Wonder why you only ever see movies about the world ending in cinemas? Why every piece of mainstream media mostly ignores socio-economic parameters and societal superstructures (eg. racism, patriarchy)?
Well, Mark Fischer said it better than anyone else “It is now easier to imagine the end of the world than an end to capitalism”
Basically what I said earlier, profits are so tight these days that every single thing is cut in order to maximise the money printing. Sequels and reboots are safe, the story is already told, no need for script writers or a good story, it’s already been told a million times. No need to design new characters/costumes/sets/lighting systems etc. ABD.
Now there are gems in the sea of shit billionaire owned medias pump into our skulls. For example the series “Dark” on Netflix instantly established itself as one of the best of this century (watch it please ). Or Idk, you’ve also got artists who aren’t fooled by the wool and actively call out the bullshit like Boots Riley and the movie he acted in recently “Sorry to Bother you” or bands like Death Grips etc.
Coming back to movies, what we’re in right now is the death of mid scale budget films, movies made with a consequent budget, but not blockbuster levels of gargantuan money. A24 is pretty much the only studio taking creative risks these days and they’re winning big because they’re the only ones doing it (!!).
Opposite you have Blade Runner 2049, one of the few blockbuster movie that took incredible risks and liberties with the source material and came out even better than the original with some strong underlying messages that escaped a lot of people (If those ideas were a bit more obvious I reckon it would never have been approved). And that movie flopped too because big studios are basically incapable of handling the creation of new movies, the advertising for Blade Runner 2049 was ridiculously small and allegedly deliberate, cos the studios involved didn’t believe it would make ANY money at all.
Video Games are even worse off, honestly just watch videogamedunkey’s recent E3 video. It’s just so blatantly obvious that the entire industry was engulfed in the same dynamics every other sector of society surrendered to. I seriously think you have to be brain damaged to look at that video and think things are fine (and i have literal brain damage! )
But it makes me hopeful to see many people aren’t duped and when I discuss theory irl with people all I encounter is interest and sometimes enthusiasm. Most of my friends told me they started reading lenin because of me and ive got more examples. I really don’t think this stupid system can go on much longer, Covid+supply chain fuckery+idiotic ukraine war sanctions have brought it to its knees, we just don’t see it yet.
Yes! I think Sorry To Bother You is the only movie I've seen in recent years that has given a vision of fighting back against Capitalism in a material way. It is like training for Unionizing, and training for what Chris Smalls is doing right now with navigating the media as a public figure of a union. Like honestly, its so on the nose since the corporation in that movie is something akin to Amazon.
As I was reading your post I was going to bring up Sorry To Bother You in my reply, but then you brought it up! By the way, Boots Riley didn't act in Sorry To Bother You, he wrote/directed it!
Its quite telling that your example of a risky big budget movie is a Blade Runner sequel haha. I agree with you, but it really underscores the issue. I would also list the new Mad Max movie as a cool risk too, which again... hilarious that its also a sequel.
Yep. I feel like the 2008 crash sort of killed a lot of creativity in video games. The games that started getting greenlighted after that really changed. A lot of those mid-budget risks completely dried up by 2010-2012 (when all the games greenlighted before the crash stopped coming out). The Xbox 360 era still had some neat creative stuff going on. Even EA was taking small risks with games like Skate and FIFA Street. Since then alllllll the fat has been trimmed, and even the small budget sort of "indie games" from the major studios are a bunch of uncreative middle-brow mediocrity.
This was actually a big story this week. Context: Unity is the indie-friendly game engine that has been the sort of more-moral "good guy" compared to Unreal and Unreal Engine. If you've played an indie game, most likely it was made in Unity:
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2022-07-15-riccitiello-developers-who-push-back-against-monetisation-are-pure-brilliant-and-fucking-idiotshttps://www.gamespot.com/articles/unity-ceo-says-youre-a-fing-idiot-if-you-dont-think-about-monetization-during-creative-process-apologizes/1100-6505516/Yes, I agree. I am optimistic. Its great to see that Socialism and Unions are only dirty words around Boomers/GenXers these days. Like you said about COVID... the pandemic is still raging (third highest peak of the pandemic, but this one is sustained, its not peaking) and the whole Capitalist media apparatus and politicians are trying to convince people the pandemic is over and refer to it in the past-tense so workers will shut up and go-to work. I don't know how much longer they can keep that lie up, and I don't know how much longer this lie of an economy can be held up before collapsing.
Gotta put in the work now to build up our communities/unions to be self-sufficient before the shit hits the fan even worse.