This supercut of trailers…
…reminds me of the beginning of Steven Soderbergh’s excellent State of Cinema talk, about something that happened to him on a plane:
So I’m getting comfortable in my seat. I spent the extra $60 to get the extra leg room so I’m trying to get comfortable and we make altitude. And there’s a guy on the other side of the aisle in front of me and he pulls out his iPad to start watching stuff. I’m curious to see what he’s going to watch – he’s a white guy in his mid-30s. And I begin to realize what he’s done is he’s loaded in half a dozen action sort of extravaganzas and he’s watching each of the action sequences – he’s skipping over all the dialogue and the narrative. This guy’s flight is going to be five and a half hours of just mayhem porn.
I get this wave of – not panic, it’s not like my heart started fluttering – but I had this sense of, am I going insane? Or is the world going insane – or both?
There are people who will watch the above trailer and think that it would make the best movie ever. There are people out there who are dying for a movie where every Marvel superhero fights every DC superhero for two hours straight. There are people who would kill for a movie that’s all action and no context. Unfortunately, a lot of these people work as film studio executives.
In related news, 3D revenue continues to decline. Hollywood needs to find a new gimmick, quick.