It's a sad state of affairs when the best you can say about most of the movies you've seen this year is “I didn't hate it as much as I thought I would…”
Everything is superheroes at the moment. Hopefully this will look like a dated statement in just a few months. A majority of people don't watch these and couldn't care less about them. Unfortunately for anyone interested in seeing anything aside from costumed freaks beating up other costumed freaks, the people that care deeply about this see these films reliably. We're never going to stop getting these movies until these people die. The true fans will hang in there even when the latest reboot of Superman portrays Clark Kent as a gay porn star by day. These people will just talk about the subtleties of the new assless costume, it's strengths and weaknesses, and they'll just see the next one and the one after that. You can't possibly ruin the franchise for the hardcore fans. Few things have reliable returns except for superhero movies. A guaranteed number of people are going to see them. That's all there is to that. Despite bad reviews, despite anything, they'll still turn up. Not only that, they'll buy it on video and might even purchase the tie-in game.
Why is this true? If I have to pick an argument, then I'll go with resistance to change. They want to go out and do something, but they don't want to do anything unfamiliar. See also, binge rewatching. Risk avoidance is a key component of American culture whether we like it or not. If you're driving across country and pull off the Interstate in some desert town, you're always going to find a McDonalds and a Denny's. We don't like to eat at unbranded diners, because we don't know the menu and we don't know the quality of the food. “Risk avoidance” is termed “consistency” to make us feel better about being big pussies. The problem with that way of thinking is that any given Denny's, like any given super hero movie, can suck ass, even if you know the story or if you know the menu. It's impossible for people to understand that the thin veneer of purchased signage and branded materials hides a core product that can be good or bad. But we still keep eating at Dennys and we still keep watching the same Batman movie over and over again…
If you think physical media is dead, you've never been sufficiently deep in the woods long enough to be thankful for that stack of dusty DVDs.
I have a slight obsession with this one1) for all the wrong reasons. I also like reel-to-reel tape players, so that should tell you something. CED is a videograph, for a lack of a better term. Like a phonograph record, but it has video on it. Isn't that great? Now we have all the problems inherent in a record coupled with the more intensive demands of playing back video! Isn't it great that there's no way to record with this system? Isn't it also great that it came out after Betamax and VHS? Isn't it also great that the disc, since uses a groove, has to be protected from the environment and human touch by a plastic sleeve? Isn't is great that the sleeve can't stay with the disc when it plays but instead you push this thing into the player, and then remove the sleeve, leaving the disc? Isn't it great that you can accidentally put the wrong disc into the wrong sleeve? I bet they never counted on one person in the country having more than one of these players in their house, but that person, whoever they are, has caused untold chaos as a result… well, not that much chaos. No one used this shit.
Each tape takes up more space than the book the movie is based on sometimes. Somehow this was the standard for nearly 20 years.
The machine started to make strange noises when rewinding. The solution to this weird noise? Buy a separate appliance that rewinds tapes. We lived like savage animals in the past, I tell you.
Only cool people had Laserdisc. Strangely, they never bragged about it…
Because it SUCKED. Each side of the huge disc holds 60 minutes of video. At that break point, high end players would have a noticeable pause while it switched sides. OR, if you had a really early or lower-end player, you stopped everything, turned the disc over yourself, and resumed playing it. If the movie was over two hours, you'd have to change discs either way. SUPER HIGH TECH AWESOME POWER. The supposed trade-off in picture quality was there, but we were still watching television on primitive caveman screens connected to this wondrous device by “VIDEO IN”, so it wasn't that big of a deal.
Try to think this through: the kids want to watch the Disney movie they watch constantly. Are you really going to trust those filthy little shits with your high end video equipment? Fuck no. They'd just put their peanut-butter-encrusted fingers all over that expensive disc. Either you were there to flip the disc for them, forcing you to watch the movie too, or you just broke down and got them a tape player that only needed one-time operation.
Also, you have to spin this enormous disc at speed. Now do that and try to make the unit both quiet and affordable. It really can't be done… so it hums. A lot. Even the high-end units. Far worse than any tape player of the era…