Disney recently started brainstorming and putting out feelers on how to create an IP that appeals to young men.
Some hyperbolic idpol takes aside, this feels like a big, famous restaurant asking how to make meatloaf and mashed potatoes.
Hey Disney, get this: "Action man kills the bad guys."
And that comes with lots of variations. Action commando kills the goons. Action spy kills the henchmen. Action cop kills the gangsters. Action knight kills the foul knaves. Action fantasy hero kills the monsters. Action barbarian kills the sorcerer. Action space captain kills the aliens. So on and so forth. You almost limitless options to freshen things up with new settings and concepts, while basically just making the same movie over and over again.
This was something that I thought Hollywood had down to a science, but apparently big media companies like Disney don't know this anymore.
I feel a creeping degradation of American media where it feels like they don't know how to make their old staples anymore.
>>711937I said hyperbolic idpol takes aside, anon, but here's a classic "action man kills the bad guys" movie
<People can't be talking face-to-face for too long or else the movie is "prentious".Don't know what the specific criteria for this are, but there are plenty of dialogue scenes.
<Women cannot consciously make important plot decisions.Leeloo makes plot decisions
<Male characters need to look coolly detached in 90% of the scenes.No.
<Male protagonists can only show strong emotions through a sublimated homoerotic attraction to their nemesis, sometimes by proxy of reacting to the death of their girlfriend.The main action man protagonist never meets the main human villain face-to-face, so no.
<All significant female characters need to look conventionally attractive.Yes.
<The male main cast can't look better groomed than your dad, their asses needs to be throughly unwiped.I don't know how well groomed you would consider 90s Bruce Willis to be, but he's not poorly groomed.
>>711937>>711941Here's another one.
<People can't be talking face-to-face for too long or else the movie is "prentious".Once again, there's plenty of dialogue.
<Women cannot consciously make important plot decisions.I'm fairly sure that I remember the rebel love interest making important plot decisions
<Male characters need to look coolly detached in 90% of the scenes.Sort of, not really.
><Male protagonists can only show strong emotions through a sublimated homoerotic attraction to their nemesis, sometimes by proxy of reacting to the death of their girlfriend.I don't remember any homoeroticism with the villain, and the love interest lady doesn't die
<All significant female characters need to look conventionally attractive.Yes.
<The male main cast can't look better groomed than your dad, their asses needs to be throughly unwiped.Arnold Schwarzeuyghur's character looks fairly well groomed throughout the movie
>>711941>>711943>Don't know what the specific criteria for this are, but there are plenty of dialogue scenes.It's not so much length as being the type of scene that fundamentally breaks up the action of the scene, the dialogue being the main point of conflict: not two men uttering pithy lines, jerking each others egos or screaming at one another, but a conflict of ideas (like the criticism of ideology scene in snowpiercer).
>I don't know how well groomed you would consider 90s Bruce Willis to be, but he's not poorly groomed.>Arnold Schwarzeuyghur's character looks fairly well groomed throughout the movieI didn't mean "has to look like a literal ogre", think about what your dad would have looked like at his wedding. Clean-shaven Timothée Chalamet is pushing it.
>>711950I don't even get what you're trying to say here
You don't like the concept of movies that appeal to young men because they won't stop the action dead in its tracks to deliver a sermon, and the men look like grooms at a wedding instead of twinks?
>>711951>I don't even get what you're trying to say hereKeep in mind there are decades of movies "that appeal to young men". The point is that there *is* a formula more narrow than "man does action" and svgma moids are unreasonably pissy about any semi-recent deviation from it. For decades market research has shown most women are willing to engage with prominent male characters, while the exact reverse applies to men. The maulerites have been praising the recent top gun and naked gun
heh, thinly veiled symbolism sequels, literally for being this painfully narrow continuation of decade-old tropes, which is why i find your OP irritatingly narrow.
>>711980That's bullshit, your criteria was bullshit and it wasnt even hard to think of counterexamples.
The only thing you need to avoid is actively resenting young men.
>>711949How
Total Recall would have to be "updated" to appeal to your average 20 year old male in 2025.
>>712009 (me)
And the issue really is not that we cant come up with Action Man and Action Spy, is that people are tired of hugely encompassing continuities, because they fucking suck. People called this out, only nerds want to keep up with multiple timelines and dimensions or whatever worth of continuity, normies were going to drop out eventually when they start to become to hard to follow. This is what originally killed Marvel to begin with, Disney was able to rescue it because they boiled it down to a single continuity. There's no way to square this hole, this is what is making Disney execs nervous, people dont want to keep up with their slop, that's fucking stupid
>>711932you would think
>>711937 is a good summary, but on the other hand, I won't watch any movie that follows those precepts, and I know plenty of "normal" (not over-politicized freaks like us leftypol.org users) that also wouldn't. not because of any political reason but because they are boring. and don't get me wrong, bad, predictable and cliche doesn't necessarily mean boring (see: anime, romantasy, procedurals, etc.) hollywood slop is plain boring even when they regress to the old patriarchal wasp recipe
as much as people talk about aesthetics, I think there is an aesthetics crisis because actually existing fascism is cringe and boring and liberalism can't come up with an alternative. this is why so many movies now are set in the recent past, specially the 90s and 00s. and as much as we like to underestimate people, I think there is a certain consciousness against the disingenuous infantilization of the audience and corporate media in general
<if this piece of media was interesting it wouldn't be a disney production
>this feels like a big, famous restaurant asking how to make meatloaf and mashed potatoes.disney was never high brow, wtf are you talking about. it never really appealed to young adult men. imo they should focus on what they have always focused: children's media and maybe some occasional nostalgia baiting for adult women
>>711932honestly I think they just cant write for shit anymore. Even when they adapt good IPs they manage to butcher it
they used to give script writing to commies in hiding and get amazing movies, now they just get libs and its shit
>>712114> Back in the day they used to have a few big tentpole productions that could reliably bring in the cash and would create the liquidity to fund a bunch of smaller low budget experimental project. Only like 1 in 10 or 20 of those might be a success,>Hollywood doesn't do this shit any more. You have some studios like A4 doing smaller budget projects, I wish people would just stop repeating the same stupid made up bullshit from youtubers talking out of their asses.
This is the list of all the Netflix original movies they made in 2024. This is just one single streaming service. There's like a dozen of them. There's never been so many films of all budget categories being made now.
>Be dumb youtuber whose life is centered around raging at half-billion dollar Disney slop and watches nothing else.>WHY WON'T HOLLYWOOD MAKE ANYTHING BUT BIG BUDGET DISNEY SLOP!!?!?! >>711937this sounds like those ai "concept" trailers
the future is ai slop
>>712116Really, I think what people are noticing, is there are no movies that have any kind of cultural impact anymore, perhaps outside of these big blockbusters. Everyone knows like
>"you complete me" >"Greed is good" >"say hello to my little friend!" >"Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get" or whatever. I think that's actually because the market for mid budget movies nowadays is so damn immense, no single film can really enter the movie canon in the same way as films once did, because there's so damn many of them so of course everyone isn't watching the same stuff like back when things were only released in theaters and then there is just a handful of films that they rerun all the time on TV like that.
I think it's the same way with music and streaming now too. I don't feel like any of the supposed super stars have the zeitgeist like they once did. I feel like back in the day, when Britney was big. You probably could mention her to anyone and they could sing the hook. Now you take whoever they keep telling you is supposedly the new It Girl, and I swear most of the target demo probably haven't even heard of the name "Sabrina Carpenter" let alone name one of her songs.
>>712116Having exclusive distribution rights for a film isn't the same thing as producing it, and when you don't promote your catalogue at all those films might as well not exist. Just because something is a "Netflix original" or whatever doesn't mean they actually funded making it.
>youtubersProjection
>>712133>>712114>youtubers<ProjectionWhere did you get it from then? Have any actual figures to back up your claims?
< Just because something is a "Netflix original" or whatever doesn't mean they actually funded making it.>You have some studios like A4 doing smaller budget projects,And A24 is also largely just a distributor that buys the rights to already made movies that screened at a festival. That's how the indie/art house film world has worked for forever.
>>712133>and when you don't promote your catalogue at all those films might as well not exist. Yeah dude, because there are tons of like $50 million dollar or less movies coming out. Some might say more than ever.
Also advertising budgets are always proportional to the production budget, so no shit they are going to promote them less.
Besides theater is dead. Who goes to movie theaters anymore? I think my average the last few years has been like 2-3 max. Nobody wants to pay all that money to go to the theater unless it's some mind-blowing spectacle film that the small screen wouldn't do justice to. Otherwise your shit is going straight to streaming.
>>712157Have you tried counting lmao?
I just picked two random years because I am not about to count a list of 100s.
1992: 21 films
2022: 43 films
>>712122counterpoint: the joker
it's a movie that interpellated people because it was about decadence, nihilism and a vague and impotent anti-elitism. and that's all the notable movies we are going to get from now on, "falling down" but the guy is a gig worker and his only family is a discord girlfriend (or a literal delusion, in the case of the joker)
I think it has more to do with that quote from marx about capitalism destroying all sentimentalism and fantasies
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