Uncommonly known factoid: movie ticket sales have been sharply declining for decades. We hit 'peak Hollywood' in 2002. [1] That's especially remarkable when you consider that the population has continued to increase since then.
The 'record breaking sales' since then are mostly a product of inflation alongside a mix of price increases. Here [2] is a table of best selling movies, inflation adjusted. No movie made in the past 25 years, including the endless men in spandex movies, is among the top 10. It's not us - it's Hollywood, but they seem ultimately unable to bring themselves out of this rut. What happened? I suspect a mixture of drugs and politics - the two cancers of the mind.
There's a really interesting poll (that was not so easy to dig up!) here. [1] It's from 2005, so still quite near peak movie, on why Americans aren't going to the movies. The interesting thing about the poll is, as you mentioned, the leading reason for people stated for why they aren't going to the movies anymore is they prefer to watch at home (33%).
Yet when the identical question is asked in a slightly different way, you get a very different result. When asked if they would see more movies if they were cheaper, 43% said they would be much more likely. When asked about movies being better quality, 36% said they would be much more likely to see more movies. And that was back in 2005 when movies were still far from the rock bottom current era of spandex, sequels, and remakes!
> back in 2005 when movies were still far from the rock bottom current era of spandex, sequels, and remakes!
Really? If anything, I’d say the frequency of remakes and sequels is going down from how I remember things back then.
The top movies in 2005 were Star Wars 3, a Harry Potter Sequel, a War of the Worlds remake, Charlie and the Chocolate factory remake. We also got spandex remakes of Batman Begins and Fantastic Four. Hardly some golden era of original storytelling
Wiki has a nice little series of pages with releases that placed 1st during at least one weekend in a year. The pages aren't well designed and have only a nav button at the very buttom (beyond even the references), but you can also just change the year in the URL manually. Anyhow, it's definitely not how you remember it.
Although of course you are right. 2005 was not a great year for Hollywood, though it had some decent movies like Sin City, and comedy still hadn't been banned yet (Meet the Fockers, 40 Year-Old Virgin) - so that was cool. But contrasted against 2023 (and the contemporary era in general), it makes it look like the Golden Era of Hollywood.
It's certainly quite hard to see things when you close your eyes. You intentionally ignored the lists of movies I referenced to try to find one you could spin into being 'not so bad.' And even in your cherry picked sample, there's still a decline - substantially more so when once one factors in your quite creative counting.
Modern Hollywood has always found itself in ruts, as efforts at stable revenue generation gradually give way to creative decline. For instance in the 90s every film was a disaster film of ever deteriorating quality, but they eventually managed to pull themselves out of it before the decline hit too hard. But this rut they're stuck in today seems like it's become inextricable and will be their final resting place, until we gradually see China become the new Hollywood. Incidentally one of the 2 novel top grossing 'Hollywood' films of 2023 you referenced was Chinese! All we have left is Christopher Nolan, one of the few individuals in Hollywood still putting out decent films.
I scrolled down to the top 10 highest grossing section in each link you posted and counted the number of non-remakes, sequels, or “spandex” movies. Those are your links and the categories you defined.
Sorry I’m not really following the entirety of your rant.
You ignored 40+ films from both years, and these films made the difference even more strikingly apparent than your cherry picking.
As for your understanding, I think there are generally two types of films in Hollywood. There's the largely uninspired make a buck type film, and there's the more creative works where you have a group of people who actually have a pretty neat idea. 'Hollywood' did not remake the Little Mermaid because there was some wave of inspiration where they felt they could really create an amazing film. It was just an uninspired sifting through an IP bucket to find what could be remade to make a movie for the year. And that drivel is what they dug up.
And this is of course nothing new. But what's changed has largely been the ratio. I reference the spandex films not because there's anything inherently wrong with the genre, but because it's become the clearest embodiment of this uninspired conveyor-belt style film-making. The overwhelming majority of these stories may as well have been written by ChatGPT, and the future ones probably will be! And Hollywood is absolutely spamming us with them at this point. But there's nothing inherently awful about the genre. The Dark Knight was clearly an inspired and quiet good film, yet of course it was also spandex.
I've absolutely nothing against Hollywood and am more than happy to see an inspired film. In recently saw Dune 2 yesterday - a sequel of a remake!? But I have no interest in watching 'conveyor belt films', and that is currently the vastly overwhelming majority of what is coming out of Hollywood. And that's not how it used to be.
> Here [2] is a table of best selling movies, inflation adjusted. No movie made in the past 25 years, including the endless men in spandex movies, is among them.
The Force Awakens (2015) is #11. Avatar (2009) is #15. Avengers Endgame (2019) is #16. And that’s just in the top 20. Not too bad for a list that covers a century of films, especially when you consider the limited entertainment options available in the first half of that century.
Part of it is that Hollywood has gotten worse, but another part of it is that our other mindless entertainment options have gotten better. 30 years ago, if you didn't want to go to the movies, you had what, TV? Books? Now you have TikTok, Instagram, Fortnight, Reddit. There's a larger and more powerful set of forces competing for the same limited hours in a day.
The 'record breaking sales' since then are mostly a product of inflation alongside a mix of price increases. Here [2] is a table of best selling movies, inflation adjusted. No movie made in the past 25 years, including the endless men in spandex movies, is among the top 10. It's not us - it's Hollywood, but they seem ultimately unable to bring themselves out of this rut. What happened? I suspect a mixture of drugs and politics - the two cancers of the mind.
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[1] - https://www.the-numbers.com/market/
[2] - https://www.boxofficemojo.com/chart/top_lifetime_gross_adjus...