Movies are more expensive to make than ever before. Hiring star performers, making high-quality animation and hiring thousands of employees isn’t cheap. So companies are far less likely to take risks, develop characters, change animation styles or innovate.
Marvel is the film studio most often guilty of these issues. Film studios, like Marvel, have settled into a storyline guaranteed to make a profit. And it leaves many of their movies feeling strangely familiar.
There is a hero who overcomes a challenge and defeats a villain. It has been told hundreds of times. But it will never die as long as Disney, Marvel’s parent company, can make money from it. But due to a cultural shift, the MCU’s latest films have lost money, a sign that its significance in the film world is on a sharp decline.
Recently, the superhero genre has been falling in popularity. Disney lost $900 million over 11 released movies, and internal meetings show Disney is working on damage control after many financial failures like the latest Ant-Man movie and Indiana Jones movies. Money talks, and it shows the audience has gotten bored with sequels, retellings, and elderly actors and actresses coming out of retirement for another “one last movie”.
In 1980, the average film cost $11 million to produce. By 2000, it had soared to $60 million. Today, the average cost is anywhere between $60 million and $100 million, with 7 movies this year alone costing more than $200 million to produce. While visual quality is higher, they sorely lack new plotlines.
Freshman Grant DeVore shares this sentiment, noting, “I definitely feel as if movies made today are lacking content that made older ones great. They add unnecessary content that doesn’t add to the story or interest the audience,” he continued. “Now of course there are exceptions, but when I watch a recent movie most of the time I leave thinking about what could have been.”
A growing trend in the film industry is adding undeveloped side stories and characters, artificially extending the length of the film. This has caused the average length of a film to dramatically rise from an average of 110 minutes in 1981 to 131 minutes in 2021.
Junior Lucas Haas showed his distaste of the big-budget monopoly. “I think the mid-budget movie has disappeared because a lot of massive franchises have been created in recent times such as the MCU which have outshined these mid-budget movies. I think this a bad thing for moviegoers because they are drawn to these massive franchises with even larger budgets and most never even bat an eye at these other movies with smaller budgets, even if they are truly better than the big-budget movies,” he conveyed.
Even though Marvel and Disney have lost money recently, independent directors like Christopher Nolan have built a positive legacy, and Nolan especially has delivered. His more recent films such as Tenet and Oppenheimer have raked in billions over the past few years because the quality and complex story appeals to older, more mature audiences.
Senior Abram Giese had a different perspective. “I probably watch more movies now versus 5 years ago because I discovered Christopher Nolan and started watching all of the movies he directed,” Giese stated.
While films have inspired entire generations and given moviegoers something to escape reality with, lately they have become dominated by large corporations, which are less likely to take a chance on a new, different kind of movie and are much more inclined to stick with what “works”. The rise of independent films signifies audiences are looking for a change, and one could see the fall of the MCU and even possibly Disney if current trends continue.
