I’ve watched three movies this week: Beetlejuice, Little Shop of Horrors¹, and Beetlejuice 2. I don’t typically watch a lot of movies, or TV for that matter, so this is a pretty unusual occurrence for me. (If you’re wondering - Little Shop of Horrors was the most enjoyable of the bunch, highly recommend.)

Watching the first two movies I was pleasantly surprised by how tight-knit the narrative was. My impression was that you couldn’t really remove anything from the movie without leaving scenes feeling emptier or disconnected; every scene had some purpose that it had to fulfill. While sometimes the purpose itself was a bit lackluster (Beetlejuice’s plot is 90% “Wasn’t that weird? anyways moving on”), it still had some goal it needed to reach whether narratively or thematically. Meanwhile, I had the exact opposite experience with Beetlejuice 2: the movie is 1 hour and 45 minutes and I felt like you could cut out half of the movie without changing all that much in the story (Beetlejuice’s ex added nothing to the plot and I’ll die on this hill).

Now that I sat to think about it, I realize this is a problem I have with most modern big-budget media: an excessive need to take up more time without doing much with that time. The average AAA movie is taking up about 2 hours, the average AAA game taking up about 60, we’ve replaced most 20 minute shows with 45+ minute miniseries’s, and almost always half of that time is fluff. We end up getting a worse experience that costs the studio more money and is harder to self-justify because now it’s a really big time investment!

Playing and watching old media really gives you the sense of how faster the pace is and how bigger the scale is. The big movies from the 80s and 90s like Groundhog’s Day, Ghostbusters, or Little Shop of Horrors are much more intimate in scope and tend to only focus on a small town or group of people. Even if the plot technically affects the whole world, the big expansion of scale is reserved for the climax or happens in the background of the movie. Meanwhile the big movies of late feel like the scope is, at minimum, global (or if we’re talking MCU films - multiversal). Even Beetlejuice 2, that tries to still be about this small town and family, involves multiple existential threats to the ghost world and the entire main cast is world-famous. It makes these stories so much less personal and harder to vibe with.

It’s a real shame too because it’s not like you can’t handle a large scale with a personal story (Everything Everywhere All At Once is a perfect example), but it seems like it’s fallen to the independent creators to make the more personal productions. Indie Games tend to be only 10 or less hours in scope because they don’t have the budget to make The Biggest, Fanciest, Most Graphics Game Ever Seen By Mankind so they have to work with the limited tools they have, and are much better for it! In Pizza Tower you don’t spend 5 hours grinding more Pizza Toppings to unlock a level door, you just GO and KEEP GOING until you finish the game. Even Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom, a game which is just “collect shit to move to the next level” can be completed in 9 hours total.

So what am I saying with this all? Basically - popular media needs to stop being so disrespectful of our time. I don’t know if this is born by the same mentality that obsesses over retention rates in apps and websites, but just because your product managed to keep me chained for longer does not mean the product is better. Hell, it probably means I won’t be returning to you a second time. I’ll keep going to the little store down the road that only gives me the best bits of what it has to offer and doesn’t charge me a small fortune for the privilege.