Imaginary

Imaginary is an astoundingly mediocre film released just a couple of weeks ago.  As of now the box office receipts are a shade over the estimated budget.  Which brings up my first objection.

In this day and age you always hear that a movie isn’t considered a success unless it makes some significant percentage over the estimated budget.  Then the alleged experts make some caveat about something like the estimated marketing BUDGET that wasn’t included with the estimated budget.  Like somehow they don’t understand what the word BUDGET means when giving their success or failure story the first time around.

Usually these success or failure stories are emphasized on big budget blockbusters instead of tiny in comparison little 10-20 million dollar budget movies.  But sometimes these movies can explode into a hugely profitable undertaking, often with the moniker of cult classic attached to them.  Not everyone is as talented as someone like a Sam Raimi that can make a micro budget movie into a success story like The Evil Dead.  And one of the failures of Imaginary is its ironic lack of imagination.  The plot is awfully similar to The Conjuring where an imaginary universe is messing with children.  Unlike The Comjuring the child has grown to adulthood that needs to sort out some issues with the evil entities first encountered in childhood.  But then it also concludes with the obligatory ending sequel bait right before the ending credits.

In the glory days of Blockbuster, Imaginary probably would have gotten several sequels.  With an even smaller budget than the relatively low budget of the first.  Maybe the second movie would be the same producers and director and some of the cast.  Eventually nothing to do with the original other than the name.  Throw in some popular B movie popular names, an aging star cameo from someone desperate for a paycheck and then finally fade into oblivion.

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All the ideas of gematria and other conspiracy grifting are nothing new.  Looking for a social media account that isn’t an established name from around 8-10 years ago that is active and isn’t simply rehashing the older stories gets more an more difficult as time marches on.  There’s no new exciting, innovative clique to latch on to.  Views, comments and sharing are at an all time low.  The sports decoders are all equally bad at predicting game winners.  Predicting the end of the world every day and it not happening is super tedious.  Even trying to incite violence against an arbitrary scapegoat is lower than one would maybe expect for an election year.

So what’s missing from the gematria narratives now that makes it so boring compared to the heyday from years ago?

Good word of mouth advertising.  Nothing makes a low budget film explode like capitulating audiences and talking it up.  And movies that suck don’t get talked up.  The ideas aren’t new, even for successful cult classics, they’re just well done for the budget.  There’s no celebrity endorsements, try as they might.  Even politicians that enjoy capitalizing on the hatred of the other side aren’t openly talking about how cool they are because of the gematria.  They have no advertising budget, just another sequel that is a rip off of another bad movie, day in and day out.  And getting people to see your “Barbie” because you advertise that “Oppenheimer” sucks isn’t really good when the masses find out and decide that your movie sucks based on its own merits.

Now I’d like to think that the influx of critics in recent years has an impact.  They are more intelligent than they used to be, armed with knowledge of relevant info about why exactly the gematria narratives suck.  But ultimately it’s word of mouth that decides.  Who cares what Roger Ebert thinks when millions of people went to Rotten Tomatoes to praise how they were actually entertained?

And here the gematria clique leaders have become their own worse enemy.  Constantly bickering over whose movie sucks more than their movie instead of providing any relevant and enjoyable content.  Not that they care to improve the product.  It’s always been about the box office today and worrying about sequels…maybe later.  If there is a useful function for gematria it lies in some relatively innocent lulz as you poke around looking at fun synchronization with your name and your current events or without actually putting money on it screw around and decode the Super Bowl.  But the masses are tiring of the doom and gloom stories.

There is a reason for this post.  I always get riled up when the arbitrary scapegoat crisis actor stories pop up and I don’t regret what I said.  I shared that with a friend who commented that the maker of that gematria should have their head beaten on the pavement to knock some sense into them.  Not cool, but he’s also fed up with all the doom and gloom, so I get it.  However, after poking around I found that to be an outlier.  As far as Twixter and YouTube went there wasn’t much content worth talking about.  It could be that as soon as the title of your movie contains the word gematria or similar wording that people just don’t want to watch it anymore.  Same goes for the eclipse stories.  There’s some, but not as much as there could be.  Supposedly we are in the golden age of grifting, but it’s not centered around gematria anymore.  Maybe a good old fashioned fad diet is the way to go.  We’re waiting to see how this all plays out through early November.