Amazon Studios Founder Admits Modern Movies "Are Actually Worse"

Roy Price, the founder of Amazon Studios, recently admitted that modern Hollywood films “are actually worse” than films created in the past and that Hollywood has a massive quality problem.

In a recent Substack article titled “Can Anyone Develop Movies Around Here?”, Price observed that the quality of films that Hollywood studios are making in recent years has actually gotten worse.

After discussing The New York Times’ Top 100 films list of the current century and when they were released, Price shared his thoughts, “My suggestion, and no one is allowed to say this so it’s good that we can chat here, is that the movies are actually worse.”

It’s not just movies either. He pointed to television series and noted that the number of television series receiving an 8 or above on IMDb significantly declined beginning in 2020.

Price then reiterated his opinion that Hollywood has a quality problem, “To me it looks like there are multiple factors but something is happening around quality – something bad.”

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As for what the root cause of this is, Price opined that the people making the movies and TV shows just aren’t as talented and good, “It’s as if after Rembrandt died, the market decided that his style of painting makes other painters feel bad and we have to set a lower bar.”

Specifically, he shares that modern Hollywood creatives are not creating strong characters and he uses The Materialists and Elio as examples, “When characters have no personal context and everything is generic, it just can’t get started. … It is essential to create characters that are real, who have context. They have to live in a specific place on a specific block. They need to be as real as people you know. We want to understand why they are the way they are and they too need to be surprised and delighted by what happens. So they have to talk in specifics. That’s how life is.”

This has long been a complaint of many genre fans especially around Disney’s big tentpole films such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones.

Viewers and even actor Mark Hamill lampooned Lucasfilm for its depiction of Luke Skywalker. He said in an interview with IGN, “There’s just such a huge gap between Return of the Jedi and Force Awakens – I had to really contemplate that. I said ‘hey, how did I go from being the most optimistic, positive character to this cranky, suicidal man who wants people to get off his island?”

Indiana Jones suffered a similar fate in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Pop culture critic Gary Buechler observed, “Kathleen Kennedy and Lucasfilm once again desecrated a beloved character, one that they just hadn’t gotten around to yet. And yes, Indiana Jones was sacrificed on the altar of agenda to bolster a brunette British woman. And once again, Harrison Ford is involved, but at least Han Solo was put out of his misery. This one wanted Indy to suffer as much as the audience.”

As for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, since Avengers: Endgame, the company has done its very best to simply replace its core characters with diversity replacements and even when they had a solid character such as the Falcon, they would reduce him by trying to make him Captain America rather than letting him stand on his own.

Additionally, Price criticizes the current crop of studio executives for greenlighting these poor scripts and films before they were made exceptional. While going over why The Materialists is an example of the poor quality of film that Hollywood is making, he shared, “In any normal time, The Materialists would first get a quick title change so it doesn’t sound like a Political Science seminar, and then it would get many, many notes. And one fine day years from now a version that works would finally come out. And that’s ok. It’s better for everyone.”

He later reiterated this point stating, “Who would not do these movies? Michael Eisner. Peter Guber. Jeff Katzenberg. Dawn Steel. Robert Evans. Adolph Zukor. Irving Thalberg…”

And this is indeed a valid point as we’ve even heard from Disney CEO Bob Iger on multiple occasions that the company got caught up chasing streaming and decided to greenlight seemingly everything that was pitched in order to have an endless train of content for Disney+.

Blumhouse owner Jason Blum even warned about this back in 2021 telling Kim Masters and The Business podcast, “I think Bill Gates or Sumner Redstone said ‘Content is king.’ Michael Eisner said it a lot after that. And in a world where everything we see is being controlled by four streamers, I think it is very safe to say that content is no longer king. That distribution and data are king. And that’s not good for anybody except the streamers.”

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Finally, Price concluded by offering some advice, namely that studios must focus on making exceptional movies, “Solid doesn’t move the needle. Exceptional does. Getting there is hard. It takes drafts. Disagreement. Real development.

He added, “Align with the audience. Obsess over quality. Start with getting the first ten pages right.”

The call to aim for something exceptional should be adhered to, but the idea that studios should be aligning with the audience is part of the reason why the quality has declined. Many studios chased representation on film rather than focusing on characters and story.

Hollywood should actually embrace Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey and the idea that despite the different types of styles of telling stories they all, in the end, point to the same Truth. Hollywood has actively been attempting to subvert, twist, and warp that Truth and this is one of the major reasons for the massive decline in quality.

What do you make of Price’s admission that modern films “are actually worse?”

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