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I think big-budget action movies that value sincerity over irony, that don't shy away from big emotions or attempt to undercut them with a self-aware one-liner, that feel like they have authentic cinematic vision and aren't just some dull, flat, bad effects laden part of a never-ending mediocre content machine-- these are the things we pretty desperately need imo. Maybe we could find a way to right the course of the ship if the biggest hits this year all differ from this snarky, ironic, pop-culture-reference-laden Reynolds style. (The new Avatar being a big smash certainly wouldn't hurt, and that's gonna crank the sincerity up to 11, just like the first one.)
This style of movie won't actually *go away* though. Styles rarely go away anyway, they just rise and fall in and out of vogue. And Deadpool 3 will be a big hit. And between that and Deadpool 4, there will be 4-5 other incredibly mid Ryan Reynolds vehicles that'll feed the machine, all of which will have trailers where there's a lot of bad CGI, then he appears at the end saying "guess who?" and a Celine Dion song kicks in. Or something along these lines. (He's got a movie based on the board game Clue coming up, so that's exciting!) And other studios will try to chase Deadpool money and do something cynically similar.
lol, but also who the fuck cares what I think, anyway? I've been writing Christmas romance movies, so obviously I'm going to be on the pro-sincerity train. And if Ryan Reynolds wanted me to write one of his Ryan Reynolds-y movies, it would be life-changing money for me, so I'd be over the moon at the opportunity. There's, like, 1% of people in Hollywood who can actually meaningfully dictate what we see, and Lord fucking knows I'm not one of them-- and I'm trying to work. lol.
But do I wish Ryan Reynolds would use his considerable star power to try to force more pre-production time? To insist not all of his movies be filmed on poorly lit green screens? To maybe not inject shameless Aviation Gin advertisements into all of his recent movies? To use the star power he's cultivated over the years like other stars before him and funnel that power into projects that have a prayer of lasting, that make people feel something? And maybe, though this is a big ask, to do the occasional Adventureland/Mississippi Grind movie again, where he's shown in the past that he can take his shtick, ground it, and use it to phenomenal effect to tell stories about actual human beings rather than mere Ryan Reynolds avatars? Sure. But maybe if he did that, he'd have less time to spend filming Mint Mobile ads. So that wouldn't be good.
(Lord knows a shitload of people in PTP disagree with me on action movies, so obviously my perception of Reynolds could be completely on an island. But yeah, I'd personally love for these sorts of movies to go the way of the dodo for a bit.) My movies: http://russellhainline.com
My movie reviews: https://letterboxd.com/RussellHFilm/
My beer TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thebeertravelguide
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