A big part of this is that modern movies are carefully calibrated so that you can follow along while sitting on your couch focused on your phone. Movies in the 1990's didn't need to have so much clanky dialog explaining, in careful detail, why we were someplace. The writers and directors could presume that the audience was actually paying attention to the movie, and so would make the necessary inferences. Modern movies are mostly terrified of doing because the audience is also swiping on Tinder and scrolling Instagram at the same time and would never realize that he just stopped walking with a limp oh my God was everything he said in the entire movie a lie?
I don't particularly disagree with you, but do you have evidence that modern movies are calibrated and written to allow for someone to sit on their phones the entire time and understand?
Largely seems like some movies are written to be mass consumed and some are not. No different then a movie from the 90s. Our attention span is decreasing a lot obviously, but it's never been that long.
>Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.”
I don't necessarily agree that it means all movies (or even most) are doing this, but it is some evidence that at least some are.
A couple of months ago I started listening to the Scriptnotes podcast, by Craig Mazin (showrunner for Chernobyl and Last of Us, also wrote for Scary Movie and Hangover sequels) and John August (Go, Charlie's Angels, Big Fish, etc.). They discussed receiving notes like that from executives on their scripts- that there needed to be a line of dialog here to explain, rather than just using the visual to explain, so that someone on their phone could follow along.
There are, of course, ways that writers and directors get to ignore executive feedback, have a bunch of recent hits already is one, do your movie outside the studio system is another, have it in your contract because you gave up some money or whatever is a third. This is why some movies are still made in older ways, but from what they said that feedback is pretty universal now.
> Amid a push to perfect 'casual viewing,' creatives say streaming execs are requiring them to remove nuance and visual cues, and do things like announce when characters enter a room.
The second screen effect is largely overstated when it comes to why movies suck. While it’s true for some movies and TV shows that end up being streaming exclusives, the same problem doesn’t exist in theatrical releases or even shows for TV for streaming services like HBO.
Modern movies suck mostly because of Hollywood mostly being risk averse and prioritizing profit over everything else. This leads to IPs being sequels, prequels, remakes, “parts of the universe” or adaptations of existing successful IPs. This also leads to creative directions that are “designed to pull maximum audiences” or in other words average. Almost every single Marvel movie has the same plot with a few changes in characters. It also translates to situations where ideas that would otherwise be successful being tabled. K-POP demon hunters is a great example, an original IP, that audiences want, being sold to Netflix because the executives somewhere did a couple of focus groups and came to the conclusion that this won’t work. Another side effect is lack of innovation. Pixar animation has largely been stale for years now, meanwhile Ne Zha 2 is taking in billions worldwide, Demon Slayer is was one of the most popular movies in the US despite its limited release and Arcane is one of the best rated TV shows ever. There’s a lot more like fewer stand ins to save money that make scenes look “empty and soulless”, overuse of CGI, overuse of Pedro Pascal, etc.
All in all, it’s enshittification if movies because less profit is unacceptable.
Not related to the main conversation, but I'm still mad that the DVD menu of that movie gave away the reveal before the movie even started (showed someone limping and then suddenly not limping anymore as they walked down the street). There was no real twist ending since I knew the guy was lying about something.
(Vagueness intended to avoid spoilers for that 1 in 10,000 someone who hasn't seen the movie)
My most "old woman yells at cloud" opinion is the fucking DISEASE of smartphones that is truly a cancer in our society. Don't get me wrong, I love mine, and they're completely possible to use in a way that coexists with the rest of your tech and life, but my god, the wide adoption of them has demonstrated the majority of our population has the regulation capacity of a fucking carrot.
And my inner artist is absolutely REPULSED at the notion that "oh I missed stuff in the movie cuz I was on my phone." Then put your fucking phone away. Watch a movie, or don't. Watch a show, or don't. Commit to taking in ONE PIECE of art at a time you fucking dopamine junkies.
I have a buddy, I absolutely love him, but I don't think that fucker has sat down with one medium at one time in YEARS. He leaves a stressful day job and he goes home and he watches YouTube or TV, while playing videogames. Every night. He got to the end of Pacific Drive and didn't know there was a fucking in-game radio station (with a whole host of absolute bangers btw).
Like I just... idk it makes my inner creative absolutely die inside how everyone is so utterly and hopelessly dependent on their dopamine treadmill that they've lost the ability to focus entirely.
Hear hear. I will admit that phones everywhere ( including full speed on highway ) made me finally consider something along the lines of 'you drop the phone in this bowl upon entry in this household'( this should be easier to accomplish at movies where you tend to have codes of conduct, terms of service and the like ). It is getting really bad and it is hard to escape.
I'm so torn on this, because on one hand smart phones have been a net positive in many aspect of my life. I get instantly access to maps, I have my bank in my pocket, I get notified of my bills, check my emails, communicate with friends and family, order stuff online..
Yet there is also the toxic stuff, constantly scrolling X, Facebook or Instagram, bombarded with ads, subscriptions and trash..
I think smart phones can be great devices but their use should be limited to useful functionalities rather than dopamine hits.
FWIW, I'm a mobile dev. So I wouldn't have my career if not for phones. If I were given a wish from a genie, and asked if I wanted to erase smartphones from the human experience, I honestly don't know. At once they're sources of incredible utility, convenience and personal productivity and edification. And again, they are just a CANCER on most people's ability to simply perform being human.
Kinda but not really. The music was all created for the game specifically, this wasn’t a GTA situation. It contributes a lot to the weird atmosphere of that game, hence me being flabbergasted he rolled credits on it having no clue it was there.
My experience playing the first few areas/levels was frequent, unskippable radio chatter telling me to do things when all I wanted was to be alone and explore the weirdness. I didn't (yet?) find out about the music stations but would probably avoid them and the game had my full attention.
It's all crap, my friend. You can pretend Super Mario is different than Predator longer than you can pretend the Big Mac is different than the Whopper or Home Alone is different than Home Alone 2. Little kids can hold two stuffed animals and make up stories where they are different, but when you're older you can meaningfully accept that it all scrolls by and your life is the same whether you ate a Whopper and root for the Bengals or you ate a Big Mac and root for the Cubs.
I have no clue what point you're trying to make. Super Mario and Predator are both classics of their genre, they're massively different. A Big Mac and Whopper are both hilariously inferior to any decent local burger place, or hell, even a chain that vaguely gives a shit like Five Guys or Freddy's. Home Alone 1 and 2 are both classics.
If you genuinely have never felt different after consuming any art for your entire life, that sounds like my personalized version of hell.
> A Big Mac and Whopper are both hilariously inferior to any decent local burger place
You have agreed with me. They are essentially the same. There is no real situation where one cannot be substituted for the other. Now that you have stopped pretending, you may reach a point where you realize that my other statements are true as well.
Or, you may not. That sounds like my impersonalized version of hell.
Are you always this insufferable when you speak, or do you just talk down to people trying to honestly engage with you as a matter of policy?
And no, I am not agreeing with you. Your statement is incomprehensible. Yes, the Whopper and Big Mac both suck to a degree where they are interchangeable. Home Alone 1 and 2 are not interchangeable at all. They have things in common, they have strengths and weaknesses, and I guess if I was in the mood to watch one, and only two was available, I wouldn't be heartbroken about it, but both have enough going on that they both deserve their own existence as well.
And Mario and Predator is just.. I have no idea what you mean. As someone who has experienced both the urge to watch Predator and play Super Mario, no, one is not remotely a substitute for the other. That's just wacky.
I'm guessing I'm "insufferable" because you don't know a word that fits what you feel. My statement is not incomprehensible, you just don't understand it. I suspect it's because it's about something you don't understand and you don't want to learn, but you do seem to be comfortable being an authority on any bits of everyday media and consumer properties.
The point of the comparison between Big Mac and Whopper is not that they both suck; if you were very hungry you would find either delicious. The point is that there is no real way that one is suitable and the other is unsuitable. This is also true of Home Alone and Home Alone II : there is no situation where one is suitable and the other is unsuitable.
Someday you too will get so old you don't care if your DVDs are in the wrong cases.
The original post was about how he was angry that his friend was messing around with his phone during a movie. Why does this bother him? He feels his friend was not respecting the integrity of art, that he is missing important things in life, that meaning and value is lost as his friend treats his screen time as a flood of dopamine.
What I was trying to tell him (really just talking into the social media void) is that it's all meaningless anyway. When you're young you care, but as you mature, that feeling of the perfectness of your screen time becomes a childish thing. It is much like the difference between two lousy fast food burgers, the metaphor he partially understood but reduced to "they are both lousy" which wasn't my point.
But his behavior was a little too immature for me, with the brinksmanship and oh-so-daring insults to my intelligence, so I probably got sidetracked in my response and it wasn't very good.
> My most "old woman yells at cloud" opinion is the fucking DISEASE of smartphones that is truly a cancer in our society. Don't get me wrong, I love mine, and they're completely possible to use in a way that coexists with the rest of your tech and life, but my god, the wide adoption of them has demonstrated the majority of our population has the regulation capacity of a fucking carrot.
Every morning, I am one of about four parents dropping Primary 1 age children off at school that isn't nose-down in a phone. While walking, while crossing the road, while standing there waiting to pick their child up after school - nose down, thumb going scroll scroll scroll.
Christ almighty. I only carry my phone because in theory I'm still at work for that half an hour, and if anyone phones me twice it's probably important enough to look at, maybe even answer.
The biggest thing for me is the cinematography. 80s/90s movies were filmed as if you're standing alongside the cast.
* Many more shots from eye level
* Significantly less jumpcuts
* People actually cast shadows onto the environment, and filmmakers would fearlessly shoot scenes with full bright or full dark elements in them without trying to make everything dark and bright visible simultaneously
* Waist-up or even full body shots of multiple (3+) characters talking and/or walking around with few if any jump cuts
I'm not even from that era but I find movies from that era to feel the most "real", like I can almost reach into the screen and just "be there" together. This aesthetic is perfectly doable in the modern age, even with digital cameras, it's just not the trend currently.
While cinematography isn't the whole answer, I think it's a big contributor to why so much feels aggressively middling these days.
Modern shows are aggressively aesthetic. There's huge overuse shallow depth of field, resulting in blurry backgrounds. Watch modern movies with this mind, and you start noticing the reliance on a sharp foreground and blurry background is extreme to the point of bizarre. Cinematography should be a tool to achieve an effect; blurring the background to intentionally make the subject stand out is a purposeful use of that tool, but is being applied everywhere now, with no intent behind it, even if it's "aesthetic".
I would also argue that it's easier with digital photography to create blandly attractive, "painterly" images, thanks to colour grading and increased dynamic range and so on. A lot of shows these days have technically competent photography, but it all converges on the same aesthetic — tons of diffuse, lush lighting (often achieved with filling the space with lightly cinematic fog) and impeccable set design, and that creamy depth of field. But there's no contrast anywhere, it's just creamy "aesthetic" blandness in forgettable environs.
Another non-visual aspect rarely mentioned is audio: Almost all TV/movie audio these days is foley, and it's sometimes jarringly bad when you start to actually pay attention to, say, the sound of footsteps or keys jangling. High quality productions can be very good here, but most productions don't spend enough time on it. Bad foley has a very strange, subliminal effect on a scene, further undermining the sense of reality.
In such environments (visual and aural), nothing seems real and nothing seems like it matters. Everything, even nominally "adult" shows set in the real world, feels like Midde Earth and not Planet Earth.
It's not all bad, of course. There are also definitely cases where the quality of the show transcends the mediocrity of the cinematography. We are still getting good shows and bad shows, like always. But it does seem like things have shifted into a sort of middle where everything is average in the same average way.
Bad audio and bad foley doesn't get mentioned enough. I think it's why people are watching things with subtitles: the actors are on a blue stage that is completely silent having a quiet conversation and then the war happening around them gets added later. In noisy environments people slow down and enunciate and directors aren't helping actors know what to do.
Ideas on how to fix it:
• actors should wear tiny headphones behind their ears (or wherever is not visible) to make noise that approximates the environment they will be shown in. They'll have to act over it.
• Foley artists should not be given video of the final scene to foley. They should be given only one single continuous very wide shot. This will solve the problem where foley artists keep doing ludicrous things like adding the sound of a pin dropping and hitting the ground (since it's shown on screen) in the context of a space ship that is in the process of exploding.
I've ranted about this so much to friends, it's so distracting to me.
I have the hypothesis that some of it is due to how easy (or easier?) it is to quickly review footage to tell if the focus is set right when it's so aggressively shallow, but regardless of the "why" the monotony of it drives me crazy.
I want to see the environments the characters are in, I want the visceral grounding of the feel of that environment. I watched "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" and it felt so primal, and watching how intentional the sound design alone is I can see why.
> In such environments (visual and aural), nothing seems real and nothing seems like it matters.
That's a great description about the strange disembodiment I've felt in modern shows for a while now.
No, I'm pretty sure it's literally fog, some kind of aerosoled mineral oil.
Here is an example: https://imgur.com/a/gdemKM3. Notice the hazy background. The still is from this video [1] at 00:22, coincidentally also a good video about cinematic realism.
Here [2] is a video about lighting that shows adding haze.
Some cinematographers certainly use blooming filters, too. I noticed that Spielberg had a period with tons of bloom, though I don't know if those were filters or just a certain kind of lens. Indiana Jones 4 had absolutely awful photography. Bridge of Spies is also a good example, lots of blooming, lots of hazy indoor rooms.
I don't buy this. Watching hi-res remasters of old films (Alien, Catch Me If You Can, Jurassic Park) you get incredible definition without damage to suspension of disbelief.
I think this comment[1] above really highlights what bothers me about modern shows and movies, but in short it's not the high def, it's how it's used.
My apologies for a comment not adding much, but you're hitting the nail on the head, it is exactly this. Watching characters move around in an environment is immersive, not 300 cuts per minute. Also more difficult to make.
I think it’s more survival bias than recency. But I strongly agree. There were many bad movies in the 1990’s, we just don’t remember them or have forgotten how bad they were.
Two examples off of the top of my head are Johnny Mnemonic and Escape from LA. Both of these are sci fi movies that are mostly just awful throughout. I remember watching them at the time and thinking they were pretty decent, but on rewatching them recently, I could barely make it through them.
Compare that to The Matrix, just four years later (and still in the 1990s), which hits super hard and seems almost flawless even today.
Really I think the movies that have survived in people’s minds are the ones where everything aligned: an incredible director with a great story to tell and everyone involved performing at the top of their game.
There's probably something in here about our personal tastes changing, as well. I used to really enjoy going to the movies and would go frequently to see all kinds of stuff. But now it hardly seems worth it knowing that I'll probably be bored by whatever it is. Now I go to the theater maybe three or four times a year. I always bring a book on airplane trips now because, despite having more selection than ever, I don't want to watch anything that's on there.
Notable also is that a lot of resources go into series rather than just movies, as well as movies that are not in the 'box office.' But I agree about the biases here; there is so much crap from the 90s that looked fake and awful, and there is so much stuff now that feels alive and real. Even more, I'd say, especially once you look away from the more mainstream sources.
Also an interesting resource here is boxofficemojo which has a simple interface for looking at the box office at any particular month and year. For example, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/month/october/1994/ October 1994 was a great time: Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, Shawshank Redemption
> Notable also is that a lot of resources go into series rather than just movies,
As a great example of this, is the His Dark Materials series. Where every episode is shot like a big-budget movie, and is pretty amazing compared to anything filmed in the 90s. Its subject matter skews toward the adolescent, but I enjoyed watching with the kids.
This is an excellent point. For example, here [1] is a list of all films released in 2025. However I bet most people 10 years from now will only remember the top 10-20 [2].
The point wasn't merely about remembering something, the raised survivorship bias is moment in time when something becomes a cult classic[0]. Box office numbers don't matter much there, as these cult classics all bombed at the office:
- Blade Runner (1982)
- Brazil (1985)
- Donnie Darko (2001)
- Fight Club (1999)
- The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
- The Thing (1982)
The question should be wether we can still create the same kind of cults like we did in the 90s.
The 90s was the best decade for film, it was peak. One thing about the blockbusters of the 90s is that they were made to appeal to Western tastes.
Throughout the 2000s Hollywood drew progressively more and more revenue from global audiences, and by the 2010s most big budget films were pandering to the global lowest common denominator, and the majority of them are an insult to my intelligence.
When can I expect 2010s movies to feel as good as 90s and early 2000s movies felt 10 years ago? Is there going to be a future golden age when this decade’s churned-out Disney / Marvel / Star Wars reboots and sequels feel inspired?
It took ten years and twenty movies for the Marvel franchise to go stale and years more for hating on it to become cool ‡. That's an accomplishment by any metric not specifically designed to facilitate the latter.
You will never be 10 years younger again, but the kids who grew up with those movies will carry forward their fond memories of the good in them and when they find their voice on the adult stage they will reclaim them, making hating on them uncool again, just as we did for the Star Wars prequels. Whether you embrace or reject the backlash-to-the-backlash will be up to you but I'd like to put in a word for the psychological benefits of trying to see the good in things. It's much more fun than ruminating on the bad, both for yourself and those around you.
‡ Yes, I'm sure you were doing it before it was cool.
How did you make the leap from a critical passing quip about Marvel movies that I “ruminate on the bad”? I’m glad you like Marvel movies, the point of my comment wasn’t to cause offense.
Is the supposition that I also forgot that I disliked movies in earlier decades? I don’t find explanations that require people to deny their own memory to be particularly convincing.
I have seen tons of great movies made after 2010, but must admit I’m having trouble thinking of any blockbuster-type movies that stand up to the best of the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
Does Fury Road count? I dunno. The closest I can get aside from that are a couple Tarantino movies. Jurassic Park, the first Mission Impossible movie, Aliens, Jaws, hell even Independence Day. Nothing’s quite up there. Lots that are a kind of janky B-movie sort of good, but nothing as solid as those. Almost all are marred by lots of CG that might look ok at the time but seem dodgy and very distracting within 5 years max, for one thing (to be fair, Jurassic Park suffers from that in a couple scenes, too)
I struggle to even think of many post-2010 films that stand up to the casual flicks of the 1990s, never mind The Matrix, or Gladiator, or the others you mentioned.
Horror, action-horror, and comedy-horror are in a really great place and have been for a while. Drama’s doing fine. Comedy’s been a bit weak for many years IMO. All the good ones I can think of are comedy/something—like, Red Rocket is very good and quite funny but also… damn dark and leans drama often enough that I’m not sure just “dark comedy” covers the difference between it and a straight comedy, it’s more a dark-comedy/drama. Or, uh, is The Art of Self Defense a comedy? Like… sorta? I can think of a couple alright ordinary comedies but nothing that stands out.
> Maybe I'm just nostalgic. Maybe I'm romanticizing the past. But when I finish a good movie, I can sit there thinking about them for hours, even days depending on the movie. When I finish most modern blockbusters, I'm already thinking about dinner. And that difference, I think, says everything.
I don’t watch modern most blockbusters because I don’t enjoy them in general. I watch a few that I know I will likely enjoy.
I think we have some bias too.
We remember better the good experiences. The Netflix catalog is full of not so good movies, and the video rental shops in the 90s were too.
> The Netflix catalog is full of not so good movies, and the video rental shops in the 90s were too.
I subscribed to Netflix for a year or two when the platform became popular, but I quickly realized it resembles those old school rental shops too much. Yes, you could get some popular classics like The Godfather or Goodfellas, but apart from that you were stuck with another crime story or a comedy with Steve Martin or John Candy. Actually, my analogy may not be 100% fortunate, because I still have good memories about watching these comedies as a kid with my dad. Now I wouldn't have time and patience to go through movies of "that" quality. Anyhow, my point is that you were very unlikely to get there anything that wasn't already proved to be popular. Forget about anything more niche / arthouse. Netflix has produced plenty by itself, but how many of those movies are actually any good? I remember a handful of them: Marriage Story, Roma, Don't Look Up and a movie for kids called Okja.
I think you're hitting the nail on the head, but the corollary is that there's so much MORE now. More of everything, and since most things are crap the gems are proportionally harder to find. I look at reality tv and wince, but I also feel that way about soap operas, it's the same itch being scratched the same way for a different generation. But the nature of reality tv (dirt cheap) means that it's been made in vast quantities, dwarfing the reach that soap operas ever had.
Soap operas weren't choking out late night comedy, they were totally different products serving different needs, at different times. Reality tv changes that equation though, with the aforementioned cheapness, and perennial popularity. A lot of the old norms are gone too, around residuals, the "one for them, one for me" system, stars vs brand... and the result is often entertainment geared at cheap production and nothing else.
The other issue is that CGI, while it empowers amazing things, also empowers the creation of real trash. It's allowed Marvel movies to film without a complete script, figuring out the ending in AVR and CGI work... and it shows. A lot of old blockbusters were crap, but they were crap that at least had the requisite craftsmanship to be made and distributed to theaters around the world.
That barrier is gone, the gates are open and that means that hidden voices are emerging (hooray!) and also that a lot of people are so inundated by noise that they disengage.
In my experience it’s that set lighting has changed enormously.
Modern digital cinema cameras can capture dark scenes far better than the film stocks of the 90s and earlier. So set designers don’t need to blast light everywhere to have actors be visible. Now, we even have AI Denoising that can make ISO 12500 look like 800.
Go watch a 90s movie and look at a night or interior scene. You’ll see that everyone is actually lit by blue lights. Not natural darkness. That’s a major change.
This also shows up in porn. A playboy photo was expertly lit and beautifully so, with angles and bounces and shade filters and gobos.
Since the 2000s the market has expected the “DV Cam” which became “Smartphone” recorded look. Which means natural lighting all the time. It’s lost the “glam”.
> Modern digital cinema cameras can capture dark scenes far better than the film stocks of the 90s and earlier. So set designers don’t need to blast light everywhere to have actors be visible…
> Go watch a 90s movie and look at a night or interior scene. You’ll see that everyone is actually lit by blue lights. Not natural darkness. That’s a major change.
-1. One of the most famous biggest budget dudes, Stanley Kubrick, using an ultra rare incredibly special f/0.7 he bargained with NASA to get is, to me, an argument not that the past was great with natural lighting & could use it. It's an argument that that was the hardest most difficult costly & inaccessible upper-est echelon of what was possible, that only a couple rare gods of cinema had any access to dark natural lighting.
A focal plane mere inches thick!
Incredibly wild constraints here. It's incredibly fun to read about & folks should!
But everything about the Barry Lyndon story & the extreme effort to make it validates the top post to me. Our modern sensors are just stratospherically better & wildly unconstraining vs the past.
> I think the difference comes down to this: older movies took risks. They trusted audiences to pay attention, to feel something, to think. Scorsese and Tarantino had visions and the freedom to execute them without endless studio interference. They weren't chasing demographics or worrying about franchise potential. They were making films, not products.
By risks, you mean they weren't just following tropes, but subverting them, inventing their own, not rehashing exist IP.
I think that's the difference. Execs have run out of ideas, and so hedge on the familiar.
Herzog talks about actually hauling the boat over the hill in Fitzcaraldo because audiences can tell real from fake. Nowadays even movies that don’t use special effects rely much more on editing and post processing. Movies shot on film feel more connected to what actually happened on set.
It’s ironic that the word choice and structure of this article feels overly embellished in that very chatgpt style… I miss the old days of people writing their own content.
Presenting fake content as though it were real is the major use of AI right now. You can ask it to write a breathless ten-paragraph post about the plot of The Godfather, for example, and it will instantly give you something shovel ready for a bot-enriched Facebook creator.
One problem, of several, is that there just was more point in doing things, meeting people, and going places up until a decade ago.
If you make a movie set in 2025, the screenwriter has to jump through hoops to avoid real life, which much of the time is someone quietly staring at a screen.
The 90s films mentioned in this post are works of art and the actors and creators were artists. Compensation sustains the art, but it’s not the primary purpose.
Netflix is a business. The content on Netflix is largely designed or purchased with a primary goal of engaging paying users.
We can find plenty of films that are works of art after the 90s. One Battle After Another is a recent one that comes to mind. Parasite, No Country for Old Men, Arrival, Moonlight, Tree of Life, Midsommar, Mandy…
I miss car crashes - realistic crashes like in Mad Max 1, not explosions or rollover on a hidden ramp. I guess cars are too expensive these days to crash them for a movie.
I'm inclined to agree, although I have to wonder where the money is going. Seeing plenty of BIG budget shows and movies where the dialogue and writing are just dreadful ... I gotta think those shows and movies could have outbid for better talent, but they just chose not to when it came to the creative team.
I'm thinking of productions like Star Wars Acolyte where the story and writing were just dreadful ... and they spent an enormous amount of money on it.
My bet is that the content schedule and need to fill the pipeline is so much faster that decisions get made hastily in service of metrics. You can call it Lord of the Rings, but that doesn’t make it so.
Movies were made to make a high majority of profits in theaters, a captive audience that had few distractions and optics developed for composite nuances.
Listen to the soft wind mixed in under Jodie's lambs tale. It comes on slowly, builds and then rapidly fades. 100s of details like these were managed for reaching audiences out of their range of conscious awareness. That's how movies used to get made. Now everything is developed to look at, to notice. And if it isn't, it's in a mode of realism that's basic.
I think some of it may be that everything is too big now and they all have too many options they can, relatively, easily take. When special effects became easy every movie turned into an action movie. Special effects are everywhere creating scenes that don't actually help tell the story or develop a character. It just seems like there aren't hard choices being made to force a movie to be its core best self. Every scene should matter. Of course we can't go back though. I don't think many people would pay to see the something like Jaws again.
Yeah I noticed that. The characters are also super one-dimensional, constantly repeating the same expressions. I think it's because people don't have the same attention span anymore.
But it's just really terrible. Stuff like reacher who solves every problem with violence (I think South park even did a piece on that). Or Amazon with their big list of spinoffs of one really mediocre spy series.
There's still some gems like Westworld, The Expanse or DARK but they're few and far between.
Good movies aren't created often, while movies in general are now produced more frequently, so unimpressive movies are much easier to bump into. I just saw a chart showing over twice as many movies were released in 2018 as in 2000. It would be interesting to see for each IMDB decade what percentage of films are rated 8 or higher.
> movies in general are now produced more frequently
I don't agree with this. Blockbuster used to be filled with movies made to go straight to "home video" whether that was VHS or DVD. Shitty movies have been made for a really long time. Typically, they didn't have a budget and no studio was involved. Now, we have really shitty movies with incredible budgets being released by the studios as well as whatever the streamers are making. The straight to home video market does seem to have lost a bit though as they still need to find a streamer willing to license it.
There is recency and survival bias, yes. But a sizable fraction of movies are remakes or series extensions. The Marvel Overextended Universe has taken this up to 11. That it's still working, mostly, leads other studios to make movies in that style.
Important distinction: This specifically applies to Netflix movies; these are explicitly aimed at people watching in the background, or listening without watching. The conclusions don't apply to modern movies as a whole.
I watched All the President's Men on a recent flight and even on an airplane seatback screen it had me rapt. No romance, no sex, no violence except a cop pointing a gun in the first 5 minutes, just a good story with two great leads.
How did this article get so many upvotes? Even among articles that pine for the good old days, this article is trash. Like 80% of it is just saying “remember that movie? And the things we thought were meaningful back then?”
The idea that modern movies don’t take risks is absurd. Have you seen Poor Things? Have you seen Zone of Interest? Mickey17? OBAA? There are more movies taking more risks in this era of film than there has ever been before. You’re just not watching them.
The real story here is the way lighting has changed and how it makes you feel when you watch the movie.
The reason these older movies are better stories is because American culture used to be much more merit based and free market based. Now, half the decision in hiring a director, actors, writers is what is their identity. Return to pure competition and movies will improve.
These movies also had less intention to be political correct. No one would have spent those blockbuster budgets on stories that were constructed around an ideological narrative instead of good storytelling.
> I was rewatching silence of the lambs and something hit me hard
That the villain‘s sexual orientation is now unthinkable to be portrayed like this? I give this movie a decade until the studio’s employees, its owners and the whole movie-ecosystem will alter the movie via AI to be more compliant with the „current thing“.
There's that incredibly funny/sad clip of the old actor playing Gandalf getting frustrated with talking into thin air.
Half of modern movies literally only exist on the special effects laptop.
But movies have always been about technology. I am sure Fritz Lang was considered a hack once.
Modern motion pictures are made for people who temporarily or permanently lack the mental capacity to understand deeper plots. The other audience is too small to bother with.
I don’t think this was a 90s thing. I think it’s been a gradual progression to shorter, shallower attention spans. Contrast 2001 space odyssey to a 90s movie, it feels so slow.
Then contrast a 2000s movie to a modern film and if you want to feel really sad, contrast that to a high budget YouTubers content.
i think your mistaking stuff here. 2001 space odyssey is considered a masterpiece by cinema enthusiasts. tested through short years. who knows if it'll still rank high in 300 years from now like some arts of old mediums; Don Quijote book is a great example
have been watched almost a hundred of hours of the early cinema (1920-1930) i found 2001 space odyssey boring as heck. had to go to a public theater to not sleep through, because the past 2 attempts at my house got me sleeping. cinema is a recent medium. it can go through a lot of stuff. and yet, you can find shallow films since the first era, till today. not every movie was made to be dense, slow or thoughtful. the 90s also had a bunch of shallow stuff
I just watched “While You Were Sleeping” with my wife while we decorated for Christmas. It was still better than 99.9% of movies from this decade and it’s not because the plot is particularly sophisticated.
It's the opposite. Modern movies are obsessed with plot. Inception being an example of this. It's everything else, the image and characters that's lacking. You're never going to get something like Tarkovsky's Solaris again that just shows you a highway scene for five minutes.
Villeneuve commented on this a year or two ago in an interview where he pointed out that he hates the extent to which television has infected film with its focus on plot and dialogue at expense of what's visually on the screen.
To me they all seem to be video game plots or soap opera / palace drama plots, which might be intricate yes, but it still doesn't hit the mark. I can't put words on it, but the spell is broken.
Several hundred new movies see significant distribution or screenings every year. Folks who say “there are no good movies now” have really narrow taste or aren’t looking hard enough.
Modern writing for films is terrible is my feeling. I can’t remember any weekend in the 90s an first decade of 2000s where I could not find one or more movies that I wanted to watch. These days neither me or the kids can find anything and we have been going to Sunday matinees and watching old 80s, 90s and even silent movies with Buster Keaton and they are better than the slop that made today. Frankly I’m hoping gen AI lets new and exiting storytellers end the industry.
A big part of this is that modern movies are carefully calibrated so that you can follow along while sitting on your couch focused on your phone. Movies in the 1990's didn't need to have so much clanky dialog explaining, in careful detail, why we were someplace. The writers and directors could presume that the audience was actually paying attention to the movie, and so would make the necessary inferences. Modern movies are mostly terrified of doing because the audience is also swiping on Tinder and scrolling Instagram at the same time and would never realize that he just stopped walking with a limp oh my God was everything he said in the entire movie a lie?
I don't particularly disagree with you, but do you have evidence that modern movies are calibrated and written to allow for someone to sit on their phones the entire time and understand?
Largely seems like some movies are written to be mass consumed and some are not. No different then a movie from the 90s. Our attention span is decreasing a lot obviously, but it's never been that long.
I remember seeing something like that referenced a while ago, and went back and found it:
https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/essays/casual-viewing/
>Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.”
I don't necessarily agree that it means all movies (or even most) are doing this, but it is some evidence that at least some are.
A couple of months ago I started listening to the Scriptnotes podcast, by Craig Mazin (showrunner for Chernobyl and Last of Us, also wrote for Scary Movie and Hangover sequels) and John August (Go, Charlie's Angels, Big Fish, etc.). They discussed receiving notes like that from executives on their scripts- that there needed to be a line of dialog here to explain, rather than just using the visual to explain, so that someone on their phone could follow along.
There are, of course, ways that writers and directors get to ignore executive feedback, have a bunch of recent hits already is one, do your movie outside the studio system is another, have it in your contract because you gave up some money or whatever is a third. This is why some movies are still made in older ways, but from what they said that feedback is pretty universal now.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/netflix-is-telling-writers-to-dum... (https://archive.is/RE0pz)
> Amid a push to perfect 'casual viewing,' creatives say streaming execs are requiring them to remove nuance and visual cues, and do things like announce when characters enter a room.
Could be from https://www.pcmag.com/news/netflix-is-telling-writers-to-dum... which mentioned https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/essays/casual-viewing/
That long article on the second link was really good, thank you.
Frequently referenced/discussed Netflix directive for 'second screen' viewing.
Some discussion:
Casual Viewing – Why Netflix looks like that
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42529756
and Related:
The new literalism plaguing today’s movies
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44567683
The second screen effect is largely overstated when it comes to why movies suck. While it’s true for some movies and TV shows that end up being streaming exclusives, the same problem doesn’t exist in theatrical releases or even shows for TV for streaming services like HBO.
Modern movies suck mostly because of Hollywood mostly being risk averse and prioritizing profit over everything else. This leads to IPs being sequels, prequels, remakes, “parts of the universe” or adaptations of existing successful IPs. This also leads to creative directions that are “designed to pull maximum audiences” or in other words average. Almost every single Marvel movie has the same plot with a few changes in characters. It also translates to situations where ideas that would otherwise be successful being tabled. K-POP demon hunters is a great example, an original IP, that audiences want, being sold to Netflix because the executives somewhere did a couple of focus groups and came to the conclusion that this won’t work. Another side effect is lack of innovation. Pixar animation has largely been stale for years now, meanwhile Ne Zha 2 is taking in billions worldwide, Demon Slayer is was one of the most popular movies in the US despite its limited release and Arcane is one of the best rated TV shows ever. There’s a lot more like fewer stand ins to save money that make scenes look “empty and soulless”, overuse of CGI, overuse of Pedro Pascal, etc.
All in all, it’s enshittification if movies because less profit is unacceptable.
Not related to the main conversation, but I'm still mad that the DVD menu of that movie gave away the reveal before the movie even started (showed someone limping and then suddenly not limping anymore as they walked down the street). There was no real twist ending since I knew the guy was lying about something.
(Vagueness intended to avoid spoilers for that 1 in 10,000 someone who hasn't seen the movie)
That spoiler should be a crime.
A crime with all the usual... er
> he just stopped walking with a limp
Remind me where this is from, this sounds really familiar.
I have a memory of this but, just like that,"whuh"...it's gone.
To avoid spoiling a 30 year old movie: ROT13 `Gur Hfhny Fhfcrpgf`
would you say that you’re feeling sort of… “spacey”?
The Usual Suspects
The Usual Suspects
I wouldn't say all movies, but particularly the ones made by Amazon and Netflix specifically for streaming.
My most "old woman yells at cloud" opinion is the fucking DISEASE of smartphones that is truly a cancer in our society. Don't get me wrong, I love mine, and they're completely possible to use in a way that coexists with the rest of your tech and life, but my god, the wide adoption of them has demonstrated the majority of our population has the regulation capacity of a fucking carrot.
And my inner artist is absolutely REPULSED at the notion that "oh I missed stuff in the movie cuz I was on my phone." Then put your fucking phone away. Watch a movie, or don't. Watch a show, or don't. Commit to taking in ONE PIECE of art at a time you fucking dopamine junkies.
I have a buddy, I absolutely love him, but I don't think that fucker has sat down with one medium at one time in YEARS. He leaves a stressful day job and he goes home and he watches YouTube or TV, while playing videogames. Every night. He got to the end of Pacific Drive and didn't know there was a fucking in-game radio station (with a whole host of absolute bangers btw).
Like I just... idk it makes my inner creative absolutely die inside how everyone is so utterly and hopelessly dependent on their dopamine treadmill that they've lost the ability to focus entirely.
Hear hear. I will admit that phones everywhere ( including full speed on highway ) made me finally consider something along the lines of 'you drop the phone in this bowl upon entry in this household'( this should be easier to accomplish at movies where you tend to have codes of conduct, terms of service and the like ). It is getting really bad and it is hard to escape.
I'm so torn on this, because on one hand smart phones have been a net positive in many aspect of my life. I get instantly access to maps, I have my bank in my pocket, I get notified of my bills, check my emails, communicate with friends and family, order stuff online..
Yet there is also the toxic stuff, constantly scrolling X, Facebook or Instagram, bombarded with ads, subscriptions and trash..
I think smart phones can be great devices but their use should be limited to useful functionalities rather than dopamine hits.
FWIW, I'm a mobile dev. So I wouldn't have my career if not for phones. If I were given a wish from a genie, and asked if I wanted to erase smartphones from the human experience, I honestly don't know. At once they're sources of incredible utility, convenience and personal productivity and edification. And again, they are just a CANCER on most people's ability to simply perform being human.
So I absolutely 100% cosign the conflict.
"Commit to taking in ONE PIECE of art at a time you fucking dopamine junkies."
"in-game radio station"
You found a loop hole
I thought Saints Row IV and Sleeping Dogs did this really well, to the point where I'd go around in the car just to hear all the radio stations.
Kinda but not really. The music was all created for the game specifically, this wasn’t a GTA situation. It contributes a lot to the weird atmosphere of that game, hence me being flabbergasted he rolled credits on it having no clue it was there.
My experience playing the first few areas/levels was frequent, unskippable radio chatter telling me to do things when all I wanted was to be alone and explore the weirdness. I didn't (yet?) find out about the music stations but would probably avoid them and the game had my full attention.
It's all crap, my friend. You can pretend Super Mario is different than Predator longer than you can pretend the Big Mac is different than the Whopper or Home Alone is different than Home Alone 2. Little kids can hold two stuffed animals and make up stories where they are different, but when you're older you can meaningfully accept that it all scrolls by and your life is the same whether you ate a Whopper and root for the Bengals or you ate a Big Mac and root for the Cubs.
I have no clue what point you're trying to make. Super Mario and Predator are both classics of their genre, they're massively different. A Big Mac and Whopper are both hilariously inferior to any decent local burger place, or hell, even a chain that vaguely gives a shit like Five Guys or Freddy's. Home Alone 1 and 2 are both classics.
If you genuinely have never felt different after consuming any art for your entire life, that sounds like my personalized version of hell.
> A Big Mac and Whopper are both hilariously inferior to any decent local burger place
You have agreed with me. They are essentially the same. There is no real situation where one cannot be substituted for the other. Now that you have stopped pretending, you may reach a point where you realize that my other statements are true as well.
Or, you may not. That sounds like my impersonalized version of hell.
Are you always this insufferable when you speak, or do you just talk down to people trying to honestly engage with you as a matter of policy?
And no, I am not agreeing with you. Your statement is incomprehensible. Yes, the Whopper and Big Mac both suck to a degree where they are interchangeable. Home Alone 1 and 2 are not interchangeable at all. They have things in common, they have strengths and weaknesses, and I guess if I was in the mood to watch one, and only two was available, I wouldn't be heartbroken about it, but both have enough going on that they both deserve their own existence as well.
And Mario and Predator is just.. I have no idea what you mean. As someone who has experienced both the urge to watch Predator and play Super Mario, no, one is not remotely a substitute for the other. That's just wacky.
I'm guessing I'm "insufferable" because you don't know a word that fits what you feel. My statement is not incomprehensible, you just don't understand it. I suspect it's because it's about something you don't understand and you don't want to learn, but you do seem to be comfortable being an authority on any bits of everyday media and consumer properties.
The point of the comparison between Big Mac and Whopper is not that they both suck; if you were very hungry you would find either delicious. The point is that there is no real way that one is suitable and the other is unsuitable. This is also true of Home Alone and Home Alone II : there is no situation where one is suitable and the other is unsuitable.
Someday you too will get so old you don't care if your DVDs are in the wrong cases.
As a neutral third party, no, you just actually aren't making any sense.
I think i can imagine the point you're maybe trying to make, but that requires me to make a lot of assumptions
The original post was about how he was angry that his friend was messing around with his phone during a movie. Why does this bother him? He feels his friend was not respecting the integrity of art, that he is missing important things in life, that meaning and value is lost as his friend treats his screen time as a flood of dopamine.
What I was trying to tell him (really just talking into the social media void) is that it's all meaningless anyway. When you're young you care, but as you mature, that feeling of the perfectness of your screen time becomes a childish thing. It is much like the difference between two lousy fast food burgers, the metaphor he partially understood but reduced to "they are both lousy" which wasn't my point.
But his behavior was a little too immature for me, with the brinksmanship and oh-so-daring insults to my intelligence, so I probably got sidetracked in my response and it wasn't very good.
> My most "old woman yells at cloud" opinion is the fucking DISEASE of smartphones that is truly a cancer in our society. Don't get me wrong, I love mine, and they're completely possible to use in a way that coexists with the rest of your tech and life, but my god, the wide adoption of them has demonstrated the majority of our population has the regulation capacity of a fucking carrot.
Every morning, I am one of about four parents dropping Primary 1 age children off at school that isn't nose-down in a phone. While walking, while crossing the road, while standing there waiting to pick their child up after school - nose down, thumb going scroll scroll scroll.
Christ almighty. I only carry my phone because in theory I'm still at work for that half an hour, and if anyone phones me twice it's probably important enough to look at, maybe even answer.
The biggest thing for me is the cinematography. 80s/90s movies were filmed as if you're standing alongside the cast.
* Many more shots from eye level
* Significantly less jumpcuts
* People actually cast shadows onto the environment, and filmmakers would fearlessly shoot scenes with full bright or full dark elements in them without trying to make everything dark and bright visible simultaneously
* Waist-up or even full body shots of multiple (3+) characters talking and/or walking around with few if any jump cuts
I'm not even from that era but I find movies from that era to feel the most "real", like I can almost reach into the screen and just "be there" together. This aesthetic is perfectly doable in the modern age, even with digital cameras, it's just not the trend currently.
While cinematography isn't the whole answer, I think it's a big contributor to why so much feels aggressively middling these days.
Modern shows are aggressively aesthetic. There's huge overuse shallow depth of field, resulting in blurry backgrounds. Watch modern movies with this mind, and you start noticing the reliance on a sharp foreground and blurry background is extreme to the point of bizarre. Cinematography should be a tool to achieve an effect; blurring the background to intentionally make the subject stand out is a purposeful use of that tool, but is being applied everywhere now, with no intent behind it, even if it's "aesthetic".
I would also argue that it's easier with digital photography to create blandly attractive, "painterly" images, thanks to colour grading and increased dynamic range and so on. A lot of shows these days have technically competent photography, but it all converges on the same aesthetic — tons of diffuse, lush lighting (often achieved with filling the space with lightly cinematic fog) and impeccable set design, and that creamy depth of field. But there's no contrast anywhere, it's just creamy "aesthetic" blandness in forgettable environs.
Another non-visual aspect rarely mentioned is audio: Almost all TV/movie audio these days is foley, and it's sometimes jarringly bad when you start to actually pay attention to, say, the sound of footsteps or keys jangling. High quality productions can be very good here, but most productions don't spend enough time on it. Bad foley has a very strange, subliminal effect on a scene, further undermining the sense of reality.
In such environments (visual and aural), nothing seems real and nothing seems like it matters. Everything, even nominally "adult" shows set in the real world, feels like Midde Earth and not Planet Earth.
It's not all bad, of course. There are also definitely cases where the quality of the show transcends the mediocrity of the cinematography. We are still getting good shows and bad shows, like always. But it does seem like things have shifted into a sort of middle where everything is average in the same average way.
Bad audio and bad foley doesn't get mentioned enough. I think it's why people are watching things with subtitles: the actors are on a blue stage that is completely silent having a quiet conversation and then the war happening around them gets added later. In noisy environments people slow down and enunciate and directors aren't helping actors know what to do.
Ideas on how to fix it:
• actors should wear tiny headphones behind their ears (or wherever is not visible) to make noise that approximates the environment they will be shown in. They'll have to act over it.
• Foley artists should not be given video of the final scene to foley. They should be given only one single continuous very wide shot. This will solve the problem where foley artists keep doing ludicrous things like adding the sound of a pin dropping and hitting the ground (since it's shown on screen) in the context of a space ship that is in the process of exploding.
> There's huge overuse shallow depth of field
I've ranted about this so much to friends, it's so distracting to me.
I have the hypothesis that some of it is due to how easy (or easier?) it is to quickly review footage to tell if the focus is set right when it's so aggressively shallow, but regardless of the "why" the monotony of it drives me crazy.
I want to see the environments the characters are in, I want the visceral grounding of the feel of that environment. I watched "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" and it felt so primal, and watching how intentional the sound design alone is I can see why.
> In such environments (visual and aural), nothing seems real and nothing seems like it matters.
That's a great description about the strange disembodiment I've felt in modern shows for a while now.
The fog you reference might just be a Hollywood Black Magic blooming filter placed in front of the lens.
No, I'm pretty sure it's literally fog, some kind of aerosoled mineral oil.
Here is an example: https://imgur.com/a/gdemKM3. Notice the hazy background. The still is from this video [1] at 00:22, coincidentally also a good video about cinematic realism.
Here [2] is a video about lighting that shows adding haze.
Some cinematographers certainly use blooming filters, too. I noticed that Spielberg had a period with tons of bloom, though I don't know if those were filters or just a certain kind of lens. Indiana Jones 4 had absolutely awful photography. Bridge of Spies is also a good example, lots of blooming, lots of hazy indoor rooms.
[1] https://youtu.be/tvwPKBXEOKE
[2] https://youtu.be/RXD97Rc5P_s?t=250
It's also color grading that has changed. https://youtu.be/tvwPKBXEOKE?si=rnVOSw1h1vM60l7x
More: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45949863
I know absolutely nothing about cinematography, but my sense is that HD has actually hurt the believability of movies significantly.
I don't buy this. Watching hi-res remasters of old films (Alien, Catch Me If You Can, Jurassic Park) you get incredible definition without damage to suspension of disbelief.
I think this comment[1] above really highlights what bothers me about modern shows and movies, but in short it's not the high def, it's how it's used.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46062911
My apologies for a comment not adding much, but you're hitting the nail on the head, it is exactly this. Watching characters move around in an environment is immersive, not 300 cuts per minute. Also more difficult to make.
Also: Recency & survival bias. We remember what became the classics from the 90s and also what came out this year and was available on our last flight
I think it’s more survival bias than recency. But I strongly agree. There were many bad movies in the 1990’s, we just don’t remember them or have forgotten how bad they were.
Two examples off of the top of my head are Johnny Mnemonic and Escape from LA. Both of these are sci fi movies that are mostly just awful throughout. I remember watching them at the time and thinking they were pretty decent, but on rewatching them recently, I could barely make it through them.
Compare that to The Matrix, just four years later (and still in the 1990s), which hits super hard and seems almost flawless even today.
Really I think the movies that have survived in people’s minds are the ones where everything aligned: an incredible director with a great story to tell and everyone involved performing at the top of their game.
There's probably something in here about our personal tastes changing, as well. I used to really enjoy going to the movies and would go frequently to see all kinds of stuff. But now it hardly seems worth it knowing that I'll probably be bored by whatever it is. Now I go to the theater maybe three or four times a year. I always bring a book on airplane trips now because, despite having more selection than ever, I don't want to watch anything that's on there.
Escape from New York is the good one (in my opinion anyway)
Notable also is that a lot of resources go into series rather than just movies, as well as movies that are not in the 'box office.' But I agree about the biases here; there is so much crap from the 90s that looked fake and awful, and there is so much stuff now that feels alive and real. Even more, I'd say, especially once you look away from the more mainstream sources.
Also an interesting resource here is boxofficemojo which has a simple interface for looking at the box office at any particular month and year. For example, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/month/october/1994/ October 1994 was a great time: Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, Shawshank Redemption
> Notable also is that a lot of resources go into series rather than just movies,
As a great example of this, is the His Dark Materials series. Where every episode is shot like a big-budget movie, and is pretty amazing compared to anything filmed in the 90s. Its subject matter skews toward the adolescent, but I enjoyed watching with the kids.
This is an excellent point. For example, here [1] is a list of all films released in 2025. However I bet most people 10 years from now will only remember the top 10-20 [2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_films_of_2025
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_2025_box_office_number...
The point wasn't merely about remembering something, the raised survivorship bias is moment in time when something becomes a cult classic[0]. Box office numbers don't matter much there, as these cult classics all bombed at the office:
- Blade Runner (1982)
- Brazil (1985)
- Donnie Darko (2001)
- Fight Club (1999)
- The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
- The Thing (1982)
The question should be wether we can still create the same kind of cults like we did in the 90s.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cult_films
I think Hollywood is well past its prime and the best films are either independent or from elsewhere.
As to a modern cult film, I think "Everything Everywhere All At Once" should make the list.
The 90s was the best decade for film, it was peak. One thing about the blockbusters of the 90s is that they were made to appeal to Western tastes.
Throughout the 2000s Hollywood drew progressively more and more revenue from global audiences, and by the 2010s most big budget films were pandering to the global lowest common denominator, and the majority of them are an insult to my intelligence.
When can I expect 2010s movies to feel as good as 90s and early 2000s movies felt 10 years ago? Is there going to be a future golden age when this decade’s churned-out Disney / Marvel / Star Wars reboots and sequels feel inspired?
It took ten years and twenty movies for the Marvel franchise to go stale and years more for hating on it to become cool ‡. That's an accomplishment by any metric not specifically designed to facilitate the latter.
You will never be 10 years younger again, but the kids who grew up with those movies will carry forward their fond memories of the good in them and when they find their voice on the adult stage they will reclaim them, making hating on them uncool again, just as we did for the Star Wars prequels. Whether you embrace or reject the backlash-to-the-backlash will be up to you but I'd like to put in a word for the psychological benefits of trying to see the good in things. It's much more fun than ruminating on the bad, both for yourself and those around you.
‡ Yes, I'm sure you were doing it before it was cool.
How did you make the leap from a critical passing quip about Marvel movies that I “ruminate on the bad”? I’m glad you like Marvel movies, the point of my comment wasn’t to cause offense.
You will forget the bad movies, remember the good movies, and describe the 2010s as a great era.
Is the supposition that I also forgot that I disliked movies in earlier decades? I don’t find explanations that require people to deny their own memory to be particularly convincing.
Poop doesn’t get better with age. But you have good movies in the 2010s.
I have seen tons of great movies made after 2010, but must admit I’m having trouble thinking of any blockbuster-type movies that stand up to the best of the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
Does Fury Road count? I dunno. The closest I can get aside from that are a couple Tarantino movies. Jurassic Park, the first Mission Impossible movie, Aliens, Jaws, hell even Independence Day. Nothing’s quite up there. Lots that are a kind of janky B-movie sort of good, but nothing as solid as those. Almost all are marred by lots of CG that might look ok at the time but seem dodgy and very distracting within 5 years max, for one thing (to be fair, Jurassic Park suffers from that in a couple scenes, too)
Fury Road definitely counts in my book.
I struggle to even think of many post-2010 films that stand up to the casual flicks of the 1990s, never mind The Matrix, or Gladiator, or the others you mentioned.
Horror, action-horror, and comedy-horror are in a really great place and have been for a while. Drama’s doing fine. Comedy’s been a bit weak for many years IMO. All the good ones I can think of are comedy/something—like, Red Rocket is very good and quite funny but also… damn dark and leans drama often enough that I’m not sure just “dark comedy” covers the difference between it and a straight comedy, it’s more a dark-comedy/drama. Or, uh, is The Art of Self Defense a comedy? Like… sorta? I can think of a couple alright ordinary comedies but nothing that stands out.
> Maybe I'm just nostalgic. Maybe I'm romanticizing the past. But when I finish a good movie, I can sit there thinking about them for hours, even days depending on the movie. When I finish most modern blockbusters, I'm already thinking about dinner. And that difference, I think, says everything.
I don’t watch modern most blockbusters because I don’t enjoy them in general. I watch a few that I know I will likely enjoy.
I think we have some bias too.
We remember better the good experiences. The Netflix catalog is full of not so good movies, and the video rental shops in the 90s were too.
> The Netflix catalog is full of not so good movies, and the video rental shops in the 90s were too.
I subscribed to Netflix for a year or two when the platform became popular, but I quickly realized it resembles those old school rental shops too much. Yes, you could get some popular classics like The Godfather or Goodfellas, but apart from that you were stuck with another crime story or a comedy with Steve Martin or John Candy. Actually, my analogy may not be 100% fortunate, because I still have good memories about watching these comedies as a kid with my dad. Now I wouldn't have time and patience to go through movies of "that" quality. Anyhow, my point is that you were very unlikely to get there anything that wasn't already proved to be popular. Forget about anything more niche / arthouse. Netflix has produced plenty by itself, but how many of those movies are actually any good? I remember a handful of them: Marriage Story, Roma, Don't Look Up and a movie for kids called Okja.
Netflix is the replacement for cable television. Their job is not to make movies like the Godfather. It's to make CSI.
I think you're hitting the nail on the head, but the corollary is that there's so much MORE now. More of everything, and since most things are crap the gems are proportionally harder to find. I look at reality tv and wince, but I also feel that way about soap operas, it's the same itch being scratched the same way for a different generation. But the nature of reality tv (dirt cheap) means that it's been made in vast quantities, dwarfing the reach that soap operas ever had.
Soap operas weren't choking out late night comedy, they were totally different products serving different needs, at different times. Reality tv changes that equation though, with the aforementioned cheapness, and perennial popularity. A lot of the old norms are gone too, around residuals, the "one for them, one for me" system, stars vs brand... and the result is often entertainment geared at cheap production and nothing else.
The other issue is that CGI, while it empowers amazing things, also empowers the creation of real trash. It's allowed Marvel movies to film without a complete script, figuring out the ending in AVR and CGI work... and it shows. A lot of old blockbusters were crap, but they were crap that at least had the requisite craftsmanship to be made and distributed to theaters around the world.
That barrier is gone, the gates are open and that means that hidden voices are emerging (hooray!) and also that a lot of people are so inundated by noise that they disengage.
In my experience it’s that set lighting has changed enormously.
Modern digital cinema cameras can capture dark scenes far better than the film stocks of the 90s and earlier. So set designers don’t need to blast light everywhere to have actors be visible. Now, we even have AI Denoising that can make ISO 12500 look like 800.
Go watch a 90s movie and look at a night or interior scene. You’ll see that everyone is actually lit by blue lights. Not natural darkness. That’s a major change.
This also shows up in porn. A playboy photo was expertly lit and beautifully so, with angles and bounces and shade filters and gobos.
Since the 2000s the market has expected the “DV Cam” which became “Smartphone” recorded look. Which means natural lighting all the time. It’s lost the “glam”.
> Modern digital cinema cameras can capture dark scenes far better than the film stocks of the 90s and earlier. So set designers don’t need to blast light everywhere to have actors be visible… > Go watch a 90s movie and look at a night or interior scene. You’ll see that everyone is actually lit by blue lights. Not natural darkness. That’s a major change.
Let me introduce you to some film history:
https://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the-fa...
Any discussion about film should probably include a disclaimer like "what we say here doesn't necessarily apply to Kubrick because he was Kubrick"
-1. One of the most famous biggest budget dudes, Stanley Kubrick, using an ultra rare incredibly special f/0.7 he bargained with NASA to get is, to me, an argument not that the past was great with natural lighting & could use it. It's an argument that that was the hardest most difficult costly & inaccessible upper-est echelon of what was possible, that only a couple rare gods of cinema had any access to dark natural lighting.
A focal plane mere inches thick!
Incredibly wild constraints here. It's incredibly fun to read about & folks should!
But everything about the Barry Lyndon story & the extreme effort to make it validates the top post to me. Our modern sensors are just stratospherically better & wildly unconstraining vs the past.
> I think the difference comes down to this: older movies took risks. They trusted audiences to pay attention, to feel something, to think. Scorsese and Tarantino had visions and the freedom to execute them without endless studio interference. They weren't chasing demographics or worrying about franchise potential. They were making films, not products.
By risks, you mean they weren't just following tropes, but subverting them, inventing their own, not rehashing exist IP.
I think that's the difference. Execs have run out of ideas, and so hedge on the familiar.
Herzog talks about actually hauling the boat over the hill in Fitzcaraldo because audiences can tell real from fake. Nowadays even movies that don’t use special effects rely much more on editing and post processing. Movies shot on film feel more connected to what actually happened on set.
It’s ironic that the word choice and structure of this article feels overly embellished in that very chatgpt style… I miss the old days of people writing their own content.
Presenting fake content as though it were real is the major use of AI right now. You can ask it to write a breathless ten-paragraph post about the plot of The Godfather, for example, and it will instantly give you something shovel ready for a bot-enriched Facebook creator.
One problem, of several, is that there just was more point in doing things, meeting people, and going places up until a decade ago.
If you make a movie set in 2025, the screenwriter has to jump through hoops to avoid real life, which much of the time is someone quietly staring at a screen.
The 90s films mentioned in this post are works of art and the actors and creators were artists. Compensation sustains the art, but it’s not the primary purpose.
Netflix is a business. The content on Netflix is largely designed or purchased with a primary goal of engaging paying users.
We can find plenty of films that are works of art after the 90s. One Battle After Another is a recent one that comes to mind. Parasite, No Country for Old Men, Arrival, Moonlight, Tree of Life, Midsommar, Mandy…
I miss car crashes - realistic crashes like in Mad Max 1, not explosions or rollover on a hidden ramp. I guess cars are too expensive these days to crash them for a movie.
I thought Max Max Fury Road was cool. Though they spent crazy money on vehicles for that so maybe it agrees with your point.
I mean Max 1 is ok https://youtu.be/Utj2o2eWdC0?t=93
But fury was kind of epic https://youtu.be/hEJnMQG9ev8?t=118
both seem to have some ramps and explosions.
What’s funny to me is how many hidden ramps are featured in that Mad Max 1 trailer :)
Majority if not all shots in fury road are heavily cgi enhanced if not fully cgi.
Dunno - this thing says mostly real https://fraserengineco.com/fraser-fast-facts/mad-max-fury-ro...
Here's some making of where you can see the real shot and the cgi https://youtu.be/hsFc76R7W6E?t=656
Even some of the explosions I thought would be fake was them actually blowing stuff up https://youtu.be/hsFc76R7W6E?t=1278
I'm not sure if the making of shots aren't more impressive than the end verisons.
There is only so much top talent to go around. We cannot have infinite new content at the same quality as the best Hollywood could do in the 90s.
I'm inclined to agree, although I have to wonder where the money is going. Seeing plenty of BIG budget shows and movies where the dialogue and writing are just dreadful ... I gotta think those shows and movies could have outbid for better talent, but they just chose not to when it came to the creative team.
I'm thinking of productions like Star Wars Acolyte where the story and writing were just dreadful ... and they spent an enormous amount of money on it.
My bet is that the content schedule and need to fill the pipeline is so much faster that decisions get made hastily in service of metrics. You can call it Lord of the Rings, but that doesn’t make it so.
Yes it’s nostalgia. You’re comparing your all-time favorite classics to not-as-good new movies.
Movies were made to make a high majority of profits in theaters, a captive audience that had few distractions and optics developed for composite nuances.
Listen to the soft wind mixed in under Jodie's lambs tale. It comes on slowly, builds and then rapidly fades. 100s of details like these were managed for reaching audiences out of their range of conscious awareness. That's how movies used to get made. Now everything is developed to look at, to notice. And if it isn't, it's in a mode of realism that's basic.
I think some of it may be that everything is too big now and they all have too many options they can, relatively, easily take. When special effects became easy every movie turned into an action movie. Special effects are everywhere creating scenes that don't actually help tell the story or develop a character. It just seems like there aren't hard choices being made to force a movie to be its core best self. Every scene should matter. Of course we can't go back though. I don't think many people would pay to see the something like Jaws again.
Yeah I noticed that. The characters are also super one-dimensional, constantly repeating the same expressions. I think it's because people don't have the same attention span anymore.
But it's just really terrible. Stuff like reacher who solves every problem with violence (I think South park even did a piece on that). Or Amazon with their big list of spinoffs of one really mediocre spy series.
There's still some gems like Westworld, The Expanse or DARK but they're few and far between.
Good movies aren't created often, while movies in general are now produced more frequently, so unimpressive movies are much easier to bump into. I just saw a chart showing over twice as many movies were released in 2018 as in 2000. It would be interesting to see for each IMDB decade what percentage of films are rated 8 or higher.
> movies in general are now produced more frequently
I don't agree with this. Blockbuster used to be filled with movies made to go straight to "home video" whether that was VHS or DVD. Shitty movies have been made for a really long time. Typically, they didn't have a budget and no studio was involved. Now, we have really shitty movies with incredible budgets being released by the studios as well as whatever the streamers are making. The straight to home video market does seem to have lost a bit though as they still need to find a streamer willing to license it.
There is recency and survival bias, yes. But a sizable fraction of movies are remakes or series extensions. The Marvel Overextended Universe has taken this up to 11. That it's still working, mostly, leads other studios to make movies in that style.
Important distinction: This specifically applies to Netflix movies; these are explicitly aimed at people watching in the background, or listening without watching. The conclusions don't apply to modern movies as a whole.
Maybe it’s in part because films from the 80s and 90s were filmed on actual film.
I've started to think that this might be a good reason.
Anecdotally one thing I’ve noticed is that older films had much fewer characters.
Take a movie like When Harry Met Sally — there are basically four on screen characters, giving more time to build chemistry and relationships
Movies with stories about building chemistry and relationships just need fewer characters. They still exist:
- All of Us Strangers (2023)
- Aftersun (2022)
- The Lighthouse (2019)
- Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu) (2019)
- The Duke of Burgundy (2014)
They are also shorter which means they don’t overstay their welcome
If you think the stories in 90's movies are good, you need spend some time with classic era movies (pre-1970).
When you have to let the writing carry the story, the movie works much better.
I watched All the President's Men on a recent flight and even on an airplane seatback screen it had me rapt. No romance, no sex, no violence except a cop pointing a gun in the first 5 minutes, just a good story with two great leads.
How did this article get so many upvotes? Even among articles that pine for the good old days, this article is trash. Like 80% of it is just saying “remember that movie? And the things we thought were meaningful back then?”
The idea that modern movies don’t take risks is absurd. Have you seen Poor Things? Have you seen Zone of Interest? Mickey17? OBAA? There are more movies taking more risks in this era of film than there has ever been before. You’re just not watching them.
The real story here is the way lighting has changed and how it makes you feel when you watch the movie.
Gen Z discovers nostalgia.
The reason these older movies are better stories is because American culture used to be much more merit based and free market based. Now, half the decision in hiring a director, actors, writers is what is their identity. Return to pure competition and movies will improve.
These movies also had less intention to be political correct. No one would have spent those blockbuster budgets on stories that were constructed around an ideological narrative instead of good storytelling.
> I was rewatching silence of the lambs and something hit me hard
That the villain‘s sexual orientation is now unthinkable to be portrayed like this? I give this movie a decade until the studio’s employees, its owners and the whole movie-ecosystem will alter the movie via AI to be more compliant with the „current thing“.
Movies also have gotten to long. I long for 5he days of 90 min. It also meant cinemas could run more movies and had space for smaller releases too.
There's that incredibly funny/sad clip of the old actor playing Gandalf getting frustrated with talking into thin air. Half of modern movies literally only exist on the special effects laptop.
But movies have always been about technology. I am sure Fritz Lang was considered a hack once.
Modern motion pictures are made for people who temporarily or permanently lack the mental capacity to understand deeper plots. The other audience is too small to bother with.
I don’t think this was a 90s thing. I think it’s been a gradual progression to shorter, shallower attention spans. Contrast 2001 space odyssey to a 90s movie, it feels so slow.
Then contrast a 2000s movie to a modern film and if you want to feel really sad, contrast that to a high budget YouTubers content.
i think your mistaking stuff here. 2001 space odyssey is considered a masterpiece by cinema enthusiasts. tested through short years. who knows if it'll still rank high in 300 years from now like some arts of old mediums; Don Quijote book is a great example
have been watched almost a hundred of hours of the early cinema (1920-1930) i found 2001 space odyssey boring as heck. had to go to a public theater to not sleep through, because the past 2 attempts at my house got me sleeping. cinema is a recent medium. it can go through a lot of stuff. and yet, you can find shallow films since the first era, till today. not every movie was made to be dense, slow or thoughtful. the 90s also had a bunch of shallow stuff
> Contrast 2001 space odyssey to a 90s movie, it feels so slow.
I believe it felt slow when it originally released as well.
I just watched “While You Were Sleeping” with my wife while we decorated for Christmas. It was still better than 99.9% of movies from this decade and it’s not because the plot is particularly sophisticated.
It's the opposite. Modern movies are obsessed with plot. Inception being an example of this. It's everything else, the image and characters that's lacking. You're never going to get something like Tarkovsky's Solaris again that just shows you a highway scene for five minutes.
Villeneuve commented on this a year or two ago in an interview where he pointed out that he hates the extent to which television has infected film with its focus on plot and dialogue at expense of what's visually on the screen.
> Modern movies are obsessed with plot. Inception being an example of this.
I don’t think Inception is a great example of this. It has plot, but the plot is all texture. None of it makes that much sense, nor does it need to.
To me they all seem to be video game plots or soap opera / palace drama plots, which might be intricate yes, but it still doesn't hit the mark. I can't put words on it, but the spell is broken.
Related:
Why movies just don't feel "real" anymore
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45949863
I've seen many good films this decade too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There Is No Evil (شیطان وجود ندارد) 2020
Drive My Car (ドライブ・マイ・カー) 2021
The two Dune films
Alcarràs 2022
Suzume (すずめの戸締まり) 2022
Monster (怪物) 2023
Fallen Leaves (Kuolleet lehdet) 2023
The Holdovers 2023
Perfect Days 2023
The Substance 2024
Bugonia 2025 (even though it's a remake)
Several hundred new movies see significant distribution or screenings every year. Folks who say “there are no good movies now” have really narrow taste or aren’t looking hard enough.
Let me add in Everything, Everywhere, All At Once (2022)
I didn't like that at all :')
As one of the characters said "it’s all just a pointless swirling bucket of bullshit"
how does 90s movie compare with say 60s movies that would be interesting too.
60s has so many good movies like 2001, psycho etc etc. it’s really the last 5-7 years where I feel the quality took a dive
NFLX series and AI slop are converging fast.
Modern writing for films is terrible is my feeling. I can’t remember any weekend in the 90s an first decade of 2000s where I could not find one or more movies that I wanted to watch. These days neither me or the kids can find anything and we have been going to Sunday matinees and watching old 80s, 90s and even silent movies with Buster Keaton and they are better than the slop that made today. Frankly I’m hoping gen AI lets new and exiting storytellers end the industry.