It’s a question that has come up before since the full on mainstreaming of the Internet has happened, and it’s come up again in relation to John Carter, but it’s one that I’ve certainly wrestled with in different ways over the years. Quite simply, do we know too much about the movies, TV shows and comics that are coming up in our near future and is that ruining it? As we are definitely seeing with the home video release of John Carter, and it’s something I knew and talked about happening, you’re getting a slew of people checking it out on rental or for a cheap purpose to see if it’s just as bad as “everyone” said it was. And the wave of positive tweets, reviews and comments is amusing. As noted in the Criticwire piece, the review aggregate for it is inching upwards with every day as more people are writing about it and wondering why it got so maligned. That’s not to say it’s not getting bad reviews, and we’re really not talking about this movie in general, but it’s an interesting point. Do we know too much? I recall distinctly in the “early” days of the Internet when work was apace on The Phantom Menace and it felt like every day on the dedicated movie sites and the Star Wars sites there was a new bit of footage, a storyboard shot, some rumor, some design element or just more location news that was just revealing more and more of it. It got to the point that not long after that, I took a break from movie forums for awhile because it felt like I knew the whole screenplay for films that weren’t due out. The magic was being lost.
Of course, that has me in a bit of a difficult position considering what I do today, but it can be done without spoiling a whole heck of a lot when you get down to it. What really worked for me was with Prometheus in that there was little out there until about a month or so before it landed overseas and then we had a torrent of clips and viral things. But they were easy to ignore because the movie was so close and the allure could be dulled.
For the last decade, especially with the advent of the crowdsourcing of opinion to get a film some buzz combined with clips upon clips upon featurettes and so forth, there’s a ton of material out there for movies, TV shows and more before they hit. Has it impacted how you enjoy your entertainment? Or are you able to still enjoy everything even while having all that information in the back of your head before seeing it for the first time?
Are we too much of a sneak-peek culture now when it comes to our entertainment that nothing truly surprises us anymore?
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