At the end of the day, the movie business is about making money. However, it’s a lot easier to bring in the desired profits if the film in question happens to be entertaining enough to not just draw in an opening weekend audience, but keep bringing them in for weeks on end, something Top Gun: Maverick has managed in spectacular fashion this year.
On the other side of the coin are the transparently cynical projects that you can tell were precision-engineered in a boardroom just from watching them. You know the ones; there’s egregious product placement, A-list stars going through the motions with one eye on a paycheck, a workmanlike director that’s the definition of “a safe pair of hands”, a blandly inoffensive string of quips and action sequences, and on it goes.
However, fans will not stand for it any longer… at least, they won’t on the forums of Reddit. Taking Hollywood to task, cinephiles called out the most blatant examples of corporate cinema they can remember, and it’s hard to argue.
Space Jam: A New Legacy deservedly takes top honors at the time of writing, because it was nothing more than a two-hour promo for all the properties Warner Bros. has at its disposal. Netflix’s Red Notice also gets a mention, and the accusations are reinforced when you consider that almost every single criticism of the platform’s most-watched original movie ever can be slung at The Gray Man, too, almost as if the algorithm was dictating how the end product turned out.
Mac & Me and The Wizard are both feature-length ads for McDonald’s and Nintendo respectively, so they deserve to be shamed (as does The Emoji Movie), and it just goes to show how many projects are created without a single shred of creativity, even if it’s something we’ve gotten used to.
