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Comment on Martin Scorsese urges filmmakers to fight comic book movie culture: ‘We’ve got to save cinema’

In the late-70s/80s it was slasher movies. In the 80s/90s it was Rambo-style action movies, or Lethal Weapon and Fatal Attraction-style thrillers.
There have always been Hollywood bandwagons.

The difference is that back then the major studios made a bunch of films of all scopes and budgets, while today those same studios make fewer, more expensive movies.
If Scorsese was a young man today - or Robert Altman or William Friedkin, whoever - he probably wouldn’t get a chance to make a Raging Bull, he’d be steered towards a superhero film with - of course - NO final cut. The one exception is Christopher Nolan. And even he did an entire superhero TRILOGY.

Taking what Marty is saying and putting it another way - major studio content is not driven by a director’s creative vision in the current environment, but by producers… the suits and their market research.

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Syndic@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

Taking what Marty is saying and putting it another way - major studio content is not driven by a director’s creative vision in the current environment, but by producers… the suits and their market research.

I’m by no means an expert but was that ever different? Making movies always was very expensive, so the people in charge obviously had to have money and then try to use that to make more money. That alone leads to rather conservative decisions regarding which movies should be produced and which shouldn’t. Artistic merit isn’t something I believe ever had much sway in Hollywood unless some directors actually used their previous success to bully the rich cats in charge to trust them or outright finance the movie themself. And that I guess is rather rare. I think the only thing really different today, is that market research today is way more advanced than it was in the 60’s or 70’s.

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- niktemadur@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Making lower budget films and giving artistic freedom to their directors allowed them to:
  
  Spread the risk.
  
  Catch lightning in a bottle, sometimes.
  
  This was also in the days when a film could play in theaters for months, breathe and grow.
  Now, they want every movie they release to make 100 million in the first weekend with a marketing carpet-bombing blitz.
  
  In Scorsese’s 70s heyday, a “modest success” was seen by the studio suits as a success, they made many of these and were happy about it.
  Nowadays, a “modest success” is seen as a fizzle. Half a billion or bust.
  
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- SnowdenHeroOfOurTime@unilem.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  There probably are hundreds of weird movies made that cannot be explained by financial interest alone. In fact one was given above which you ignored. Raging Bull.
  
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