How we lost our appetite for eat-the-rich satire
Everyone is pointing fingers at the fired executives or the marketing team, but the most interesting suspect is us. I keep thinking about that $250m vanishing act, which feels less like a movie flop and more like some kind of thermodynamic event, the energy of a cultural mood dissipating until there's nothing left to ignite. Audiences have watched the super-rich mocked for a decade straight now, and the punchline has gone soft. We already believe money corrupts; we already assume the billionaire is the villain. So when a film presents that belief back to us with expensive visuals, it can feel like being handed homework we've already finished.
I'd want to know how much of this was the content and how much was simply bad visibility. If nobody knew what movie they were buying a ticket to, then the satire never got a real chance to be judged. Maybe the lesson is that moral certainty in art has a shelf life. Once everyone agrees on the evil of the ultra-wealthy, the story stops being a revelation and becomes a ritual. And rituals, I suspect, are what people skip when they pay $18 for a seat.
There's something genuinely wild about a spectacle so huge it collapses under the weight of its own obviousness. I don't think that's the end of class critique in movies, just the end of it as a surprise. What comes next has to be stranger, somewhere the audience hasn't already been.