knives wrote: ↑Wed Nov 06, 2019 5:13 pm
Additionally, and I feel this is my main point, Marvel isn't crowding out smaller movies. They don't make enough movies for that to be possible. Assuming your average small town threater has five movies it can hold at any one time and they hold them for an average of about five months even at max occupancy which is something I suspect never happens you'd have two theaters available for something else. Marvel's only that ubiquitous in people's minds.
Right, Marvel is just the most prominent and successful of the franchises that are demonstrably doing the crowding out I'm describing (anecdotally, I lived in a smallish town in the South for five years, and saw this happening in real time earlier this decade). Of the top 20 grossing films this year, only
It: Chapter Two,
Us,
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and
Glass can charitably be described as non-franchise films, and two of those are sequels and one is a superhero movie! I'm not demanding that every American be able to see the latest Hirokazu Kore-eda on the big screen (god forbid), but if something like
Hustlers is the least focused-grouped and most original film you can see in a theater in an average quarter, there's an imbalance in what is available to you.
knives wrote: ↑Wed Nov 06, 2019 5:13 pm
But you haven't explained how those are mutually exclusive traits. Going with the supposed ne-plus-ultra as mentioned before in this thread many singular voices have managed to express their voices clearly in the committee vision of Marvel. We can have a top tier James Gunn movie and a slick Hollywood product.
They're not strictly mutually exclusive, of course, but surely you're not arguing that your average
Marvel,
Star Wars, or
Fast & Furious entry has something approaching a singular artistic vision?
And how would we know what a top-tier James Gunn movie would look like? He's only made four features, two of which are Marvel movies and the other two of which are a low-budget dark comedy and a hard-R grossout horror film. I like the
Guardians movies more than the average Marvel film, but I'm also not going to pretend that a less blandly generic version of the house style than usual = a showcase for a singular voice.