How does anyone watch those Avatar movies? I made it about 45 minutes into the second one before I had to leave, and I rarely walk out of movies. I left The Last Showgirl with half an hour to go, but I was hungry and the movie was so poorly-made that I couldn’t concentrate on anything other than the thought of chicken noodle soup. It’s what on the menu, along with the gore and the guts that come de rigueur now at the cinema and on television, so I hear. Tim Robinson’s too tame and silly to take, but showing Santa Claus getting a blowjob, with full, hard, massive throbbing erection, even on HBO, is a new river crossed. Ditto Ed Gein committing necrophilia on Netflix, where Monster: The Ed Gein Story is being watched, passively or not, by far more people than movies like The Smashing Machine, Die My Love, After the Hunt, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, The Running Man, Nuremberg, and Bugonia. Even One Battle After Another, breathlessly praised in late September as a “masterpiece” and even “one of the greatest movies ever made,” has receded into the recent past, more distant than ever, the only people maintaining its existence its super-fans, eager to pay $19.95 to rent the movie digitally.
Disney’s about to pay Josh Gad, Idina Menzel, and Kristen Bell $60 million each for the next two Frozen sequels; Brady Corbet says he’ll follow The Brutalist with “a four hour NC-17 horror Western that spans 150 years”; David Fincher, friend and director of Bennington Quibbits, will jump right from shooting The Continuing Adventures of Cliff Booth to Squid Games: America in February 2026, not a remake but “a continuation” of the original South Korean television series, a hit for Netflix a few years ago; and James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash, the third of these monstrous bores, will be the only movie that makes more money than Wicked: For Good this year. Probably.
The mega-event films, like Wicked, Avatar, and Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, are here to stay and safe from total audience erosion. Ditto kids movies, which, along with horror, have kept multiplexes open through the first half of the 2020s. Microbudget, “no budget,” and independent films that play film festivals and nowhere else are doing alright, too—no doubt effected by the de-centering of movies as the pinnacle of pop culture, but far from exhausted or out of ideas. What’s currently dying an unbearably slow death is the earnest, awards-obsessed drama that invariably comes out between Labor Day and New Year’s Eve. This is a kind of movie that Millennials, the youngest of whom are near 30, have enjoyed—or endured—their entire lives. The tropes, clichés, beats, and style of these films haven’t moved an inch, and if they’re all bombing, it may be because there’s no appetite for old food. You see Ken Burns try to eat some “yucky” Civil War-era food? It’s technically edible, but why bother?
The Avatar films only have appeal because people born after 1981 grew up with video game consoles as a fact of life; their popularity among non-gamers, to the point of “Post-Pandora Depression,” makes sense when you consider the unmatchable high of playing Super Mario 64 for the first time, and remember that Baby Boomers and many members of Generation X never experienced something so powerful, if not profound. It’s no mystery why these movies are bombing, and it’s not because people don’t want to go out, or even that the tickets are too expensive or they’re unaware of any movies that are out in theaters to begin with. More than anything, people get the message loud and clear that Hollywood, like Netflix and the cable news complex, just doesn’t care about them anymore. They don’t even care about their own product, because as far as they can tell, the end is nigh. These idiots think that artificial intelligence is going to wipe everything out, so they’ve decided to stop work early. You know, no one’s pulled the trigger yet—you don’t have to start stabbing yourself. I don’t think AI will produce anything for the cinema, even if it’ll be used as much as Autotune (and AI) are used in the music industry; but if you listen to Jon Peters, Peter Bart, Barry Diller, and other Empire sentinels, artificial intelligence is the greatest, most significant revolution in living history.
Give me a break. AI will be useful for cleaning up bad audio, airbrushing photos and video, and, as in The Brutalist, generating background art and material that can’t be seen with the naked eye. Someone soon will make an AI film that can’t be ignored; if Romania’s Radu Jude is the first, which American will strike out in the abyss? Harmony Korine? His last two movies used AI extensively, but there was a “basis of reality” to both AGGRO DR1FT and Baby Invasion; Jude’s Dracula is not entirely AI-generated. Considering how hostile (and scared) certain people get at the mere mention of AI, I’m amazed that more filmmakers and artists in general aren’t at least experimenting with it, if only just to see what happens. It’ll probably be more appealing, if not more interesting, to today’s audiences than “prestige pictures” which exist only to win Oscars, or at least nab a nomination.
Remember: Weapons was a big hit in August, and there was some brief “Oscar talk” around Amy Madigan as Aunt Gladys, but even the movie’s fans dismissed the idea: “Weapons is not an Oscar movie.” Even after The Substance gained multiple nominations earlier this year, Demi Moore was still snubbed, a loss that felt like a dinosaur Hollywood’s rejection of a genre—horror—which has kept them employed for longer than they know. If the Academy needed to become more “diverse” in 2016, maybe in 2026 they should think about reconsidering what exactly makes a movie “Oscar worthy;” then, at the very least, everyone won’t be losing so much money, and filmmakers and movie stars won’t be embarrassed in front of a world that’s grown increasingly indifferent towards them.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith