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So, James Bond meets Indiana Jones meets National Treasure… with Jack Ryan being a little bit Chris Pratt?
Greenlit.
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I’ll watch it for the dumb entertainment, but generally Apple TV’s film output isn’t any where near the tv series standards they set themselves.
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It´s sad, really, if one thinks back to a streamer-less world.
Imagine this would be the next big release in the cinemas, a pre-summer season blockbuster.
Would it at least be a little bit more original? Or would we look at that and think: straight-to-video release?
Because that seems to be now streamer fare. It looks high gloss and definitely more expensive than the stv-releases of earlier times, with more famous casts. But the stories are on the same level.
And somehow, the lesser known actors and the lesser visual look always made those stv-releases much more charming.
These new streamer movies - I don’t know, I always feel like “with that budget they should have tried harder”.
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James Vanderbilt’s scripts are all over the place, for every Zodiac there’s an Independence Day: Resurgence, but I notice that’s more the director he has - This is going to be a Guy Ritchie movie, even if not written by him. For point of comparison, the only 2 times Ritchie hasn’t written his own films are the two RDJ Sherlock Holmes films he made.
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It looks like popcorn fun. Zero aspiration outside the production values. Possibly just what will keep subscribers happy for two hours.
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It’s exactly the kind of fare Justine Bateman talked about in the THR interview:
How does all this tie into your anti-AI stance?
So this is about how the business has changed long before AI — when the tech companies came in and carpetbagged Hollywood. They’ve never been in the entertainment business. They’re in the tech business, which is a different financial ecosystem. It used to be that every time one viewer watched a film one time they paid $15, and the filmmaker got some of that. Then it became $15 so a whole household and anyone they share their password with can watch 5,000 or 10,000 films. It became about subscribers and a totally different setup. That’s never going to benefit a filmmaker.
And you think this affected the quality too, this drive towards quantity.
The north star was always excellent work. Sure, you had movies and TV shows that weren’t great. But everybody wanted to be connected to a really good project. Now with the whole new model, what you get is a conveyor belt of content. Of course there are exceptions. But the north star is not excellent work — it’s the conveyor belt.
How do you define that term?
Conveyor-belt content is the kind of film or TV series that can play in the background while you scroll mindlessly through Instagram. If you look away for 15 minutes and can’t know what’s going on when you look back — they don’t want that. I literally had a filmmaker friend who got a note from a streamer that said their film was “not second-screen enough.” The goal is to be cinematic Muzak. This is why a lot of people don’t want to go to movie theaters anymore. A good theatrical movie is designed to make you pay attention every minute. And people are not conditioned for that. So you take this conveyor belt and then you throw in the fear of being boycotted because you don’t have this type of box checked or that type of box checked, and oh man, the system it’s broken. It’s done.
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In that world, advertisers helped pay for the work. But in a subscription-based environment, the streamers need to keep feeding the viewers, or the viewers can stop their subscription until something they want to see comes along (my husband does this). Product constantly needs to be pumped out.
Another behavior of my husband.
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Love is bigger than sadness about the neglect of visual storytelling.
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I especially like the executive claiming with a straight face that Homer would be proud of the film.
Reality really is a Terry Gilliam movie.
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“this film will be a once-in-a-generation cinematic masterpiece that Homer himself would be very proud of”
Maybe tone it down a tad? I think no more coffee or white powders for a few days for you…
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Says something about my mood that I actually laughed watching this.
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It looks horrendous, which didn’t surprise me when I saw that Seth Macfarlane was involved with it.
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I mean…the OJ gag is pretty good.
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Didn‘t you like „The Orville“?
I like that they are diving into Superman mythology as well. It feels more original than MOS and BVS. I’d better run and hide from the Zack Snyder cultists for saying that. I think (and hope) that there are some more surprise characters we don’t know about.
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No need. Snyder is a terrible con man, and his idea of Superman was a disaster. Choosing him was Nolan‘s biggest misstep so far.
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Next up: the Kool-Aid Movie.
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My first thought was “that is exactly my 1 year old dog”
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