Decline of the space opera genre

[Simon_Jester]

If you really care about sci fi, you should hope to hell that it stays as obscure as posisble, to minimize posisiblities of fucking up.

When science fiction was young and a print medium only, in the Golden Age and earlier, there was a lot of fucked up SF out there. It was quite obscure at the time, too.

Obscurity does not guarantee quality; 90% of everything will still be crap. It'll just be 90% of a smaller sample size.

As for hardness/softness, I grade SF on many things other than that. I'd rather see soft-SF that nods in the direction of physics but generally ignores it when it's inconvenient, if that means better plotting or characterization. There are examples of this happening, and I often wind up liking them.

Hard-SF can of course be good. I am not denying this. But I don't grade SF on "hardness;" I grade it on plotting, characterization, and ability to fire the imagination.

[Uraniun235]

The guy who did the Trek/Wars movie reviews on Red Letter Media also suggests that it's not just the same old game any more in Hollywood. Supposedly there's increasing competition between burgeoning high-quality personal movie libraries, on-demand streaming or rental services, and other forms of electronic entertainment (video games - console, PC, and even browser-based; other time sinks on the internet). Coupled with a declining economy - isn't MGM facing/in bankruptcy right now? - the movie studios are supposedly going to be really abandoning anything which might be remotely risky or niche in favor of maximum mass appeal.

Would The Fifth Element or Stargate* even be made nowadays? I'm not so sure.


(*This assumes that Stargate had not already been made; a new Stargate movie isn't out of the question as it is a pre-existing franchise.)

[Marcus Aurelius]

cCoupled with a declining economy - isn't MGM facing/in bankruptcy right now? - the movie studios are supposedly going to be really abandoning anything which might be remotely risky or niche in favor of maximum mass appeal.

This isn't a new thrend, however. The 1960s and 1970s were Hollywood's experimental years and since the early 1980s they have become more and more cautious with ever increasing "bottom line" focus and favoring of existing franchises. You could claim that the this trend has picked up pace during the last 10 years, but I'm not sure if that's true. For example The Fifth Element probably would not have been made even back in the 1990s if it had been a purely Hollywood studio lead project instead of wide international collaboration with significant part of financing coming from France and other European countries.