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10 Great Movies That Accidentally Made Cinema Worse
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00:00Brilliant movies can genuinely change lives, but sometimes they can also have an unfortunate
00:06unintended negative side effect on the whole industry. Perhaps a film's success sends the
00:12wrong message to Hollywood about what audiences actually want, or inspires a whole generation of
00:17filmmakers to rip off its stylistic and narrative achievements in massively inferior fashion.
00:23Whatever the reason though, I'm Josh from WhatCulture.com and these are 10 great movies
00:28that accidentally made cinema worse. 10. Star Wars The Force Awakens
00:33Popularized Cynical Legacy Sequels After suffering through the wildly
00:38uneven Star Wars prequels, The Force Awakens sure was a welcome return to form, a safe and familiar,
00:44yet thoroughly entertaining space opera which affectingly united beloved legacy characters
00:49with a new cast of appealing heroes. But The Force Awakens' mammoth commercial success basically
00:55kickstarted the legacy sequel as we know it today. You know, the nostalgia soaked entries into flagging
01:01franchises that basically just replayed the hits, while shuffling the legacy cast into supporting roles
01:08as younger actors try to carry the starring load. While these types of movies can work,
01:14they more often than not feel like crass commercial exercises intended to distend dying or creatively
01:21bankrupt IP. Again, legacy sequels can work when they come from a place of genuine heart and creativity,
01:28but too often they simply rake over stories and character types that we've already seen while
01:34showering us in member berries. With the pandemic further heightening the risk factor of truly original
01:40blockbusters, expect to see Hollywood regurgitating the past even more aggressively in the years to come.
01:469. The Avengers Made Cinematic Universes The Next Big Thing
01:51There's no denying the impressiveness of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a blockbuster franchise
01:56achievement, building a massive world of meaningfully interconnected films. It all began,
02:02as you probably know, with 2008's Iron Man, but the first MCU film to truly prove how satisfying a shared
02:08universe can be was 2012's Avengers, which brought the prior solo movies together into a fantastically epic
02:16superhero team-up. Its massive box office success and the MCU's continued dominance has caused every
02:23major movie studio to chase its coattails ever since, attempting to spin off every property that they own
02:30into its own lucrative cinematic universe.
02:338. The Bond Supremacy Taught A Generation Of Action Directors About Shaky Cam
02:38The Bond Supremacy is a remarkable sequel to The Bond Identity, and one elevated significantly
02:44by Paul Greengrass's intense and kinetic direction. Throughout the film, Greengrass extensively utilized
02:51intentional shaky cam work during action sequences in order to heighten the chaotic realism of what we
02:57were seeing, giving it a full documentary vibe which, for a time, did feel refreshingly unique.
03:03But in the years that followed, countless inferior filmmakers also used shaky cam cinematography,
03:08yet without Greengrass's shrewd understanding of visual language. The Bond Supremacy's precise
03:15editing ensured that we always knew the spatial geography of any given moment, no matter how much
03:21camera shake there was. Yet for many action directors, the style just emboldened them to shoot tons of
03:26mediocre, scarcely comprehensible coverage, and spliced it all together with quick cuts in the editing room.
03:327. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Made Two-Part Blockbusters Acceptable
03:37Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows wasn't the first ever movie to split itself in two,
03:42but it was the one to popularize the practice at a blockbuster level. In an attempt to squeeze a
03:47little extra cash out of customers, the final Harry Potter book was divided into two movies,
03:52and while many fans will defend the decision given the epic scope of that story, it unintentionally
03:58kickstarted a gross trend in the film industry. See, in the wake of the Deathly Hallows' release,
04:04many other blockbuster franchises pulled similar tactics, what with Twilight, The Hunger Games,
04:09and Divergent all splitting their finales into two-parters. Though in Divergent's case,
04:15it actually backfired spectacularly as the first part bombed, which meant the second never actually
04:19got made. The most egregious example though, must surely be The Hobbit, where Warner Brothers
04:24convinced Peter Jackson to adapt J.R.R. Tolkien's 310-page book into three movies totaling almost
04:32eight hours in length. The trend has definitely cooled in recent years, though studios have grown
04:38wise about how much audiences hate the part one, part two gimmick, and so tend to give their two-part
04:43movies titles that disguise their compartmentalized storytelling. Number six, The Babadook sparked the
04:50infuriating debate about elevated horror. 2014's The Babadook received a rave reviews upon release,
04:57for its expert collision of conventional horror tropes with a more psychological character-driven
05:02component. The Babadook's success even sparked a trend of similarly inclined artsy horror films in
05:09the years that followed, such as The Witch, Get Out, Hereditary Midsomer, The Lighthouse, Us,
05:14Saint Maud, and Relic, and many of them were released by A24, and many of them, especially the
05:20ones I just said, were really really good. However, this soon led to the term elevated horror being
05:26coined, a designation signifying horror films which supplemented more traditional horror movie elements
05:32with themes and ideas from dramas or art movies. And ever since the phrase first gained traction in the
05:38mid-2010s, horror fans have been locked in a fierce, exhausting debate about the term's merits or lack
05:45thereof. To many, it seems understandably condescending to imply that any horror movie with a sliver of
05:51depth is placed on a pedestal above its genre brethren. Beyond tarring the bulk of the genre with
05:58the same brush, it also completely ignores the fact that elevated horror has existed for as long as
06:04horror has. There have always been psychological, visceral, experimental horror films. It's not just
06:10a new thing. 5. Batman Begins, ushered in an era of needlessly gritty reboots
06:16Batman Begins is one of the most influential movies of the 2000s, a gritty reboot of a beloved
06:21comic book IP, shaking off his goofy prior interpretations and treating him in a more or less
06:26grounded and realistic fashion. The success of Batman Begins, and especially its sequel The Dark Knight,
06:32prompted Hollywood to use that restrained style as the template for retooling a glut of stagnant
06:38franchises, whether it's suited them or not. Perhaps the most immediately divisive example is
06:44the DCEU's Man of Steel, which gives Superman the dubious grimdark treatment, no matter the
06:50inherent hopefulness and optimism of Superman in the comics. There are far, far worse examples though,
06:56like the Kirsten Stewart starring Snow White and the Huntsman, Josh Trank's Fantastic Four,
07:02and 2018's Robin Hood to name just a few. 4. Furious 7 Proved Hollywood Could Believably
07:08Resurrect Dead Actors Furious 7 is unquestionably one of the strongest films in the Fast and Furious
07:14franchise, and an all the more impressive achievement considering the tragic death of Paul Walker
07:19mid-production. In order to complete Walker's role as Brian O'Connor, Peter Jackson's VFX company,
07:25Wetter Digital, was hired to create a lifelike CGI model of Walker from existing footage which would
07:31then be mapped onto body doubles played by Walker's brothers Caleb and Cody. The end result is genuinely
07:38terrific, with only a few distracting moments where the digital scenes become visible. Given the enormous
07:43pressure on the production though, it's tough to argue with how this turned out. The problem, however,
07:48is that Furious 7 proved beyond any doubt that Hollywood could believably resurrect dead actors,
07:55and so in the years that followed we've had numerous films featuring long dead performers.
08:00The most prominent examples of course are Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One,
08:04and Harold Ramis as Egon Spengler in Ghostbusters Afterlife. And while the estates of each actor did
08:10sign off on their inclusion, does that really make it right? Number 3, The Matrix made bullet time
08:16Hollywood's favourite new trick. The Matrix is unquestionably one of the greatest action movies,
08:21if not movies period of all time. Yet its groundbreaking, Oscar-winning visual effects
08:27were so freaking cool that Hollywood spent the next decade or so shamelessly attempting to one-up them.
08:33The Matrix's big, splashy VFX coup was of course Bullet Time, an advanced version of slow motion whereby the
08:40camera moves through the space of a scene while time is slowed, giving the audience otherwise
08:46impossible coverage of an awesome action beat. There are certainly movies that have managed to
08:51co-op Bullet Time in interesting ways. I mean, take the jaw-dropping bomb explosion at the start of
08:56Swordfish for one, and I know, Swordfish, what a weird drop, but yeah, it worked at the time.
09:01Number 2, Napoleon Dynamite forced Netflix to improve their algorithm. Napoleon Dynamite is one of the
09:07most memorable indies of the 2000s, an ultra quirky, hilarious coming-of-age comedy that grossed an
09:12incredible $46.1 million on a mere $400,000 budget. In 2008, the Napoleon Dynamite problem was first
09:23coined, referring to the film's strong popularity on Netflix and how the service's content algorithm
09:29struggled to decide whether customers would like it or not. Because Napoleon Dynamite is such an order,
09:35difficult to categorize piece of work, it contributed to Netflix seeking to overhaul their algorithm,
09:41even offering a $1 million prize to anyone who could improve its effectiveness by 10%.
09:48In the years that followed, Netflix's algorithm became increasingly efficient,
09:52as did those of its streaming competitions, such that today, you're unlikely to be recommended anything
09:57even remotely outside of your comfort zone. Despite the massive libraries that streaming services offer,
10:03the algorithm will aim to steer you towards movies most likely to guarantee the attention of your
10:09eyeballs, in turn de-incentivizing the exploration of more adventurous left-field works of cinema.
10:15There's actually a really good video on this on the YouTube channel called Now You See It,
10:19by the way, which I would definitely recommend checking out if this has piqued your interest.
10:23Number 1, Pulp Fiction ushered in an era of obnoxiously cool crime films.
10:28Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction is a stone-cold masterpiece, and one of the most influential
10:33films of the entire 1990s, if not of all time. As brilliantly conceived as it is though, its
10:40distinctive dialogue and inventive narrative structure inspired an entire generation of
10:45young screenwriters and filmmakers to produce their own inferior knockoffs. We were inundated with a
10:51deluge of hip, darkly comedic crime movies filled with too cool for school characters, pointlessly
10:57non-linear storytelling, and a story that wasn't explicitly about much in the traditional sense.
11:04A few of those examples could include things like things to do in Denver when you're dead,
11:09reindeer games, eight heads in a duffel bag, and the big hit, each of which attempted to approximate
11:15the style and tone of Pulp Fiction without any of the skill at storytelling or character building.
11:21That's our list, I want something you guys think down in the comments below,
11:23what do you think about the influence that these movies had on cinema as a whole,
11:28and are there any other great movies you think kind of made other movies a bit worse?
11:32While you're down there as well, could you please give us a like, share, subscribe,
11:35and head over to whatculture.com for more lists and news like this every single day.
11:39Even if you don't though, I've been Josh, thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you soon.
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