Argumentative Essay: What Are Standalone Films?

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Imagine yourself in front of a crowd of 100 randomly selected people from all kinds of age, social, and culture backgrounds.
You ask, "Who here has watched The Last Jedi?"
A sea of hands shoots up and an excited chatter about the latest Star Wars movie erupts throughout the room.
You then ask "How about Thor Ragnarok? Who has seen that?"
A few hands drop, but the excited whispers and sea of hands remain.
"Has anyone watched Baby Driver?" is your 3rd question.
You see a significant number of hands fall. You still have about half of your audience's hands raised, but a trend is starting to become apparent.
Finally, you propose the question, "Has anyone seen Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri?"
And all but a few of your …show more content…

IMDb has two, but we largely come to the same conclusion. The highest rated movies amongst audiences and film critics tend to be standalone movies. Personally, my favorite films this past decade: Wreck It Ralph, Wall-E, Lady Bird, La La Land, and Dunkirk have all been standalone films. Film series have the potential to outdo standalone films in story as spanning across multiple installments allows for deeper character growth and worldbuilding, but we have yet to see many films accomplish that. From an audience point of view, the overabundance of sequels creates subjectively worse films overall, but how about from the producer stand point? Producers should also be concerned because when the big studios own all the big-name series, it makes it difficult for independent films to make a name for themselves at the box office. I consider myself well informed in terms of film news, but I didn't even know what Moonlight and Manchester by the Sea were until I saw them start to pop up at the Oscars. The monopoly created by these large franchises caused a lack of innovation and creativity for original films.
Now the obvious solution would be to make more standalone films, right? They have higher ratings, so they should attract more movie goers and create more interest in independent movies. However, as we have seen, movies with higher ratings are not necessarily more popular …show more content…

Each of these movies had to attract as many audiences as possible from all demographics. There could no longer be dozens of movies that could fulfill everyone's niches. Each movie started to become more generic and cliché to appeal to the general demographic.
With rising viewership in alternate platforms such as Amazon and Netflix, inflation of movie ticket prices, and more and more dumping of money into the budget of each film, Hollywood is backed against a wall. In the 1990's, if one out of the thirty movies that a studio released failed, there were twenty-nine others to make up for it. Now there is no wiggle room for even one film to perform poorly at the

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