For the last ten years Hollywood has been making movies based on what they thought audiences ought to see instead of what they wanted to see. This steady stream of girl-boss super hero and transgender romance stories have lost the studios literally billions of dollars. I’ve been raving against this for years saying something will have to give and finally it has.
There’s a guy named Scott Cawthon whose twisted imagination came up with a story line where a Chuck E. Cheese-style restaurant becomes possessed by evil spirits and the animatronic animals start slaughtering the patrons. He called it “Five Nights at Freddy’s.” He went from on-line storytelling to a video game to finally a couple of movies in the theaters that made hundreds of millions of dollars. And the Rotten Tomatoes scores from the professional reviewers was 33% and the rating by customers was 86%.
So, what’s the lesson? Find what the audience wants and give it to them. And this is becoming more frequent. A YouTuber named Markiplier self-financed a sci-fi horror movie called Iron Lung about a prisoner sealed in a submarine prison on a moon covered in an ocean of blood. And once again there is a built-in audience from the game and story fans on-line.
Well, finally the actual studios are waking up and saying, “Wait a minute. Why don’t we start making movies out of stories that people actually like?” So, there are about a billion kids who play Minecraft so a Minecraft movie will make a billion dollars. Duh! Studios like Apple are starting to make science fiction and fantasy movies that piggy back on books that have actual audience appeal instead of left-wing ideological cachet. It’s still barely detectable but without a doubt it’s the future.
Now, this isn’t targeted at me. It’s for my grandkids. They play the video-games that these movies are based on. When I watch them it’s like some kind of fever dream. The plots are crazy, the characters are cartoonish and the pacing is almost non-existent. But no one is preaching. It’s reminiscent of the slasher movies back in the eighties. The audience was teenagers and there was no danger of anyone winning an Academy Award but the audience left happy and the studios made money. This is the model that seems to be returning.
I was talking to one of my grandsons about this phenomenon and he provided a piece of supporting evidence. He mentioned that none of his friends were going to bother to see the third Avatar movie because basically it’s the same movie recycled. He said now that the CGI isn’t as cutting edge there’s really no reason to go listen to the same lecture about the military-industrial complex colonizing and oppressing space-aborigines for a third time. Of course, that’s my take on what he said but it was interesting to me that he recognized the recycled aspect of the plot. The Zoomers aren’t as helpless as some people paint them. At least not the ones I’m related to.