A Critique of the Modern Audience: A Cultured Opinion
There was a time, in the not too distant past, when the marketing for art was in the name of the artist. Picasso, John Wayne, Michael Jackson. When they created something, the world watched. They expected greatness and thus accepted the work for what it was. They came in with an open mind, seeking to be entertained, not catered to.
The Bronze Age of Hollywood exploited this, with films relying heavily on the auteurs and actors to carry the box office much more so than the Intellectual Property itself. This shifted with the rise of the franchise; Hollywood began using the IP to bring financial success, effectively killing the movie star. I think Anthony Mackie put it best, saying, “There are no movie stars anymore. Like, Anthony Mackie isn’t a movie star. The Falcon is a movie star. Now you go see X-Men. The evolution of the superhero has meant the death of the movie star.” As a result of this, audiences began to expect certain things from their franchise films. You expect a Transformers to be bombastic and Bay-esque, a Marvel film to be goofy and exciting, a Batman to be gritty and realistic, for example. But this has led directly to the decline in studio risk in the past two decades. Audiences expect a certain kind of movie, and recoil violently from anything else.
Certainly the internet is to blame for some of this. When Batman (1989) released, there weren’t dozens of trailers being combed over by internet gurus. There was one theatrical trailer, a few TV spots, and word of mouth. Thus the audience knew little about the plot and tone of the film going in. Now, if you want to know what the new Spider-Man film is about (a full month before release, mind you), there are trailers and people breaking down the trailers, and leaks about the plot and the villains, and speculation about what it could be setting up. You would be hard-pressed to go into that movie without some preconceived notion of what it is going to be.
That preconceived notion has led to films becoming more formulaic, and the films that do break against those expectations review much less favorably and typically perform much worse than the films that don’t. Take two recent DC films for example: Joker: Folie a Deux and Supergirl. The former was a sequel to a very successful elseworlds project, and the latter was a spin-off of a very well-received Superman film. Joker (2019) worked well because it told a story no one had seen before; it was wholly original, and audiences didn’t know what to expect; thus, when they got the dark and Taxi Driver-esque film, they were open to it. But Joker ends with Arthur Fleck becoming the Joker, so when the sequel was announced, everyone assumed we would be getting the Clown Prince of Crime at the peak of his powers. Instead, it was a story of shared madness and how fame can feed delusion. Oh, and it was a musical. It bombed, was reviewed terribly, and has mostly been forgotten. But if you watch it blind, with no expectation, I maintain that it is a very good film, and a perfect follow-up to the first one. It’s the expectation of the audience that ruined it.
Supergirl is largely the same. When you think of a Supergirl movie set in the same universe as last year’s comic-booky and cartoonish Superman, you expect a comicbooky cartoon. Instead, what was delivered is a dark story about an orphaned girl who has no home to return to, learning to overcome her grief and bitterness to become something better. And also take down an intergalactic human trafficking ring. It’s a good story on its own merit, but the expectations for a Supergirl film lead to disappointed fans who wanted it to be something else. It’s not a film for little girls a la Captain Marvel, but rather much darker. I think the film suffers from trying to cater to a PG-13 rating and bring in that younger audience, and I firmly believe that it would have been better off with the R-rating, but the movie we have is still nowhere near as bad as the cinemascore would have you believe. I’d go so far as to say it is quite good actually, but the expectations have led to mixed results.
This leads directly to my point: the modern audience seeks not to be entertained, but to be elevated. They want their art the way they would make it, but they don’t want to make it themselves. They act like a petulant child who spurns his steak and bemoans the fact that it isn’t a box of chicken nuggets. As I said before, some of this is conditioning, but I believe most of it is in the self-centeredness of our culture. People want to be catered to. They want to see themselves in the movie, with narrative and in some cases accuracy (I’m looking at you The Odyssey), coming second to inclusion and relatability. It’s a large-scale narcissism that begins in childhood, and unless something is done about it, our art will be safe and unsurprising, and we will remain bored and unsatisfied with it. In the words of Anaïs Nin, “We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are“, and we must learn to leave ourselves at the door if we ever want to return to a golden age of art.
