The landscape of film–both television and the movies–has been changing in the past twenty years. More and more money has been poured into shows and movies by production companies. This saw impressive results for a while (think of the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe–at least until Endgame hit the theaters), but has more and more often resulted in diminishing returns or even outright losses in the past five years.
Consider as just one example the film Chaos Walking, which you almost certainly didn’t see. Despite having two A-list, young, popular celebrities as leads (Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley), an intriguing plot, a $100,000,000 production budget, and being based on books that are both popular and well-received, despite all of this the film only made about $30 million counting both box office and home viewing. (Source) Not every film loses 70% of its cost, of course. But Chaos Walking is more and more the rule than the exception.
Now there are obviously complicated reasons for why a movie like Chaos Walking doesn’t do well (despite being an okay enough movie–it really was decent). There are also complicated reasons as to why we got here and whose fault it is. Multiple streaming service options, the fragmentation of popular culture, the Covid pandemic keeping people away from the theaters, fatigue with played-out narratives, over-saturation of political messages (it doesn’t even really matter what kind of political messages–we get enough of that IRL from the Left and Right alike and don’t feel like having it shouted at us from fictional characters as well), and many, many other factors have created our modern world. I’m not writing about any of that here.
Instead, I plan to use the next few blog posts to write some speculative non-fiction of my own. Namely: what might the media landscape look like moving forward? How will the pop culture industry (the visual side of it, anyway) respond to the new world? What can we as consumers expect? And how should Christians think carefully about what’s coming? All this and more next time!
Dr. Coyle Neal is co-host of the City of Man Podcast an Amazon Associate (which is linked in this blog), and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO
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