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Soundwave on 24 August 2025
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JuliusHackebeil said:
Soundwave said:

The take away there shouldn't be Ninja Turtles though. The take away should be things like Ghost and Pretty Woman and Home Alone. 

Hollywood's hyper fixation on basically "nerd IP" for the last 10-15 years has destroyed the market for other types of films and now they are reaping what they've sown. 

You can't just cater to one audience. 

Even this summer ... Lilo & Stitch is the no.1 movie of the summer .... not Superman or Fantastic 4 or Mission: Impossible. 

If movie theaters are going to have any kind of future, it's imperative that women start coming back and going to the movies, a sausage fest of dorks is just going to lead to an inevitable decline. You can see like Superman did OK actually in the US but the international box office is dismal, internationally I think audiences are tuning out of superheroes. 

And I get that sense from "regular folks" too ... they're done with superhero movies and the 80th Star Wars movie or whatever, it's hard to constantly care about Iron Man or Batman's problems for the 50th time. It has no relevance to most people's lives and especially if you're not a so-called "male dork" you don't have the same kind of nostalgia for those properties either. 

I get from Disney's POV that they want to keep that male-dork audience because they made an awful lot of money especially from 2015-2020 with them, but I would say it's been  the net detriment of the overall movie business. Also I will add I don't think the superhero surge of say 2008-2019 (Iron Man to Avengers Endgame) is over and not happening again. Will things like Avengers Doomsday with like the novelty of like 30 superheroes still do well? Sure, but the days of releasing just a "good superhero" movie and sitting back and watching the huge dollars come in are over. That new Fantastic 4 was pretty good honestly, but it's just like hard to get excited about the same shit for the 3rd, 4th time. 

While I fully agree and want more variety than just superhero stuff and think that concentration on this genre came to the detriment of other genres, there seems to be something missing from the equation, as far as I can tell.

1) The "male-dork-audience" as you call them would have happily continued giving big bucks to cinemas. But these movies stopped catering to their tastes. If studios stopped with the feminisation and "en-wokening" of these movies, men would still watch them.

2) There is still other stuff out there. Lots of it actually. It is just not watched as much. I went to the cinemas for Naked Gun, which was a lot of fun. And I saw Holy Cow, which was alright. But just because men cannot keep cinemas open because all the movies they would be super interested in are shit, does not mean that other demographics and groups could not pick up the slack.

The thing with the superhero genre is there was always going to be a downturn no matter what. If anything, Disney is guilty of doing these movies *too well*, I mean after Avengers Endgame where can you go to top that? You can't do it much better than that, there's no where to go but down. It's not like all the 2008-2019 era superhero movies were gems either ... Thor 2, Iron Man 2, Ant-Man, etc. I mean some of these movies were very mid to dull, honestly that new Fantastic 4 is a better movie that those 3 examples, it's probably better than Avengers Age of Ultron too. 

But it's just too much. How much can you expect people to invest into the 37th MCU movie? How many times can you reboot the same characters? Seeing Tim Burton's take on Batman in 1989 was thrilling compared to the camp 1960s TV series, seeing the 3rd or 4th or whatever grimdark Batman we're on now is not that interesting anymore. 

The problem is the studios all went chasing this same audience to the exclusion of everyone else and didn't greenlight even projects for other audiences and those other audiences have just stopped going to the theater. They could have made a new Naked Gun ten years ago, that Space Balls sequel that's coming, great, but really that should've come out like 10-15 years ago. 

Even though horror is a bit of a tired genre too it's ironically probably  more grounded in some kind of reality than superhero movies are, so I'm glad to see something original and new like Weapons doing well at the box office. Sinners did well earlier in the year also. Things like that are much needed. 

For theaters to remain viable other audiences need to be catered to, just making Marvel and Star Wars movies the way the same tired audience wants them is not the answer. Like you make those IP less female leaning and so what? You're just doing what you were doing 10 years ago then. That's not a viable path forward either.