Hollywood Fatigue

Thank you. I was right

I wanted to do a follow-up to this post.

You may remember that the premise of BS Fatigue was that I didn’t think that the failure of superhero films was “superhero fatigue.” My thesis was that the failure lay more in the lack of quality control, and saturation of political nonsense stuffed into plots and casting and marketing.

Since then, how was 2025?

Oh dear, however did that happen?

Remember my quality control issues I pointed out in “BS Fatigue”?

Yeah.

It’s not Superhero Fatigue.

It’s Hollywood Fatigue

In the immortal words of the internet, “F you, I was right.”

And yeah, you could rattle off a whole bunch of factors.

Streaming, for example. Drinker mentions it in his video. Hollywood hasn’t adapted to the streaming market. They don’t know how to make money off of it like they did with DVDs. It used to be that if I wanted a set of Death in Paradise, it’s a British murder series, so I had to wait years before the price dropped to something sane ($20 as opposed to $50). Now, with streaming, DVDs aren’t priced the same way. And Hollywood just hasn’t figured it out yet.

In a world where I can buy a DVD of a new film for $17 a month after release, or take my wife to the theaters for $24 as soon as it comes out, I’m taking the $17 with home delivery.¹

“Financial flops”: And yeah, Hollywood is spending like drunken sailors. Hell, drunken sailors can only spend money they have on them. Hollywood is taking out bank loans in order to finance films.² Tell me, who thought it was a good idea to automatically assume that “my movie is going to make a billion dollars³”? If you believe Grok, before The Avengers (2012) only ten movies broke a billion dollars.

And only 11 Marvel films⁴ broke a billion at the box office.⁵ As of now, we have nearly 40 MCU films. A cultural juggernaut broke the billion dollar threshold with one out of four films.

Since The Avengers, it’s been 13 years. How many films have made Avengers money? 44. Some of them are other MCU films. Since 2012, over EIGHT THOUSAND FILMS have been made.⁶

Why make a film and then assume “my film will make a billion, so I can invest the half a billion”? Were I into business, those are not odds I would want to play.

I’ll grant that those are issues. Hollywood needs to learn how to integrate streaming into their business model. And they need to hold the purse strings way tighter.

But they need better writers. Don’t believe me, look at IMDB for the CV of some MCU writers after Endgame.⁷ Or the writer of Snow White.⁸ Consider shilling out money on the front end, with competent writers, and maybe Hollywood can save money on the back end with CGI and insane directors who get “creative.”⁹

They need to stop throwing CGI at everything. Don’t believe me, compare Iron Man CGI to Ironheart CGI. Demand has gone up by an absurd amount, deadlines are tighter, quality has suffered. Could I have been tempted by The Marvels? I’m not sure, but having enough CGI cats in the ads that it looked like an animated film didn’t help.

They need to throw a net over their damn actors. I know I don’t like to give money to people who hate me. Jennifer Lawrence figured out that she should keep her mouth shut, only after her career cratered enough that she needed to do a full front sequence in a comedy, and her IMDB profile has year-long gaps. It may be too late for Rachel Zegler. Alan Richardson is in damage control after screwing over League of Ungentlemanly Warfare (and maybe Reacher), by doing commercials and comedies.

Hollywood can also stop with tHe MeSs@g3. Does every action hero have to be Keanu Reeves? No. But I’m not going to believe that the fat gay black woman is going to drop the seven foot body builder.¹⁰ I will not accept waif fu unless we’re in comic books or supernatural fiction. Gay folk are maybe 3% of the population, I don’t need them to be 50% of the characters in media. Stop turning every fantasy world into downtown Manhattan.¹¹ I can go on.

You know what I saw in the theater this year? A Working Man. Why? Because I like Chuck Dixon and I wanted his film to do well.

Film Review: A Working Man

But Hell, you know how bad it is? I got the DVD for John Wick 4 a few weeks after it came out. I did not see it in theater, because 2023 was a busy year for me.¹²

I didn’t watch it until October of this year. Why? Because I was just waiting for them to drop the ball. Because it’s Hollywood, of course they’re going to drop the ball. Did they? Well … I don’t know if I would go that far, but I can add another reason why Ballerina didn’t succeed.

And I think Ballerina is a good example of yet another Hollywood problem. Hollywood doesn’t want to put in the work. Ballerina shouldn’t have been treated as “another guaranteed John Wick moneymaker.” It wasn’t. It was a test run. But Hollywood poured in $90 million dollars to make the film, and didn’t even take in $140 million. They should have treated it as ground zero, and put in only $30 million. (Also, Len Wiseman as director? Really?) The MCU couldn’t put in the effort to establish other superhero, and expected inertia to keep bringing in billions of dollars.

At the end of the day, Hollywood has multiple problems. But I think base competence is the biggest problem. It can’t be bothered to create a good product. They’re putting in zero effort, trying to chase easy money. Hollywood can’t even bite back its hatred for its own audience. So why should I burn time and money to support them? Why should anyone?

Anyway, that’s all for now. Illegitimi non carborundum, y’all.

1. You could blame this on the economy, or you could blame it on Covid heightening my social anxiety… but I’ve always been this way.

2. So, things I learned from following media and culture crap. When Disney makes a half-billion dollar film, it’s the bank’s money. Because while Disney may be a billion-dollar company, the “billion” isn’t necessarily liquid assets, and pure cash. The “billion-dollar” evaluation comes from all their assets—including property, parks, rides, IP, etc, et al, blah blah blah.

3. No. I’m not accounting for inflation. But then again, I don’t think anyone else is, either. It should be following ticket sales. If we go by pure ticket sales, The Avengers barely breaks the top twenty.

4. Yes, we’re talking MCU. We’re not playing with who owns all the IPs.

5. I recall it from the header of a ScreenRant article, so take that for what it’s worth.

6. Again, in the world according to Grok.

7. See also, BS Fatigue.

8. The writer of ten psychological thrillers was brought in to script a hundred million dollar Disney film?

9. EG: Taika Watiti on Thor: Love and Thunder, where he made up the movie as he went along DURING FILMING, leading to a bloated budget and a film that had to be cut down from a four or five hour run time.

10. See Queen Latifah in The Equalizer

11. See … any fantasy on streaming. Sigh. No. Really.

12. I buried my father and moved to Texas from New York. Busy.