The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

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/

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.

I don't like (most) Anime (I feel like it's one way I diverge from typical geek culture) but I do often like foreign movies and TV shows more than domestic ones. That's probably an effect too.

On the flip side, I've heard the blandness of larger ticket domestic US films in terms of things like sexual, religious, or political themes attributable to global distribution. Many culture are much more sexually conservative, and most overseas cultures outside maybe Canada and some of Europe would not get (or care about) US politics.

Anime is such a broad genre that it is completely normal to dislike most of it.