With the little exposure I’ve had to the cinema in the six weeks since I last wrote a post on this blog, All that I can reflect on is how fickle our culture is to large scale events.
I refer, of course to the major pop culture milestones that have pulled into our psych, parked briefly and have since moved on to the annals of history despite the relative warmth of their ever fading footprint.
The release of Avengers: Endgame and the final season of Game of Thrones.
There is no question that these two properties, at their peak, captured an enormous market share and the imaginations of millions. But what strikes me in this day and age is the ease with which we are happy to move on to the next event in line.
These properties are mere weeks old, yet I’d bet you’d be struggling to find a multiplex that would play session upon session of the Avengers, or find someone who is now re-watching GOT.
Instead, we’re all gearing up for the follow-up — Spiderman: Far From Home, Or the GOT prequel.
The moment, albeit brief, has passed.
Ten years ago and upon the release of The Dark Knight — I remember specifically the film screening in cinemas for an entire year before it’s run slowed to a steady holt. A decade earlier, Titanic faced a similar scenario where the prints were literally falling apart off the projectors — they had been played to death!
Yet with our Marvel diet, even the ginormous entries that take ten years to cultivate can only sustain our appetites for hours at a time before we hunger for something new, something different.
The disposable nature of these properties devalues all other properties in cinema. If something as major as a ten-year release model of films has the final entry with a cinematic lifespan of a month, what do we hold to such dear value as to make sure it runs a suitable length?
What makes a masterpiece in 2019 and beyond?
It’s akin to the completion of the construction of the Pyramids of Giza, only for the Egyptians to shrug and await the latest build from the Aztecs.
The enormity of these projects — one being the largest film ever made (ensemble, production budget and marketing) and the other, the largest TV show ever produced, means that smaller voices are relegated to free options of distribution.
Smaller voices with important messages.
We yearn for stories yet the ones with magnitude mean nothing to us anymore — there is no longevity.
So this may lead us to look for smaller voices, made on zero budgets that tell a human story with imagery that is more familiar to the human eye.
This could lead to a renaissance in visual storytelling.
I’m talking about the age of the YouTube Auteur.
It’s not a thing…
Yet.
