So What’s With the Movies?

By Lee Duigon

July 6, 2023

For most of my life, going to the movies was a treat. Go with a date, go with your friends, or just go alone: you’d always enjoy it.

My wife and I still watch movies on the Internet, but it’s been—what? A dozen years, at least, since I went to a theater and paid to get in.

In our area most of the movie houses are no more. They were palaces, once upon a time. My grandmother took me to the RKO Theater in New Brunswick, and the magnificence of the place just blew my mind.

But it’s not just the theaters going out of business, one by one. There have not been many movies lately that I’d want to see.

Take, for instance, Indiana Jones 5: The Dial of Destiny (and if I ever proposed such a title to my editors, they’d think there was something seriously wrong with me). This must be the worst movie ever made. Every day there are two or three more blistering reviews posted on the Internet. They’re saying it’s a total wipeout.

Yeahbut, yeahbut… Meanwhile, Disney Corp. has cranked out eight (!) box-office bombs in a row, losing almost a billion dollars on them, and Warner Bros., five in a row, just over a billion dollars up the spout. And these figures, mind you, presuppose a world-wide market. Yeesh, what if they couldn’t show these films in China? What if they were forced to show them only in America? One, two, three, it’s off to bankruptcy.

It’s not that people don’t watch movies anymore. They’re still watching them online, and family-friendly, faith-friendly movies—like Jim Caviezel’s Sound of Freedom—are doing just fine at the box office. People still want movies. They just don’t want lousy movies.

Movies are a form of story-telling, which is part of being human. However far back you go in the history of human culture, you find storytellers.

What you don’t find is storytellers who insult and berate their audience. “Once upon a time in this no-good stinkin’ tribe of ours, where nothing’s fair and even the woolly mammoths despise us for our systemic racism, two serial killers had sex and begat three babies before they had a chance to abort them. One was a thief, another was an idiot who would’ve voted for Donald Trump if he were alive today, and the third was a villain who invented a gas stove…”

Gee—add a little dash of transgender, and you’ve got another Disney movie. And another bomb.

Why do they make movies like this, sure-fire failures? Who wants to see them, except for people who take their kids to drag queen story hours and can’t wait to re-elect Joe Biden? And what kind of fan base is that? Has Hollywood gone altogether suicidal?

They must know they’re competing with movies on the Internet—movies that people choose to see. So the studios make their movies available for home screening and still come up short. Even to the most rudimentary intellect, it must be obvious that the problem with today’s big-studio movies is the content. How can Disney executives fail to see that?

Well, never mind! If they want to tear down their own house, the public should just step aside and let them do it. Companies that make movies that don’t condescend to us, that don’t club us over the head with political preaching, will surely capture a bigger and bigger share of the market.

If Walt Disney could ever come back to take control again… heads would roll.

I have discussed these and other topics throughout the week on my blog, http://leeduigon.com/ . Click the link and enjoy a visit. It’ll be better than The Dial of Destiny. My articles can also be found at www.chalcedon.edu/ .

E-Mail Lee Duigon: leeduigon@verizon.net