Episode 009 | Hollywood is dead. Are we the problem?

The Serrano siblings discuss NY Times film critic⁠ A.O. Scott's retirement from film criticism⁠ and whether or not Marvel movies and the streaming generation have brought on the death of Hollywood or if the industry is evolving into something new.

This is a real high-brow episode, folks. We use words like "the democratization of filmmaking" and "intellectual property," but we also keep things entertaining and light. Plus, we may or may not take a shot at Samuel L. Jackson for starring in a zillion Capital One commercials. The point is, if you have ever streamed a movie or a tv show in the comfort of your own home, this episode is for you.

Have a hot take on where the future of Hollywood is heading? Shoot us an email (or a voice memo, if you're feeling brave!) at ⁠hello@hauntedbasement.video⁠⁠.

Haunted Basement⁠⁠ is a full-service, boutique production company that creates professional content to promote your business or brand. Visit ⁠⁠hauntedbasement.video⁠⁠ or contact hello@hauntedbasement.video for more. 

Episode 009 Transcript

A.J.: Hello and welcome back to Haunted Basement: The Podcast. I'm A.J.

Bubba: I'm Bubba.

Ashleigh: And I’m Ashleigh.

A.J.: We're siblings. We run a production company called Haunted Basement. And this is our podcast where we talk about the movies, music and pop culture that inspires and influences our video work.

Bubba: Today, we're going to tackle a topic that's kind of been top of mind for the past few episodes.We've been flirting with the topic a little bit. And actually in our last episode, Billy Magnussen, it came up quite a bit.

A.J.: Check it out. Good episode.

Bubba: Very coincidentally, the day after we recorded with Billy Magnussen, this podcast episode on The Daily drops in which the New York Times film critic A.O. Scott kind of announced that he was retiring from film criticism and going to book reviews. We realized that a lot of what we were talking about with Billy coincided with things that A.O. Scott said about the state of film criticism, the state of the film industry at large, and why he doesn't want to do film criticism anymore. So we figured we would spend some time talking about it, chatting about it, digesting it, mulling it over.

Ashleigh: Lots to discuss here.

A.J.: I listened to that episode with A.O. Scott a few times and my hot take, my initial reaction is it sounds like a man who has reached his midlife crisis. What do you think about that?

Ashleigh: So I listened to it a few times. The first time I listened to it I was like, he comes off as an elitist here. 

A.J.: A man who has worked for the New York Times for 20 years an elitist?

Ashleigh: I know, I know. Obviously.

Bubba: And he’s attacking Marvel movies. 

Ashleigh: It was mostly when he talked about how he got his start with movies. “You know, my mother brought us to Paris and I used to just go into the theaters and catch the film.” Like, obviously that's a dramatized version of it. But yeah, I was like, Oh, man, I don't know if this is the man that we want talking about this.

Bubba: Yeah, he's an easy target, but before we get into our hot takes, let's give a brief overview for anybody that hasn't heard the news. So, A.O. Scott, film critic for The New York Times, is leaving the world of film criticism. He talks about his background, as I actually just mentioned, about falling in love with movies, in love with films. But then the reason why he doesn't want to continue reviewing and offering criticism for films is that Hollywood is now producing a ton of these IP-driven films, franchises and branded movies. IP stands for Intellectual Property. So we're talking about the Star Wars franchise that seems to produce a new series or movie every other month. Jurassic World, the Marvel Universe, the DC universe.

A.J.:  Anything that has pre-sold audiences based on you already know what this concept is before you see the movie.

Bubba: Right. 

Ashleigh: Space Jam.

Bubba: All the nostalgic remakes that Disney has produced over the many years. A.O. Scott is saying that film criticism almost doesn't even have a place in the world today because the massive fan base for these IP-driven movies doesn't allow for it. If you're a fan of the Marvel Universe, you are just looking forward to the next film because you're already a fan. You're predisposed to just love it and accept it and want more.

Ashleigh: He says superhero movies seem to be designed to be critic proof.

Bubba: Exactly. 

Ashleigh: And we can talk about all of what that means.

Bubba: I just imagine him being bombarded by maybe not trolls, but like, you know, the Redditors of Marvel. Yeah, they're just like, attacking him for a bad review of something.

A.J.: Well, he talks about how Samuel L. Jackson started this whole trend back when the first Avengers came out and A.O. Scott had a negative review about it. And Samuel L. Jackson sent all of the Marvel fans against him. He's like, we've got to get a film critic who actually can do his job or something like that. And then I'm looking at Samuel L. Jackson. I'm like, when was the last time you ever acted in a non-Marvel movie or a Capital One commercial? 

Ashleigh: Shots fired.

Bubba: Oh, what's in your wallet, baby?

Ashleigh: But does he have to be since he was in Pulp Fiction.

A.J.: I guess he's earned it. Yeah. I don't know. What's in your wallet, but okay, this isn't about Samuel L. Jackson.

Ashleigh: But it is. This is the caliber of person who is in these Marvel movies. It is about him.

A.J.: You cast ten huge stars and you put them in superhero costumes, and people are going to buy a ticket for the opening weekend, and that's Marvel/Disney's plan for the last decade plus.

Bubba: That's one kind of aspect of A.O. Scott's displeasure with film. But the other aspect or the other thing that he kind of points to, as, you know, attributing to the downfall of film criticism or film viewing, you know, movie experiencing-

Ashleigh: Yeah, all the above for this one.

Bubba: -is streaming, right? Like Netflix, HBO Max, Paramount Plus, Peacock. We live in a world now where the majority of people do not go to theaters to see a movie. We just stay in and we binge The Office or we binge the next season of Succession, which I plan to do, and that has changed our viewing habits. That's changed the way that we experience these movies, these television shows, and relate to them and the way that we value them.

A.J.: Yeah, back when we were younger, you had a month or two to go see a movie in theaters, probably even less, and then it would be gone for 6 to 8 months while we waited for it to come out on home video. And even before our generation, if you didn't catch that movie in theaters, you probably might not see it ever again in your life. There's a risk. So there's a heightened value when you make something scarcer and there's no scarcity in the streaming generation.

Bubba: This is why we saw Spider-Man 2 three times in theaters back in the day at Showcase Cinema in Lawrence.

A.J.: This is why we held hands and wept during The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in theaters. 

Bubba: Wept. Wept! Let's talk about reactions. My reaction: you guys already know my reaction. I really miss the days where you weren't inundated by content and the infinite scroll. The infinite scroll has kind of seeped into Netflix. You're kind of paralyzed by all the options. And you ultimately default to what's easiest. You go back to The Office and it turns into comfort more than a challenge. Maybe not a challenge. But something new. A novel experience. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is back in the day when we had a VCR and just a stack of VHS tapes, you made a relationship with all the movies that you had in your library, right? Because you're watching them on repeat.

A.J.: Ultimately, we picked Mary Poppins and sang chim-chimeny-chim-chimeny-chim-chim-cheree. 

Bubba: That's what you do. Even if you don't love the movies, you watch them enough so you develop some kind of critical reaction to them.

A.J.: Even more so than a critical reaction. You develop a relationship with them. You were saying this on Billy's episode. You're saying we had that X-Men DVD. I don't know if that's a great movie, but we watched it so many times that it was part of our identity. And I don't know if that exists for this new generation at all, which makes me a little bit sad that movies seem like they're dying.

Ashleigh: I don't know if it is they're dying or if they're just evolving and it's just one of the millions of things that you can consume now. Yeah, because if you were to ask a young person what their favorite type of media is, it's probably either someone on Tik Tok or some sort of video game. And those things are magical to them. Their technology is so impressive and so crazy. It might be like when you were watching Jurassic Park, but it's just a different form of media and things like Tik Tok and Instagram and all that stuff have certainly shortened attention span. So it's a very interesting challenge for something like the movie industry, like how do you gain these viewers?

Bubba: Everything seems very niche now in my head. I'm thinking about fans of You on Netflix, like random shows that I'm not watching, but I know have a huge audience. I still have great conversations about TV shows that I'm watching with family and friends, but a lot of the conversations are often a little bit more superficial about what do you think happened at the end, you know, narratively? How do you make sense of this puzzle that they presented? The writers have kind of spun this web of mystery that they've spun and feel like everything's about dissecting what actually happened as opposed to debating the value of a movie that came out and how it's affecting culture at large, you know? I watch a lot of TV for sure, but I get burnt out on the series that are super long where it just seems like you're watching to see how the writers keep a narrative thread going for three, four, five seasons. It's like you're watching to almost root on a marathon runner.

Ashleigh: Movies, as I think we're talking about it, really hit an emotion and for us maybe you didn't know how it ended and and you could think about it for a while and now with you know, all the superhero movies and everything, it's like, well, the CGI, the CGI just keeps getting better and better. Oh, my God, did you see that CGI? And the number of users something has. Even the fact that Netflix has users, they're not the Netflix audience. 

Bubba: Yeah, it's more data driven when you know that you have a long term or a product that you know that you will be iterating on and giving season or producing season after season after season or Marvel movie after Marvel movie. It's definitely data driven. They're absolutely looking at some analytics. They are prioritizing stuff that will sell because they have generated enough data to know what sells.

Ashleigh: Right. It's moved from an art to an industry and just making more money.

Bubba: When you're thinking about the scale of a show versus a single movie, say a two and a half hour movie versus a ten episode long season of television– within those two and a half hours, as a filmmaker, you need to be making creative decisions that are much more efficient to tell an entire story. But also you need to use these narrative devices that are dialogue-driven, like sometimes a single look in a scene is all you need. And I think that the less explicit, more implicit stuff is what at least gets my brain going a little bit more and my heart pumping a little bit more when I'm watching movies because you need to engage with them. You know, it's not as passive of an experience. Everything isn't spelled out.

A.J.: So theater and film, they’re very related, right? I feel like films sort of spun off of the theater world. How come theater has been able to sustain itself for centuries now and film, specifically Hollywood, is 100 years old, and it almost seems like it's doom and gloom. It's about to end. Do you think that Hollywood constantly is worried that it's going to disappear? For example, back in the late twenties when sound was introduced to film, all the people who worked in the silent era were like, well, film is done. This is a whole different thing. It's not Hollywood anymore. And then masterpieces were made in the thirties, forties, fifties, and then television came around in the early fifties. And Hollywood is like, Oh shit, we're done. It's a wrap. And then in the sixties, studios were bought by the big oil companies. Gulf + Western bought Paramount and everyone was like, Oh shit, Hollywood's done. We don't know what to do. We'll just hire a bunch of young filmmakers who are cheap. And that brought in Spielberg, Scorsese. And to go against what A.O. Scott is saying, I see it as I have never had as many movies that are as accessible as they are now. And I think this young generation that can watch anything from the newest Marvel movie to a random Abbas Kiarostami movie, they can discover Iranian cinema if they want to at the click of a button, right? And the likelihood that that is going to generate filmmakers who want to continue the trend of making interesting, cool, entertaining movies is very high, right? And I feel like it's always very difficult to make a movie no matter what decade you're in. So do you think that Hollywood just enjoys being very dramatic about themselves or filmmakers enjoy being very dramatic about their art form, whereas the theater world isn't as dramatic about it?

Bubba: It cannot be translated to streaming on your phone. I know they did that with Hamilton and Disney+. It's medium-specificity for sure. You can stream movies and TV but not theater.

A.J.: And movies started out as like you go for ten cents, you go see a movie. It was an art for the masses. And now it's like $20 for a ticket.

Bubba: And then the additional $25 for your medium popcorn.

Ashleigh: So we're getting to where I ended up after listening to the A.O. Scott The Daily podcast. Who are you talking about when you say quote unquote Hollywood? For me, it's the studio execs and they're probably all old, wealthy, white, straight men, you know? And now that we have all these different streamers and different ways that you can consume media, it makes it so much more diverse. So it's almost like where we're getting to is where the theater was, where it is more approachable for the masses. And movies are becoming the theater because they're way more expensive. And to go now, it's like, Oh my gosh, you have to shell out a lot of money if you want to go see an actual movie in the theater. So people aren't seeing them. It's definitely a turning point for movies. And, you know, Marvel, everyone has a lot of different thoughts about Marvel. But ultimately, I think it's a pretty beautiful thing where as a consumer, you have a lot more options from a lot more people than in the past you never would have had access to unless you traveled to different countries and the people creating them are way more diverse and get a lot more chances to actually get what they want out into the world and to maybe have an audience. So it is kind of a beautiful thing.

Bubba: Yeah, it is. The democratization of movies and music and I'm sure other art forms or media is something that is influencing culture right now and our lives right now. I can see movies easily and engage with music easily. Record labels do not 100% dominate the music industry anymore. A self-recorded, self-published musician can generate a following. And it's easier to make music and to publish it and to listen to it than ever before. And I think that's been great. So that's democratization and that's the wonderful, you know, sunshine, rainbows view of it. But the downside is there's so much music now that people can't make a living anymore without going on tour constantly. The streams don't actually pay for you to make your music.

A.J.: Can we do a little bit of an exercise? Today is March 30th when we're recording this. I have a list of the top two highest grossing films from last year, from five years ago, 2018, from ten years ago, 2013, from 20 and from 30 years ago. Do you guys want to hear them and hear about how it has changed over time?

Bubba: Yeah. Exercise.

A.J.: So last year, March 32, 2022, the highest grossing films at the box office on that day were The Lost City and The Batman. The highest grossing film on March 30th, 2018 at the box office: Ready Player One. Also on that list was Black Panther. And now we're going back. March 30th, 2013. Highest grossing film was Oz the Great and Powerful. G.I. Joe: Retaliation is on that list as well.

Ashleigh: Oh, Channing raking it in.

A.J.: Now we're really going back in time. 

Bubba: Take us back.

A.J.: March 30th, 2003, the highest grossing film at the box office on this day was Bringing Down the House, which I am almost sure is that Steve Martin, Queen Latifah movie. I'm just going to check. It is absolutely that movie, which I saw. So that this is at the very beginning of A.O. Scott’s reign as the New York Times film critic. Second and third on that list. Chicago and Old School. A studio comedy. A studio comedy will go right to streaming nowadays. And now 30 years ago, March 30th, 1993, the top film at the box office was Groundhog Day. Another studio comedy.

Ashleigh: So actually this is very interesting because after I listened to the A.O. Scott podcast, I listened to Smartless with Jason Bateman, Will Arnett and Sean Hayes, and they happened to have Jon Favreau on that episode. Very interesting. After listening to that, the whole, you know, A.O. Scott-Marvel debacle, it got me thinking because one thing that Jon Favreau said was when he was directing Elf, which he said is his favorite movie, which I was glad to hear, any time they had notes it was always about a line of dialogue. They had notes on every joke. But all the action, like the sleigh chase and any action scenes, they could care less about it. It was just all about the dialogue. Then he went to Marvel and you know, they're storyboarding the action scenes and all the Marvel people had notes on was the action scenes. They could care less about the dialogue. So he had free rein on the dialogue. And so he said he really infused a sense of humor into it. So that got me thinking about, okay, these Marvel movies. I resisted them for a long time because I'm like, Oh, I hate superheroes, but they are funny. They're funny. And yeah, they have a lot of action. But I was very surprised at how funny they were. And then I was thinking about all the other directors and people involved and it's the Russo brothers, who got their start in Community, and then Lord and Miller, who also have a background in comedy. A lot of those movies that you just mentioned were comedies, and so now it's just like a new medium for comedy, like maybe we shouldn't call them superhero movies because they are kind of comedies.

A.J.: Can you off the top of your head say a line from Elf that you remember?

Ashleigh: Yeah, Buddy the Elf. What's your favorite color? But the children love the books.

A.J.: Ok, now name a line that made you laugh that you remember from any superhero movie.

Ashleigh: Oh, I have no idea.

A.J.: Are we too old for superhero movies? Like what is happening?

Ashleigh: We are the movie snobs now.

A.J.:  And the movie snobs when we were younger, were complaining like, Oh, Jurassic Park is a thrill ride, it's not a movie. And now you watch Jurassic Park and it is an action packed, entertaining movie that's old school. A lot of that stuff that I watch on Tik Tok, I'm like, I don't get it, but I wish you all the best.

Ashleigh: It's like the Beatles, you know. The Marvel Avengers are the Beatles of this generation. Have I done it? All right. I'll see you guys later.

Bubba: I don't know if you've done it, but you definitely put something out into the universe. Now things are changing. It's good that people are recognizing the change. We're talking about it. That's all. That's all we can do.

A.J.: Do you guys have hopes for the future of entertainment, specifically movies and television?

Ashleigh: I just hope that the studios treat their viewers as audiences versus just numbers a little bit more because it seems a little bit crazy right now. Netflix, chill out a little bit. Maybe you don't need a new show to automatically start 2 seconds after my last show. Maybe I want to think about it a little bit more. Chill out, man, chill out. Give people a little bit more time. Respect your audience a little bit more. They'll come back. We'll come back. Just give us some time and space to appreciate what you have given us.

A.J.: Yeah, I completely agree with you, Ashleigh.

Bubba: I think my hope for the future is less about what Hollywood's going to do and just more about my personal habits. And my hope is that I can be more selective with what I watch and when I watch and that will somehow make things more valuable and more of an engaging experience, you know, not not just bingeing a season-long series to fill up time, but to be a little bit more intentional about watching certain things.

Ashleigh: It's a really good point. You said it earlier, the pandemic certainly changed people's behaviors and how they consume things. And so I think it's important as we continue to come out of it, like you just said, it's like anything, you have to practice it. You have to practice stepping away, being like, okay, tonight we're going to watch a movie. Tonight, we're going to book a babysitter and we're going to go to the movies. Like, you don't just have to sit in your chair. You can take a breath and plan things out a little bit more and things are going to be okay.

Bubba: Yeah, basically, yes. It's being more mindful about my media diet. 

A.J.: My hope is that Netflix, whatever sort of requirements that they have for the lighting of their shows and movies that's so bright it blinds our eyes. 

Ashleigh: Or so dark you can only watch them at night.

A.J.: I hope that that gets thrown in the trash. And I hope visionaries, people who have unique perspectives and unique stories and unique ideas, I hope they continue to get enough money to be able to have a chance to find an audience. We watched the trailer for the new Wes Anderson movie. It's coming out in the summer. I'm not saying that Wes Anderson's the best filmmaker. What I am saying is you watch 5 seconds of any of his movies and you know, that is a Wes Anderson movie. I would like a few more of those filmmakers where you can identify, it's sort of like a friend. Oh, I know who that is. I know that personality. Let's have more of that.

Bubba: Let's have more of that baby.

A.J.: Okay, okay. I'm done. I'm off my soapbox. Thank you for listening to this episode of Haunted Basement.

Ashleigh: Tell us what you think.

Bubba: Listen, here's the email, baby. It's hello@haunted basement.video. Send us an email with your thoughts. You can type them up or you can send us a little audio snippet. You can record it in your Voice Memos app if you have an iPhone. Let us know what you think.

Ashleigh: Let us know what you thought of A.O. Scott. Let us know about your media diet and what you hope for in the future of Hollywood and the streaming services. We'd love to hear from you.

A.J.: Okay, smooches. We'll talk to you later, people.