i absolutely love the mcu films myself, but even if i hated them, i wouldn't want to begrudge anyone else's enjoyment of them. there are lots & lots of films i don't care about, but those films have their audience & they are entitled to their preferences.
i actually think the mcu has been a really unique & quite remarkable achievement - 23 films in a fairly brisk 10 year period, almost all of them good, some of them genuinely great.
i don't think that's anything to be dismissed lightly. & the fact that so many other studios have tried to pull off the same trick with much less success, & flat out failure in some cases, shows that there's really nothing simple or easy about what they've done.
these are not challenging films, but they are large scale, enormously expensive films that have pleased audiences & been as a whole enormously profitable.
i certainly want there to be all kinds of movies. i want to be able to see films from pta & guy maddin & s craig zahler & gaspar noe as long as i'm alive and have my marbles. but i understand that it's not disney that's going to scratch that itch for me, & i don't mind that they produce mass-marketed, broadly popular films. it's also worth remember that this was a company that produced an awful lot of nonsense that nobody really liked much for a long time - computers wearing tennis shoes, the black hole, cats from outer space, an awful lot of dreary nonsense. they've turned things around by actually making films people want to see.
but i think what the mcu may represent is perhaps the last gasp of the theatrical experience as a large scale event that lots & lots of people go to see. it was the case that movie-going was probably the major passtime of the american consumer, & that's not the case anymore. these kind of event films may be the only way to get consumers out to theatres en masse in our era, and who knows how much longer this will remain effective?
& it's also worth remembering that about 50% of films don't make back their budget - & the films that i tend to like myself almost certainly fall overwhelmingly into the group that are not profitable. to a very large extent, the kinds of films i like, & maybe the kinds of films you like too, are subsidized & can only exist because of the existence of broadly popular, crowd-pleasing films.
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halomaniac88 (1736)
6 years ago
i read somewhere it is 10% that actually make a profit
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[deleted]
6 years ago
yeah, i've heard 10-20% in terms of profitability.
i used the weasel-term 'make back their budget.'
i recently read a book on risk that had a chapter on the film industry, & it stated that 50% of films make less in box office revenue than their total budget, & the general assumption is most films need 2-3 times their budget cost in revenue.
the bottom line is that producing any individual film is an extremely risky undertaking. i certainly don't blame any given studio for being cautious & making explicitly commercial films. i certainly don't expect them to spend millions to make marxist terrorist art.
based on the little bit of reading i have done, my understanding is that lots & lots of the people in the film industry are (surprise surprise) enormous film fans who indeed love pta & euro-snob art films and all that kinda stuff. but they are also realists who have to try to get a return on their investor's money. i don't invest in things strictly out of artistic purity, & i wouldn't expect anyone else to.
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