Why are Recent Movies SO Bad?

Storytelling gatekeepers can no longer tell stories.

It’s widely acknowledged that, in recent years, all the (former) movie-making gatekeepers, Hollywood, Disney, Warner Brothers, and others, are crashing and burning. Recent releases from Pixar and Disney have flopped, leading to considerable financial losses. In 2019, Disney had seven movies cross the billion dollar mark. In 2023? Zero, with Wish being their crowning failure. WB stock has plummeted, and the company is laying off hundreds of employees. 

Marvel sequels, the Indiana Jones sequel, recent family-friendly movies, and almost everything in between either tanked at the box office or didn’t do anywhere near projected outcomes. 

Some might blame the lingering effects of Covid lockdowns and the subsequent writer strikes. And while those events are certainly factors, they may not even be the main factors. 

The truth is that Hollywood has been producing one box-office bomb after another. The quality of their content is at an all-time low. They have produced a weak, pasty substance with all the nutritional value of Wonder Bread for many years now.

And they don’t seem to have caught on. 

They have apparently lost the ability to tell a story well. They see there’s a problem, and so they throw more and more money at the exact same fixes, only more of it, and worse, thinking, “Maybe this time, we’ll get different results.”

They get storytelling on one level, of course. They know that there needs to be a theme stated near the end of Act One before the story’s catalyst. They know the theme should answer the protagonist’s defining moral problem and that this problem should drive the story's conflict. They know how to follow a screenplay “beat sheet.” 

But that’s not enough. 

Why are Mainstream Movies so Appalling These Days?

There are many reasons for this and a LOT that I would like to say, but right now, I want to pinpoint one single thing. 

When it comes to stories, we have erased evil from the equation. Instead, we have introduced “morally grey” characters or “misunderstood” bad guys with “issues” who are just struggling to do the right thing. We take a classic villain like Maleficent and Psychoanalyze her; she was just hurting and troubled and acted out. 

It’s not that there’s no conflict; there can be no story at all without conflict. But the conflict is weak, a stream of insipid, vague, unsatisfying goo. 

But isn’t life sometimes complicated? Aren’t we all a jumble of mixed motives and good intentions and hard upbringing and stressful days? 

When we tell stories, we project our assumptions about what’s true onto them. Stories are worldviews in miniature. 

It’s not that there are no complicating factors when it comes to a character’s morality. In fact, a strong character must have a “ghost” or a backstory foreshadowing their central moral dilemma - that’s non-negotiable. But there is a huge shift in thinking if we assume that you are ONLY your past and that any character is, therefore, off the hook for choices made. You don’t get to be a wife-beater just because your dad was never around. 

A good story gives us a road map for dealing with and understanding life, the unfolding events, and the people around us. And life has real evil in it. The Bible is an unfolding story of people behaving badly. And so history, by the way. 

We (and especially our kids!) need to learn how to handle it, prepare for it, and understand it. 

You might be thinking, wait, I can think of tons of bad guys in modern films; take Thanos, for example. I don’t have time to cover big boss bad guy’s in this post, but you can read some of my thoughts about that here. 

Therapy to the Rescue

When I was 14, I was beaten into a concussion by a girl in a gang. Yeah, I grew up in California. The entire school watched, including teachers, and no one intervened. In their defense, this was a somewhat normal occurrence. 

The Principal dealt with this by sitting us both down, me, the other girl, and him, and having a nice long conversation in his office. He asked the girl why she felt she needed to use physical violence against me. She said I had given her a dirty look. He said something about how her reaction was not helpful. He then, without asking any questions, reprimanded me for giving her a dirty look. And that was that. 

This “therapeutic” response to conflict was somewhat unusual in public schools back in the nineties but has now become the norm everywhere nationwide. 

In the opening chapter of The Silver Chair, Lewis describes modern education during his time. Kids were allowed to “do what they liked. And unfortunately, what 10 or 15 of the biggest boys and girls liked best was bullying the others. All sorts of things, horrid things went on, which at an ordinary school would have been found out and stopped.”

Or if they were found out, Lewis continues, “The people who did them were not expelled or punished. The head said they were interesting psychological cases and sent for them talked to them for hours, and if you knew the right sort of things to say to the head, the main result was that you became rather a favorite.”

If getting beaten up and then talked to had been the end of my story, I would have been left vulnerable, with no immunity to deal with real trouble or evil when I encountered it. Thankfully, I moved in with my dad not long after and became a Calvinist. 

The thing is, I’m sure the girl with whom I had the “incident” did have a troubled upbringing. But a strictly therapeutic approach, as if that’s the only gospel out there, gave her no immunity against the evil in her life either. 

When we only ever apply a therapeutic approach to problems, two things happen: 

• First, the trouble only worsens. The little chat from the principle didn’t help anything at that school. The violence in California schools was notorious even in the nineties. I’ll spare you the details.

• Second, there clearly IS real evil in the world, but kids are left with no way of understanding it or facing it. They need moral courage, not vague, misapplied empathy. 

Why is it SO important that stories have legitimately bad badness? Only then can we see that the goodness is even stronger. Love is stronger than hate. Good is stronger than evil. 

It’s only when we look evil in the face, and instead of sidestepping it, dismissing it, trying to understand it, redefine it, or excuse it - and overcome that evil that we know we have just consumed a real story. Those are the stories that resonate. 

For a story to be a story, “We can’t give God his due unless we give the Devil his due.”

—Dorothy Sayers 

We are left with nothing to hope in or believe in when the entire world is only a morally grey and misunderstood jumble of good intentions. Grace is not real grace when it is not allowed to triumph over real evil.

If you would like to give yourself or your kids a story-based immune system for dealing with the world, stick around.