What registrar do you use? Last time I checked .io domains where like 4x the price of a .org

I wish you named it “lewwy.world” just for the symmetry lol.

This may be true, but I think the main reason for less “obvious” baddies in modern movies is simply that they kind of went out of fashion from a culture standpoint. The ways how stories are told and how world is portrayed/perceived in art and media is heavily dependent on the people who live in it. Post-modernism is en vogue because we’ve shifted our world view from simple good vs. bad towards recognizing that the world we live in is much more nuanced/complex. “Sometimes the villain is in your head” or “nothing really matters, everything sucks one way or another” are world views that reflect our modern western culture a lot more since we are so much more connected to the world through the internet.

That said, post/meta-modernism is just one side of this. I’m sure there are plenty of commercial reasons to make toothless, non-offending movies as well. Also, movies like Top Gun: Maverick prove that the classic approach to storytelling (good guys vs bad guys) can still work and make a shitton of cash (although they didn’t go all in on who the enemy actually is).

The big studios have been putting all their eggs in the most profitable basket in the last few years, which is huge action-packed franchises that consume record-breaking budgets. The mid-budget summer movie as we knew them up to 2015 or so (think Hangover, Superbad, Bridesmaids,…) have been dying out as a result, unfortunately. But the cracks of this model are now starting to show due to many “big” franchise productions bombing at the box office this summer.

AC leans even harder into Wes’ unabridged self-indulgent side imo, so I wouldn’t get my hopes up.

This is an interesting graph! I think the phenomenon of longer runtimes has two major reasons:

1. Streaming Studios are much less stringent with how long a movie can be since it’s less of a concern how many times it can be shown per day/theatre. Also, runtime doesn’t matter as much when the viewers can pause and return to it whenever they please. This is encouraged by streaming services because it also increases the overall time spent in the app.

2. The vanishing of medium-budget movies High-profile, high-budget movies by known directors have always been longer on average, because they can afford to do so and are expected to draw large audiences. In recent years the number of mid-budget movies, the likes we are used to from pre-2010, has drastically decreased in favor of big blockbuster productions (here’s an article about it). So the average runtime has increased as a consequence of this.

I personally don’t like this trend. Although I really enjoy longer movies, most of them wind up with obnoxious amounts of badly written filler-content.