By | Aidan Curtis
Staff Reporter
When Netflix became a worldwide streaming service in January 2016, many other streaming services such as Disney+, Hulu, and Paramount+ began to emerge. Companies have also been pushing for quantity over quality and dropping a ton of projects all at once while putting the bare minimum of work into it beforehand.
TV shows and movies have gotten to a real low point in today’s society.
Original ideas are rare today. You see movies like Wonka, Spider-Man No Way Home, and Mean Girls (2024) that are just sequels or prequels. And then there are movies and shows like Dune and Hawaii Five-O that are reboots. And very rarely do you have original new movies or shows that have no relation to any other project like Everything Everywhere All at Once and Beef.
Cinematography in television and movies now is just lazy. When you take a look at well-created projects like Aftersun, La La Land, and Euphoria you’d expect other companies to look at those pieces of work and take notes, but with newer stuff, you never really see it and it comes to just basic camera work. Christopher Nolan had projects like The Dark Knight and Tenet that were shot so beautifully and were just amazing projects overall. Then he directed Oppenheimer and in my opinion, completely failed it camera-wise.
Film and TV companies spend so much money on creating such high-budgeted projects and just hope they make it back. Examples of movies that did make it back would be Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: No Way Home, both making more than their budgets, and projects that did flop in the theaters like Eternals and The Marvels. While Eternals did not necessarily fail box office-wise, it did get massive amounts of hate thrown onto it due to directing choices.
I see why people could think differently or think that at least the streaming services have stuff on it to watch, so be grateful, but I disagree with that completely. If you own a streaming service, the least you could do is make well-done movies to put onto it and not push for bad projects and instead push for greatness. It seems as if everyone has gotten so lazy now and they just let everyone else do the work for them, and that ends up being a very bad decision.
In the future, I think companies should really just be focusing on quality over quantity, keep projects coming but slow it down because going so fast leads to where we are now with all of these strange screwed-up projects. If they all focus on that, everyone would be so much happier with everything that drops, give everything a little more time to simmer and more time to make plots so much stronger.
