I thought Dune sucked. But I could never manage to get through the book either.
Power of the Dog was unwatchable. I got through maybe 30 minutes of it. I turned to my wife and asked if she thought it was any good. We both agreed that we did not have the time in our lives to give up another 90 minutes or so in order to “know” the movie.
This year the movies sucked. (It is understandable considering the lock downs.) TV is just now starting to come back to life.
The woke flavor of everything will eventually pass when the accountants tell these idiot studio heads that money makes their world go round. And lousy “fit the peg” racial and sexual actors cannot make up for lousy scripts and bad direction.
The writing has been horrific. The circle jerk entertainment business has lost touch with the marketplace. When Marvel and DC comics provide inspiration for the top products...you know there is trouble out there.
Power of the Dog was a dog - a crappy movie. Dune was more watchable.
People will get bored with ‘superhero’ films, and will look elsewhere for entertainment. All superhero films are the same plot, just different bad guys.
The stockholders will demand change and the studios will have to stop making adolescent action films and social warrior content films.
They will actually be required to make movies people want to watch.......................
I make no claim to be a sophisticated observer, but from noodling around over the last couple of years, I think the writing is the biggest chokepoint and problem area -- not that there aren't plenty of other problems as well, but the writing problem is acute and the DEI mania is making it worse. I'm a newbie, amateur and complete outsider, but I keep running across the scattered, always anonymous complaints that the writers rooms are the hardest places to diversify and that there are now too many writers who run to HR if they get edited or rewritten. The lunatics are running the asylum. The industry is hiring people who never would have made the cut a generation ago. Just like academia.
The bigger the company, the more entrenched these problems seem to be. Good writing? I'd look to foreign films and smaller, independent films. It's hard for a DEI committee to wreak havoc when the writer/director/editor team is one person. That's still not uncommon in movies. TV series are a different kind of beast.