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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
"in-game radio station"
You found a loop hole
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.
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.
(Vagueness intended to avoid spoilers for that 1 in 10,000 someone who hasn't seen the movie)
Remind me where this is from, this sounds really familiar.
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_films_of_2025
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_2025_box_office_number...
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
Let me introduce you to some film history:
https://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the-fa...
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.
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.
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.
> 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“.
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'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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 believe it felt slow when it originally released as well.
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.
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.
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.
But movies have always been about technology. I am sure Fritz Lang was considered a hack once.
Take a movie like When Harry Met Sally — there are basically four on screen characters, giving more time to build chemistry and relationships
- 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)
When you have to let the writing carry the story, the movie works much better.
Why movies just don't feel "real" anymore
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.
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)
As one of the characters said "it’s all just a pointless swirling bucket of bullshit"
