I hate it. But at least it's self-aware? Sorta? In a drooling, knuckle-dragging way. Like, at least the simpletons know what they want. Though quality has little to do with it because the impulse is satisfied regardless of actual cinematic content.
Top Gun: Maverick: It's an excellent, Nostalgia-Bait movie done right. Both well made and true to the original source material. The market rewarded it appropriately.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom: I haven't seen it nor am I particularly eager to. But this is one of the few times I'm gonna confidently say it probably nailed the Nostalgia-Bait and failed everything else across the board. It also probably failed the Nostalgia-Bait. But the hungry market was (mostly) too dumb to notice. "Sam Neill is in this one! 😲"
Pixar's Lightyear: I don't give humanity much credit. And by that I mean I'm regularly surprised that people can tie their shoes. But at least the drooling, Nostalgia-Bait population intuitively knew "That's not my Buzz Lightyear!" and helped that miserable, joy-vaccum of a film underwhelm, at least by Pixar standards.
And that credit isn't misplaced, I don't think. Lightyear's failure isn't merely "No one's taking their kids to the movies anymore in general" cause that standard Minions movie came out a month later and still made quadruple the profits. Nor was the failure a Disney+ streaming thing because it only recently released on the streaming platform.
It was just a bad movie all around. Neither fulfilling to the nostalgia-bait general audience nor to the connoisseur of quality cinema.
So I express an ever so miniscule modicum of hope for humanity. It ain't much. Jurassic Nostalgia-Bait World will probably still gross a bil globally and, more tragically, a brilliant, original, beautiful film like the Northman can't find an audience in this market.
But at least humanity understands what it wants in nostalgia. Those standards aren't high. They can be fulfilled just by throwing Sam Neill in a trailer. But, hey, that's at least SOMETHING.
