I’d like to thank @[email protected] for posting this article from the L.A. Times over at [email protected]. A hot topic with some interesting (and less interesting) takes on the subject. This was going to be a mere cross-posting but, of course, you’re always going to get your mouth-breathing audience in any discussion regarding the—ugh—superhero genre, so I felt the need to distance myself from that.

Did you not see the name of this community?

While I might admit under pressure to some exaggeration on Prof. emeritus Scorsese’s part (it’s Martin Scorsese, for Buddha’s sake!), he’s certainly not wrong. One thing that few have understood, like Scorsese has, is that while cinema has always had cookie-cutter formulas and copycat movies, since the age of the Blockbuster and especially in this age of 3D, AI and algorithms it’s all been to reduced to formula. Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, Save The Cat scriptwriting, Seven Basic Plots, etc. It’s just a matter of choosing what color gimpsuit the test audience preferred. Scorsese, when he was making The King of Comedy or New York, New York couldn’t forsee the lowest common denominator going so low or so common.

I must mention the comment by @[email protected] regarding Scorsese’s reference to Christopher Nolan. Just in case anyone here can’t see it, there is a world of difference between [insert any MCU/DCU/SMU movie] and Nolan’s Batman trilogy. Especially with the second entry, The Dark Knight, Nolan elevates the entire genre because Nolan knows what he’s doing: he made movies about a comic book character, the others make comic-book movies. Nolan’s work is cinematic. The others’ are just big, dare I say, hulking. There’s just no comparison. It’s the difference between Finnegans Wake and Finnegan’s corner bar.

@[email protected] commented…

Sure, the Marvel movies pull in more money than other movies, but the money makers are usually trash. Marvel is like the McDonald’s of movies. It’s going to pull in way more money than a fine dining establishment, but not because it’s good, because it’s the garbage that the public will take out their wallet for. There is space in the market for both of these things.

For the most part we’re on the same page but there isn’t space for both, really. Masked Gimpsuit IV: The Revenge of The Attack of The Revenge is always going to push any smaller (independant) release off cinema screens and (maybe) on to one of the streaming services, if not push them right out of production.

Dopamine hits used to have different flavors. Marketing has discovered dopamine doesn’t even have to have a flavor, just get the drip timing right. God is in the details and the details have become flamingos.