PDX is full of faggots, but I really think people underestimate how many native Portlanders have a living memory before the city turned to shit. If you told them "you can have 2004 Portland back, you just have to let us bust a few skulls" I think everyone would be shocked how much of the city would agree as long as it was dressed up palatably for them.
I think at this point, anything that doesn't involve live ammunition is probably gonna be acceptable. You're regularly seeing rioters blasted with pepperballs and other 'less lethal' options and nobody is even mentioning it as unusual from the middle. They could break out beanbag on anyone trying to pull officers off an arrest and normal people would see them dropped with a broken bone/rib and go "What did you expect dumbass".
Now all these things are either extinct or have niche audiences.
This is it, movies haven't really adapted to the internet age. I'm not talking about resistance to streaming or anything else, I mean they haven't adapted to the production realities that come from being so easily interchanged. It used to be that a movie had extremely defined, narrow competition, there would be a few other movies showing at the same time but that was limited in any one area by physical screens, and each of those screens would almost assuredly be the other competition in the space.
If you were the only science fiction movie during this season of major films, you'd get the sci fi nerd audience. Even if it was a bit of a mid sci fi movie, it was the absolute best sci fi you could get right now. You could go buy physical, but home cinema quality was just way behind theaters for the time, the recording media couldn't keep up. People would absolutely pay for 'good enough' when the alternatives might as well have been nothing at all.
Now, though, a new sci fi movie has to not only be good, but it needs to be arguably better than most of all the sci fi that's ever been produced before, otherwise there's not really much incentive to pay a superpremium price to go to the theater and see it right fucking now. The internet age coincided with more or less solving the media quality issue with a mix of genuinely lossless compression techniques and functionally unbounded storage - there is not any one film that is going to be limited by a m.2 drives capacity. Similarly, the internet age ran parallel to home displays becoming very competitive with theater visual quality, and the same for home sound systems. Theater has the edge for sure, but now its just a notable edge, not completely insurmountable.
Without that audience assurance, the habit of just throwing billions into a movie that'll be ready in a few years is suicidal, and Hollywood has been playing Russian Roulette and losing with so many of these productions. They're still behaving like they're the only media game on the block, when they only maintain a dominance over a sliver of things, with functional competitors eating up swathes of the market as more accessible alternatives. Like gaming, although I hold a different sentiment on that, I suppose.
I think gaming has threatened movies more in the sense that gaming is a superior medium for action stories, mysteries, and some kinds of horror, as opposed to gaming being a true substitute. Hollywood relied on those as junk food easy movies for a long time, and now gaming is just better at it, the only thing cooler than watching a guy blow something up is blowing it up yourself. The only thing scarier than watching someone be stalked by the alien is to be the one who's stalked by the alien. This doesn't work so well with other genres like documentaries, romcoms, family films and other situations where there's not clearly a single protagonist and thread, games can do split narratives but movies control the pace of that far better, for vastly better results. Regardless, hollywood lost its monopoly on one of its easy moneymakers, and the pain shows.
Amusingly, TV trying to warp into hollywood is more, in my perception, a sign of hollywood failing, as opposed to TV succumbing to the same fate. TV was incredible and still is incredible at what it used to do, telling short stories connected by general series and characters, while assembling a loose overarching narrative for the people watching all of it. Most seasons only had 2-3 eps of 20+ focused on the season wide arc, one or two setups and one or two conclusion episodes at the season end. The rest was mostly interchangeable, and could be consumed at the viewers convenience, which was essential for reruns. Today, it still holds value as being a low commitment way to engage with any particular series, you can usually just jump in and the core story starts and stops in that ep. You might not know every character well, but essential elements were always played out.
But now hollywood refugees have grabbed the nearest media they could shift off to, and are warping it into a twisted replica of what they used to have. TV is giving up its strengths and adopting the weakness of hollywood by turning episodes and seasons into one long, running, overproduced, extremely precise production where the whole season is one singular story, and the episode storyline is itself often a secondary afterthought. You're seeing them try and apply movie tricks like foreshadowing and subtext to events that are legitimately hours apart for the viewer, and wondering why its hard to follow. Your seeing seasons shorten out and reduce the episode count to try and solve this and the production costs associated with making every episode at the level of a movie, and now you've got 4-6 episode seasons that drop every four years. At this point, Television is just an uncut movie where the director wasn't told "no" to extraneous stuff. Its no longer suitable junk food media, its not longer reasonable to pick up one episode and watch just that, its now mandatory to watch it all in exact order to understand anything that's going on, and its doubling down on that layer of stupid.
I wasn't expecting this to break out into a massive rant, but then I just sort of kept going. It infuriates me to see media homogenize into the worst elements of all things, and then scream at us for being the haters as it burns down for not making what we want.
Just go back, watch all of Stargate, and relearn what you lost. That worked for a reason, and the foundational elements of it do still work. Small, self contained stories, loosely coupled, with compelling characters and simple motivations. Complexity comes with time on those series, let it cook. They didn't have the fine detail of Goa'uld genetic memory in episode one of season one, they were just evil for the sake of it for quite a while. Build simple, build up, and you can end up with a lot of cool stuff.
