Fast Food Movies

Francis Ford Coppola: You as a person, you may not realize it – though I’m sure you do realize it – but there’s a lot of money being spent on you liking a certain kind of potato chip that you can’t stop eating or a certain kind of fast food. But the same thing is being done with movies. They’re teaching you that in the first few minutes, you have to know who the protagonist is and who the antagonist is very clearly. In other words, you are being given the formula of what a movie is so that when you then go to the movie that is the same as when you eat at a McDonald’s. You’re eating something isn’t particularly nutritious for you, but it satisfies what you have been taught to expect. And that’s the same thing the movie industry does, which is why they love sequels over and over again, because you are become their perfect audience.

So when you see a movie that doesn’t do that, you say, “What the hell is that?” Even if it’s interesting and engaging. You don’t know what it is because you’ve been taught that it should be something else. That’s my personal theory.