Is it me or are movies just mostly bad these days?

I'm not saying they are all bad but in the last few years it seems to be getting worst even in the early to mid 2010's I feel like there was more creative movies it just seems harder to find these days. Also I do like indie movies so it's not that I just like big blockbuster movies the majority of them today are awful IMO.

They're bad only if you fail to explore and just watch what's put in front of you. There's lots of great stuff that comes out but you gotta put in the effort to find them. If you're only watching Star Wars and Comic book stuff, I understand why you feel that way but there's way more than that stuff.

I'll always tell people great art comes from the past, present and future. I tell that to people no matter what their biases are - does not matter if you think new movies are bad or old movies are boring. Time to explore.

Those movies are still out there, but like Jaydan said, you just have to look.

I personally find the 80s and 90s to be the pinnacle of filmmaking, as they were right at a point where the special effects were passable to support the plot, but not so good that they could carry a film on the back of spectacle so the films still required a decent script to be successful. Nowadays they can just create that spectacle, hit render, and people will mindlessly shovel popcorn into their mouths, be "ooooo'd" and "ahhhhh'd", and walk away.

It's depressing that most of the talk I hear from people after a watching of today's films are the same type of sentiments I hear after getting off of a roller coaster: "Well, that was fun", to be quickly forgotten. Anecdotal I know, but it does feel that way.

I still watch lesser known and foreign stuff, but I'm not so dishonest that I pretend movies generally are as good as they used to be. Movies did decline, even if you ignore all the mainstream. Something about "You just have to look" or how it's typically used in context also rubs me as pretty hipster. Like it's implying you shouldn't want more quality from the Hollywood stuff again and the indie and foreign are just better by being that.

I'm not a Star Wars fan at all and I hate the majority of comic book movies. I do explore alot and I have found gems over the years all I'm saying it's getting harder to find.

80's and 90's where amazing for films so many iconic movies from those two decades. So many classics from that era that have been rebooted to hell but it can never be replicated.

100% agree.

When it comes to American stuff do find them kinda boring now.

Usually opt for Asian stuff over them.

TV though is argubly better than ever. At least if you're not watching Star Trek.

Series have surpassed movies as far as my personal enjoyment of them is concerned. It's funny because I used to avoid series because I thought they were time-consuming and inferior in production values, but times have changed.

With series, I have a chance to follow and appreciate the characters and their developments for an extended period of time and to be excited about what happens next in the story for weeks and sometimes months, allowing me the time to emotionally invest in them. The last few series that I have finished still has a lasting impression and I keep going back to watching the clips on YouTube.

I have seen some good movies over the years, and while I usually have an enjoyable time with them, I usually forget about them and move on quickly afterwards. I've also become numb to big Hollywood productions where the focus is on unrelatable and flawless action heroes doing impossible feats and movies with large scale mayhem and destruction.

I think its harder for them to get creative. We are at a time where a lot of music has been sung and made and a lot of movies have been made. I think video game will get to that stage aswell. Some of us older folks will feel like its the same o same o and for the new people entering the world it will be fresh and new because they havent seen anything.

Movies and series have switched places imo; movies have gone down in quality, while many series (streaming or TV) have become really quite excellent.

Just guessing here but I think movies tend to chase trends a lot and try to make a bigger dent, and therefore take fewer risks and suffer from a quality perspective.

Series, on the other hand, get multiple chances to make impressions. They can also take more risks, and they have more time to develop their story. You also see gambles taken on actors that might be more niche or lesser known as well.

It's why the best Star Wars material in recent years has been in Rebels and Clone Wars, both series. It's why the more interesting Marvel content has been the series they've cranked out in the past few years. The best horror, mystery, and suspense I've seen in recent memory has all been from series.

Series can afford to go after specific interests, while it seems most movies tend to go after no one and therefore don't really excel at anything.

Boring movies, boring uncharasmatic actors. Latetly i noticed the pathetic state is in. It can only get better.

I agree.

Yeah, I never understood that mentality. It's just excepting that blockbuster movies can't ever be good again which is not true.

Well said. I find most modern Hollywood movies put style over substance and the result is entertaining but soulless. Not to mention that budgets have skyrocketed so they're unwilling to risk going into unexplored territory. They just don't bother creatively and resort to rehashing older films and ideas which is why the movie industry is full of sequels and reboots.

Personally, I branched out to Korean cinema years ago. My favorite movies of the last 10-15 years are predominantly Korean.

People post the same question about games and the answer is the same. Sure there's mediocre stuff out there but there's plenty of good stuff if you look. There's such a wide gamut across genres, budgets, and countries that decrying "films bad". A24 has been releasing a bunch of great stuff in the last decade.

There's a lot more content to sort through now. Used to be you watched what your local movie theater played or what was available to rent or on tv. With studios, tv channels, and streaming services having to put out some much new content a lot of stuff is getting greenlit that wouldn't have even a few years ago. Some of it's good but a lot of it is unwatchable.

@warmblur: IMO since 2000. TV just as bad in quality.

I’ve heard decent things about Korean films but haven’t much delved into them as of yet. Do you have any recommendations?

One thing I forgot to mention why I enjoy older films more (and this ties into the advent of CGI and the ability for filmmakers to further realize their visions) is that the limitations of special effects back in the 80s and 90s restrained films from wandering too far from the plausible. I highly enjoy films that exercise restraint in keeping the plot within the realm of plausibility, because in that plausibility is relatability. Unless I’m watching a Marvel film or something that obviously extends past my own experiences, a movie remaining in the realm of the possible is the most effective way to sell it to the audience.

For an example, I hated Top Gun Maverick, and I feel I’m the only one on the planet that does as everywhere I look I see nothing but effusive praise for it. It was filled with not only the implausible which pulled me right out of the experience, but also felt like a nostalgic bucket list, so much so that I could sense the writer’s hand pulling the plot strings to be able to check off what was expected (bike racing the plane, great balls of fire, beach football, hard deck scoldings, “talk to me, Dad”, etc). The film reeked of not only creative bankruptcy, but of a degree of implausibility that was too hard to overcome in order for me to take purchase in the fiction.

Just like mainstream games are bad. same goes for movies. ie MCU and super hero trash which dominate Hollywood are pretty bad.

only excited for John wick 4 to come out next year.

missed wild west movies.

It's difficult to judge because as I grow older my interests get more mature too. When I was growing up I watched and enjoyed a lot of shitty B movies too.

Nowadays, by nowadays I mean the last two decades or so, I just can't get the hype surrounding MCU, Transformers, Fast and Furious movies, etc. I haven't watched everything but all I did is beyond mediocre. Even when you have good actors, you still have them acting in a green room with just awful writing.

It might be a me problem, but I feel like big pop corn movies became just corporate products, where scripts are written by focus groups and have to strictly follow production formulas. Maybe that's just a natural occurrence of capitalism as it tends to optimize profits. We see something similar with games.

There's no space for something new like Alien, Terminator or Indiana Jones nowadays. But what's even worse, you completely lost high quality movies like Apocalypse Now, Scarface, Kramer Vs Kramer (etc etc) where you had proper cinema achieving commercial success and earning a place in the popular culture of the time.

But there's still good stuff and there might be an even bigger audience for it then in the past, it's just that those who own media don't see the point on investing in it when all they need to do it to put some good looking actors in masks and people will pay for it, buy the energy drink with the branding, get the t-shirt, visit the theme park, play the game and spend a portion of their lives generating online traffic arguing if captain America should be black or white.

• Memories of Murder
• Oldboy
• Castaway on the Moon
• Miracle in Cell No. 7
• Peppermint Candy (also checkout Lee Chang-dong's other work)
• A Bittersweet Life
• The Chaser
• I Saw The Devil
• Mother
• Joint Security Area
• The Host
• A Moment to Remember
• The Wailing
• Sympathy for Mr & Lady Vengeance

You can't go wrong with any of these. More or less, they all gave me this feeling when you've watched a really good film and you feel lost in it even after the credits roll.

There are hardly any "new" and "groundbreaking" movies because almost everything has been done already and since "been there, done that" ain´t enough for hollywood, they decided to "go there again, doing it again" hence we get flooded with remakes and reboots all the time.

The only way of doing something "new" and "groundbreaking" is the way of approaching things, like "JOHN WICK" actually just telling the ancient revenge story but giving it a slight twist along with executing it in its own style.

And then again we have "NOBODY" which in fact is the same as "JOHN WICK" but giving it its own twist and making it another great experience.

I infact enjoyed "NOBODY" even more than "JOHN WICK", from a psychological point of view (and coz i just love Bobby!) coz while John Wick does not really want to go back killing people and rather being "forced" to it, "Nobody" is just looking for all the ways so that he can kill people again, after all those years of not killing any bad guys.

I think the industry is expanding too fast too quick and talent is spreading thin. Anyhow, whenever I found something I liked, like if I like a film and not familiar with director's work maybe try seeing other films they've done. Otherwise just aimlessly trying to find something worthwhile is a total crapshoot.

The only problem with TV as a replacement for movies is that the stories tend to meander because they have to fill more time than their core stories merit. It leads everything to be like a Stephen King novel where every character has to have their own subplots.

When I finally stumble across a TV show that's tightly written and intentionally paced to fill out the runtime it was going for, it's admittedly awesome. Those just aren't that common, unfortunately, and it's simply a curse of the medium.

Reading can be more entertaining than movies/shows these days. More creative unique content.

Way too many remakes, shows/movies going into the past, and or just the sheer amount certain types of it is gag worthy (like marvel).

Boring characters (actors), excessive political/social commentary, politics mutilating and limiting artistic freedom, boring movie characters, genZ, bad cgi/bad physics, too much content (streaming) quality quantity ratio. Netflix became the Steam of streaming. Or streaming became the Steam streaming...

No, reading can not be more entertaining, first of all it takes too much time, time i could spend with doing better things...like playing video games or watching another remake/reboot of a movie or a book.

You gotta be fu**ing kiddin me.

That creative content you´re talking about, is basically just the same over and over again.

Until to this point in time, everything here on planet earth has been done already multiple times, there just aint nothing new anymore and the same is meant for books.

It is always the same in just slightly different versions, no matter if it´s either about the good knight rescuing the helpless princess from the claws of an evil dragon or The Mandalorian rescuing that green yoda-clone from some evil sith-lord....

...it´s just all the same!

No, not just you. It's the same for videogames and music.

But yeah, it's probably just that the popular stuff is way worse now than before.

Most forms of entertainment have slopped downwards,especially music. Movies hit a high mark in the 90’s and 80’s. Still pretty sad.

I think the ballooning budgets have hampered creativity in the blockbuster scene, but if we are being honest there is a certain amount of nostalgia that clouds our vision here. We tend to judge the worst of today against the best of the past. We compare bad modern movies to Terminator 2, but for every T2 there were about 10 Running Mans. Be honest, when is the last time you heard anyone bring up Running Man? Even the worst Marvel movie is probably better than that.

Hell, most Marvel movies are better than the first X-Men trilogy. Even back in the day I didn't quite get why people liked those so much. They were just kinda fine, but expectations for comic book movies were low. Marvel may feel formulaic now, but 15 years ago they raised the bar.

To me, this title is one of the most overrated movie ever while every other Terminator-Movie (except T3, which was in fact the same as T2) in that franchise has more balls than the more or less rather "pathetic" T2.

I mean even back those days i just found the idea of T-800 shooting people in their knees just to save those useless lifes, along with John Connor being a ludicrous pissant of a softie, was just something making the whole movie rather a political correct joke than being something to be taken any serious....let alone making the movie something like a "cult-classic" like its original predecessor.

But that doesn´t mean i hated T2 nor is it a bad movie, T-1000 or better good ole Jason Patrick still rocks.

@wladolfputler: Fair enough about T2. I was just trying to say that over time highly regared stuff is remembered, and crap is forgotten.

But you bring up another interesting point. People complain about heavy handed political messages in modern movies, but that isnt exactly a new thing. Imagine how many youtubers would flip their shit when Sarah Connor laments that a robot would make a better father to John than any man she's ever known, if T2 came out today.

I think as we go on it just becomes harder to make an original film, because so many are already out there.

A few years back when I would go to the theater sometimes, I still went and saw some movies and was entertained. I guess that's the main point.

Nothing now really excites me and feels original at least when going to the movies. I remember years ago it was animated movies that I saw with my nephews and there were a few bad ones. Before that it was superhero movies and I got burned out with those.