A big part of this is that modern movies are carefully calibrated so that you can follow along while sitting on your couch focused on your phone. Movies in the 1990's didn't need to have so much clanky dialog explaining, in careful detail, why we were someplace. The writers and directors could presume that the audience was actually paying attention to the movie, and so would make the necessary inferences. Modern movies are mostly terrified of doing because the audience is also swiping on Tinder and scrolling Instagram at the same time and would never realize that he just stopped walking with a limp oh my God was everything he said in the entire movie a lie?
I don't particularly disagree with you, but do you have evidence that modern movies are calibrated and written to allow for someone to sit on their phones the entire time and understand?
Largely seems like some movies are written to be mass consumed and some are not. No different then a movie from the 90s. Our attention span is decreasing a lot obviously, but it's never been that long.
The second screen effect is largely overstated when it comes to why movies suck. While it’s true for some movies and TV shows that end up being streaming exclusives, the same problem doesn’t exist in theatrical releases or even shows for TV for streaming services like HBO.
Modern movies suck mostly because of Hollywood mostly being risk averse and prioritizing profit over everything else. This leads to IPs being sequels, prequels, remakes, “parts of the universe” or adaptations of existing successful IPs. This also leads to creative directions that are “designed to pull maximum audiences” or in other words average. Almost every single Marvel movie has the same plot with a few changes in characters. It also translates to situations where ideas that would otherwise be successful being tabled. K-POP demon hunters is a great example, an original IP, that audiences want, being sold to Netflix because the executives somewhere did a couple of focus groups and came to the conclusion that this won’t work. Another side effect is lack of innovation. Pixar animation has largely been stale for years now, meanwhile Ne Zha 2 is taking in billions worldwide, Demon Slayer is was one of the most popular movies in the US despite its limited release and Arcane is one of the best rated TV shows ever. There’s a lot more like fewer stand ins to save money that make scenes look “empty and soulless”, overuse of CGI, overuse of Pedro Pascal, etc.
All in all, it’s enshittification if movies because less profit is unacceptable.
My most "old woman yells at cloud" opinion is the fucking DISEASE of smartphones that is truly a cancer in our society. Don't get me wrong, I love mine, and they're completely possible to use in a way that coexists with the rest of your tech and life, but my god, the wide adoption of them has demonstrated the majority of our population has the regulation capacity of a fucking carrot.
And my inner artist is absolutely REPULSED at the notion that "oh I missed stuff in the movie cuz I was on my phone." Then put your fucking phone away. Watch a movie, or don't. Watch a show, or don't. Commit to taking in ONE PIECE of art at a time you fucking dopamine junkies.
I have a buddy, I absolutely love him, but I don't think that fucker has sat down with one medium at one time in YEARS. He leaves a stressful day job and he goes home and he watches YouTube or TV, while playing videogames. Every night. He got to the end of Pacific Drive and didn't know there was a fucking in-game radio station (with a whole host of absolute bangers btw).
Like I just... idk it makes my inner creative absolutely die inside how everyone is so utterly and hopelessly dependent on their dopamine treadmill that they've lost the ability to focus entirely.
Not related to the main conversation, but I'm still mad that the DVD menu of that movie gave away the reveal before the movie even started (showed someone limping and then suddenly not limping anymore as they walked down the street). There was no real twist ending since I knew the guy was lying about something.
(Vagueness intended to avoid spoilers for that 1 in 10,000 someone who hasn't seen the movie)
The biggest thing for me is the cinematography. 80s/90s movies were filmed as if you're standing alongside the cast.
* Many more shots from eye level
* Significantly less jumpcuts
* People actually cast shadows onto the environment, and filmmakers would fearlessly shoot scenes with full bright or full dark elements in them without trying to make everything dark and bright visible simultaneously
* Waist-up or even full body shots of multiple (3+) characters talking and/or walking around with few if any jump cuts
I'm not even from that era but I find movies from that era to feel the most "real", like I can almost reach into the screen and just "be there" together. This aesthetic is perfectly doable in the modern age, even with digital cameras, it's just not the trend currently.
While cinematography isn't the whole answer, I think it's a big contributor to why so much feels aggressively middling these days.
Modern shows are aggressively aesthetic. There's huge overuse shallow depth of field, resulting in blurry backgrounds. Watch modern movies with this mind, and you start noticing the reliance on a sharp foreground and blurry background is extreme to the point of bizarre. Cinematography should be a tool to achieve an effect; blurring the background to intentionally make the subject stand out is a purposeful use of that tool, but is being applied everywhere now, with no intent behind it, even if it's "aesthetic".
I would also argue that it's easier with digital photography to create blandly attractive, "painterly" images, thanks to colour grading and increased dynamic range and so on. A lot of shows these days have technically competent photography, but it all converges on the same aesthetic — tons of diffuse, lush lighting (often achieved with filling the space with lightly cinematic fog) and impeccable set design, and that creamy depth of field. But there's no contrast anywhere, it's just creamy "aesthetic" blandness in forgettable environs.
Another non-visual aspect rarely mentioned is audio: Almost all TV/movie audio these days is foley, and it's sometimes jarringly bad when you start to actually pay attention to, say, the sound of footsteps or keys jangling. High quality productions can be very good here, but most productions don't spend enough time on it. Bad foley has a very strange, subliminal effect on a scene, further undermining the sense of reality.
In such environments (visual and aural), nothing seems real and nothing seems like it matters. Everything, even nominally "adult" shows set in the real world, feels like Midde Earth and not Planet Earth.
It's not all bad, of course. There are also definitely cases where the quality of the show transcends the mediocrity of the cinematography. We are still getting good shows and bad shows, like always. But it does seem like things have shifted into a sort of middle where everything is average in the same average way.
My apologies for a comment not adding much, but you're hitting the nail on the head, it is exactly this. Watching characters move around in an environment is immersive, not 300 cuts per minute. Also more difficult to make.
I think it’s more survival bias than recency. But I strongly agree. There were many bad movies in the 1990’s, we just don’t remember them or have forgotten how bad they were.
Two examples off of the top of my head are Johnny Mnemonic and Escape from LA. Both of these are sci fi movies that are mostly just awful throughout. I remember watching them at the time and thinking they were pretty decent, but on rewatching them recently, I could barely make it through them.
Compare that to The Matrix, just four years later (and still in the 1990s), which hits super hard and seems almost flawless even today.
Really I think the movies that have survived in people’s minds are the ones where everything aligned: an incredible director with a great story to tell and everyone involved performing at the top of their game.
The 90s was the best decade for film, it was peak. One thing about the blockbusters of the 90s is that they were made to appeal to Western tastes.
Throughout the 2000s Hollywood drew progressively more and more revenue from global audiences, and by the 2010s most big budget films were pandering to the global lowest common denominator, and the majority of them are an insult to my intelligence.
Notable also is that a lot of resources go into series rather than just movies, as well as movies that are not in the 'box office.' But I agree about the biases here; there is so much crap from the 90s that looked fake and awful, and there is so much stuff now that feels alive and real. Even more, I'd say, especially once you look away from the more mainstream sources.
Also an interesting resource here is boxofficemojo which has a simple interface for looking at the box office at any particular month and year. For example, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/month/october/1994/ October 1994 was a great time: Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, Shawshank Redemption
When can I expect 2010s movies to feel as good as 90s and early 2000s movies felt 10 years ago? Is there going to be a future golden age when this decade’s churned-out Disney / Marvel / Star Wars reboots and sequels feel inspired?
This is an excellent point. For example, here [1] is a list of all films released in 2025. However I bet most people 10 years from now will only remember the top 10-20 [2].
> Maybe I'm just nostalgic. Maybe I'm romanticizing the past. But when I finish a good movie, I can sit there thinking about them for hours, even days depending on the movie. When I finish most modern blockbusters, I'm already thinking about dinner. And that difference, I think, says everything.
I don’t watch modern most blockbusters because I don’t enjoy them in general. I watch a few that I know I will likely enjoy.
I think we have some bias too.
We remember better the good experiences. The Netflix catalog is full of not so good movies, and the video rental shops in the 90s were too.
I think you're hitting the nail on the head, but the corollary is that there's so much MORE now. More of everything, and since most things are crap the gems are proportionally harder to find. I look at reality tv and wince, but I also feel that way about soap operas, it's the same itch being scratched the same way for a different generation. But the nature of reality tv (dirt cheap) means that it's been made in vast quantities, dwarfing the reach that soap operas ever had.
Soap operas weren't choking out late night comedy, they were totally different products serving different needs, at different times. Reality tv changes that equation though, with the aforementioned cheapness, and perennial popularity. A lot of the old norms are gone too, around residuals, the "one for them, one for me" system, stars vs brand... and the result is often entertainment geared at cheap production and nothing else.
The other issue is that CGI, while it empowers amazing things, also empowers the creation of real trash. It's allowed Marvel movies to film without a complete script, figuring out the ending in AVR and CGI work... and it shows. A lot of old blockbusters were crap, but they were crap that at least had the requisite craftsmanship to be made and distributed to theaters around the world.
That barrier is gone, the gates are open and that means that hidden voices are emerging (hooray!) and also that a lot of people are so inundated by noise that they disengage.
> The Netflix catalog is full of not so good movies, and the video rental shops in the 90s were too.
I subscribed to Netflix for a year or two when the platform became popular, but I quickly realized it resembles those old school rental shops too much. Yes, you could get some popular classics like The Godfather or Goodfellas, but apart from that you were stuck with another crime story or a comedy with Steve Martin or John Candy. Actually, my analogy may not be 100% fortunate, because I still have good memories about watching these comedies as a kid with my dad. Now I wouldn't have time and patience to go through movies of "that" quality. Anyhow, my point is that you were very unlikely to get there anything that wasn't already proved to be popular. Forget about anything more niche / arthouse. Netflix has produced plenty by itself, but how many of those movies are actually any good? I remember a handful of them: Marriage Story, Roma, Don't Look Up and a movie for kids called Okja.
In my experience it’s that set lighting has changed enormously.
Modern digital cinema cameras can capture dark scenes far better than the film stocks of the 90s and earlier. So set designers don’t need to blast light everywhere to have actors be visible. Now, we even have AI Denoising that can make ISO 12500 look like 800.
Go watch a 90s movie and look at a night or interior scene. You’ll see that everyone is actually lit by blue lights. Not natural darkness. That’s a major change.
This also shows up in porn. A playboy photo was expertly lit and beautifully so, with angles and bounces and shade filters and gobos.
Since the 2000s the market has expected the “DV Cam” which became “Smartphone” recorded look. Which means natural lighting all the time. It’s lost the “glam”.
> Modern digital cinema cameras can capture dark scenes far better than the film stocks of the 90s and earlier. So set designers don’t need to blast light everywhere to have actors be visible…
> Go watch a 90s movie and look at a night or interior scene. You’ll see that everyone is actually lit by blue lights. Not natural darkness. That’s a major change.
> I think the difference comes down to this: older movies took risks. They trusted audiences to pay attention, to feel something, to think. Scorsese and Tarantino had visions and the freedom to execute them without endless studio interference. They weren't chasing demographics or worrying about franchise potential. They were making films, not products.
By risks, you mean they weren't just following tropes, but subverting them, inventing their own, not rehashing exist IP.
I think that's the difference. Execs have run out of ideas, and so hedge on the familiar.
One problem, of several, is that there just was more point in doing things, meeting people, and going places up until a decade ago.
If you make a movie set in 2025, the screenwriter has to jump through hoops to avoid real life, which much of the time is someone quietly staring at a screen.
It’s ironic that the word choice and structure of this article feels overly embellished in that very chatgpt style… I miss the old days of people writing their own content.
Presenting fake content as though it were real is the major use of AI right now. You can ask it to write a breathless ten-paragraph post about the plot of The Godfather, for example, and it will instantly give you something shovel ready for a bot-enriched Facebook creator.
These movies also had less intention to be political correct. No one would have spent those blockbuster budgets on stories that were constructed around an ideological narrative instead of good storytelling.
> I was rewatching silence of the lambs and something hit me hard
That the villain‘s sexual orientation is now unthinkable to be portrayed like this? I give this movie a decade until the studio’s employees, its owners and the whole movie-ecosystem will alter the movie via AI to be more compliant with the „current thing“.
The 90s films mentioned in this post are works of art and the actors and creators were artists. Compensation sustains the art, but it’s not the primary purpose.
Netflix is a business. The content on Netflix is largely designed or purchased with a primary goal of engaging paying users.
We can find plenty of films that are works of art after the 90s. One Battle After Another is a recent one that comes to mind. Parasite, No Country for Old Men, Arrival, Moonlight, Tree of Life, Midsommar, Mandy…
I'm inclined to agree, although I have to wonder where the money is going. Seeing plenty of BIG budget shows and movies where the dialogue and writing are just dreadful ... I gotta think those shows and movies could have outbid for better talent, but they just chose not to when it came to the creative team.
I'm thinking of productions like Star Wars Acolyte where the story and writing were just dreadful ... and they spent an enormous amount of money on it.
Modern movies aren't allowed breathing room. Watch something from the 70s versus now. We absolutely blast people with dialogue and spoon feed action sequences. Older movies has silence in moments. Casual conversation. People weren't trying to pack in maximum information through close up monologues disguised as dialogue.
Herzog talks about actually hauling the boat over the hill in Fitzcaraldo because audiences can tell real from fake. Nowadays even movies that don’t use special effects rely much more on editing and post processing. Movies shot on film feel more connected to what actually happened on set.
The reason these older movies are better stories is because American culture used to be much more merit based and free market based. Now, half the decision in hiring a director, actors, writers is what is their identity. Return to pure competition and movies will improve.
I think some of it may be that everything is too big now and they all have too many options they can, relatively, easily take. When special effects became easy every movie turned into an action movie. Special effects are everywhere creating scenes that don't actually help tell the story or develop a character. It just seems like there aren't hard choices being made to force a movie to be its core best self. Every scene should matter. Of course we can't go back though. I don't think many people would pay to see the something like Jaws again.
Movies were made to make a high majority of profits in theaters, a captive audience that had few distractions and optics developed for composite nuances.
Listen to the soft wind mixed in under Jodie's lambs tale. It comes on slowly, builds and then rapidly fades. 100s of details like these were managed for reaching audiences out of their range of conscious awareness. That's how movies used to get made. Now everything is developed to look at, to notice. And if it isn't, it's in a mode of realism that's basic.
I miss car crashes - realistic crashes like in Mad Max 1, not explosions or rollover on a hidden ramp. I guess cars are too expensive these days to crash them for a movie.
Yeah I noticed that. The characters are also super one-dimensional, constantly repeating the same expressions. I think it's because people don't have the same attention span anymore.
But it's just really terrible. Stuff like reacher who solves every problem with violence (I think South park even did a piece on that). Or Amazon with their big list of spinoffs of one really mediocre spy series.
There's still some gems like Westworld, The Expanse or DARK but they're few and far between.
Modern motion pictures are made for people who temporarily or permanently lack the mental capacity to understand deeper plots. The other audience is too small to bother with.
I just watched “While You Were Sleeping” with my wife while we decorated for Christmas. It was still better than 99.9% of movies from this decade and it’s not because the plot is particularly sophisticated.
I don’t think this was a 90s thing. I think it’s been a gradual progression to shorter, shallower attention spans. Contrast 2001 space odyssey to a 90s movie, it feels so slow.
Then contrast a 2000s movie to a modern film and if you want to feel really sad, contrast that to a high budget YouTubers content.
It's the opposite. Modern movies are obsessed with plot. Inception being an example of this. It's everything else, the image and characters that's lacking. You're never going to get something like Tarkovsky's Solaris again that just shows you a highway scene for five minutes.
Villeneuve commented on this a year or two ago in an interview where he pointed out that he hates the extent to which television has infected film with its focus on plot and dialogue at expense of what's visually on the screen.
Good movies aren't created often, while movies in general are now produced more frequently, so unimpressive movies are much easier to bump into. I just saw a chart showing over twice as many movies were released in 2018 as in 2000. It would be interesting to see for each IMDB decade what percentage of films are rated 8 or higher.
> movies in general are now produced more frequently
I don't agree with this. Blockbuster used to be filled with movies made to go straight to "home video" whether that was VHS or DVD. Shitty movies have been made for a really long time. Typically, they didn't have a budget and no studio was involved. Now, we have really shitty movies with incredible budgets being released by the studios as well as whatever the streamers are making. The straight to home video market does seem to have lost a bit though as they still need to find a streamer willing to license it.
There's that incredibly funny/sad clip of the old actor playing Gandalf getting frustrated with talking into thin air.
Half of modern movies literally only exist on the special effects laptop.
But movies have always been about technology. I am sure Fritz Lang was considered a hack once.
There is recency and survival bias, yes. But a sizable fraction of movies are remakes or series extensions. The Marvel Overextended Universe has taken this up to 11. That it's still working, mostly, leads other studios to make movies in that style.
Important distinction: This specifically applies to Netflix movies; these are explicitly aimed at people watching in the background, or listening without watching. The conclusions don't apply to modern movies as a whole.
I watched All the President's Men on a recent flight and even on an airplane seatback screen it had me rapt. No romance, no sex, no violence except a cop pointing a gun in the first 5 minutes, just a good story with two great leads.
How did this article get so many upvotes? Even among articles that pine for the good old days, this article is trash. Like 80% of it is just saying “remember that movie? And the things we thought were meaningful back then?”
The idea that modern movies don’t take risks is absurd. Have you seen Poor Things? Have you seen Zone of Interest? Mickey17? OBAA? There are more movies taking more risks in this era of film than there has ever been before. You’re just not watching them.
The real story here is the way lighting has changed and how it makes you feel when you watch the movie.
Modern writing for films is terrible is my feeling. I can’t remember any weekend in the 90s an first decade of 2000s where I could not find one or more movies that I wanted to watch. These days neither me or the kids can find anything and we have been going to Sunday matinees and watching old 80s, 90s and even silent movies with Buster Keaton and they are better than the slop that made today. Frankly I’m hoping gen AI lets new and exiting storytellers end the industry.
Several hundred new movies see significant distribution or screenings every year. Folks who say “there are no good movies now” have really narrow taste or aren’t looking hard enough.
mandevil|3 months ago
dubcanada|3 months ago
Largely seems like some movies are written to be mass consumed and some are not. No different then a movie from the 90s. Our attention span is decreasing a lot obviously, but it's never been that long.
darth_avocado|3 months ago
Modern movies suck mostly because of Hollywood mostly being risk averse and prioritizing profit over everything else. This leads to IPs being sequels, prequels, remakes, “parts of the universe” or adaptations of existing successful IPs. This also leads to creative directions that are “designed to pull maximum audiences” or in other words average. Almost every single Marvel movie has the same plot with a few changes in characters. It also translates to situations where ideas that would otherwise be successful being tabled. K-POP demon hunters is a great example, an original IP, that audiences want, being sold to Netflix because the executives somewhere did a couple of focus groups and came to the conclusion that this won’t work. Another side effect is lack of innovation. Pixar animation has largely been stale for years now, meanwhile Ne Zha 2 is taking in billions worldwide, Demon Slayer is was one of the most popular movies in the US despite its limited release and Arcane is one of the best rated TV shows ever. There’s a lot more like fewer stand ins to save money that make scenes look “empty and soulless”, overuse of CGI, overuse of Pedro Pascal, etc.
All in all, it’s enshittification if movies because less profit is unacceptable.
ToucanLoucan|3 months ago
And my inner artist is absolutely REPULSED at the notion that "oh I missed stuff in the movie cuz I was on my phone." Then put your fucking phone away. Watch a movie, or don't. Watch a show, or don't. Commit to taking in ONE PIECE of art at a time you fucking dopamine junkies.
I have a buddy, I absolutely love him, but I don't think that fucker has sat down with one medium at one time in YEARS. He leaves a stressful day job and he goes home and he watches YouTube or TV, while playing videogames. Every night. He got to the end of Pacific Drive and didn't know there was a fucking in-game radio station (with a whole host of absolute bangers btw).
Like I just... idk it makes my inner creative absolutely die inside how everyone is so utterly and hopelessly dependent on their dopamine treadmill that they've lost the ability to focus entirely.
add-sub-mul-div|3 months ago
wingmanjd|3 months ago
(Vagueness intended to avoid spoilers for that 1 in 10,000 someone who hasn't seen the movie)
politelemon|3 months ago
Remind me where this is from, this sounds really familiar.
CupricTea|3 months ago
* Many more shots from eye level
* Significantly less jumpcuts
* People actually cast shadows onto the environment, and filmmakers would fearlessly shoot scenes with full bright or full dark elements in them without trying to make everything dark and bright visible simultaneously
* Waist-up or even full body shots of multiple (3+) characters talking and/or walking around with few if any jump cuts
I'm not even from that era but I find movies from that era to feel the most "real", like I can almost reach into the screen and just "be there" together. This aesthetic is perfectly doable in the modern age, even with digital cameras, it's just not the trend currently.
atombender|3 months ago
Modern shows are aggressively aesthetic. There's huge overuse shallow depth of field, resulting in blurry backgrounds. Watch modern movies with this mind, and you start noticing the reliance on a sharp foreground and blurry background is extreme to the point of bizarre. Cinematography should be a tool to achieve an effect; blurring the background to intentionally make the subject stand out is a purposeful use of that tool, but is being applied everywhere now, with no intent behind it, even if it's "aesthetic".
I would also argue that it's easier with digital photography to create blandly attractive, "painterly" images, thanks to colour grading and increased dynamic range and so on. A lot of shows these days have technically competent photography, but it all converges on the same aesthetic — tons of diffuse, lush lighting (often achieved with filling the space with lightly cinematic fog) and impeccable set design, and that creamy depth of field. But there's no contrast anywhere, it's just creamy "aesthetic" blandness in forgettable environs.
Another non-visual aspect rarely mentioned is audio: Almost all TV/movie audio these days is foley, and it's sometimes jarringly bad when you start to actually pay attention to, say, the sound of footsteps or keys jangling. High quality productions can be very good here, but most productions don't spend enough time on it. Bad foley has a very strange, subliminal effect on a scene, further undermining the sense of reality.
In such environments (visual and aural), nothing seems real and nothing seems like it matters. Everything, even nominally "adult" shows set in the real world, feels like Midde Earth and not Planet Earth.
It's not all bad, of course. There are also definitely cases where the quality of the show transcends the mediocrity of the cinematography. We are still getting good shows and bad shows, like always. But it does seem like things have shifted into a sort of middle where everything is average in the same average way.
carlosjobim|3 months ago
milleramp|3 months ago
recursivedoubts|3 months ago
dosinga|3 months ago
D13Fd|3 months ago
Two examples off of the top of my head are Johnny Mnemonic and Escape from LA. Both of these are sci fi movies that are mostly just awful throughout. I remember watching them at the time and thinking they were pretty decent, but on rewatching them recently, I could barely make it through them.
Compare that to The Matrix, just four years later (and still in the 1990s), which hits super hard and seems almost flawless even today.
Really I think the movies that have survived in people’s minds are the ones where everything aligned: an incredible director with a great story to tell and everyone involved performing at the top of their game.
Fricken|3 months ago
Throughout the 2000s Hollywood drew progressively more and more revenue from global audiences, and by the 2010s most big budget films were pandering to the global lowest common denominator, and the majority of them are an insult to my intelligence.
adzm|3 months ago
Also an interesting resource here is boxofficemojo which has a simple interface for looking at the box office at any particular month and year. For example, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/month/october/1994/ October 1994 was a great time: Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, Shawshank Redemption
throwaway894345|3 months ago
SamuelAdams|3 months ago
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_films_of_2025
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_2025_box_office_number...
speedgoose|3 months ago
I don’t watch modern most blockbusters because I don’t enjoy them in general. I watch a few that I know I will likely enjoy.
I think we have some bias too.
We remember better the good experiences. The Netflix catalog is full of not so good movies, and the video rental shops in the 90s were too.
EA-3167|3 months ago
Soap operas weren't choking out late night comedy, they were totally different products serving different needs, at different times. Reality tv changes that equation though, with the aforementioned cheapness, and perennial popularity. A lot of the old norms are gone too, around residuals, the "one for them, one for me" system, stars vs brand... and the result is often entertainment geared at cheap production and nothing else.
The other issue is that CGI, while it empowers amazing things, also empowers the creation of real trash. It's allowed Marvel movies to film without a complete script, figuring out the ending in AVR and CGI work... and it shows. A lot of old blockbusters were crap, but they were crap that at least had the requisite craftsmanship to be made and distributed to theaters around the world.
That barrier is gone, the gates are open and that means that hidden voices are emerging (hooray!) and also that a lot of people are so inundated by noise that they disengage.
snicky|3 months ago
I subscribed to Netflix for a year or two when the platform became popular, but I quickly realized it resembles those old school rental shops too much. Yes, you could get some popular classics like The Godfather or Goodfellas, but apart from that you were stuck with another crime story or a comedy with Steve Martin or John Candy. Actually, my analogy may not be 100% fortunate, because I still have good memories about watching these comedies as a kid with my dad. Now I wouldn't have time and patience to go through movies of "that" quality. Anyhow, my point is that you were very unlikely to get there anything that wasn't already proved to be popular. Forget about anything more niche / arthouse. Netflix has produced plenty by itself, but how many of those movies are actually any good? I remember a handful of them: Marriage Story, Roma, Don't Look Up and a movie for kids called Okja.
kridsdale1|3 months ago
Modern digital cinema cameras can capture dark scenes far better than the film stocks of the 90s and earlier. So set designers don’t need to blast light everywhere to have actors be visible. Now, we even have AI Denoising that can make ISO 12500 look like 800.
Go watch a 90s movie and look at a night or interior scene. You’ll see that everyone is actually lit by blue lights. Not natural darkness. That’s a major change.
This also shows up in porn. A playboy photo was expertly lit and beautifully so, with angles and bounces and shade filters and gobos.
Since the 2000s the market has expected the “DV Cam” which became “Smartphone” recorded look. Which means natural lighting all the time. It’s lost the “glam”.
phony-account|3 months ago
Let me introduce you to some film history:
https://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the-fa...
tetris11|3 months ago
By risks, you mean they weren't just following tropes, but subverting them, inventing their own, not rehashing exist IP.
I think that's the difference. Execs have run out of ideas, and so hedge on the familiar.
thomassmith65|3 months ago
If you make a movie set in 2025, the screenwriter has to jump through hoops to avoid real life, which much of the time is someone quietly staring at a screen.
solfox|3 months ago
hyperhello|3 months ago
woodpanel|3 months ago
> I was rewatching silence of the lambs and something hit me hard
That the villain‘s sexual orientation is now unthinkable to be portrayed like this? I give this movie a decade until the studio’s employees, its owners and the whole movie-ecosystem will alter the movie via AI to be more compliant with the „current thing“.
burnto|3 months ago
Netflix is a business. The content on Netflix is largely designed or purchased with a primary goal of engaging paying users.
We can find plenty of films that are works of art after the 90s. One Battle After Another is a recent one that comes to mind. Parasite, No Country for Old Men, Arrival, Moonlight, Tree of Life, Midsommar, Mandy…
bentt|3 months ago
duxup|3 months ago
I'm thinking of productions like Star Wars Acolyte where the story and writing were just dreadful ... and they spent an enormous amount of money on it.
homeonthemtn|3 months ago
mr3martinis|3 months ago
silexia|3 months ago
jmward01|3 months ago
DrierCycle|3 months ago
Listen to the soft wind mixed in under Jodie's lambs tale. It comes on slowly, builds and then rapidly fades. 100s of details like these were managed for reaching audiences out of their range of conscious awareness. That's how movies used to get made. Now everything is developed to look at, to notice. And if it isn't, it's in a mode of realism that's basic.
M95D|3 months ago
tim333|3 months ago
I mean Max 1 is ok https://youtu.be/Utj2o2eWdC0?t=93
But fury was kind of epic https://youtu.be/hEJnMQG9ev8?t=118
both seem to have some ramps and explosions.
wkat4242|3 months ago
But it's just really terrible. Stuff like reacher who solves every problem with violence (I think South park even did a piece on that). Or Amazon with their big list of spinoffs of one really mediocre spy series.
There's still some gems like Westworld, The Expanse or DARK but they're few and far between.
carlosjobim|3 months ago
throwaway894345|3 months ago
aunty_helen|3 months ago
Then contrast a 2000s movie to a modern film and if you want to feel really sad, contrast that to a high budget YouTubers content.
Barrin92|3 months ago
Villeneuve commented on this a year or two ago in an interview where he pointed out that he hates the extent to which television has infected film with its focus on plot and dialogue at expense of what's visually on the screen.
sema4hacker|3 months ago
dylan604|3 months ago
I don't agree with this. Blockbuster used to be filled with movies made to go straight to "home video" whether that was VHS or DVD. Shitty movies have been made for a really long time. Typically, they didn't have a budget and no studio was involved. Now, we have really shitty movies with incredible budgets being released by the studios as well as whatever the streamers are making. The straight to home video market does seem to have lost a bit though as they still need to find a streamer willing to license it.
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
expedition32|3 months ago
But movies have always been about technology. I am sure Fritz Lang was considered a hack once.
Animats|3 months ago
the__alchemist|3 months ago
arnonejoe|3 months ago
jslakro|3 months ago
matt_daemon|3 months ago
Take a movie like When Harry Met Sally — there are basically four on screen characters, giving more time to build chemistry and relationships
whilenot-dev|3 months ago
- All of Us Strangers (2023)
- Aftersun (2022)
- The Lighthouse (2019)
- Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu) (2019)
- The Duke of Burgundy (2014)
christkv|3 months ago
CHB0403085482|3 months ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBaoUt_Suv4
asciimov|3 months ago
When you have to let the writing carry the story, the movie works much better.
floren|3 months ago
ChrisArchitect|3 months ago
Why movies just don't feel "real" anymore
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45949863
christkv|3 months ago
kwertyoowiyop|3 months ago
kouru225|3 months ago
The idea that modern movies don’t take risks is absurd. Have you seen Poor Things? Have you seen Zone of Interest? Mickey17? OBAA? There are more movies taking more risks in this era of film than there has ever been before. You’re just not watching them.
The real story here is the way lighting has changed and how it makes you feel when you watch the movie.
christkv|3 months ago
uwagar|3 months ago
christkv|3 months ago
PorterBHall|3 months ago
haunter|3 months ago
There Is No Evil (شیطان وجود ندارد) 2020
Drive My Car (ドライブ・マイ・カー) 2021
The two Dune films
Alcarràs 2022
Suzume (すずめの戸締まり) 2022
Monster (怪物) 2023
Fallen Leaves (Kuolleet lehdet) 2023
The Holdovers 2023
Perfect Days 2023
The Substance 2024
Bugonia 2025 (even though it's a remake)
mcphage|3 months ago
phantasmish|3 months ago
karakot|3 months ago