Well, first of all you can't complain [that a movie is bad] if you don't watch it is an entirely normal response. Why should anyone care what you think about a movie you haven't even seen? You can be totally disinterested based on behind the scenes factors. You can complain that a franchise you like(d) has chosen to go in a direction you're not interested in. But when the conversation is about the movie itself, why would you waste your time arguing about something you hate the very idea of so much you refuse to watch it, and why would anyone listen to any argument coming from someone who wants to judge something without giving it any chance at all? There is no reward for making uninformed judgements and no value in reading them. Secondly, 'Why watch if you don't like it?' is not actually an argument I can ever recall being applied to a movie discussion off the top of my head. It generally comes up in tv discussions as a result of someone making the same complaints over and over again for a whole season or multiple seasons, which understandably leads to people starting to feel fed up with someone bringing up the same things over and over again. And as understandable as that response often is, I've also always disagreed with the sentiment precisely because people do have the right to their own opinion and their own determination of when (if ever) enough is enough and they're ready to stop watching. Even if someone wants to watch something purely to justify their opinion - which will inevitably and not entirely strangely lead to some people questioning why anyone would choose to do that - it's still entirely their right and nobody else's business. In any case, that is entirely irrelevant to the point. No one is demanding that everyone must watch everything. 'Why watch it if you knew you wouldn't like it' is not telling anyone to watch anything. And finally, the idea that the concept of only judging and arguing about the quality of things you've actually watched naturally leads to nothing but appreciation threads is hilariously naive. Watching something you're genuinely interested in, maybe even highly excited about, in no way guarantees you'll actually like it. In fact high expectations lead to major disappointment as often as not. And there is no movie police to stop you from watching a movie you're not interested in. If you put in the time to actually be informed on the subject, then your opinion is just as valuable as anyone else's (with obvious caveats regarding specific technical expertise). None of that says anything about the movie itself. Just about your level of interest and expectations. If that were even remotely useful to judge an actual movie itself, then it would be basically impossible for the same person/franchise to make both good and bad movies which is just factually ridiculous. Picard didn't turn anyone against standalone episodes. If you want to blame a show for that, try the Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, etc. People turned against episodic tv long before Picard was even conceived. But it was really more of a cultural shift than anything traceable to any particular series. I don't care if you choose not to watch a show because you think it looks obviously terrible. Neither does anyone else. If you try to tell me that a show you haven't seen is 'obviously terrible' I will generally ignore your obviously baseless opinion, as will most everyone else except those who feel like arguing for the sake of arguing at that particular point in time. An opinion on whether a movie or show is worth your time or money is fundamentally not the same thing as a actual judgement about the quality of the movie. If you haven't seen the movie, what you have is not a genuine judgement of the film that is in any way worth discussing. It's just you making shit up in your head, regardless of how unfunny the trailer was or how much you hated the director's last film or can't stand the lead actor's face. There's nothing wrong with that. Everyone rejects all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons. It's basic time management as well as the fundamental basis of being able to choose one thing over another without spreadsheets and focus groups. But most of us don't feel compelled to pretend our gut feelings and arbitrary choices are even remotely comparable to an informed opinion from someone who actually knows the subject. And trailers are literally pure marketing. Half the time they deliberately paint the movie as something very different from what it actually is just because someone thinks it'll be easier to sell that way. Marvel has even inserted a sequence into a trailer which was not only not in the film but actually the exact opposite of what happened in the film purely for the sake of combating spoilers.
Well, great! Thanks for giving me your tacit permission to make my own choices! And, when exactly did you get elected the spokesperson for "anyone else?" And I shall respond to your obviously ignorant assessment of my opinion by demanding to see the credentials that give you the authority to declare opinions "baseless!" Well, there you go again. Really, was it a tough election or did you run unopposed? True, but as I alluded to in our last conversation, just because the concepts are different doesn't mean they can't work in conjunction. You can decide a movie or show isn't worth your time, you can judge a movie or show without seeing it, and you can decide the movie or show is not worth your time based on your preliminary judgment of the quality of the project. I know, shocking but true. Seriously, sez who? Exactly what governmental body handed down the ruling that the validity of your judgment of a project is related to your attendance? Not if I have a trailer to evaluate. That would be the studio making up shit in it's head. What if the movie's supposed to be a comedy? Directors' careers are made or broken based mostly on the success of their previous films. Making a judgment call based on that information makes me no better or worse than the average studio exec. If I don't like the lead actor's face, I'm not going to sit down in a dark room with the great unwashed staring at the face for two hours or more. Again, thanks for your permission! So, the opinions of Film Critics and Film School Students are more valid than the opinions of fans that actually sustain studios with their money. Got it. All true, but the purpose, no matter what machinations are included, is to get butts in theatre seats and remotes clicking on specific channels...and they contain more than enough information to make an immediate judgment call on the quality of what creators want you to see.
All I meant, is that the hardcore fans are often times so obsessed with the fact that things are different, that they aren't actually considering whether or not those changes make things better or worse. The fact of the matter is that when you are changing mediums and creators, there are changes that are pretty much going to need to be made, especially if you're dealing if you're dealing with an older property that might not be entirely politically correct today. Yes, sometimes those changes are unnecessary and hurt the story, but there are a lot of times where those changes have improved things, like giving some characters more depth, or adding interesting new layers to the story. People can not like a behavior and prefer other people not do it, even if there is no law against it. Technically it does hurt the show since they have lost at least one potential viewer, and possibly more if you talk other people out of watching it. There is a difference between saying you are not interested in something, and saying something is bad. Yes, trailers are made to try to get you to see a movie, and you can tell from a trailer if it's interests you, but you cannot say if a movie is entirely good or bad based solely on the trailer. There are a lot of movies I haven't seen because the trailer didn't interest me, but I am not about to argue with people about if it was good or bad, because I do not know, all I know is that I didn't like what I saw in the trailer. And there have been times where the trailer didn't really interest me much, but then when I heard people talking about how good it was, or heard about how there was a lot of really good stuff that wasn't in the trailer, and that led me to give it a try and I really enjoyed it.
This "basic business sense" has created a culture of entitlement that gives customers license to engage in verbal and emotional abuse without consequences. It's horrible and no business should accept it.
Trailers lie. Sometimes horribly. (See: Bridge to Terabithia) Judging a movie off a trailer is like judging a book for its cover - if it makes you interested, great! But you still don't know if it's gonna be any good.
You literally asked and I said I don't care. That's not 'tacit permission'. It's answering your own question. If you openly state you're judging things you haven't watched, then there's nothing ignorant about my assessment. You're admitting your total lack of basic knowledge up front. As for my 'election', people are free to jump in and tell me I'm wrong. I'm more than willing to change my assessment of what most people think if there's actual evidence against it. So far you're the one that seems to be at odds with basically everyone in this conversation. You *can* do anything. You can judge the quality of a movie based on what day of the week you learned it existed, if that's something you want to do. It doesn't mean your judgement isn't totally worthless. What governmental bodies are you imagining that have authority over anything like this? I'm talking about the most basic principles of knowledge and discovery. IE, judgements have to be based on *evidence* to be at all valuable. A judgement that is not based on evidence is not a judgement. It's just bias. Well, firstly the studio doesn't actually make the trailer and secondly the trailer is not the movie. An ad is not a product. Interest does not prove or disprove quality. Period. What if the trailer editor butchered the jokes? Or didn't want to put the best jokes in the trailer? Or was just generally incompetent in a way the movie makers themselves actually weren't? Once again you're comparing completely different things. Executives are making judgements about who to trust to make things that they hope will be good. They're not making judgements about whether a finished product actually is good or not (except when they choose to dump something or give it extra promotion, which are actions that typically come *after* they've seen at least a version of the film). Of course not. I literally said everyone makes these sort of decisions. I, and others, just have the common decency to admit there's a difference between me not liking an actor's face and a movie actually being a bad movie. Yes or no, depending on the subject. If someone is having a debate about the technical aspects of moviemaking and you have no knowledge about the technical aspects of moviemaking then your opinion pretty obviously isn't worth as much. If someone is having a debate about whether a movie is good or fun or memorable, then anyone who has seen the movie has all the information they need to form an informed opinion. And anyone who hasn't does not. Which is still entirely irrelevant to whether the actual movie is good. And again, the creators usually have no input at all about how the trailers are put together, which scenes are used, how they're edited together (often in ways that have nothing to do with their actual position/effect in the film), what music is put over them, whether they give away too much information thereby undermining the journey of the actual film, whether they try to make a drama look like a comedy or vice verse, etc. All of those decisions are given over almost entirely to marketing people who don't give a damn about anything other than trying to catch people's attention by any means necessary, even if the means sometimes cause people to turn against the film after watching it because they expected something completely different. Trailers are ads. Trying to judge the quality of a movie by watching a trailer is exactly as stupid as trying to judge the quality of a razor by looking at a bus ad or a tv commercial. That doesn't mean anyone is stupid for getting turned off by an ad. Marketing is a double-edged sword, and most products have so much competition that you couldn't meaningfully compare *every* option even if you wanted to (and we are obviously never under any obligation to want to compare every possible option anyway). What it does mean is that insisting a product is 'clearly' good or 'clearly' bad on the basis of nothing but an ad or a general dislike for its color scheme or because you had a bad experience with a different product is basically tantamount to magical thinking. You have no reliable evidence at all about the actual product you're judging, yet you believe indisputably that you know what it is and isn't.
I don't think fandoms have universal consensus, even if it seems that the majority have a particular viewpoint about any given upcoming release. So some of the fans will turn out to be right and some will turn out to be wrong. Kor
Okay, but when you get to the point that, in your evaluation, the changes are more unnecessary than beneficial, you're likely to push back, and the most immediate way is to complain about the changes in and boycott the next project, and far too many intellectual fans respond to the pushback by deriding and insulting the intelligence of the fans doing the pushing. That's wrong, whether you've seen the freaking movie or not. Fair enough. That is literally not my problem. It's the job of the studio's marketing department to entice me to watch. If they can't, it's on them. If my thumbs-down take is more persuasive with others than the marketing material, that's multipally on them. And I'll say it again: Just because the concepts are different doesn't mean they can't work in conjunction. It's entirely possible to decide that you're not interested in something because you think it's bad, and say so. Sure you can. People have done it for ages. And that's more than enough information to make a final determination. Trailers play to your instincts. There 's no problem in trusting them and saying so. Me too, but that's rare in my experience. It's the exception to the rule, not the rule. The problem is not accepting it tends to create enterprises with managers and employees that display the same type of abusive entitlement, where they look down on and abuse even the most innocent customers and expect to be paid anyway. In my life I've been on both sides of the counter. The assholes on both sides should face consequences, but that requires standards of behavior. Customers as a whole won't establish one, so it's up to business to make the first concession. "The Customer is Always Right" is that concession. (cracks knuckles) Here we go... You didn't stop with "I don't care." You said "I don't care, but you're an idiot anyway." That's the short version. For the full version, read your own damn post. (sigh) The trailers and promotional materials are the basic knowledge, and I really find it fascinating how you can actively ignore them or another's assessment of them just so you can tell people "I'm smarter than you cause I saw a movie and you didn't." I don't see what you get outta that other than you spent money I saved for more important stuff. Real brilliant, dude! Ooh! Before I answer, funny story! See, I was around when Rudy Giuliani was the Mayor of New York City. It was a big deal at the time because not only was he the first Republican mayor of the city in ages, 9/11 happened toward the end of his second term. Now, every now and then my siblings and I risk discussing politics with each other, and one evening my brother and I got to talking about Giuliani. My brother, a die hard liberal, had a civil service job that was effected by Giuliani's policies, so he wasn't exactly a fan. At one point, when I mentioned Giuliani's popularity, he balked, saying "Everybody I know hates Giuliani!" I didn't have the heart to mention to him that if Giuliani was elected twice in a city with a population of eight million people, "Everybody he knows" was not a valid cross section of the NYC voting public And, Bubbles, "everybody in this conversation" is not a valid cross section of the general movie going public. It's an echo chamber, a very small one by comparison to the whole...and I consider it a point of pride to represent the dissenting opinion. And I'm still waiting for you to provide documentation establishing your authority to judge the worth of any opinion I have. Yeah, but I'm pretty sure the point is to consider all the available evidence, which includes trailers and promotional materials. Saying that the only valid evidence is the movie itself dismisses the other things out of hand and, frankly, is just as biased. Doesn't matter. The point of the trailer is to sell the movie the scenes are cut from. Doesn't matter. The purpose of the ad is to sell the product. It doesn't have to. It's not a court of law. It's a fucking movie. Literally none of that is my problem. If the trailer is cut in a way the creators don't like, it is up to them to correct it before it's released to the public. The word "hope" is not in the average studio exec's vocabulary. The Movie Industry is a speculator's market, and the most timid speculators won't even greenlight a film project unless they're sure the film will be "good" (IE profitable) and the only data they have to go on is often that available before a word of the script is even written. Translation: "I'm better than you cause I'll watch a whole movie starring someone I hate." Whatever, man. I spent my money on a book, There you go, ignoring evidence again... See above... I already addressed this after your first comment on trailers and ads. Do you think I'll say something different just because you're more long-winded saying the exact same thing?
I can't even follow most of what you're upset about. Wow, it turns out you can just put words in any order! This is pure nonsense. Rejecting the idea that the customer is always right does not inherently lead to abusive behavior from retailers. No, that's just enabling abuse. There are plenty of ways to establish standards of acceptable behavior without embracing the idea that the other guy can do no wrong.
Judging a film by the trailer is valid. But it is also fairly inaccurate to state the full quality of a film when things are edited poorly in a trailer. I put zero stock in trailers, and even less stock in fan opinion. Fans are their own worst enemy largely due to the fact that all of us have an opinion on the proper way a product should be done.
The often negative treatment of media patrons at the hands of media producers. Obviously you're not as upset. As you're about to demonstrate. I didn't say "inherently." I said "tends to." Of course rejecting the policy is not like flipping a switch from "Asshole Customers" to "Asshole Employees." That said, employees are just as human as customers, subject to the same temptations, and there are plenty of employees that interpret "The customer is not always right" as "Fuck them! Just give me my paycheck, Boomer!" I know. I've met them. Did you miss the part in my post where I said the statement is not to be taken literally? Nobody's actually saying the customer can do no wrong, and, of course, establishments can enact several policies to govern the actions of their patrons, but when it gets to point where your rules take the incentive out of frequenting your business, customers won't. But at least you're not enabling abuse anymore. Good for you.
Then it should not be said at all. That is what "the customer is always right" means. You can't say that and not mean that the customer can do no wrong. Which is a ridiculous concern to hold.
So you've also never heard of a "figure of speech." Got it. In a market economy??? The fuck it's ridiculous, especially when some people feed their families with the money they make running small businesses. You wondered what I'm upset about?? What the fuck is your problem'
Yes, the idea that not kowtowing to the customer at all times realistically means risking becoming so unfriendly to customers that you'll lose business is a ridiculous concern to hold. This is clearly a very proportional response to my post.