Last week, Shazam 2 star Zachary Levi said to an enthusiastic audience of fans that he was tired of the amount of garbage content coming out of Hollywood. “I personally feel like the amount of content that comes out of Hollywood that is garbage — they don’t care enough to actually make it great for you guys. They don’t,” he said. “How many times do you watch a trailer and go, ‘Oh my God, this looks so cool!’ Then you go to the movie and it’s like, ‘This was what I get?” Levi continued. “They know that once you’ve already bought the ticket and you’re in the seat, they’ve got your money. And the only way for us to change any of it is to not go to the garbage. We have to actively not choose the garbage.”
As reported byEntertainment Weekly, Levi made the comments at Fan Expo Chicago, and raised some valid points. The creation of the cinematic universe has made studios lazy, and the speed at which boring, trite, cookie-cutter movies are churned out has increased to feed audiences’ appetites for a constant stream of drip-fed garbage.
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By no means am I saying film is dead or that the medium is going down the shitter – there are so many incredible films released in a year that I simply can’t keep up. But I do think that the majority of franchise films released in a year are bad, that studios are more interested in profit than investing in making good movies under good and ethical working conditions, and that audiences should vote with their wallets. If you think Marvel movies are getting worse, stop going. You might get FOMO from missing a tiny cog in the huge MCU machine, but it’s better than wasting your money on a ticket for a movie that sucks.
It’s interesting to note that it does seem audiences have been voting with their wallets this year. Bad franchise films like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania have been underperforming, while more original, better films are doing well in the box office. It’s not all Marvel anymore, which is great.
Levi and I are in agreement here, which I loathe to say considering he’s on record as being a Jordan Peterson fan and potentially also being anti-vax. However, it’s important to note here that he is a hypocrite, because just a month ago, he was complaining about how the bad movie he starred in didn’t make enough money. “The audience score is still quite good, but the critics’ score was, I don’t know, very oddly and perplexingly low, and people were insanely unkind,” he said last month on TheFilmUp podcast. “I’ve been a part of things and as much as I wish that they were good, I know that they’re okay, I know they missed a lot. I’m not saying Shazam! Fury of the Gods is some perfect Orson Welles masterpiece, but it’s a good darn movie.”
On Rotten Tomatoes, Shazam 2 has a 49% with critics and 86% with audiences, which is… fine. I tend not to trust audience ratings too much when it comes to sequels and franchise films, because the people going into them are probably people who saw Shazam and were rooting for the sequel to be good. Either way, Shazam 2 made $133.8 million worldwide and cost $125 million to make, making it a box office bomb. The character is also absent from James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DCU roadmap, which means we might not have to grit our teeth through yet another one of these movies.
It seems like Zachary Levi wants us to vote with our wallets, just not when it comes to his films. It’s easy to say audiences need to filter out the trash, but far harder to acknowledge that your film, the one that was panned by critics, isn’t that good even if audience ratings were broadly positive. The MCU-ification of the film industry has lowered our standards, which Levi seems to acknowledge – he just doesn’t realise that his most recent flop is a result of that exact practice.
