Franchises: A Controversial Conclusion

So do I. I read only yesterday on another board that stream of consciousness writing is a good way not to be mistaken for an AI c/p post or a bot.

Thinking a bit more about M:I, I think one of the things that absolutely kills many big-budget franchises is what I call over-the-topnitis. You start trying to go totally over-the-top with the action, the stunts and the gigantic set-ups, and make each movie bigger than the last.. but at some point, you reach the point of diminishing returns.

It had also happened to F&F and 007, imho. At some point I just felt numbed by how gigantic and over-the-top they were all trying to be. The last F&F ended with a cliffhanger, and yet I am not at all curious to see how it turns out. I can't deny the F&F movies were deliciously entertaining for a while, but at some point, it reached overkill.

I think there's a difference between an epic movie and a movie that feels like it overdosed on steroids... studios have to be better at telling the difference

Seems like it, but (some) true artists in the past have been given (limited) room to operate, simply because they're better at making art. From time to time, the value of artistic invention registers as an undeniable instrumentality. Sometimes those little sh**s need to be reminded that you need to give Wonka room to operate.


In our time, however, the balance has been thrown off by

1. The sheer demand for content (all of those streaming services that consumers expect to be a bottomless well of unique content which justifies paying for access).
   
2. Culture war normativity warping the writing of characters and premises and plots. The careful check-boxing which results is a strikingly beige diversity in which "the message" mangles the product and young writers who think that moral orthodoxy is more important actual craftsmanship.
   
3. Algorithmic prosthetics which are taking us into the age of (literally) robotic storytelling. If it so frequently seems like the story is being written by an Chatbot, at some point you have to suspect that, in whole or in part, it actually is.

HYPOTHESIS: We will know when AGI has truly arrived when the story-telling dramatically improves. When Screenwriter-GPT can produce The Godfather within three seconds of being given the prompt we really will have a bottomless well of the content we want. But should we want this...

I agree with most of what you're saying here.
The "demand for content" part certainly resonates with me. On both the part of the consumer and the producer. Everything must be set up to be sequelable should it hit. And if it doesn't seem like it, no problem, we'll do a hand-wave retcon to make it work. I find it a bit exhausting. While I did really enjoy going back into the MCU over and over for a while, it ran it outta gas, and probably I'll never fully tire of Bond films but they do wear out their welcomes after about three films of each version of the character. I'd really like to see more focus on one-off properties rather than keeping John Rambo alive.
One slight pushback I would say on the Culture War stuff, and I will promise Yoda now to keep this directly related to movies, but I find that people who are easily upset about that stuff put a lot more weight on it than others. And believe me, I am sick of it as anyone but I see it as having two sides, not one, as many people do. But, to the point, I find myself not really focusing on it anymore because I don't care that much - it doesn't bother me or make me excited for it or really effect me at all; and because I'm not focused on it, it doesn't distort things much if at all for me. It just is the story. Oh that character's gay, that character's a woman instead of a dude... whatever, how's this movie gonna go? I feel like the distortion that degree of distortion it causes is directly related to the viewer's sensitivity to it.
I don't actually know what Algorithmic Prosthetics is but I am willing to learn.
And, am I just an old fuddy-duddy that I don't want AGI to be able to write The Godfather?

I don't mean to say that such writing is bad (morally), but merely artistically. Moreover, this is not about "sides." Godsploitation movies suffer from the same problem; they have to be so carefully constructed to support an orthodox conclusion. Or think of those old Hayes Code era shows where the good guys had to always win and the bad guys had to always lose. That's bad storytelling. It's predictable. It's boring. And we know it isn't true in all cases.

I agree, by the way, that it doesn't really matter so much if a character is male or female or gay or POC, so long as they're well written. If, however, that is your character's only (or primary) trait, that's not good. Human beings are complicated creatures. We do not so easily reduce simple demographic markers. If your character has no more depth than a video game character customization screen, if their justification/explanation/elaboration only compasses their character screen details, you haven't really written a character. And too much modern writing does this.

For me that is the fundamental argument against AI. I don't care if a computer can do it well. I don't even care if it can do it better and faster, or even if I can have an AI program devoted to catering to making only the type of movies I like, exclusively for me.


It doesn't mean anything if a computer is doing it. The reason it mattered in the first place is because a human did it. Because when a human did it, now we know what that human had to say or how they felt or what they were trying to inform us about...and that matters.



Who gives a shit what a computer has to say? **** computers.

I think a lot of people focus on the wrong end of the supply & demand equation. Many people are quick to blame producers, studios, or distributors, but sometimes I wonder if it isn't the consumer who should shoulder most of the blame (or is responsibility?).

When we, collectively, demand less of something, then over time that is going to have repercussions in the kinds of projects that are made.

If everyone in the world (or at least, say, substantially more than half) gave up watching any kind of filmed entertainment and chose to return to books, then a lot of producers would be out of business and the few that remained would have to dramatically scale back on production.

They're just going to give us more of what us (the masses) consistently demand more of. I know this is a bit of pointing out the obvious, but I just keep hearing a lot of conversations everywhere I go which seem to indicate that most people just blame the studios, the producers, the streamers, etc.

This is a two-way street, when we show we want more of something, they are going to try to give it to us ASAP. When we want less of something, then they will try something else.

Also, we are going to be seeing some major shifts in the kind of content that is created as the older generations age out of the "prime" audience segment. That is already happening and will probably accelerate in the next few years.

As for AI, don't rule out the possibility that it could help improve some projects. I know a very good and respected writer who is at a national publication and who has pointed out that getting AI assistance (as opposed to having AI just write everything for him), has helped him become a better writer. It does things like point out some things that may not be completely clear to some readers, suggests some additional details or references, and overall provides a number of suggestions which, if the writer decides to accept, could actually make for a better manuscript (or a better column, or a better story).

I don't think the story of humans and AI is going to be something that is completely black-and-white. There may be instances where some assistance from algorithms that can perform analysis and comparisons much faster than the human brain could certainly help us do things a little bit better. We also don't have to give up all control over everything that we have been doing on our own up to now. We can pick and choose the things where, honestly, algorithms can process information faster than our brains can.

I appreciate the sentiment. If we give up on the idea of attempting to connect with each other, we're lost. I've seen it reported that, for example, most commenters on the internet are already bots. There is an uncanny real-time audio chatbot that has emerged which I think would fool most people. We're now at the level of the movie HER and as disconnected as the younger generation is, I can see how such a bot might become their personal assistant, friend, life-coach, lover, mommy/daddy. Just about every App and service today has an AI attempting enter your user experience.

That stated, imagine a favorite film, a real concrete film that you have enjoyed and recommended for years. Now imagine, however implausibly, that it came out that this artwork was the result of an early DARPA research project into the Turing capability of generative AI. Do you still love the film? Does it still mean something to you? Do you still recommend it? This may sound like a flip hypothetical gotcha, but the day is fast-approaching when we're going to start learning that some well-received works of art are not of human origin (e.g., that painting that took first prize at a state fair a few years back).

I would still like it. I have currently seen artwork done by AI that I think is pretty great. But it just wouldn't matter in the same way. In the most important way.



And I'm not even entirely against the use of AI, if it was being used as a tool and not being the entire generator of content. But we all know how this is going to go. It's going to work out in spades for the creatively bankrupt idiots who are already running everything, and make everything even more difficult than it already is if you are an artist.

One thing that sometimes gets left out of discussions about AI and movies is the tantalising possibility that some day, AI could just cut out the middleman.

Joe Russo famously predicted this scenario a couple of years ago:

I’m sure for every person that wouldn’t want to use AI in this way, there could be many more who would jump at the chance….

It's funny. The word "artificial" means made by a human hand. Merriam-Webster gives us
What we're lamenting and agonizing about is the LOSS of artificiality. There is the natural (a beautiful sunset), the artificial (a beautiful painting of a sunset), and now the synthetic (a computer simulation of human artifice).

I think committed naturalists are slightly misanthropic as they see the "really real" inhering in nature (especially beauty) and they call for us to return to nature rather than abstract ourselves from it, because this is where the meaning and vitality really is (or so they say). This is a view in which humans are subordinate to and properly a part of a larger natural order. We're not so important or so clever, it is thought. Our attempts to supplant nature result in pollution, isolation, ugliness, and extinction. Thus we should supplicate ourselves to nature and live closer to the ground. Be apart of it, rather than above it with things of our own making. "Don't read about climbing a mountain. Climb the damned thing!".

The incursion of AI into the artificial feels like the loss of nature all over again. Here we were, happy with our apparent unique ability to create symbolically potent products, finding out that we're not so clever after all. A machine can guess. A machine can free-associate. A machine can follow a pattern and also shift it. A machine can B.S. with the best of us now. The rightful (natural?) order has been upended.

God may or may not be dead, but nature has caught a cold (welcome to the Anthropocene, but don't worry, she'll recover in a few hundred thousand years), and humans, quite concerningly, seem to be on the verge of extinction in terms of uniqueness, supremacy, relevance, and yes, existence. We're engineering gods is an gold rush/arms race to the singularity. Welcome to the death of man and the birth of the gods. Maybe the naturalists were right after all? Perhaps we should not have abandoned our pagan natural vitalism?

At any rate, I think you're right. Part of what we want out of art, or a function of art, is communication, and this involves communion with another human being. There is no meaning in a sunset. It's just a sunset. There is, however, symbolic meaning in some representations of sunsets, because the reveal to us the subjectivity of a fellow creature, opening the space for a brief intersubjective connection. That is where the magic is. That's where we beat isolation, loneliness, death, time and tide. A poem that is evocative after a thousand years is a shared subjective state that spans centuries. That is the sort of accomplishment which can only be achieved by artificial means and synthetic artworks will not offer us this connection. However, the trick of the Turing Test, the lesson, is that they don't really need to in order to have potency on the user-side. They just need to seem to be real for it to have presence on our end (although it must be owned that there is no more qualitative meaning behind a word salad generator's utterances than the "face on Mars" or squinting and seeing Jesus in your grilled cheese -- at least in those cases in which Jesus did not appear in your sandwich).

I haven't seen the 1977 nor the 2023 version of Nosferatu... actually, I think I was only vaguely aware the 2023 existed after watching Eggers, and the 1977 I had to go to wiki to find out what you were talking about. And while Eggers' version ultimately was a letdown for me for not really hitting as hard on the angle he approached it with, it was a new angle, and not one I reall seeing in a Dracula adaptation before. But we consider his a remake of Nosferatu even though it starts incorporating more of the plot from the novel into the movie (even if it is to undermine it)? I mean, I'd say, yes.

So, is it purely just changes from the book to the seminal movie that makes it the source material? I mean, I won't disagree, on some level, yes. But, and I think this is just my difference of opinion, I think if the subsequent film seems like it's treating the original adaptation as a seminal piece of art that it's interacting with it or is the reason it exists. Which is a vague standard and will probably just make it more complicated and unclear if something should be seen as a remake of the adaptation or just a subsequent adaptation, but that's the mentality I go with.

So, for example with Kaufman's, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I think because of the relative popularity of Siegel's 50's adaptation greatly overshadows the source story it was adaptated from, people will think of and interact with his film as the original material, which is why we think of Kafuman's version as a remake of Siegel's version. Where, we'd probably need some indication that Kaufman was really a lot more interested in the original story and that existed more in his mind's eye to consider it purely a subequent adaptation. We get into complicated grounds of classifications when the subsequent movie is clearly interacting with both to a high degree.

But pulling from an interview with Kaufman:
https://itcamefromblog.com/2019/01/2...ody-snatchers/

The interview also goes on his creative process on the film, and his thoughts about making it, and it feels clear to me that in terms of how his brain was working, the source material he was adapting was the 50s films (e.g. thoughts on how to update black and white to color). However, at the same time, I wouldn't not consider this an adaptation of the story (which, admittedly, I have never read).

The reason why Dracula, or Shakespeare (or Superman, or Spiderman) adaptations don't really register in the mind as a re-makes of earlier film adaptations, but rather subsequent adaptations of the source material, is because the written versions of their source materials looms large in the cultural zeitgeist and those sources are considered the ultimate text for what an adaptation is interacting with (especially Shakespeare where it usually feels more obvious that each adaptation of his work isn't inherently concerned with a previous adaptation of it). If another Catch-22 adaptation came out, I'd assume it was a subsequent adaptation rather than a remake of the 70s movie, just because I think the novel is more well known these days. The opposite for The Godfather (unless there appeared to be concerted effort to more similar to the novel, which, wouldn't be inconceivable if it was a TV series instead of a movie).

This also hasn't really gotten into the thorny issue of who the author/artist is. I used Kaufman above, but someone had to write the screenplay. And then if we're asking, "why does this movie exist," (and that is why that string of, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing, The Fly, and The Blob (I always forget Invaders from Mars here) get lumped together), after the success of IotBS, the studios were like, "which other sci-fi/horror movies from the 50s could we remake?" I don't think they were going, "which other sci-fi/horror stories/books could we adapt?". Though, we did an adaptation of Heinlen's The Puppermasters in the mid-90s, so maybe there was some spillover.

But that's just my stance on it.