
Visualization: Movies Are Getting Worse - huangm
http://moki.tv/blog/visual-evidence-movies-are-getting-worse
======
barrkel
Two things:

* I don't think polarization is a good signal for poor quality; I would rather suggest it means a more niche product, more highly focused. That the niche being served is largely adolescents is unfortunate.

* I think big-budget movies have been getting more conservative and predictable, but I would hazard a guess that it's due to financial industry turmoil and consequently less desire for risk taking.

~~~
SandB0x
"That the niche being served is largely adolescents is unfortunate"

Ever seen the Poochie episode of The Simpsons? The producers try to boost the
ratings of Itchy and Scratchy by adding a ridiculous character designed to
appeal to everyone. Near the start of the episode they hold a focus group
(text from snpp.com):

 _Man_ : How many of you kids would like Itchy & Scratchy to deal with real-
life problems, like the ones you face every day?

 _Kids_ : [clamoring] Oh, yeah! I would! Great idea! Yeah, that's it!

 _Man_ : And who would like to see them do just the opposite -- getting into
far-out situations involving robots and magic powers?

 _Kids_ : [clamoring] Me! Yeah! Oh, cool! Yeah, that's what I want!

 _Man_ : So, you want a realistic, down-to-earth show... that's completely
off-the-wall and swarming with magic robots?

 _Kids_ : [all agreeing, quieter this time] That's right. Oh yeah, good.

~~~
pjscott
> So, you want a realistic, down-to-earth show... that's completely off-the-
> wall and swarming with magic robots?

That actually sounds like the first few seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I
would have given any of several other examples, but you specified that there
must be "magic robots", which narrows things down a lot.

The kids' desires aren't actually contradictory, if you've got the writing
skills to pull it off.

~~~
derefr
I would say that Buffy isn't so much evidence that two opposed motifs can
exist _at the same time_ in a show, so much as that they can exist in close
quarters, alternating in a schizophrenic-but-enjoyable fashion. I don't recall
many moments where I was thinking of any of the characters as both teenagers
_and_ gothic-fantasy-world occupants (even in, say, The Body, you're just
watching a well-plotted drama about a teenager; the vampires, though serving
as setting elements, could be traded for mobsters or hospital patients or
needy pets in that episode without affecting the theme.)

------
pg
Interesting. I'd just been thinking about this. The last two new releases I
tried watching were so bad that I couldn't finish either of them. I know this
is only 2 data points, but they were both bad in the same way: they were
completely predictable. That's something you commonly see in a declining
medium. People recycle old ideas instead of having new ones.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spolia>

~~~
asr
To be fair, writers have been doing this for a long time...

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_style#Similarit...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_style#Similarities_to_contemporaries)

Did you watch The Social Network? Did you like it? I think we all knew how it
ended, it was the writing, cinematography, etc. that account for its
popularity. And the fact that the writers stretched the truth so the story
would be somewhat fresh :)

~~~
apu
_And the fact that the writers stretched the truth so the story would be
somewhat fresh_

Actually I'd argue that they changed the story to make it _less_ fresh, but
more understandable/appealing to the non-tech audience. After all, who doesn't
understand jilted love as a motivator? Whereas the "hacker's ethic" -- try
something to see it it'll work -- is tougher to convey to a general audience.

(For the record, I thought it was still a great movie.)

~~~
robryan
Ehh, I haven't seen more geeky hacker stuff references in a movie so while it
was given broad appeal at leas they retained a decent amount of the hacker
feel to it.

------
larrik
This article makes two huge assumptions:

1) Critical meta-ratings as THE measure of quality

2) The Top 20 popular movies per year as a representation of the entire year's
quality.

The author's final result seems to be that movie studios prefer to make movies
that have a built-in audience (at least for big-budget blockbuster movies).

~~~
notahacker
Assuming the ratings have been made since the launch of the site, there's also
a massive systematic error introduced by people being inclined to forget films
they considered to be pretty rubbish a decade ago, whilst being determined to
challenge popular opinion on the stuff they wished they hadn't watched last
year.

Whilst people feel the need to use ranking systems to express their dismay at
Avatar not being the experience they'd hoped for and correct their teenage
daughter's friends' belief that the Twilight Saga is deep and insightful, it's
mostly the people that actually consider themselves fans of Adam Sandler and
Hugh Grant's stock characters that bother to go and rate Happy Gilmore and
Four Weddings and a Funeral.

------
AndrewO
Although I agree with the statement in general, I have to ask: is polarization
really a good measure of declining quality? With ticket prices these days,
maybe a higher percentage of audiences are more likely to think it was good so
they don't feel like they wasted money...

Either way, nice visualization and it's always fun to read catty reviews about
bad movies.

------
rlmw
Its a really interesting article, but their methodology doesn't support their
conclusion. I'm willing to accept critical rankings as a measure of quality,
since I can't think of a better way of mapping the subjective notion of
quality to a quantitative measure. There are still some dodgey things being
done here though:

1\. Polarization as a measure of quality 2\. Choice of the top 20 movies as a
selection measure.

The article should really be title: "Popular movies are becoming more
polarizing". Though I concede that blogs like this are written to attract hits
and "Movies are getting worse" is probably more likely to achieve that.

------
pclark
Huge Moki.TV fan (<http://moki.tv/2481>). But also a huge movie fan. I
entirely disagree.

Think about this years movies:

The Social Network

The Kings Speech

Inception

Black Swan

True Grit

Will all almost certainly become classics.

~~~
weego
Don't you feel this might be kind of a cognitive bias? Like when people poll
for the best album of all time and it's always something that was released
within the last 3 years of whenever the poll was.

The social network is of it's time and will date really badly, to the point
where no one will watch or mention it ever again.

True Grit is a remake so specifically cannot be included as it had to be good
enough to have been remade.

Inception isn't ever going to be a classic a la The Matrix.

The Kings Speech will definitely have longevity; Black Swan I'm not convinced
will float above just being another film you can pick up for £3 in HMV in a
couple of months but then think "well, will I ever watch it?"

~~~
pclark
I chose these movies not necessarily because _I_ felt they were superb
(although I loved them all) but because they were critically acclaimed and all
received lots of oscar nominations. Almost by definition, they are the best
films of the year.

If you compare it to nominated movies ten years ago, Braveheart, Apollo 13, I
think they are comparably great.

Additionally, box office returns seem to be at all time highs. Black Swan and
True Grit are two films that typically would be destined for "niche"
audiences, but have returned hundreds of millions for reasonably small
budgets.

Also, I think that Inception will be almost as influential as The Matrix,
except in a smaller genre of films (eg: Matrix built upon action movies,
whereas Inception was more of a psych thriller) - in my opinion.

~~~
Gibbon
I never found Apollo 13 to be a compelling movie. It's so true to life that
you could just watch the documentaries and get the exact same experience.

------
bretthopper
One explanation behind increasing polarization could be the internet.

I would assume that there are more movie critics now, or at least critics are
more visible. Thanks to sites like Rotten Tomatoes, even a local newspaper
critic can have global reach.

Due to this visibility, it's harder for critics to stand out. The easiest way
to stand out is to be extreme or contrarian which would lead to more
polarization.

~~~
tpz
Your point is a very important one that I was surprised to find was not
expressed by other commenters. It convinced me of something that was bouncing
around my head while reading the article and the comments before yours:

If, as everyone seems to agree, movies are becoming more 'safe', more 'lowest
common denominator' on average, reviews should be becoming _less_ polarized in
response, not more.

That the opposite is happening suggests that reviews are progressively
carrying less and less 'truth' than they once did, and this is likely the case
even when they may be in general agreement on a given film.

------
gamble
The appropriate measure is not whether bad movies are made; (or popular) it's
whether _good_ films are still produced. There is some room for concern - mid-
budget films for adults like, for example, 'Master and Commander' are
essentially dead. The economics of film push studios to make blockbusters or
low-budget films. Still, there are enough good low-budget films still being
produced that I won't give in to despair just yet.

------
bostonpete
> The key, we think, is to look for movies that some love and some hate, which
> is the likely profile of a bad movie that's "safely" manufactured for an
> existing fanbase.

But according to the graph, Toy Story 3 was the least polarizing movie of 2010
and that seems like a prime example of a movie "safely" manufactured for an
existing fanbase.

~~~
huangm
I'd argue that looking at polarization is a good way to detect such movies,
but that not all such movies are polarizing.

~~~
bostonpete
OK, then what about The Blair Witch Project? One of the most polarizing movies
on the graph, but not exactly what you'd call "safely" manufactured for an
existing fanbase.

~~~
rflrob
> not exactly what you'd call "safely" manufactured for an existing fanbase.

I'd say a film having a budget of $22k[1] is pretty safe, as far as the rest
of the films on that list are concerned. While not a non-trivial amount of
debt for a handful of people to take on, it's roughly in the same price range
as a new car, which most people are capable of taking on.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blair_Witch_Project#Budget>

------
earnubs
The 80s was the greatest decade for movies. Sadly I cannot prove that from
this graph.

~~~
stop
I'm inclined to think the 70s was the golden age of American cinema (Scorcese,
Copolla, Cassavetes, etc).

------
foulmouthboy
Why would extremely polarizing movies be an indicator that movies are getting
worse? If anything, more polarization would seem to mean that critics are
finding movies more difficult to come to consensus on, which could mean that
movies are getting MORE complex and nuanced in their storytelling, which in
tern could be taken to mean that movies are getting BETTER.

~~~
Corvus
The reason extremely polarizing movies are an indicator that movies are
getting worse is because that is what Moki's data shows.

Their graph shows that "polarizing" movies are strongly correlated with low
ratings by Moki users (not just critics), and that both are increasing over
time (i.e. getting worse).

Moki does not claim one causes the other, or try to psychoanalyze users based
on their ratings. They simply note that it does exist.

~~~
foulmouthboy
Then I'm not understanding the definition of "polarizing". By my thinking, a
polarizing movie would have distinctly good ratings to go alongside distinctly
bad ratings, i.e. Twilight is not polarizing if everybody agrees it is bad.

------
petercooper
_The key, we think, is to look for movies that some love and some hate, which
is the likely profile of a bad movie that's "safely" manufactured for an
existing fanbase._

Some people love death metal and some hate it. Some people love classical
music and some hate it. Polarization is hardly a quality indicator. Indeed, it
seems more like an indicator of memorability.

------
Splines
_People recycle old ideas instead of having new ones._

IMO this is a weak argument - you could say the same thing about startups.
When it comes to creative work, it's all about the execution.

Just because a story is being retold doesn't automatically make it bad.
Similarly, just because a story has been told before doesn't mean you can't
tell it again.

~~~
commieneko
Robert Heinlein once wrote (On the Writing of Speculative Fiction) that,
gimmicks aside, there were only 3 stories that were about people:

Boy meets girl.

The little tailor.

The man who learned better.

~~~
burgerbrain
Which is Die Hard?

~~~
commieneko
The man who learned better.

~~~
burgerbrain
How so? Seems to me it's just "the man who kicked lots of ass". He certainly
didn't learn better, since John McClane proceeded to find himself in similar
situations 3 more times :P

~~~
zeemonkee
Only if you are referring to John McClane. "The man who learned better" could
be Alan Rickman and all the other villains whose ass he kicked.

------
sliverstorm
If you look closely at the graph, notice that while there are more poorly
rated, highly polarizing films, there is also an increase in less polarizing,
very highly rated films... They're just hidden because your eyes are drawn
upwards to the red. If you only pay attention to the red, it's just a chart
about polarization.

------
Gibbon
Polarization is a measure of the assertiveness of an artist.. the degree to
which they have executed an opinionated concept for a specific audience.

A niche film should be as highly opinionated as possible, with the objective
of both catering to your chosen market and excluding all others intentionally.

For example, the musical act Prodigy do not do TV performances. This is a
mainstream marketing method that does not appeal to their audience. By
avoiding it, they increase their appeal to their true fans, while ignoring
uninterested listeners. Likewise, the singer Adele does not perform at music
festivals for the same reason.

The ideal niche product would repel exactly half the critics and attract the
other half. This would create a core of hardcore evangelists, a bigger group
of fans, a big group of uninterested bystanders and a small group of haters.
The haters and bystanders can mostly be ignored, making marketing super-
efficient.

Lack of polarization is a measure of beauty and popularity. Beauty is a
measure of average-ness and normality. The most beautiful person in a given
society is the one that looks the most an average of all the people. The most
popular movie is the one that everyone can relate to.. the most profoundly
average.

Case in point.. the Shawshank Redemption. This is a movie that is consistently
voted one of the best ever made, but it's highly rated because of its
familiarity. It's a near flawless execution of common mythologies that
everyone can relate to: fall from grace, redemption, justice, freedom and so
on.

Toy Story is another example. Pixar's entire methodology is to distill the
world's archetypes and mythologies down into the "perfect" movie with every
"i" dotted and every "t" crossed. The result is profoundly familiar, yet kept
fresh with just enough plot twists and humour to keep it interesting.

Niche movies are just popular movies for specific groups instead of a general
audience. Polarization is a measure of how effectively they achieved the goal.

------
commieneko
It's all relative, and trying to apply "scientific visualization" to literary
criticism is not an especially useful activity. (Applying it to literary
markets is another matter...)

Interestingly, I liked the Matrix sequels, the 3rd Spiderman movie, and
thought the Star Wars prequels were pretty good (though not as good as
_Empire_). And having been around at the time depicted in the latest Indiana
Jones movie, late 50s early 60s, I enjoyed it tremendously.

I'm in my early 50s, and one of the things I've noticed over the years is that
I become _less_ critical of movies and literature as I get older. That is to
say I'm much more tolerant of elements in a movie or story that would drive me
nuts when I was younger.

When you are very young, everything is new and wonderful, then you become an
adult and suddenly you start to notice that "hey, I've seen this type of story
before. And I liked it better then!" Of course most likely the story wasn't
all that new when you saw it first, but it was new to _you_. There are very
few truly new storie.

As you get older, though, you often start looking not at the flash and the
surface of stories, but at the quality of execution, at the subtleties of
exposition, and the nuance of character. You also can view the story in a
larger context, both your own context, and the context of history. And, more
importantly, you stop comparing the _qualities_ of works to the _feelings_ you
had when you were twelve years old. I can tell you for sure, _nothing_ is ever
going to be as much fun as whatever it was that was pushing your buttons when
you were a kid.

As they used to say in old school science fiction fandom, "the golden age is
twelve."

Sad, but true. In compensation, though, you do get a possibly deeper
appreciation, and, if you let it happen, a broader range of tastes. If you had
told me 30-40 years ago that one of my favorite genres would be josei anime
and manga I would have laughed in your face; once you'd explained to me what
that was...

Having said all that, the vast bulk of movies at any given time follows
Sturgeon's Law pretty closely. Mostly shit. We remember the gems of the past
and in aggregate they seem to add up to a larger sum than the current year's
turkeys. I seem to go to the movies about as much as I did in my 20s and seem
to be enjoying them at about the same rate.

------
keeptrying
I think its more that no one is taking the time to write great and compelling
stories.

It takes time and patience and a lot of effort to create a story like the The
Lord of the Rings. And the movies that are really good are ones with a great
story behind them.

Hollywood seems to be just mining stories from the past. Its gonna run out at
some point and all we'll get are sequels.

There needs to be some infusion of creativity. "Contemporary" creativity. Ie
new but compelling and interesting stories. It seems to be a lost skill.

~~~
gnaritas
> I think its more that no one is taking the time to write great and
> compelling stories.

Seriously? Pick up a book, that's so far from true it isn't even funny.

> It takes time and patience and a lot of effort to create a story like the
> The Lord of the Rings.

Sure, and there's a ton of them already out there in the form of books.

> Hollywood seems to be just mining stories from the past. Its gonna run out
> at some point and all we'll get are sequels.

You can't run out of mining stories from the past; more great stories have
already been written than will likely ever be able to be put on film.

> There needs to be some infusion of creativity. "Contemporary" creativity. Ie
> new but compelling and interesting stories. It seems to be a lost skill.

Or you're simply misdiagnosing the problem. Perhaps movies just suck more
recently because exec's have gotten really good at shooting for the lowest
common denominator to gain the largest audience and thus revenue.

Making money is not a guarantee of a great movie and great movies are quite
often box office failures because they're too niche, by necessity.

The more the business folks pull the strings, the worse the movies will be
artistically, but their goal is money, so they don't care, nor should they.

Movies will become great again, when Avatar style technology drives down the
cost of making one to the point that making cheaper niche movies can be
profitable.

~~~
light3
Watching old movies like Star wars, Indiana Jones, old Bond movies, you get
the sense that a lot of work was put in to creating the scenes. It must have
been very expensive to make, was it because revenue was very high back then?

~~~
gnaritas
Movies used to be the only game in town; now there are actual games and the
gaming industry surpassed Hollywood a while back. Besides, blockbusters have
always been profitable, but with so many other entertainment options these
days, viewers have choices they didn't in the past.

That Michael Bay movies continue to make big bucks is a travesty, but that's
today's market. I'd much rather watch _Man from Earth_ than any movie he's
ever made, but one can't deny his movies make execs lots of money by being
dumb and going for every cheap laugh, big explosion, overdone effect he can
think of.

------
ootachi
Might want to mention that your chart works fine in Firefox 4 as well. The
"Works best in Google Chrome" gives me eerie memories of the "Best Viewed in
Internet Explorer" days.

------
yarone
Anyone know how they created that really nice graph with the mouseovers,
filtering, etc?

~~~
huangm
We heavily adapted <http://moochart.coneri.se/> for the graph.

------
cafard
A bit over 25 years ago, I saw _Top Gun_ and told my girlfriend that people
had forgotten how to make movies, though they did know how to make commercials
and music videos. I don't think that I was wrong, but I may have implicitly
given too much credit to the movie makers of years past.There were a lot of
awful movies made during times that at least the film critics look back on
with nostalgia.

------
bmelton
I'm not sure if I'm reading the visualizations correctly, but thankfully, they
put Christopher Nolan on there, so I can have a reference as to whose work is
best. ;-)

I do have to agree with AndrewO though, there are many movies that I consider
to be of the highest quality that I would consider as eliciting heavy polar
reactions. Primer is perhaps the best geek example.

------
michaelty
It probably hasn't helped that TV can now feature long-running complex shows
(Lost, the Sopranos, the Wire, Dexter, Mad Men, the Office, etc) that 2 hour
movies can't beat in terms of character exploration and plot depth.

------
jameskilton
In other news, those damn kids have it too easy these days, had to walk 10
miles, bare foot, in 10 feet of snow, up hill...

Sensationalist title and a data visualization that's useless. Try average
Rotten Tomatoes score or something, not some random stat with no formula made
up on the spot. Seriously, what does "polarizing" actually stand for?

This kind of thing has been going on since the beginning of time and will
continue until the end of it. Sorry, nothing to see here.

~~~
CPlatypus
RTFA.

"We looked at how polarizing each movie is by measuring the standard deviation
of the ratings for each movie."

That's pretty clear, even if it's still a bad measure. There are plenty of
valid criticisms of this survey; you don't need to make stuff up based on
skimming it before you post your predetermined conclusions.

------
hammock
The coolest thing about this is the visualizations. That's great work creating
an interactive piece in HTML5.

------
aaronbrethorst
There was a great article about the decline in the quality of movies in GQ
recently. [http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201102/the-
day...](http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201102/the-day-the-
movies-died-mark-harris?printable=true)

------
Sukotto
As a bit of a tangent, I'd like to mention a movie ranking site I think is
pretty underrated <http://www.phi-phenomenon.org/> which uses some interesting
statistical methods to aggregate "best of" lists

------
dawgr
Some recent good movies:

-Animal Kingdom (Australian crime film)

-True Grit (Western)

-How to train your dragon (Pixar film)

~~~
rexf
The 3rd one is by DreamWorks
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Train_Your_Dragon_(film)>

Pixar is currently in the sequel game. Toy Story 3 last year, and Cars 2
scheduled for this year. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pixar_films>

~~~
dawgr
Yeah, you are right, I always confuse the two.

------
andraz
When were those movie rated? Now or at the time of the release?

If they were rated recently then there is obvious bias there. Yes/no?

------
ovi256
OT: that website is horrible in Firefox, 100+ assets, 25 secs to the onload
event, and afterwards it locks up periodically because of the chartbeat
analytics ajax call. In Chrome, it's a breeze, fast load and then completely
fluid. Chrome is magic.

PS: the Firefox UI freeze on ajax calls seems to be a Mac specific problem.

~~~
ootachi
In Firefox 4 or 3.6?

~~~
ovi256
3.6

Never tried 4. In benchmarks it's way faster than 3.6. Downloading it now.

------
yread
Eh non-english speaking movies don't exist anymore?

~~~
rottencupcakes
What specifically do you think is missing? Remember, it's only the 20 most
popular films in a given year.

Oldboy (Korea), City of God (Brazil), Pan's Labyrinth (Mexico), and Spirited
Away (Japan) are all on those, and that's not an exhaustive list.

~~~
JonnieCache
I think his point is that bollywood (for example) is bigger than hollywood by
most measures (budget, gross etc.)

~~~
InclinedPlane
_citation needed_

By my research Bollywood's total annual revenues are barely a third of
Hollywood revenues for theatrical releases alone (aside from dvd, broadcast,
and digital distribution revenues).

------
dadro
1992 was a good year in movies!

