Tom Hanks says moviegoers are no longer interested in VFX spectacles and are returning to good storytelling.
Audiences have always been interested in good storytelling. The reason the MCU took off was because it told good stories. The problem is that the stories have become too formulaic or half-baked.
People showed up for Deadpool and Wolverine, so the issue isn’t about comic book movies.
EDIT: My comment about D&W isn’t meant to hold it up as an example of good storytelling. As I said, the stories have become formulaic. My mentioning of it is meant to point out that many comic book movies succeed despite mediocre storytelling. You can’t say “audiences are tired of comic book movies” when many are still clearly successful.
Ah good, a Marvel movie! I wonder what will happen?
- Super cool opening number showing how awesome it is
- Baddy makes huge entrance and introduces themselves to the protagonist
- Who is this guy? Let’s get some backstory
- Funny cameo
- First fight with baddy, which is lost
- Self reflection, pump up talk, You’re the god of thunder not the god of hammers, I’m taking the suit back, etc etc
- Huge baddy fight which is awesome, optional expensive background music
- Quick wrap up with slight cliffhanger for sequel
Ah that was fun, did it feel similar to <<insert any other recent marvel movie>> though?
(And I say this as someone who loved the marvel movies, up until endgame, but everything since phase 3 has followed this pattern very closely)
Don’t forget how the bad guy is just a bigger, badder version of the hero.
I hate how we can’t just have villains anymore. It’s either a future corrupted version of our current hero, or we spend about a third of the runtime making our villains relatable so people can be upset when the consequences finally catch up to them.
Imo we don’t need relatable villains, which is ironic because I used to think being evil for the sake of being evil was annoying, until it went away.
IW killed it, it broke us completely.
Endgame was expurgation, but we’re still so overloaded, I think the only thing even remotely interesting to me has been loki. And that’s just because tom h is the most charming thing to exist.
I’d say hype and seeing Hugh Jackman again was what carried D&W, not really the storytelling. When you peel away the character hype and humor, the story was actually pretty bland.
D&W was two hours of pure fanservice. The story was extremely forgettable and I think that was intentional.
Are you suggesting that Deadpool vs Wolverine is an example of good storytelling?
Edit: I found it to be entertaining enough, I expected only fan service, and I’m glad I kept it at that. But story wise? I cannot think of a marvel movie that was worse in that regard. It didn’t need to, of course… I just did a double take at this being used as an example for a good story. The borderline omnipotent and omniscient antagonist wants to destroy the universe because someone relatively unimportant didn’t keep their word? groan.
In context of this conversation Deadpool vs Wolverine would be storytelling of storytelling. Great examples are all the breaking of the forth wall and exploration of tangential stories or actors that had short lives or never made it off a writers page. It was less a single cohesive story and more a moving about storytelling.
I just have to chime in to say that Godzilla Minus One is a masterpiece in terms of story telling and VFX. You don’t have to be a fan of Godzilla or anything in particular, this movie is 10/10 in all categories. Blew my fucking mind!
I like VFX … what I don’t like is the monotonous repetitive stories from comic book movies
- intro of hero
- hero is attacked by villain
- villain wins and is more powerful
- hero fights back but loses
- villain is winning
- hero fights back again … wins at the last possible moment
- everyone lives happily ever after
Having just bombed in an almost solely VFX production, this man knows what he’s talking about
That “just bombed” is doing some very heavy lifting here, considering that Polar Express was released 20 years ago.
I feel like quality is severely underestimated here. Everybody now has 1-tap access to aggregate reviews from seasoned reviewers and regular audiences. When a movie sucks, everyone finds out and your marketing budget suddenly means nothing.
Good movies aren’t guaranteed to make a profit, but in 2024, bad ones are pretty much guaranteed not to. This is completely independent of a single element like VFX.
