[ SECRET POST #6257 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #6257 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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[Unexpected Star - Michael McIntyre's Big Show]



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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 07 secrets from Secret Submission Post #894.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

04. https://i.imgur.com/e8FgcCi.png

[(Anonymous)]

Too many creatives get self conscious about sticking to a formula, no matter how much their paying customers want it.

[(Anonymous)]

Nah, westerns got taken down by Blazing Saddles. There hasn't been that kind of lampooning for the MCU yet.

[(Anonymous)]

Not OP

Man, I wish it would hurry up and arrive.

[(Anonymous)]

I really don't think that Blazing Saddles had that big a role in the decline of Westerns.

For one thing, there've been Westerns since then! And Westerns were already pretty thin on the ground by the time Blazing Saddles came out.

[(Anonymous)]

There's The Boys!

[(Anonymous)]

I think the actual issue is that they're too formulaic. It's the same thing, over and over and over again. Sure, people like the familiar, but they still get sick of things after awhile.

[ariakas]

Oh, same. Maybe the tv shows are doing different things, but I have no interest in them at this point, because the big tentpole releases are the same thing again and again, beat for beat, right down to the obligatory chase sequence, and once I got tired of that I've never been back to the franchise.

I think westerns suffered the same fate; the only way to wring blood from the stone is to do something different or edgy or deconstructive, which is why There Will Be Blood/True Grit (gritty!remake)/The Revenant were all resounding box office successes while classical white-hat/black-hat fare like the 3:10 to Yuma remake flopped.

OP has it completely backwards for sure; the only thing that's going to reverse the MCU downward spiral is breaking the formula completely and approaching the genre from a completely different angle, not just slapping a new coat of paint on what they already have.

[(Anonymous)]

I would loathe that
I hated tho
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[(Anonymous)]

W
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[(Anonymous)]

Yeah I think this is pretty much it. At some point, any genre just becomes so ossified that it's really difficult for people to get interested in stories in it. That's as true of fans as it is for critics or creatives.

I think you *can* have Western films that aren't revisionist that are still appealing and popular. But it would be really difficult and you still would have to make a conscious effort to not get trapped in the time-worn structures of the genre. You would need a lot of skill and effort into it. It's not like the heyday of the Western where it was a cheap genre where you could churn out formula pictures and there would be a ready-made audience for them. That audience doesn't exist anymore.

(also, my pet peeve: the Coen Brothers True Grit is NOT a remake)

[ariakas]

Also what Western audiences were either blind to or reveled in, the genocidal colonialism involved in "taming" the West is no longer something a modern audience can unsee and must be addressed (which it can be! and still tell a worthwhile and entertaining and even uplifting story!), so we can no longer go back an age where the old formulas worked.

Likewise, the fascism/militarism inherent in the superhero genre is starting to wear the shine off after 20+ years of the war on terror and World Policing; I know people are averse to the concept because "deconstructing" superheroes makes them think 90s-style hyperviolent antiheroes and not what is actually meant by the term, i.e. something like Watchmen. I think, were someone bold enough to make it, there's a modern!MCU!Watchmen out there waiting to be made that would blow peoples' minds and not only be critically successful but wildly popular.

[(Anonymous)]

More people say they care than actually care. Especially outside the AO3 echochamber.

[(Anonymous)]

Okay point on westerns, but the superhero genre is about beings with abilities or powers defeating villains. It is satisfying for the heroes to beat villains, and it doesn't have to be related to fascism. Space robots are bad! Murderous villains are bad! People enjoy superheroes kicking ass and cracking some jokes.

What viewers should sometimes accept instead is that they've outgrown a genre. Not in an age/maturity sense, but in the sense that it doesn't work for them anymore. I'm not at all interested in straightforward Hallmark Channel-style romances, but I don't expect those to change to cater to me, because many people enjoy those. I just watch something else.

[ariakas]

but the superhero genre is about beings with abilities or powers defeating villains. It is satisfying for the heroes to beat villains, and it doesn't have to be related to fascism. Space robots are bad! Murderous villains are bad!

Sometimes things are about things other than the things that are a literal description of the plot lmao

And man, as far as "supremacy through violence" and "special people inherently superior to normal people" go, these are about the most fascist themes out there, trumped only by "group of those inherently superior special people defend the normal people of their homeland from murderous undifferentiated hordes of subhumans." That's, like, straight off the wolves/sheep/sheepdogs bumper sticker of the jeep with confederate flags on it tier. Agreed that superhero shows "don't have to be" related to fascism, there is stuff that isn't this - but when the themes are this - which describes much of the large cinema releases - that is exactly what it is, and the genre is absolutely rife with it.

(The militarism side of the claim seems to have gone without question but in case it didn't, like, the MCU quite literally works directly with the US military on film development.)

It doesn't mean the people who enjoy these films are fascists nor are the people who made them (most likely), or that I'm saying they're bad and people shouldn't watch them - they're just consuming/reproducing the narratives of their culture, childhood, and surroundings. It just means the genre is a fertile ground to start questioning and subverting these things, just as modern Westerns have done with their own genre.

And lbr there's a ton of unfortunate themes/implications in Hallmark Channel-style romances, too, as well as rom-coms, and the comment thread below about it is bouncing off the realization that this, too, might be a genre with flaws people can no longer unsee (gender roles, consent, entitlement to sex, etc.) and requires questioning/reformulation to revive it.

[philstar22]

I do think they are formulaic to a certain extend, but TBH I mostly don't mind because the formula works for me.

[sparklywalls]

For me it's not so much the formula, which can still be fun if you go into something knowing this is what you're going to get but you just want to enjoy yourself for two-three hours...it's how they're having to underpin the formula to keep trying to make it work in a way that keeps you coming back.

If you keep having to make the bad guy even bigger and badder, more universe ending etc, you then have to overpower the heroes a little bit more so that it's a fair fight, and eventually you run into "well why didn't Y character show up earlier" and "hey, if X character always had the capability of learning to do that, why didn't they do it sooner?" I know you can sorta handwave some of this with plot conveniences that explain why something didn't happen before that point but I think the general tolerance of the audience is waning on that too.

It's sort of like, as much as it annoyed me I understand why they hedged their bets with magic in the MCU for so long in Phase 1-2 because now we're at the tipping point where some magic wielders are virtually unbeatable unless they remove themselves from the equation e.g. Wanda.

It's funny how comic book films have engineered themselves into the inescapable Complaints Department of actual comic books too. Sort of like...finally we're getting the FULL comic book experience in live action!

I feel the end of season episodes of post-2005 Doctor Who have a similar problem with perpetually upping the peril fwiw. Except for in that case we just seem to get The Doctor Vs Daleks Vs Whoever and "the Earth/Galifrey/another planet/a galaxy/the entire universe/all of reality is doomed" on a loop.

[(Anonymous)]

Bad take, very bad take

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah the same thing happened with Rom-coms too.

[(Anonymous)]

The rom-com one is weirder because I honestly think they literally just forgot how to make them. Like how we forgot how to make ancient Roman concrete or whatever.

[(Anonymous)]

Man, ain't that the truth.

I think people in general forgot...how...romance happens. I don't know if it's because everyone dates through apps now or what, but the concept of meeting someone, getting to know them, and developing feelings for them over time seems to have become a real struggle for writers.

[(Anonymous)]

There's a few things in that. Romcoms do still get made, they're just called Hallmark movies. Because as with the Western, and now MCU movies, the genre calcified and got stripped down to a basic formula and they plug in a generically good looking man and woman (preferably with some minor notability from a tv series), and a situation (it's christmas, city woman moves to the country, it's christmas, she's a princess, it's christmas, city woman moves to scotland, and even sometimes, it's christmas).

And people don't really see movies for the stars anymore. In the heyday of the romcom, they could put Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts or Hugh Grant on the poster and probably make a profit. And that doesn't really work in any genre now, like in action, Tom Cruise is basically the last guy left trying to sell on name power.