At the same time, you certainly could reasonably read the film as being very dubious about the military. It opens with the psychological collapse of Maverick's wingman when a MiG locks on to him, Cruise's character has to defy orders to save him, and gets chewed out for doing so.
Maverick's original motivation is clearing his father name, not patriotism. Goose dies in a pointless accident. The final dogfight is random "rescue mission" against an unnamed foe in "hostile waters" in the Indian ocean, and Cruise's character almost abandons the fight due to PTSD.
Yeah, the almost pornographic love the camera shows to the jets probably made the actual story all be irrelevant to the Navy's recruiting success. But it's easy to imagine all the whining from the Fox news personality cosplaying as Secretary of "War" about such a film if it were made today.
Maybe one could reasonably blame on-line video and or video games if this were a global phenomenon.
But it isn't. China and India are going gangbusters. Japan is thriving and doing strong work. Nigerian cinema is projected to hit 3 million ticket sales for the first time this year. The UK--is at least stealing work from Hollywood with tax breaks. Korea had a rough patch, which they turned around by doing more mid-market films.
The US studios problems are unique, which at least suggests that the answer lies in the failures of their leadership. Perhaps their long project of abandoning original mid-market films to push bloated huge special effects heavy franchises was ill-advised. It's almost Like having a portfolio of 10-20 reasonable original bets is better than investing everything in a single expensive "sure-thing" sequel it increasingly seems like no one actually wants to see.
So I agree that Hollywood has stopped innovating, but am dubious that any other problems has much to do with Youtube (as much as I enjoy YouTube).
To be honest, a lot of the YouTube content creators, especially the most successful ones, actually moved to LA and Hollywood already, suggesting that its not Hollywood itself, as a place for developing fresh ideas, that is dying, but its more established institutions. I would say that if you are in LA right now, there is no end to the amount of young people ready and willing to work on some creative entertainment project, but the market is YouTube, and the biggest studio is MrBeast's (among others).
Everytime I see a trailer for an american film I feel like it's the same crap just re-hashed with different actors and the same plots over and over again. Give me something original. Something from Japan, Turkey, India, someone with a new idea.
The Koreans? Yup, they push the boundaries of story telling. For example the School Nurse Files, that was either one of the best or the worse series I've ever seen. I'm still trying to figure it out. No way a Hollywood studio would take a risk like TSNF.
It's funny that you mention Japan, because I live here and I swear 90% of Japanese movies/dramas/animes are just rehashes of the same ideas over and over again. I guess only the good stuff gets exported.
Korea too, and any other country. There are some great movies that push the boundaries of storytelling but those are just as rare as great American movies.
> The US studios problems are unique, which at least suggests that the answer lies in the failures of their leadership
Studio consolidation, fiscal myopathy resulting in low risk tolerance and chasing the big-blockbuster-sequelitis trend that has worked very well in the past. 2025 had some great, non-sequel breakout hits - and sequel flops. I hope both trends continue.
Canada is great. Montreal feels like a stylish and fun European city.
As a film lover, I've been to the Toronto film festival many times, it's an unmatched experience--so many things to see, and watch films with a very engaged festival crowd just makes them better. (In the same way, even if you don't love Star Wars, going on opening weekend, with the most enthusiastic fans, makes the experience better.) And given that nearly half of Toronto's population was born outside of Canada, it makes even New York feel a little parochial.
It's a bit simplistic to personify complex organizations of millions of people like "The Government" or "The Market" as if they were a living, breathing persons with a single mind.
There were people working in government who successfully attacked Oppenheimer for personal and/or policy reasons, people who stood by, and people who unsuccessfully supported him, voted to clear him, or condemned the proceedings.
Oppenheimer still paid the price, and arguably, the risks to someone like him today are considerably higher, as the current administration isn't exactly like Eisnehower's.
Nevertheless it's reductionist, reifying sentimentality to talk about "the government" turning "viciously" on someone who "served them well" because they are defying its agenda. The government isn't a character in Game of Thrones. The responsibility lies with the specific individuals who attacked him, and those who stood by.
Nevertheless it's reductionist, reifying sentimentality to talk about "the government" turning "viciously" on someone who "served them well" because they are defying its agenda. ... The responsibility lies with the specific individuals who attacked him, and those who stood by.
I'm sure that was of great comfort to Oppenheimer, as it will be to Altman and/or Amodei. "It's not you, it's us."
It is really unclear why you think that either the political interest or strategic logic of not wanting to rely on manufacturing in China, and having some on the value being created here goes away, or is some idle whim.
Sure, if it took decades of slow patient effort to create the current situation, it might take decades to unwind it. And, sure, the US political system is exceptionally bad at industrial policy.
But, at the end of the day, the political and military logic is, and will be for the forseeable future, get your supply chains out of China. Just because it is slow and difficult doesn't there is any reason to believe the pressure will relax. (Putting aside the possibility of an AGI/robotics revolution)
I understand the logic of getting out of China, and the reasoning is sound. However, cost is the bigger issue. Are you willing to pay more for your computers and electronics? Is your neighbor? Is your company? Are your investors?
The pressure to reverse this disaster will always be there but material change isn't realistic. We have neither the capacity nor a strong enough inclination to built out an industrial base anywhere near what China can do. I understand China is supplying the whole world and we'd only need to supply ourselves to achieve security, but that also makes the cost problem even worse.
Chips will come from Taiwan and everything else will come from China for the foreseeable future unless like you said there's a major disruption from somewhere. Without that, I only see one pathway everyone can stomach: continue growing the economy, which includes leveraging China's industrial and labor base, and hope any political differences with China can be mitigated diplomatically.
I was lucky enough to be an early tester, here's a brief video walking through the process of creating worlds, showing examples--walking on the moon, with Nasa photo as part of the prompt, being in 221B Baker street with Holmes and Watson, wandering through a night market in Taipei as a giant boba milk tea (note how the stalls are different, and sell different foods), and also exploring the setting of my award-nominated tabletop RPG.
Yeah, sure, starting from 1998 just a year after Amazon went public, when it was still just a glorified online bookstore, is the most relevant and honest comparison one could make to Nintendo.
I think it depends where you live. Peanuts seems to have fairly large presence in Taiwan and Japan--it's currently owned by Sony. It's one of the tentpoles on Apple TV.
According to Wikipedia, as a franchise it's brings in more revenue than Star Trek or the Avengers.
A wide range of countries got rich, while China's policies were unique, in addition to being abhorrent. Why should anyone believe that the only other option for China was "being Nigeria"?
The PRC is getting older faster than they are getting rich. As a graying middle income country, they are worse off than Japan or Taiwan or Korea, places that that actually managed to become broadly developed and wealthy before needing to navigate population aging.
Sure, China received some temporary benefits from having an artificially low dependency ratio. That is over, the demographic payday loan is coming due.
India's low dependency rate positions them well for the next 50 years, as China flails in a demographic crisis caused by the CCP.
Going to enjoy holidays after one effort post. Only 1 of 2 extremely large country has gotten reasonably developed while starting from same level, hint: it's not India. Nigeria useful measure, because Nigerian income level is comparable to the few 100m left behind in PRC, that's the human develop cost of not concentrating resources and being stuck in informal economy. In terms of actual development, PRC not unique, just generic competent authoritarian directed export led growth. It was fact the only viable modern growth model, for small/large countries, PRC simply had to execute much better because they don't have luxury of only mastering a few sectors but all of them due to scale, and even now mastering almost everything, PRC still has too many people than high skilled opportunities. There is no other proven/repeated development model for no resource states, well except more authoritarian colonial exploitation, which you know is worse.
>old before rich
PRC can inflate RMB a few % and instantly be high income AKA rich as defined by world bank, ultimately the old before rich is retarded single dimension analysis. PRC is young/rich, old/poor society, which is much better setup than JP/TW/SKR for the simple reason PRC old (who also has 95%+ home ownership and high savings) are disproportionately poor and therefore cheap to caretake by the increasingly affluent young. It's more optimized vs advanced economies where welfware costs is uniformly unsustainably expensive to maintain. For reference bottom 2/5 of PRC, i.e. 500m constitutes 5% of GDP, every new skilled worker with multiple times more productivity to take care of multiple subsistent farmers and informal workers who are fucking poor and have little expectation to begin with. Also helps that PRC is... actually incredibly rich, in terms of manufacturing abundance, aka material richness. PRC old/poor, young/rich is one of the greatest caretake arbitrage opportunities, they wouldn't have been double fucked if they were old/rich, young/rich. BTW old before rich projection, PRC demographers already anticipated it, hence the family planning and zerg rushing for mass manufacturing and high end industries. One more thing to consider, every old/poor that drags down per capita average that dies (and they die first) will move per capita towards young/rich, i.e. for PRC to be statistically rich per capita in a few years, all they have to do is nothing but wait for old/poor to die.
>coming due
After you and I are dead. Their payday loan is the greatest high skill demographic dividend in human history, with actual system to capitalize on talent. They're going to have roughly OCED combined in just STEM in next 20 years, that workforce going to stick around until 2060s/70s+, aka they have basically 50 years to build dominance, and 30-40 years to figure out demographics. And btw this reality is based off PRC having effective 800m pop (again 500m are functionally Nigeria useless), they can afford to shed 500m useless mouths and still maintain advantage. BTW PRC 2100 demographics is ~2nd largest country, i.e. they will still have have massive human capita advantages, assuming they don't fix TFR, which of all countries with proven family planning systems, they're most likely to succeed.
>India's low dependency
Low demographic dependency doesn't matter if young/poor can't handle old/poor. NVM Indian TFR in most developed regions also crashing below TFR. Remember that stat PRC, despite being magnitude more successful at development than India still left with 500m surplus poor people, i.e. 40% of population. India is going to have 1000m-1200m out of 1700m, if they're lucky - that 30% stunting, 20% wasting is going to toast a lot of workforce. Most likely they're even more fucked because they couldn't capitalize on mass manufacturing now that labour saving tech is proliferating and AI is eating service. So you're looking at country where future profile is 7 Nigeria's and 1 Japan. Forget old ate dependency ratio, their young is going to be poor, underemployed, and restless. AKA the exact scenario PRC family planning was trying to avoid on a very condensed timeline. Again it's not like Indian didn't try to cap population via own sterilization / family planning policy. They simply failed and now they're heading into PRC demographer doomsday scenario, old/poor and young/poor. That's India's position. There will still be pockets of Indian rich but when demographic payday comes due PRC will be mostly rich taking care of poor vs India mostly poor/old/young vs few rich. Having mostly poor will also fuck a lot of other development goals, i.e. don't expect India to fix their air pollution anytime soon. Just like PRC old/poor, young/rich was locked decades ago, Indian old/poor, young/poor is more or less locked in due to their development velocity (lack of) and tfr trends.
Meanwhile most of advanced economies will struggle to fund social welfare nets where young/rich eat shit in inverted social contract to caretake old/rich(er) at their expense, i.e. new gen will be materially worse off than old gen. Ultimately PRC can on paper afford to caretake for old/poor, vs advanced economies on paper cannot afford to caretake for old/rich. India crashing TFR is old/poor + young/poor double shit sandwich. Everyone be flailing but guess who'll flail least. The flailing China is going suffer is old poor retiring in abundance they never dreamed of while everyone else likely regress vs past.
At the same time, you certainly could reasonably read the film as being very dubious about the military. It opens with the psychological collapse of Maverick's wingman when a MiG locks on to him, Cruise's character has to defy orders to save him, and gets chewed out for doing so.
Maverick's original motivation is clearing his father name, not patriotism. Goose dies in a pointless accident. The final dogfight is random "rescue mission" against an unnamed foe in "hostile waters" in the Indian ocean, and Cruise's character almost abandons the fight due to PTSD.
Yeah, the almost pornographic love the camera shows to the jets probably made the actual story all be irrelevant to the Navy's recruiting success. But it's easy to imagine all the whining from the Fox news personality cosplaying as Secretary of "War" about such a film if it were made today.
Cheney was sensible enough to take the win.
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