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Hello all. I feel it's pretty obvious there is a slump in the film world right now. I am pleased to see films such as "American Fiction" and "The Holdovers" gaining traction, as these character driven stories are my personal favorite. I am a screenwriter and I was wondering what kind of films you all wish to see being made? Are there social topics you wished were talked about more in film? Or perhaps what you feel is being overdone. I'd like to see where people's heads are at right now.
your handle is from one of my all time favorites, so points for that. i would also like to see more character driven films coming out. i think the superhero stuff is being done to death right now.
a few recent ones i liked were dumb money, the royal hotel, talk to me, asteroid city, and beau is afraid. i haven't seen the two you mentioned, but i'll put 'em on the list
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I think low budget has high potential to produce some character driven stuff going forward.
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i completely agree, more gems coming from the indy scene than streaming or big budget right now. that being said, i do still really want to see oppenheimer. but other than that i think the latest theatrical releases that i really enjoyed were the banshees of inisherin and dune.
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Oppenheimer was fantastic
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I watched an Indian Film called "Jailer" available on amazon prime, mind literally blown, it was tarantino level stuff but from another dimension.
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-be Indian movie -Movie is about killing pedophiles Bollywood dancing
-movie about a cancer patients last wishes to his family Bollywood dancing
-movie about installing a toilet on the moon Bollywood dancing.
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A lot that is written is to sell to a particular audience. Very little has anything personal to say about what the author believes in, or considers, without being a hit on the head in terms of “current social mores.”
That is to say nothing is really hitting universal-particular, if that makes sense. The trend of auteur pictures makes hyper-particular stories really flashy, especially for a first project but rarely it seems that anyone is making statements on human nature. I hate topicality in a picture where someone thinks they are trying to fill this need with a talk talk fluff for 3 hours about some socially popular topic. Nothing cuts into actual human drama when you write like this.
I like to think of the very best classic Simpson episodes when I think of this need. Bart’s First Girlfriend; Bart’s First Crush: these are episodes that can NEVER be redone and they hit on such a personal, intrinsic dance within the psychology of the character that translates to the audience because of the universality.
What’s your genre?
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I think there is a real shortage of superhero movies. Would be cool if a company like Disney acquired a brand like Marvel and then other studios copy them and acquire other comic brands and make movies for every character. Imagine the thousands of movies they could make all about superheroes. Every movie would be a superhero movie. "And I think to myself, what a wonderful world".
what kind of films you all wish to see being made?
I feel like we need more movies that appeal to a span of generations that aren't also Marvel movies, Pixar movies, or absolutely sappy.
I feel like movies aren't being made for generic audiences anymore. We've gone too far on the direct to consumer stuff.
I know someone who works in animation and they write stories for such a narrow population - 4 to 6 year olds! I feel like it wasn't long ago most cartoons appealed to 3+.

Both the movies you list are dramedies which I often enjoy too, but I find it hard to sit in those emotional rollercoasters most of the time. It's feels like a bit of a workout for me (as is often the case with genres we aren't regularly watching).
I generally prefer thrillers. The more technical the better. We watched Videodrome (1983) last night and while I'm not a huge Cronenberg fan, it was at least interesting satire exploring "whats the worst that can happen" with graphic video content.
We're working our way through Criterion's technothriller collection right now and have plans to watch House (1977) which is not a thriller this weekend.
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I am currently working on stepping into the absurdist horror genre, so hopefully people keep wanting weird shit. I do agree dramadies can be quite the emotional investment.
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weird shit is my favorite. i was pretty impressed with they cloned tyrone, especially for being a netflx release.
as far as horror goes, i thought barbarian was good, but i've been a zach cregger fan since wkuk, so i'm probably a little biased. i also liked bones and all, but i think that was based on a novel.
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More movies that show the average person what living in the panopticon will actually be like.
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I love the idea of leaning into the satire of leaning in the satire. Obvious and in overt plays on the times.
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The Bitcoin Megalomaniac
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Screenwriter here aswell. I'm not sure there's a market for this or that your story will get picked up based on this , but what I'm exploring are non traditional themes and narrative structure.
We are inundated with a few recycled narratives I am very bored of. Stories that explore the drama's of the elite (Monarchist or Fiat Financial elites) and the structures that support them. All couched in what I call American Standard Script dialogue (ASSologue). You know, the predictable hype of English culture, the "Oh my gawd Tiffany!" that pervades our short attention spans and makes other cultures look at us like we are all weird t.v characters. It gets to the point where I can't bare to watch another American production, it's so predictable. So i branch out into French, Scandinavian or Korean for relief. Soviet era sci-fi is particularly good at burning past the malaise of junk American storytelling and then i round it out with the classic black and whites, Italian if i'm feeling really depressed about the state of the field.
So what i want to see, and i'm giving a bit of my pet project away here i hope you appreciate, is a new form. A bitcoin culture set. A sovereign individual aesthetic. How this new art movement would materialize is important. From buildings to clothes. It's cypher-punk, yes but also boundless from the constraints of white silicon valley. It's Libre and Opensource, but it pays the bills, privately. International without the WHO or IMF .
In this aesthetic, violence is seen the way a class taboo is seen in typical story telling. (Like a Janitor offering his opinion to a room of mathematicians.) Every story we tell now relies on police and state violence. Something bad happens in a modern day setting to the protag ? It's moments before the police are called. We even think it in our minds, Where are the police ? It's so thick and pervasive it informs our view of natural science and sociology, with no easy to conceive alternatives. We literally are not able to think outside of violence, so all our stories are about it in some way. Look at video games, the most successful are some variation of warrior activity. Even our best Utopia's cannot drive a story or be interesting without centering around violence, its use and administration.
Example: You start a scene in middle class America, It's a coming of age story. Formulaic. The protag is rising above challenges.They come up against existing authority figures who only want the best for them. Their love interest cautions them against being too "out there". blah blah blah. fuck. reproduce, fight, fuck, reproduce over and over the same story in different styles. NO ! There is no age in the network. Instead: a furry or anime avatar goes through real life trying to flip hamburgers while people are shooting eachother point blank in the face around them. The avatar, in color, is somehow a locus of calm and stability, an almost boring character, we care about because the story is driven by the margins. The blurry out of focus is where the action is actually happening, and somehow builds sympathy for the protag. This has not been done before but it describes the incongruity and paradox of modern life. We saw in real time 10 thousand people die in a month.
Gaspar Noé and Jodorowsky meet prescription lithium.
Tldr; less elite knob gobbling and drama about elite problems and concerns. Probably doomed, as middle class writers want to be elites and elites want middle classes to write about them. Even stories about revolution against the elites are boring now. There are no stories about just opting-out.
I think i would call it something like Voluntarist storytelling. Not historical analysis or philosophical lectures. Not even speculative world building, which is an entirely dead genre. More like Exploration of alternatives to stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
But most important. We must break or go back to limited copyright. The original limits. Our long lives and litigious culture is killing us.
Anyways, i have a lot to say about this, but that should suffice.