THe Future of Media

In the mid 1990s, Hollywood was littered with smaller independent studios. Studios which were willing to take smaller risks on smaller passion projects by a variety of young up and coming directors, like Kevin Smith, Gus Van Sant and Whit Stillman. These Studios defined the cinematic landscape in the mid-late 90s up until Circa 2010, when the cinematic landscape became swallowed by the tent pole juggernauts of DC, Marvel, Disney and Star Wars, to name a few. Movies became more about the brand that the movie was promoting rather than the movie itself, and the name of the game was big budget action block buster. Which ever studio could make the biggest, loudest most colorful film and could cross the billion Dollar threshold the quickest was the winner.

For a long time, this Winner was Marvel, which had been bought by Disney in 2009, and up until 2019 commanded the Summer Movie Season and every other movie season that did exist. And then, after the release of Avengers Endgame in the Spring of 2019 several things happened that again changed the look and feel of the movie going experiences. One of those things was COVID. People got used to staying in and watching movies at home. Another was the sudden over saturation of Superhero content from all sides. Avengers Endgame had made a billion dollars and everyone wanted a piece of the action. And nobody thought it was a good idea to slow down or try to mitigate this problem. Another issue was the infusion of Hollywood’s general liberal leaning politics into everyone movie, televsion show, and medium they could get their hands on.

This lead to a sudden downturn in audience retention and general superhero fatigue. Big Budget movies are fun, but they’re more fun when you can get them once a year, when they define the summer season, when its a reminder of being a kid again and having nothing better to do on a hot summer day than go sit inside a theatre and escape for a while.

With all these factors working in tandem, the result has been bad for big budget films, most recently the massive box office flop of Snow White, and the constant underperformance of Marvel films since 2019, and the rise once more of smaller indie films. The leader on this front is the independent studio A24, which focuses on cheaper, character and story driven movies. Some which work and some which don’t. Does that mean that Blockbusters are done forever? No, but for the forseeable future, the media landscape is going to go back into the hands of the Auteurs I believe. Summer can have it’s tentpoles, but Fall, Winter and Spring are for the Independents.