Does Hollywood Really Have A Fatigue Problem?

Why are box office numbers so low? Ask the mainstream entertainment media and sites who wish they were and you’ll usually hear that some kind of “fatigue” is responsible. Superhero fatigue, shared universe fatigue, poor writing fatigue, this or that performer fatigue, activism fatigue, nostalgia fatigue…and of course the solution is “make new, original properties” followed by complaints that those new, original properties aren’t drawing a crowd in.

Strange. I never heard of Western fatigue, spy movie fatigue, action movie fatigue, romantic comedy fatigue…genres that are now shadows of their former selves. It’s always the superheroes, science fiction, and fantasy genres that apparently nobody wants and the directors and producers insist they have to be shelved in favor of the “better” movies. SEECA in action again. Blaming fatigue is a great way to not take responsibility for their own mistakes, and Hollywood right now is making a lot of mistakes. Even Netflix, a company whose man in charge has “kill the theatrical experience” on his bucket list, does better in theaters. Why?

Is there really fatigue out there, and what is it? How do we solve these alleged fatigue issues without losing the stuff that was working before the decriers of fatigue came along?

When Marvel Studios started in 2008, interesting around the time this blog started, superheroes were already in a slump. The X-Men movies had gone downhill and only so much of Sam Rami’s Spider-Man slippage in Spider-Man 3 the year prior can be blamed on Marvel insisting Venom be in there despite Rami, a supposed Spider-Fan (STILL not over organic web shooters), hated the character. Ang Lee’s take on the Hulk was a resounding “meh”. DC couldn’t keep a director on more than one Batman movie without giving them so much freedom they tanked their second film, while Superman had all but disappeared from the theater, Superman Returns making some questionable decisions in their alleged love letter to the first Donner Superman movie and the Salkind continuity. Making it a reunion movie, for starters.

So with Iron Man they wanted to be faithful to the comic depiction without being enslaved by the stories themselves. It not only worked, but set the stage for a series of beloved movies set in their Marvel Cinematic Universe. Everything was going well for Marvel. The merch was making money, fans were happy, and moviegoers had movies they could enjoy.

Then Disney took over.

Remember when this was cool? It still is. The stuff after it went downhill.

People now in charge hated comic books and possibly hated superheroes. The adaptation successes became failures as Marvel now just wanted the brand names, thinking they alone would bring people into their “improved” versions of characters, fueled by their own narcissism. Ramming movies out there faster than the special effects houses didn’t help, and now (I plan to get to this sometime this week) they’re filming movies without a script. Not that it matters with nearly full movie reshoots because nobody finalized the script until after half the thing was done. It’s like they believe, in their low opinion of their own audiences, that they can just jangle keys and entertain the crowd. Even babies get tired of that eventually.

“Superhero fatigue” is a lie. What Marvel Studios should be doing, and Kevin Feige won’t because he and his producers doesn’t care about what he’s adapting and just wants to regain his “glory days” without doing the things that brought them success while Bob Iger still pushes Disney+ as the most important thing they’re working on. DC isn’t doing much better. Zack Snyder doesn’t believe in superheroes, but Warner Brothers made the mistake of assuming someone with that attitude was the right choice simply because Watchmen, a movie that shared his negative views on superheroes because Alan Moore does, did so well in the theaters. His grimdark take on the regular DC universe was replaced by James Gunn, who is more interested in being wacky and keeping his wife and brother in movies and continuity than doing a proper DC adaptation. You can’t claim “fatigue” about something fans aren’t getting: superheroes being heroic, saving the day, and looking cool doing it.

An easy solution would be finding creatives who do care about the comics, putting these other producers, directors, and studio heads on the original indie stuff they clearly really want to be making, and letting people who care about what they’re working on take over. If they can’t find them, then stop making those movies. Chasing your audience away with stuff they don’t want and then calling them evil for not falling for the “diversity shields” keeping them from doing honest reviews (and being full of stereotypes that annoy the group you’re trying to pander to) won’t work anymore. So you’re training people to not want to watch these genres. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d almost say that’s the goal.

This is nothing new out of studios. The terms “mockstalgia” and “notstalgia” exist on this site for a reason. Studios see the brand is popular and put it in the hands of people who don’t know or care why it’s popular. The result is something unrecognizable from the source material. So you get bad movies even from good creators who are the wrong fit for a project. Quentin Tarantino makes studios money on the stuff he’s good at, but if you’ve ever heard what he wanted to do with Star Trek you’d know he isn’t a good fit because what he wanted to make bears no resemblance to the show. Superman Lives was a series of bad ideas by people who didn’t understand Superman and a hairdresser turned movie producer who was obsessed with giant spiders. Getting it wrong goes all the way back to the Captain America serials who had “better ideas” about depicting Steve Rogers. It’s not just superheroes and sci-fi. Baywatch, CHIPS, The Fall Guy, Jem, SWAT, The A-Team–all had movies that were either a mocking insult of the source material or only shared the names in the hopes of suckering people into the theaters to see how much better they were than the creators of the beloved source material that gave them something in the first place.

What people are tired of is seeing things they love, loved in the past, or even themselves treated like garbage who must bow to “my superior story”, stereotypes used as lazy “representation”, and then being told they have bad tastes or are outright bigots for not supporting their work because there couldn’t possibly be another reason, like they were either the wrong fit for this project…or unfit for any project in some cases. It doesn’t help that the moviegoing experience has become terrible. The 2020 lockdowns, whether you agree with them or not, still had consequences. People had to go through older movies and found them better, and in some cases more accurate to the source material. Or they just went back to the source material and were reminded why they loved those IPs so much, and they did it in a place with comfortable seating, the ability to pause, and without someone loudly riffing the movie or talking on their phones. There’s also a lesser chance of being shot. A mall here in Connecticut has had multiple shootings just this summer, and there’s a movie theater on top. The snacks are also not as expensive, if you don’t just set up TV trays and have dinner while watching a movie, or setting up an outdoor theater on a cool summer’s night. Between prices and jackasses the theatrical experience just isn’t as fun as it used to be, and taking a huge amount of time when they couldn’t take part in it did a lot to show people they might not need it.

What’s really impossible is thinking Pedro Pascal and the same small group of actors/actresses can become beloved by sheer repetition instead of the opposite. There’s your “fatigue”.

Trying to force people to like certain actors, characters, or genres, or hate certain characters and genres, also doesn’t help. This has never worked. All the fans of the characters and genres simply know what you think of them and the things they like. They’re catching wise and at some point grabbing a new property and taking everything that made it popular away from it isn’t going to last. It’s already failing more and more to the point fans want Hollywood to stop making those properties until they learn to do it right. That certainly plays into the aforementioned conspiracy, that they’re doing it on purpose to kill the stuff they don’t like, because they get to decide what is or isn’t made, not the fans who ignore your stuff as well because it still suffers from bad storytelling, social pandering, and not being the genres they enjoy.

If studios gave the right assignments to the right people, or alternately if more directors and producers saw adaptation as a challenge to get right and show they can do something original (preferably both would happen), if those same studios remembered that taking risks is what got them where they are and found a way to set up a risk budget or something on newer and smaller movies while still giving fans more of the stuff they already love,getting those audiences to trust you’ll do it justice–in short, if they proved they cared about what they’re producing and the people they should be producing it for rather than chasing the approval of the cool kids, maybe there wouldn’t be so much “fatigue”. Also they need to give audiences a good reason to return to theaters beyond the director’s bias and nostalgia, and recapture or innovate the experiences that set theaters apart from home theaters. I don’t see any of this happening anytime soon. Gimmicks seem to be all they have, and you can’t trick people who no longer trust you forever. Meanwhile, old movies being released are better received sometimes than the new stuff because they were made by people who care and it showed in their work. The baby wants to do something else now, and treating your audience like babies was the biggest mistake.