The world is the way the people with money want it to be, because it’s the lowest effort, most extractive model they can legally get away with. That’s not to say people didn’t like Endgame, but we all could have done without the last 3 or 4 Transformer movies. There are plenty of examples of trash movies that only get made because the story is watered down enough to pass globally.
The McDonalds analogy is actually better than you think - imagine by some market quirk most of the restaurants in your city hired chefs that suck at their job. Because, say, The American Culinary Institute declared food is not supposed to taste good, it is supposed to send the right message, and the taste is secondary. It's not like the food isn't edible or harmful anymore - it still delivers the nutrition, and still kinda edible, but sucks. Ignoring the fact you could cook for yourself - let's imagine for a minute you have to dine out - what would you do? You'd go and eat sucky food. And since you do, the business model is provably working. Maybe if the whole town agreed to not eat out for a couple of months as a protest against sucky food, it could be changed - but what are the chances of that actually happening?
I didn't write the McDonald's thing, so I'm not gonna try to contextualize it.
I also enjoy the cinema but I only go when there are films that I find interesting and worthwhile. In my specific case this means that over the past few years I've seen Parasite, a showing of the original Alien, a few midnight B-tier horror movies, etc. I don't get to go to the movies as often as I would prefer but the alternative of wasting my time on films that I don't find attractive while simultaneously financially supporting an industry I disagree with seems obviously non-viable to me.
That seems like another odd assumption to make. It doesn't need to be based on individual choices, social dynamics drive plenty of decision making [1]. FWIW, I've only seen 1 new movie this year, and I only plan to see 1 other, so it's not like I disagree with you at an individual level. That's not how it works out in the larger population though - for many people it's their leisure activity of choice.
The consumer is in charge of what movies they see. To suppose otherwise assigns people no agency: it's easy to do when it's others, but, it's not a valid way of analyzing it.
I see this as a slippery slope argument that supposes any people who choose to see movies are drowned out by zombies who see only what ads tell them to see and think they're happy, but they're actually not
No they are not. The consumer is in charge of what they see given the options available. If what the consumer wants is not being produced, then the consumer is choosing the least-bad option (which is sometimes to choose a different activity).
Two economists go walking down the street. One of them looks down and says, "is that a $100 bill on the sidewalk?". The other economist says, "it can't be, someone would have picked it up already", so they ignore it and walk on by.
Hollywood is controlled by a small number of corporate conglomerates, many of which have their hands in too many pies to keep track of. Their movies are largely stagnating, which is probably creating an opportunity for better movies to capture an outsized share of the market. Some day, some of those movies are going to come out and make a lot of money. Studios will scramble to react and get stuck in a newer and more different rut.
This is the same kind of cycle that Hollywood has gone through over and over again since the beginning. We're just in the trough of the cycle.
this is again "it takes one to tango" - the people create the incentives the studios follow. movies largely make money with sales volume. this is important; tickets arent more expensive for different movies, its strictly a numbers game (ignoring uncommon deals like toys and video games, etc). according to the first link i clicked, marvel's last movie infinity war grossed two BILLION dollars. you are simply wrong if you think some novel, avant-garde sundance indie is going to interest that many people.
the world is the way people want it to be. this is the tyranny of the majority. if we want non-incentivized things to exist, we're gonna have to invent new socioeconomic theories in this movie thread : )