It wouldn’t be Hollywood without a staggering amount of clichés. What was once groundbreaking cinema over 30 years ago are now tiresome tropes that have been through the wringer one too many times. It’s long been debated whether filmmaking peaked in the ’80s and ’90s or if the 2000s are just getting started. Either way, films have evolved over centuries, spanning all the way back to 1885 when the first-ever motion picture production was shown to a paying audience. You’d think in all that time that we’d have moved on from the same-old, but here we are — in 2023 — deciding which clichés are done to death.
In the last decade or so, we’ve found new and creative storytelling methods, be it through visuals, sound, light or theatrical performance. There always seems to be some technique discovered that becomes the norm for every like-minded film of that particular genre, even if it isn’t original in the slightest, but rather derived from more historical approaches. There have been breakthroughs in cinema, no doubt about it, but what’s mind-boggling in 2023 will be nothing but overrated by the time 2032 rolls around. And Reddit agrees, it would seem.
Some of the cliche’s discussed in the thread include extremely and abnormally dark cinematography, naked old people in horror flicks, too many multiverses to count, and random pop culture conversations inserted into mainstream movies to make them more relevant. If we consider Matt Reeves’ The Batman, there’s your prime example of dark cinematography to the extreme, which wasn’t a smart decision given that the main superhero and femme fatale both wear all-black ensembles. Then, there’s the naked elders randomly inserted into a slasher, such as Pearl in Ti West’s X or the shapeshifting antics of ‘IT’ in the Stephen King adaptation of the same name. Let’s bury that trope with The Visit, where it belongs.
As for multiverses, we need not go further than mentioning the MCU, which has become decidedly ridiculous in its 10+ years on the big screen. That nonsense should have died with Iron Man in Avengers: Endgame. Does the DCU really need a multiverse too? And what about this supposed ‘horror multiverse’ we’re getting? Wait, fine. That actually sounds pretty cool, so that one can stay.
And there’s the ‘random pop culture discussions,’ for which franchises like Scream are so infamously known. After 2022’s ‘requel,’ you’d think Radio Silence would take a break from the self-referential approach, but no, it wouldn’t be Scream without it nowadays. It isn’t enough to have Ghostface terrorize New York City, we also have to mention how he terrorized Woodsboro for five other films before that. If we don’t, we’re not mainstream. No!
By now, you probably get the picture. There’s so many more clichés out there, but we’d estimate in the last five years or so, these ones are the most prominent by a long shot. Sadly, we’ll have to wait another 10 or 20 years before we can safely confirm that these are indeed clichés.
