for a movie for anyone being interested in the movie.
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pjc50 ◴[15 Jul 25 13:54 UTC] No.44571200[source]▶
> more people in the US like anime than domestic pop culture

Difficult to get viewing figures for that, but I find it hard to believe. That does feel like a bubble effect. And possibly a piracy bubble effect too.

In fact the difficulty of getting meaningful viewing figures out of streamers is probably a big part of the problem. Nobody knows what's actually popular. Even those supposed to be getting royalties had no idea (wasn't there a strike over that?). And the streaming services themselves pay far too much attention to the first weeks, preventing sleeper hits or word of mouth being effective.

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1. michaelbuckbee ◴[15 Jul 25 14:01 UTC] No.44571268{3}[source]▶
Part of the bubble is generational, what my parents watch, what I watch and what my kids watch are all very different. Aka the death of "four quadrant" entertainment.

Even just saying "watch" feels off as so much of my kids time is spent with franchises in Roblox or other online games.

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2. PaulHoule ◴[15 Jul 25 14:44 UTC] No.44571671[source]▶
I don't tend to like generational analysis because it obscures the Diffusion of innovations analysis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations

People think of anime as "for young people" and maybe it is -- but I first saw Star Blazers circa 1981 and thought it was the best thing I ever saw on TV, then about ten years later Urusei Yatsura and Ranma 1/2 and Tenchi Muyo and Guyver and I still watch it. Anime is actually the center of a "media mix" that includes manga, light novels, visual novels, video games, web novels. streaming and other channels. In Japan there must be plenty of people my age who had the same experience starting with Gundam or something like that.

Granted I don't talk to a lot of Xers who like anime, but I sure see it in 20-somethings. (To be fair I see a lot of people who have an obvious squick reaction when they say "I don't care for anime")

Another case where generational analysis goes wrong is in the analysis of TikTok vs YouTube. I'd argue that most of the cultural changes (personalization economy, filter bubbles, an environment where Zohran Mandami does well, ...) actually happened with YouTube but we didn't notice it because it had a broad base, happened slowly, and personalization is deceptive since you don't see what I see -- but TikTok seemed to come on so fast and was visible to people because it affected an "other".

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3. cgriswald ◴[15 Jul 25 17:40 UTC] No.44573796[source]▶
I’m a Gen Xer. Voltron and Robotech were the big ones for me and my friends but these Americanized shows didn’t lead us to anime in general. We weren’t really exposed to real anime and to the degree we were (Akira comes to mind) we couldn’t get our hands on it. Even as a teen when I could finally buy it on VHS selection and availability were very limited. (Manga was somewhat more available.) It’s not surprising to me most of our peers don’t watch it. I still watch it now and almost have the same problem from the opposite angle: There’s so much available finding the good stuff that isn’t just yet-another mediocre shonen or isekai, or is cringey soft porn is difficult.