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Most comments lean onto the unscientific results about fashion and design, which follows fashion. But the article also displays one categorie that should be ind

Most comments lean onto the unscientific results about fashion and design, which follows fashion. But the article also displays one categorie that should be independent of fashion and solely rely on creativity: media. This chapter proves the premise with statistics about film grossing and the increasing unoriginality that influences movie plots. When I was a teenager or years 20 to 30, I went to the cinema up to a dozen times per year. Almost no matter what genre, there was always an interesting movie with a fresh plot or story background. But since 2010 I visited less and less, and (also pandemic-related) the last movie I watched in the cinema is from 2018. But also at home I got the feeling there were less interesting movies. I thought maybe I am getting old. But these statistics tell me, this is not a feeling, it’s a machinery of permanent repetition without being creative AT ALL. And why is that? Because people still watch these repetitions and seems to not get tired of them. Yes, I watched the phenomenal 22-movies-Marvel-universe with a great finale. These are of course part of the repetition statistic, but it was a new idea at the time, and Marvel clearly went to the success lane with this movie-spanning story. But now? Story’s over, they still produce new mediocre (but still visually pleasing) action movies which do not have any hint of a new spanning plot, and people STILL go watching them and create giant revenues. If people just would boycott any one of these movies, the financial desaster (200+ million dollars of cost per movie!) would end this at once. So … is it a problem of the society that they expand fashion also to creative things and seem to be happy with any different-but-same movie? I am tired of these movies, I am also tired of TV/streaming series with the same plots again and again. There is more film material produced than ever but for me there is much less to watch than say from 20 to five years ago.

zeroonetwothree 4y ago
Film is much less creative. But look at television and you see a different story. We have far more creativity and variety than ever before.
- omginternets 4y ago
  Is it? What do you have in mind? There’s certainly more television than ever before, but I haven’t seen anything truly novel in a while.
  - watwut 4y ago
    "Truly novel" is kinda difficult to define requirement. With literally any movie, you can argue for hours whether it was truly novel or not. But for me, just browsing netfix got me much bigger variance then what was available to me 20 to years ago. Back then, all films were the same action movie plus some comedies, basically. They all ended well. There are good and bad characters, no nuance and good ones win. The structure was also the same and formulaic. You could go to indie theater and see something else once in a while, but that was it. I have seen more novel things (at least novel for a movie). Not all of them were well executed, but the writers at least tried a new idea here and there. Twin sisters that switch families every year for example. It was not too good, but was not too bad and mainly it was something different.
- fullshark 4y ago
  I don't see any novel TV. The last truly novel TV format was probably the different reality TV formats which exploded 20 years ago and kind of took over everything. Netflix which has dropped billions of dollars on TV basically decided to just copy every format which was successful on cable TV, and has invented nothing novel as far as I can tell except for the interactive TV specials (https://help.netflix.com/en/node/62526 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/62526) which didn't really seem to take off.
  - duckmysick 4y ago
    Releasing the whole season all at once (instead of weekly/daily) is a novel format to me.
  - michaelt 4y ago
    If you expand TV to include youtube and other streaming services, in a sense we're in an age of unprecedented choice. You want to watch someone building a robot? Or building a sailboat from scratch? Smelting iron in a furnace they built themselves out of clay? Blacksmithing? Welding? Reviewing PC-98 Visual Novels? Taking apart LED lights? Picking locks? Shooting antique firearms? Using a tatoo-removing laser on themselves? Restoring classic cars? Fitting powerful rally car engines into classic cars? We've got all of those, completely free and available on demand. Back when there were only 4 TV channels, content had to have much wider appeal - requiring both mainstream topics, and keeping things simple enough to be accessible to almost anyone.
    - fullshark 4y ago
      Great point! But even those services seem to have stagnated after an explosion in their growth phase maybe 10 years ago with novel attempts to capture eyeballs, and are becoming relatively samey in terms of content. The article even talks about the phenomenon of "instagram face" and "UGC all looks the same." One of the weirdest to me is twitch, before twitch/justin.tv existed did you think a platform for live streaming by anyone on the planet would be used largely for watching strangers play video games?
yamtaddle 4y ago
> But also at home I got the feeling there were less interesting movies. I manage maybe 30-35 new movies per year (and usually pick up a few more from that year by about two years out from its end) and I'd say a solid 80% don't suck, and about half are pretty damn good. Usually there are another ten or so that I know about and wanted to watch but never get to, and there are surely a bunch more good ones that I miss entirely. 2021 was a bit of an exception because Covid fucked with productions quite a bit and made the movie scene that year kinda weird (though there were several really good small-cast-small-crew films released that year!) but otherwise, consistently, there are roughly mid-tens of good movies released every year, not even counting local indie scene stuff. Now, assessing it this way does require 1) looking at more than just what's heavily advertised, and 2) having pretty broad taste in genres and being willing to meet a movie where it is, and at least having the capacity to enjoy what it's trying to do assuming it pulls it off reasonably well—me, I'd say Beyond the Black Rainbow and Guardians of the Galaxy and One Cut of the Dead and Logan Lucky are all good movies, so... I'm capable of enjoying most genres and both "high" and "low" art, so the set of films that I might like is pretty large, which helps a lot.

zeroonetwothree 4y ago

Film is much less creative. But look at television and you see a different story. We have far more creativity and variety than ever before.

omginternets 4y ago
Is it? What do you have in mind? There’s certainly more television than ever before, but I haven’t seen anything truly novel in a while.
- watwut 4y ago
  "Truly novel" is kinda difficult to define requirement. With literally any movie, you can argue for hours whether it was truly novel or not. But for me, just browsing netfix got me much bigger variance then what was available to me 20 to years ago. Back then, all films were the same action movie plus some comedies, basically. They all ended well. There are good and bad characters, no nuance and good ones win. The structure was also the same and formulaic. You could go to indie theater and see something else once in a while, but that was it. I have seen more novel things (at least novel for a movie). Not all of them were well executed, but the writers at least tried a new idea here and there. Twin sisters that switch families every year for example. It was not too good, but was not too bad and mainly it was something different.
fullshark 4y ago
I don't see any novel TV. The last truly novel TV format was probably the different reality TV formats which exploded 20 years ago and kind of took over everything. Netflix which has dropped billions of dollars on TV basically decided to just copy every format which was successful on cable TV, and has invented nothing novel as far as I can tell except for the interactive TV specials (https://help.netflix.com/en/node/62526 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/62526) which didn't really seem to take off.
- duckmysick 4y ago
  Releasing the whole season all at once (instead of weekly/daily) is a novel format to me.
- michaelt 4y ago
  If you expand TV to include youtube and other streaming services, in a sense we're in an age of unprecedented choice. You want to watch someone building a robot? Or building a sailboat from scratch? Smelting iron in a furnace they built themselves out of clay? Blacksmithing? Welding? Reviewing PC-98 Visual Novels? Taking apart LED lights? Picking locks? Shooting antique firearms? Using a tatoo-removing laser on themselves? Restoring classic cars? Fitting powerful rally car engines into classic cars? We've got all of those, completely free and available on demand. Back when there were only 4 TV channels, content had to have much wider appeal - requiring both mainstream topics, and keeping things simple enough to be accessible to almost anyone.
  - fullshark 4y ago
    Great point! But even those services seem to have stagnated after an explosion in their growth phase maybe 10 years ago with novel attempts to capture eyeballs, and are becoming relatively samey in terms of content. The article even talks about the phenomenon of "instagram face" and "UGC all looks the same." One of the weirdest to me is twitch, before twitch/justin.tv existed did you think a platform for live streaming by anyone on the planet would be used largely for watching strangers play video games?

yamtaddle 4y ago

> But also at home I got the feeling there were less interesting movies. I manage maybe 30-35 new movies per year (and usually pick up a few more from that year by about two years out from its end) and I'd say a solid 80% don't suck, and about half are pretty damn good. Usually there are another ten or so that I know about and wanted to watch but never get to, and there are surely a bunch more good ones that I miss entirely. 2021 was a bit of an exception because Covid fucked with productions quite a bit and made the movie scene that year kinda weird (though there were several really good small-cast-small-crew films released that year!) but otherwise, consistently, there are roughly mid-tens of good movies released every year, not even counting local indie scene stuff. Now, assessing it this way does require 1) looking at more than just what's heavily advertised, and 2) having pretty broad taste in genres and being willing to meet a movie where it is, and at least having the capacity to enjoy what it's trying to do assuming it pulls it off reasonably well—me, I'd say Beyond the Black Rainbow and Guardians of the Galaxy and One Cut of the Dead and Logan Lucky are all good movies, so... I'm capable of enjoying most genres and both "high" and "low" art, so the set of films that I might like is pretty large, which helps a lot.