Media Literacy Essay: Movies: The Blockbuster Mentality

Media Literacy Essay: Movies: “The Blockbuster Mentality” Media literacy is a process that attains an understanding of mass media and how they construct meaning. As the book mentions, Media literacy “follows a critical process that takes us through the steps of description, analysis, interpretation, evaluation, and engagement” (Campbell, Martin, and Fabos 31). Description is when we pay attention to the subject under study. In this step, we take notes and find as must research as possible. Analysis is when we discover and focus on patterns that emerge from the description stage. Interpretation is when we ask ourselves what all of this means. Evaluation is when we arrive at a judgment about whether something is good, bad or mediocre. Finally, …show more content…
Hollywood is a business, and of course, they want to make as much money as possible. Film production companies can look at the list and see what is working and what isn’t. The films that seem to make more money are films with an already establish franchise. This means that these production companies will try anything to get a franchise started so that they can start producing movie after movie and attract people year after year. Of course, if a film production company already has an established franchise, what they are going to do is produce more sequels for that franchise. The sequels for movies can be considered a movie franchise because you have a continuation of a story. Other movies that are on the list are animated movies. Animated movies have a great “blockbuster potential” because they attract a lot of kids. Kids go to the movies with their parents so it automatically makes the revenue double. As well as animated movies, the top movies really a lot of computer animation and special effects. Special effects is a great way to create new ways of telling a story but the top movies rely completely on special effects and computer generated images. This means that moves with more special effects do better in the theaters because people want to see incredible things when they go see a …show more content…
This pattern of movies will continue until something new is created. This means that more animated, action, comic book, sci-fi, fantasy movies, etc., are going to keep being the top movies in the United States. Movie studios are going to continue producing movies based on the patterns that we talked about, and they will continue to try and create a movie franchise that appeals to every type of audience. The movies will continue to be heavily merchandise and they will start to loose the sense of story just for the spectacle. Movies like the Transformer franchise are losing more and more the story aspect just for more special effect, action sequences, and product placements. Movies studios don 't have a motivation to create new types of movies because it can be a big risk for