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excitement...

It wasn't my post, but my favorite film of the last decade.. bombed.. that would be Cloud Atlas. It was a genre/actor/ storytelling mindbender

None of my favorites over the past decade were box office successes either, in fact they barely made a dent, and they too skewed on the eclectic side: Super, Predestination and Her. But then again, I'm not a kid anymore so what excites me are things that are a little more complex than what A New Hope brought. Super has a perfect ending. Predestination has a tour de force performance by Sarah Snook that makes one of the ickiest Heinlein stories endearing, and Her is the execution of a science fiction idea done to perfection.
 
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Maybe people's expectations are too high?
They are. The common reaction I get to the ST's performance is "Well, it's SW it should be the biggest thing ever!"

Except, it literally can't be. Star Wars, the original, was a completely new thing, barely made and looked down upon by many in the film industry as it was being produced. Now, such genre type films are encouraged and expected. SW is no longer the Big Wookiee On Campus and yet some fans expect it to be treated as such. It's completely unreasonable.

I won't disagree. But, IMO, it took Star Wars all of 2 films to start repeating itself, and therin lies the problem. Most people can agree on the 2 best SW films, the first 2 ever made. There's little consensus on #3, and I see that as a problem.
It is, largely because Lucas is good at broad strokes, but the movement of the actually story is more challenging. I love SW, and ROTJ but I'll not ignore that "just rebuild it" is repetitive.

Ultimately, SW could only go so big and then it would a part of the market. Not good; not bad. It just is.
 
The modern blockbuster owes Star Wars a lot. Sure, Jaws was really the start of the Blockbuster, but Star Wars moved it to the next level. A lot of that comes to fruition to the general feel of the films and the excitement that FSM recognizes is definitely a big part of that. However, I also think, in some ways, Star Wars is to blame for the current state of cinema. I think that the "faster and more intense" film making that Lucas started within Star Wars, made most films continue that direction. Now, we have unbelievably quick cuts and any world and character building goes by the wayside to be replaced by adrenaline.

A prime example is introduction to the Enterprise in Star Trek: The Motion Picture vs. Star Trek (2009).

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Now, say what you will about TMP as a whole, but that sequence is a marvelous setpiece, showing off the E in a way we've never seen it before. The same can be said about 2009, but it is just a few quick shots. I personally find TMP (while long), a more intriguing sequence. And I like 2009 in general too. But I feel there could be a midway point. In any case, I think that looking at this through the lens of energy and excitement though, I think it does come back to the corporate machine needing to get films out the door to meet a release date as opposed to crafting a good piece of cinema and a part of it comes to that excitement that we as an audience crave.
 
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^ Well, the TMP Enterprise porn sequence is kind of a whole thing onto itself. I don't know what else could possibly compare with it.

EDIT: Maybe Black Hole from the same time period...
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^ Well, the TMP Enterprise porn sequence is kind of a whole thing onto itself. I don't know what else could possibly compare with it.

I would compare it to Kubrick's treatment of the Overlook Hotel, Spielberg's of his end scene of Close Encounters, Lean's lovingly rendered sweeps of the Arabian desert in Lawrence of Arabia and De Mille's take of the splitting of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments.
 
Said it before, but keep in mind how used to Star Wars we all are. I was in school when the special editions were released in the late 90s and people who had barely heard of these movies still went wild for them. I know things have changed a lot since then and now, but they'd also changed a lot between 1977 and 1997.

Not saying changing times isn't part of the problem, but most people who are even just casual fans have now seen the originals more than once or twice, and I'm betting most people on this thread have seen them considerably more than that. We know every twist and every line of dialogue almost by heart, so of course much of the impact is gone. I no longer laugh at shows I've watched a few times because I know all the jokes - that doesn't mean they aren't funny.

Worse, these movies have now been bogged down by pop culture and additional projects. Yoda has been used to sell everything from cereal to phone contracts, and we've seen Vader competing in dance offs at Disneyworld. I know some people like the Star Wars movies and shows that have come out since the originals, but I'm not sure anyone likes all of them, so we've all been massively overexposed to this brand to the point that it's honestly become a little annoying.

Now compare Star Wars to Indiana Jones. Obviously Jones didn't rely as much on special effects, but it's still very much a movie of its time that remains exceptionally exciting today, and Raiders was only released a few years after ANH. The major difference is that property has been (mostly) left alone.
 
Can you provide a few examples? I'm not an active film-watcher.
Just a few movies over the last few years that I really enjoy that were not part of preexisting franchises that bombed at the box office.
The Last Witch Hunter
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The Book of Eli
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It wasn't my post, but my favorite film of the last decade.. bombed.. that would be Cloud Atlas. It was a genre/actor/ storytelling mindbender

Abominable
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Spies in Disguise
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It wasn't my post, but my favorite film of the last decade.. bombed.. that would be Cloud Atlas. It was a genre/actor/ storytelling mindbender
Cloud Atlas was based on a novel, so I don't count it as an original IP.
 
Hollywood has changed in terms of output and there simply isn't the cushion that was available in the 70s and 80s. Star Wars was considered a lark-it was there to prop up 20th Century Fox if "Damnation Alley" underperformed. Underperformance now means a lot more with a lot less cushion.

I don't know much about the film industry but this sounds like what may have ruined the film industry in the last 30 years or so.
 
I don't know much about the film industry but this sounds like what may have ruined the film industry in the last 30 years or so.
This is exactly what ruined the film industry. There is simply not the emphasis on output because they cannot take as many risks.
 
This is exactly what ruined the film industry. There is simply not the emphasis on output because they cannot take as many risks.

The summer of 1982: Star Trek II: TWOK, The Thing, Poltergeist, Conan The Barbarian, The Road Warrior, Blade Runner, Tron, ET, Rocky III, An Officer And A Gentleman, The Sword and the Sorcerer...
 
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