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.\u00a0 This steady stream of girl-boss super hero and transgender romance stories have lost the studios literally billions of dollars.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been raving against this for years saying something will have to give and finally it has.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s 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.\u00a0 He called it \u201cFive Nights at Freddy’s.\u201d 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.\u00a0 And the Rotten Tomatoes scores from the professional reviewers was 33% and the rating by customers was 86%.<\/p>\n
So, what\u2019s the lesson?\u00a0 Find what the audience wants and give it to them.\u00a0 And this is becoming more frequent.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And once again there is a built-in audience from the game and story fans on-line.<\/p>\n
Well, finally the actual studios are waking up and saying, \u201cWait a minute.\u00a0 Why don\u2019t we start making movies out of stories that people actually like?\u201d\u00a0 So, there are about a billion kids who play Minecraft so a Minecraft movie will make a billion dollars.\u00a0 Duh!\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It\u2019s still barely detectable but without a doubt it\u2019s the future.<\/p>\n
Now, this isn\u2019t targeted at me.\u00a0 It\u2019s for my grandkids.\u00a0 They play the video-games that these movies are based on.\u00a0 When I watch them it\u2019s like some kind of fever dream.\u00a0 The plots are crazy, the characters are cartoonish and the pacing is almost non-existent.\u00a0 But no one is preaching.\u00a0 It\u2019s reminiscent of the slasher movies back in the eighties.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This is the model that seems to be returning.<\/p>\n
I was talking to one of my grandsons about this phenomenon and he provided a piece of supporting evidence.\u00a0 He mentioned that none of his friends were going to bother to see the third Avatar movie because basically it\u2019s the same movie recycled.\u00a0 He said now that the CGI isn\u2019t as cutting edge there\u2019s really no reason to go listen to the same lecture about the military-industrial complex colonizing and oppressing space-aborigines for a third time.\u00a0 Of course, that\u2019s my take on what he said but it was interesting to me that he recognized the recycled aspect of the plot.\u00a0 The Zoomers aren\u2019t as helpless as some people paint them.\u00a0 At least not the ones I\u2019m related to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,237,4,243],"tags":[799,4494,4729],"class_list":["post-35632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-movie-reviews","tag-build-your-own-platforms","tag-crowd-funding","tag-movies"],"yoast_head":"\n