Hi, and welcome to Positively Dreadful with me, your host, Brian Boyler.

We wanted to stretch our wings here a bit this week since we're right in the heart of summer

blockbuster season and talk about what's happened to movies over the past, say, 15 or 20

years.

As you know, we prep for these shows to be about unwelcome trends in our politics and

culture and everything in between.

And it's a constant challenge not to fall into the sort of get off my lawn trap.

Certain things seem to be trending in an unfortunate direction, but that doesn't mean the best

thing would be to go back to the way things were when I was a teenager or a young adult

and everything seemed great.

Because one, that's definitely not the case.

And two, there's no challenge there, right?

If you take a wrong turn along the way, it doesn't necessarily make sense to retrace

your steps all the way back and start over.

So I don't just want to complain that movies were better in my day.

Why can't we make movies like the ones I grew up with?

But I do think that somewhere along the line, the pressures shaping filmmaking from the

pandemic to technology, to copyright, to just straight up profit motive, kind of vulcanized

movies.

They steered budgets towards comic book movies and reboots, and we lost a broad middle

of movies that weren't necessarily big budget block fusters and weren't necessarily

high-brow cinema, but were shared cultural artifacts that most people had some relationship

...