Love him or hate him, Quentin Tarantino is one of those directors with such a distinctive voice that more people than not are going to see a film because of him, not because they necessarily think he’ll do a good job tackling modern trends or even because the subject matter looks interesting. He’s one of maybe ten or twenty directors who can reliably draw a profitable audience on his name alone.
So, I’m not sure why he’s worried that we are in one of the worst eras of Hollywood History.
Tarantino is probably as fully-steeped a cinephile as there is working today, with an enthusiastic and encyclopedic knowledge of film. So if I’m going to listen to anyone ruminate on the history of movies, it’s going to be him even if half the time he’s just stirring up shit for fun.
I’m looking at you, Video Archives Podcast. I think people should stop asking what constitutes actual cinema. Like half these “old man doesn’t like Marvel movies” stories are because in some interview some asshole brings it up, inevitably wanting a soundbite for the clicks. It’s less “old man yells at cloud” and more “young people keep bothering olds about clouds.”
Pop culture is more of a constant, it’s the least common denominator.
The problem is not “pop culture exists” the problem is it’s increasingly hard to get the studios to back ANYTHING that’s not existing IP in a tested franchise. The mid-budget production in particular is what’s endangered- very low budget stuff can get made by independent funding but there is a level where you don’t necessarily need 100 exploding spaceships but you do need a large cast and/or good period detail and/or a lot of sets and locations, etc. Like Everything Everywhere All at Once is a great movie but there is a reason it takes place mostly at the tax office and the laundromat.
There are obviously some bright spots, and I think specifically horror is now a sort of bastion of original ideas, because most of those can be made for cheap and you don’t need familiar IP to sell it, just a premise. And of course someone on the level of Tarantino on Scorcese can get funding, they still have their names to sell it. But it’s fair to say now that studios are close to the most conservative they’ve ever been, there’s very little incentive to take risks.
Once the bottom drops out (which it will eventually), studios might reshuffle money toward lower-budget productions with higher margins. Or they might not, depending what the landscape of streaming and theatrical release looks like. A lot of these filmmakers’ criticisms are probably about the disappearance of an older distribution model (and the back-end pay that came with it), rather than the death of cinema. The trouble is that nobody has the slightest idea where movies are heading. Streaming isn’t exactly new, but it’s pretty unstable right now. And we’re still coming out of one of the largest social disruptions of the past century.
There’s probably still a theatrical market for non-action movies targeting adults, but the market has really pushed smaller projects to streaming. When a studio loses a few million dollars on Bros, it’s a sign that there isn’t a theatrical market for romcoms, but when a studio loses hundreds of millions of dollars on a franchise IP, it just means they have to go bigger on the next one.
I think repeatedly asking auteur filmmakers about Marvel specifically isn’t a useful conversation. Largely because a lot of Marvel’s movies are actually pretty good (for a certain definition of good – whether or not they’re quote-unquote “cinema” is another boring and unproductive debate).
I think instead the conversation needs to be about franchises, and how Disney, Sony, Warner, Amazon, Netflix and maybe one or two other companies own all of the big IPs and keep regurgitating that content endlessly. If you want to talk about the death of cinema or whatever, you need to look at the Fantastic Beasts and Morbiuses and Black Adam and the next three Avatar movies, not just Black Panther 2.