Bad movies aren't a resource problem. Studios have the budgets and the tools, but the decisions keep pointing toward money over story.
At some point, the excuse ran out. Studios have the budgets, the tools, the talent pipelines, and decades of filmmaking knowledge to draw from. If a movie lands in a cinema and it's bad, that's not an accident. It's a decision.
That's the core frustration driving this conversation: we're not short of resources. We're short of motivation. Films like Scary Movie and Supergirl didn't fail because the people making them lacked the means. They failed because the money logic took over from the creative logic, and those two things are not always pointing in the same direction.
If you make a bad movie, it's just a choice at this stage.
The clearest symptom of money-first filmmaking is the IP reflex. The Super Mario sequel is a perfect example: cram in every reference, every character, every Easter egg from the existing universe, and then forget to build a story underneath it all. It's more IP than IQ. The references become the product, and the film is just the container.
What follows from that is a very specific kind of bad movie. Not incompetent, exactly. More like deliberately shallow. The plot is designed so you can pick up your phone mid-scene, put it down twenty minutes later, and still know exactly what's happening. The movie functions as background. That's not a side effect of poor filmmaking. It's a feature, built in intentionally, because the assumption is that audiences, especially younger ones, won't give it their full attention anyway.
Movies are designed for you to be on your phone and still be able to understand the plot even though there's a movie in front of you.
The generational shift is real. During the last World Cup, there was a wave of concern that Gen Z wasn't watching full football matches. But the more accurate read was that they were watching, just differently: short clips, reels, highlight packages. The content consumption changed shape, not the interest. The question is whether film is going through the same transformation, and whether studios are right to design for it.
There's a Venn diagram worth drawing here. Good films and successful films are not the same circle, but they're not mutually exclusive either.
The Minecraft movie was the highest-grossing film of last year. It was, by most accounts, a bad film. It made an extraordinary amount of money. That's success by one metric. But it's not the same thing as a good film, and conflating the two is exactly how studios end up making creative decisions on the basis of box office projections rather than storytelling instincts.
Obsession sits in both circles. So does Project Hail Mary. Both were well-reviewed, both performed, and neither seemed to sacrifice the original creative vision to get there. The proof is right there that you don't have to choose. The frustration isn't that good-and-successful is impossible. It's that so many films don't even try for it.
"When a decision is made from a money point of view, that's where it goes wrong."
The R-rating point is telling. Once a film commits to an adult audience, a certain pressure lifts. You're no longer engineering the thing to be watchable by the widest possible demographic. The family-friendly constraint isn't inherently bad. There are great family films. But when "family-friendly" becomes the revenue strategy rather than an organic creative choice, it warps everything downstream: the script, the casting, the pacing, the trailer.
Speaking of trailers. Showing every major plot beat and surprise in a two-minute promo is its own version of the same problem. It's a money-making decision dressed up as marketing. It also guarantees that anyone who cares enough to watch the trailer is already half-disappointed before they buy a ticket.
The most interesting counter-example right now is horror. Not the cheap jump-scare variety, the kind where the monster pops out and the audience screams and nothing much else happens. The elevated kind, where the horror is doing real narrative work.
Hereditary changed what felt possible in the genre. From that film forward, you could see the category expanding: horror films that were genuinely about something, that had plots worth following even when you weren't scared, that trusted the audience to stay engaged without constant stimulation.
I love when a horror film has a plot. It's elevated. It's not relying on a jump scare, it's relying on a good story.
The recent wave of horror releases isn't happening because directors decided they wanted an Oscar. It's happening because there were genuinely good stories to explore, and horror turned out to be a flexible enough container to hold them. The comparison that lands is Beyoncé doing rock: you know the genre, you feel the familiarity, but it's been taken somewhere unexpected. That combination of safe and surprising is exactly what audiences respond to.
Marvel is the opposite trajectory. The shared universe concept was fresh once. Now, fifteen years and dozens of films into the experiment, it doesn't feel fresh at all. People aren't not showing up because superhero films are inherently bad. They're tired of the formula. Avengers: Doomsday has to answer the question of whether there's any creative reinvention left in that machine, or whether the IP has finally consumed itself.
Strip away the box office logic, and a few things remain. Script first. Then casting, though the casting conversation has shifted in an interesting direction. There was a time when a film's commercial appeal was almost entirely tied to which famous actor was in it. That time seems to be passing. Obsession built its entire cast from relatively unknown performers and it worked. The big names have largely migrated to prestige TV. What's left for cinema is the possibility of a genuinely good actor, found anywhere, doing genuinely good work.
The freshness question matters too. It's hard to make something people haven't seen before when new material is arriving constantly from every direction. But audiences still respond when something feels genuinely different, even inside a familiar genre. Especially inside a familiar genre. The trick is taking the known shape and filling it with something unexpected, rather than taking the known shape and filling it with IP references until there's no room left for a story.
The tools to make a great film have never been more accessible. The motivation is the part that keeps going missing.
