What is the principle purpose of a movie?
If you said anything other than "entertainment," you're doing it wrong.
Many people nowadays would protest this. Movies these days should be promoting diversity, empowering women, revealing the flaws in our society, abolishing racism, fighting for minorities, trying to make a difference, they say. Many, many moviemakers these days are stating exactly these reasons for making movies. These kinds of moviemakers have made it into Star Wars. They've just recently made it into Marvel. They've been making DC TV shows for years and ruining many various sequels, remakes, and reboots.
What's the problem with promoting diversity, empowering women, abolishing racism, or just trying to make a difference in the world? Nothing necessarily, but let's go back to the core of why movies and TV shows exist. Tell me, what are they all a part of? The entertainment industry. Why do people spend their money on the entertainment industry? Is it so they can watch a feature-length sermon on why God exists? Is it to be yelled at for not recycling enough? Is it to watch a twenty-minute docudrama on the evils of war profiteering? Not likely. People go to the entertainment industry to be entertained. And it seems that the movies coming out of the entertainment industry just aren't very entertaining these days.
Just look at Star Wars. The Original Trilogy was fun, and despite what the media claims, was beloved by people from all walks of life, not just fat nerdy fanboys who spend all their time reading comic books and oppressing women (or something like that). In fact, Star Wars became beloved all the world over, by people that couldn't be more different. Star Wars was entertaining, and its basic themes appealed to everyone. The Prequel Trilogy came out and wasn't as beloved because it wasn't as good quality (poor George really should have hired someone else to write the dialogue) and therefore wasn't as entertaining.
Then along came the Sequel Trilogy. The Force Awakens was pretty good, and fairly entertaining. It was a fun new space adventure with more universal good-and-evil themes that appeal to everyone. It made fans were excited for the new Star Wars movie. And then The Last Jedi came out. Remember my comment about a twenty-minute length docudrama on the evils of war profiteering? Yeah, that was referring to this movie. The bulk of The Last Jedi seemed about war profiteering, animal abuse (but not child abuse, even though there were child slaves), how powerful women are (to the point of not rehiring all of the ethnically and species diverse men that worked for the Resistance in The Force Awakens, which took place in the story five minutes before The Last Jedi), and featuring a token Asian woman that had no relevance to the plot whatsoever. Most of the rest of the movie was just badly put together. It wasn't an entertaining movie at all, it was a dividing movie that wasn't fun to watch and felt very preachy. No escape was to be found here. Yet the primary force behind the movie, Rian Johnson, continues to insult fans that point out the seeming agenda and the failed writing in The Last Jedi, calling them racist manbabies, and ignoring that no one cares what the message is in The Last Jedi, they just don't want their movie to be about it.
The divide between moviemakers' goals and moviegoers' wants makes me think, of all things, of a Trivial Pursuit question: What was Adolf Hitler's favorite movie? It wasn't a movie heralding the triumph of the Aryan race. It wasn't a movie featuring a Jewish person as the bad guy. It wasn't a movie about the successes of eugenics. It wasn't even a movie with Germans in it. It was the 1930s King Kong, and that wasn't because there are hidden Nazi ideologies in the movie, but because he thought the special effects were really cool and it was a really entertaining movie. Not even someone as good at propaganda as Hitler came to movies to be preached at. Even though the Nazis spewed out propaganda galore, Adolf Hitler's favorite movie wasn't a piece of Nazi propaganda but a universally entertaining movie.
Why has making movies and TV shows stopped being about entertaining people and become about propaganda? If your primary motive is to champion a cause, you shouldn't make movies. You should start an organization, a charity, or a political movement. Movies, TV shows, and anything that is a part of the entertainment industry, exists first and foremost to entertain. If they fail at that, they are missing their primary purpose for existing. Remember, George Lucas wanted to promote New Age philosophy with Star Wars. He wanted to teach everyone about moral relativism with the story, but he focused first and foremost on making a good, entertaining story. He didn't exactly spread New Ageism all over the world, and he failed spectacularly in making Star Wars about moral relativism, but he made a really amazing story that is popular all over the world. He knew that the job of a movie was to entertain first and if it didn't do that, it wasn't worth making.
So, if you want to make a movie, and your primary purpose is anything other than entertaining viewers, please, do us all a favor: run for office instead. If you want to make a difference, go into politics. If you want to entertain people, lift them up, make them smile, and give them a reason to keep going, by all means, make movies.
