I am about to gird my loins and subject myself to two hours of brutal mental punishment: I’m taking my kids to see A Minecraft Movie today. It’s yet another movie based on a toy, or in this case, a children’s video game.
In a way, this is a return to the good old days. Hollywood is simply giving the people what they want: grizzled old Jack Black, unkempt, bedraggled, and manic, doing his schtick in front of a green screen mugging for licensed IP for all eternity. Plus, The Rock in a fright wig.
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We used to go to the movies to get lost for a few hours. Now we’re just lost.
This is not another article about why we need better movies. I mean, that would be great, but only you and I need those. No one under 20, maybe 30, cares. They don’t miss movies — at all — because they don’t remember ever enjoying them.
I confess that my daughters saw Snow White — not on purpose. They were with friends whose mother took them to see it. To my delight, they hated it. Kids have a surprising ability to smell bullsh*t when you try to sell it to them. The entirety of their review when they got home was “Snow White looked like Lord Farquaad,” referencing the diminutive villain in the first Shrek movie with the severe bowl cut.
“But the movies are dead! Why are you giving people who hate you your money?” Sorry, I still like going to a movie theater once in a while. We go to the movies to get the kids off their screens…by plopping them in front of different, enormous screens. It’s the American way. Movie theaters are throwbacks, yes, but I am going to keep propping them up for as long as they’ll let me. And the only time I ever go is when the kids ask; I am inured to disappointment. Every kid’s movie is a horror movie to me these days: just one elegy after another to broken IP, creative travesties, and beloved characters debrided of all the charm and wit that made them famous.
At this point, mild humor, flat jokes, tired cultural references, and even a fart joke seem wholesome and refreshing. As long as the story doesn’t involve some form of teenage queer awakening, someone getting an abortion, or a suicide, I will usually find myself sitting in the theater a few times a year grimacing through the latest simulacrum of what used to be called “entertainment.”
Kids in my house who watch things watch mainly ONE thing: streamers playing video games and uploading the streams on YouTube. That is 90% of their content diet. The rest is a smattering of a few watchable shows, and the occasional old movie. We just watched Shrek 4, the one where Shrek signs a deal with Rumpelstiltskin and loses his family. Shrek is my kryptonite; seeing his face has the same effect on me that hearing the theme music to Wheel of Fortune or M.A.S.H. has on me — I normally flee the room. But somehow, even Shrek 4 is more entertaining, has more heart, and is better written than the current children’s movie slop. God forgive me for saying so, but it’s a thousand times better than the cheap Moana 2 sequel that Disney released recently.
After the catastrophic, you-could-see-it-coming-from-miles-away failure of Snow White Disney unceremoniously pulled the plug on the live-action Tangled remake. I guess they were probably relieved; female hair has become a racial hot-button issue, and the nature of the Rapunzel story would have required the character to have long, straight hair. Would they have cast a black princess in very long braids? Or — hm, an Indian princess? Having a white princess would have been problematic on its own, but casting an Asian or Indian girl as Rapunzel would have exposed problematic cultural stereotypes about the overwhelming number of Asian and Indian female infants that are routinely abandoned or sold. If they cast a white actress as Rapunzel, they would have had to cast a non-white actor to play Finn Ryder, but that’s also problematic because he’s a thief and also attempts to steal her crown. A nonwhite male sneaking into a young girl’s house to rob her? Disney can’t cast a black male to do that!
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We are already making plans to totally avoid the coming two-hour Toy Story commercial, and the two Frozen sequels on the way.
What does the future hold for children’s entertainment? Easy: a thousand Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox movies! But: a small studio solely focused on developing new kid’s story ideas could absolutely make money — you don’t even need animators anymore. There’s an AI for that! If a throwaway poem by William Steig could be spun into spinoff gold for DreamWorks in the form of the eternal Shrekverse, we can certainly find other ideas to entertain all the children who are wandering lost in the woods, following the trail of popcorn directly into Disney’s evil lair.