Splash No. 43
Sequels! Reboots! Spinoffs!
I just watched Avengers: Infinity War, which is a movie that lasts nearly 3 hours just to end on a cliffhanger. As the apparent climax of the 10-year long journey of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Infinity War was meant to tie together a variety of different movies and characters into one single story. For such a massive undertaking, I felt like it was a great effort. However, I’ve noticed that nearly every big movie that comes out has to be either a sequel, a reboot or a spinoff.
Here’s the trailers that showed before Infinity War: Adrift (standalone), Fantastic Beasts 2 (sequel to a spinoff), Incredibles 2 (sequel), Deadpool 2 (sequel), Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (sequel), and Venom (reboot). It isn’t like there isn’t source material - great books are still published every year and people haven’t forgotten how to write stories.
Overall, I get it, I’ve lived in a capitalist society for some time and I understand nearly everything is a cash grab, but I feel like there has to be more to this. Because these movies are so common and a huge part of the psyche, they are huge at the box office, which leads to massive budgets to make these films as large and grand as possible. Despite all of the budgeting and things like that, most of these films aren’t great movies. They get good reviews because they’ve established a very particular identity that we’ve come to know and expect. However, they don’t really push the boundaries, with MCU having the most generic music to every major action movie giving us motion sickness.
I take issue with the constant supply of recycling the same stories, characters, and ideas since a lot of time and effort is going into movies that don’t push the boundaries. The Dark Knight is the greatest superhero movie of all time since it was headed up by a brilliant director in Christopher Nolan. I wouldn’t have any issues with these movies if it became more common for nuanced plots and well-thought-out filmmaking to appear, instead of being the exception to the rule.
Infinity War has already made $800 million at the box office in a week.
And this is a real picture of me right now.
Drops of the Week
where I *drop* recommendations of cool things this week
Playlist
Chillhop music discography - someone put this on in a meeting and I really enjoyed it as background music, even at a low, barely audible volume.
Book
How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen - Harvard Business School professor talks about business models and theories to help you navigate your own life. I think this is a good read to come back to every once in a while to remember what’s important in life.
Article
"Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems" by George Monbiot - a great article digging into the ideology that we don’t really consider, but underlies a lot of the problems we are facing today as a society. Also, why Ronald Reagan is the devil.
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:~)
Love,
Nikhil