The TL;DR is that more people these days are watching and rating low-budget artsy movies that critics generally love but they don't, hence the rising discrepancy.
Are film critics losing sync with audiences?
161–170 of 421 posts
Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?
#162I feel like the mass of people are ossifying around the familiar. People like re-watching the same stuff that they've already watched, they're comfortable these days watching reboots of the same superhero movies. They like big budgets and flashy special effects. They don't like being challenged by anything. Even when it comes to something like online forums, something like reddit is mostly a wasteland of the same 50…
I am sure that is also true, but on the other extreme I use IMDB ratings to suggest new movies to myself as within the genres I can watch (i.e. anything where the character doesn't wear a cape and doesn't lecture me about social justice), I find a high correlation between my taste and imdb ratings (and low correlation with most film critics).
A few examples of recent movies that I would have never thought watching but came my way thanks to imbd ratings:
Donny's Bar Mitzvah (too vulgar for its own sake, but very funny)
Last Night in Soho (nice british movie about London of the 60s)
Never look away (biopic of some german painter I never heard of)
Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?
#163I feel like the mass of people are ossifying around the familiar. People like re-watching the same stuff that they've already watched, they're comfortable these days watching reboots of the same superhero movies. They like big budgets and flashy special effects. They don't like being challenged by anything. Even when it comes to something like online forums, something like reddit is mostly a wasteland of the same 50…
If you never engage with anything that’s bizarre, intellectual, or can be more polarizing to the audience then you’re never really stressed out by the tension of learning or confronting new ideas.
It has always been the case that humans select for comfort, and that when something is commonly adopted they’ll make it simpler, more streamlined and less exciting.
Movies, the internet, television, video games, and then whatever technological terror we can conceive of next will also subsume to the same fate.
Personally I believe it’s because that Intelligence at extremes leads to a fixed or absolute worldview, where ideas are somewhat crystallized and remain fixed, changed only by the most drastic personal occurrences. Intelligence in the middle of the bell curve is more related to shared experience rather than personal experience, and as such, having a collective experience of the unknown actually does and can change both the personality and mind state of the persons consuming the media. (They’ll watch James Bond and feel like a secret agent) because merely having the sensory experience is intellectually the same as being the other person. I suppose it’s an inability to filter or perceive which experiences come from the self vs. the world, which either one would need to be stupid and not care about the world (left side of the bell curve) or considers the world from a perspective of being in relationship to the self.
Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?
#164Interesting that the gap is with lower budget movies. It goes along with my gut feeling that mid budget movies are disappearing (I have no data to back that up), and it's as if the studios have optimized movie making into two types: #1 The big budget crowd pleasing blockbusters. A few flop, but generally audiences like them and they don't do anything critics can complain about too much. #2 Highly targeted low budget…
What killed the mid-budget movie was the rise of "peak TV" -- the B-list actors that defined mid-budget movies can land a meaty TV role that pays them well on a consistent basis. We're also seeing more and more A-list talent move to anthology or event series, where you can make a deep dive over 8/10/13 episodes instead of a 120-minute film.
Sometimes, I'd prefer some sort of limited series more than a movie. 'Maniac' was enjoyable for me because it had time to let things go slowly, despite taking course over what was probably 1 week in-universe.
I may also be different from the usual audience, in that I try to avoid binging anything. Hour-long episodes are great for my WFH lunch break, and to pad some time in the evenings if I so desire, but I prefer to commit to watching a movie if I know I have the time.
Molly's Game was a nice and long movie, but at over 2 hours long, I feel like it could have had potential at being a miniseries. But also, maybe not? Who knows how much meaningful material was left on the chopping block.
Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?
#165I feel like the mass of people are ossifying around the familiar. People like re-watching the same stuff that they've already watched, they're comfortable these days watching reboots of the same superhero movies. They like big budgets and flashy special effects. They don't like being challenged by anything. Even when it comes to something like online forums, something like reddit is mostly a wasteland of the same 50…
"These Days" in particular('Rona Season), I feel like a lot is/has been getting produced to keep up with increased demand. More people spending time indoors, means more people sitting on the couch looking for things to watch. From this, I think it's safe to assume that the lowest common denominator is growing fastest. Why put in original thought when you can use an internal plot-point checklist or AI/ML to guess at w…
Just as a tangent: let's start with the AI/ML produced movies already. I honestly think they would be hilarious
Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you ever considered that there might actually be something to "ooh lala, fancy pancy hard to understand arty farty" movies that you are merely unable to appreciate and that your failure to appreciate any virtue doesn't constitute proof of its nonexistence? The whole point of pursuing the opinion of critics isn't averaging them to see what smart people like its in finding critics whose taste isn't wholly out of l…
Artsy movies are great... sometimes, and unartsy movies are also great sometimes. Sometimes I want to watch the Seventh Seal and sometimes I want to watch Die Hard - both movies have their place but a lot of critics tend to lean strongly into arthouse movies and sell them well above their actual appeal. I think one of the hardest parts of being a genuinely good critic is being able to leave your own tastes at the doo…
Isn't their specific taste the only thing of value the critic is adding.
Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?
#167Interesting that the gap is with lower budget movies. It goes along with my gut feeling that mid budget movies are disappearing (I have no data to back that up), and it's as if the studios have optimized movie making into two types: #1 The big budget crowd pleasing blockbusters. A few flop, but generally audiences like them and they don't do anything critics can complain about too much. #2 Highly targeted low budget…
What killed the mid-budget movie was the rise of "peak TV" -- the B-list actors that defined mid-budget movies can land a meaty TV role that pays them well on a consistent basis. We're also seeing more and more A-list talent move to anthology or event series, where you can make a deep dive over 8/10/13 episodes instead of a 120-minute film.
Matt Damon talks and laments about this. What killed the mid-budget movie was the collapse of DVD sales. Without DVD sales, there is no extended "second bite" that allows word of mouth to build up. So, instead, your marketing is $30-$50 million and you need to make that back.
Getting a second bite is also responsible for the recycled pablum with China pandering--if you say something that the Chinese government deems unacceptable you lose your shot at that market.
As for "episodic", I suspect that's less a "deep dive" and more ADHD background watching on a phone. "Encanto" was an absolute poster child for this--"HEY! LOOK UP NOW! HEEEEEEEEY!" "Okay, volume back down. You can go back to your text messaging for a while." "HEY! LOOK UP AGAIN! TIME TO PAY ATTENTION! HEEEEEEY!" ad nauseam.
Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?
#168I feel like the mass of people are ossifying around the familiar. People like re-watching the same stuff that they've already watched, they're comfortable these days watching reboots of the same superhero movies. They like big budgets and flashy special effects. They don't like being challenged by anything. Even when it comes to something like online forums, something like reddit is mostly a wasteland of the same 50…
My theory is that: You make a massively appealing thing by removing what people don’t like, not by adding something they do. The truly mass market media is devoid of substance because of that. Hence why I feel that the most interesting things are those which are polarizing.
I frequently enjoy "weird" movies that audiences tend not to like. But there have been plenty of movies that audiences and critics both enjoy despite a lack of high-brow or polarizing content. I'm thinking of (e.g.) The Godfather, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, The Sound of Music, Contact, Disney's animated Beauty and the Beast, Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, Alien, the original Ghostbusters, most Pixar movies...
I feel like there is something pretty blah about most big-budget movies today, but I don't think that it can be explained by saying that filmmakers are progressively removing polarizing elements. Now that I consider it, most big-budget action movies in the past were blah too. The action movies that first come to mind are the ones that I have enjoyed enough to re-watch, but the 1990s had plenty of blah action movies. Maybe the problem is just too many big-budget action movies.
Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?
#169You probably need to do some data cleaning and validation before drawing any conclusions. A fair number of critical darlings are somewhat topical movies about current relevant social issues and they can be subject to review bombing by audiences, often audiences that don't even see the film. I'm not sure if IMDB really does much about that. Rotten Tomatoes at least stopped letting you review a movie before it was possible to see it after Captain Marvel had thousands of bad reviews before it even came out, but they still don't verify you saw the movie. They surface verified reviews closer to the top, but the ratings from unverified raters still count.
This was, of course, much less of a thing in 2000 than in 2019.
Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?
#170No post body was provided.