Instinctually, do you prefer blockbuster $100+million dollar films, or smaller indie films?

For me, in truth this is quite a doozy, because my favorite films are ones I'd self-deem indie blockbusters: the original SW trilogy (and the new one, damn it OT!), the LOTR trilogy, and the Dark Knight trilogy. Though all of these made obscene amounts of money, I feel as if they were designed in such a meticulously well-structured and crafted way that I am continually blown away when I revisit them. From the sets, to the costumes, to the cinematography, I feel like all three mentioned above pushed the envelope forward for incoming blockbusters to not grow stale and repeat the same ole same ole traditional expensive films (with clearly mixed results).

Likewise though, I am never opposed to watching smaller films, and often find that they can delve into more material because of their niche audience. Whether it be a Donnie Darko, 28 Days Later, or 500 Days of Summer (which all probably fall in between blockbuster and indie truthfully), they are able to take more risks because so much less is expected. And with that very risk-taking approach, can become very successful to the mainstream audience who wish to experience something new.

Overall though, my gut says a massive blockbuster.

What about you guys?

I find I'm more "likely" to enjoy a blockbuster than an indie film, but that's largely because I'm fine with a fun popcorn flick. There are brilliant blockbusters and brilliant indie films. The big difference for me is that when a blockbuster film misses being brilliant, you still have a 90% shot of it being a fun experience. When an indie film misses being brilliant, you have a 90% shot of having wasted an hour or two.

I like blockbuster films.

I'd say blockbusters. My time for movies is limited and like matt says, if a blockbuster is not amazing it'll probably still be entertaining and with an indie film I normally have more of the "all or nothing" experience. That being said, when I do have more free time I go for a bit of everything.

I definitely prefer the blockbuster movies.

Depends. I watch a lot of small one of a kind documentary films in Netflix in addition to blockbusters.

The film I hated the most was that horrible Indiana Jones. I'm not sure if that was an Indie film or not though. I mostly just like films about Ponies.

Foreign art-house films, which I guess could be considered blockbusters in their respective countries.

I like anything as long as it's good; both indies and blockbusters can be equally pretentious garbage though. I'm not a snob like I was in my youth and enjoy anything worth enjoying.

It just depends on the content of the film I suppose.

I prefer whatever I end up liking. Whatever I like is what i like. Which could be anything from anywhere.

probably blockbuster type movies. i gravitate towards them simply because i know about them. i'm sure there are tons of great smaller movies out there but i never hear about them nor am i the kind of person to go seek them out. if a movie entertains me for the 90 - 200 minutes i'm in the theater it's done it's job. i'm not going to be spending much of my time after i've left thinking about costumes or cinematography. i don't care how it was made, just that it was made.

In my opinion, most of my FAVORITE movies tend to be lower budgeted indie films. Whereas a lot of blockbusters have a better chance of being COMPETENT.

Point being...if you've got 200 million dollars invested in a movie, you're probably gonna hire people who know what the hell they're doing, and you're also gonna play things extremely safe. It'll probably be "watchable" and "mostly technically competent" even if it kind of sucks. In fact, it probably will kind of suck, because a very large number of those big blockbuster films are the cinematic equivalent fast food. The whole need to make it for EVERYONE means leaving out stuff that's gonna alienate too many people. Such as stuff that people actually have to think about after leaving the theater. Or anything that might actually challenge the audience in some way. The result is hopefully something technically sufficient, but easily consumable.

By contrast, I find most of my FAVORITE movies to be smaller budget movies, since not spending assloads of money potentially allows interesting and innovative ideas to be profitable by appealing to a smaller audience. The downside is that with a smaller budget potentially comes the lack of ability to hire people who are experienced or capable (after all, talent costs money). So you'll potentially end up sifting through a LOT of horrible fucking small budget indie movies in order to find the real gems.

me too

I am interested in the films that interest me. Whether they cost $1 million or $100 million to make is not a factor.

i mostly watch B movies so..

I can go either way, but I'm also a firm believer that throwing money at a film doesn't automatically make it "good". Avatar is a great example and I call it one of the worst films ever made. Not necessarily because it's terrible itself, but because it's at best an average (and extremely overdone) screenplay that they threw half a billion dollars worth of special effects at and it became a major hit because of it. By comparison, I've seen indie or foreign films that basically had nothing going for them but good dialog that left me with my jaw on the floor by the end. I'll take writing over special effects any day.

-Byshop

blockbusters because if i want something with substance i will read a book.

I prefer big budget films with well known actors and directors.

@Byshop: I agree 100% about Avatar. I didn't care for Titanic either. I like a good blockbuster but a lot of my favorite movies had small budgets but good writing and acting.

Avatar at least was a passably ok movie even if it was carried entirely by its special effects budget. Also the idea that "white guy is the native's chosen one" is used so often that it's its own trope.

I didn't see Titanic until only a few years ago and I was surprised at how awful it actually was. Performances by the leads were okay but some of the supporting cast was awful and the dialog wasn't much better. I forgot, what was Jack's friend's name? Was he called "Every Italian Stereotype ever"?

By comparison, look at movies like Glengarry Glen Ross or Res Dogs where there's little or even no action but they are amazingly memorable and become a part of our cultural lexicon.

-Byshop

You've gotta remember though, there are a LOT of low budget movies getting released all the time, and the vast majority of them never come close to Glengarry Glen Ross or Reservoir Dogs. The Human Centipede and The Room qualify as low budget indie movies too. Also, in the case of Reservoir Dogs, that was Quentin Tarantino's directorial debut. Sure it was a low budget movie, but it HAD to be a low budget movie. Once Tarantino got successful, his movie budgets went up.

Anyway, when it comes to actual 100 million dollar blockbusters, I'd argue that it's relatively rare for those kinds of movies to be truly great or truly awful. Most of the best movies I've ever seen have had lower budgets, and most of the worst movies I've ever seen have had lower budgets. Big blockbuster movies usually tend to fall squarely in "play it as safe as possible" territory.

That doesn't really matter. The end result is that there are still a lot of good indie films out there getting released all the time, and the bad indie films that get released alongside them don't detract from that. To your point, even, the AAA films tend to be designed to be safe so unlike the indie films they usually aren't really trying to do anything interesting or clever. Indie films don't have massive budgets to fill the screen with special effects so they actually have to write something decent if they want their film to be seen. Because of this, I tend to find a lot more indie films that are poignant or that stick with me than I do with the mainstream Hollywood stuff.

-Byshop

@MrGeezer:

Hollywood best days(quality speaking) were the 90s.

Neither, I'd rather watch something on youtube honestly.

Middle

I think that's why I love the aforementioned films I posted in the initial post so much. They all tell a very competent story and take risks while still giving the general audience what they want. I think that's why I always defend high quality pop culture films. Isn't it better to support the big films that actually do what they can to stand out?

But likewise, at the end of the day, I love films of all shapes and budget sizes, and many of my favorites are indie.

@Byshop: Sure. My point was just that I don't necessarily think that lower budget indie films tend to be better. I think that the ones that are good are often better than big budget blockbusters for the reasons I've stated (less corporate involvement from guys in suits, less of a need to pander to everyone in order to see a return on the initial investment). But compared to big budget blockbusters, I think there's a higher percentage of low budget indie movies that are just WAY worse than your average big budget blockbuster.

Indie movies usually contain both the best and the worst that I'm likely to see. Big budget blockbusters usually kind of suck, but it's relatively rare for them to suck in an utterly spectacular way. Usually they're just at worst on the low end of "completely average and unmemorable".

@PSP107: Yep, over use of cgi and shaky cam has pretty much killed the blockbuster.

it depends

There are more immediate options for me as far as small budget indies go. Gigantic blockbuster films are a dime a dozen, however about 95% of them are mostly garbage.

Blockbuster movies... They are made to entertain and often do well in that regard.

@joehult: "Yep, over use of cgi and shaky cam has pretty much killed the blockbuster."

Im glad you bought up CGI. Amazing Spider-Man popped up in my head as I find the CGI Lizard awful.

@jdiggle: Indie is basically stuff made by a small independent studio. They tend to be low budget because they don't have big name publishers attached to it. And because of that they don't tend to get much attention because they don't have the budget to market them or take them to theaters everywhere.

As for what I prefer... well neither really. I try not to favor one over the other.

I really don't care one way or the other as long as I enjoy it.. But I have been incredibly disappointed with Blockbuster movies as of late like Avengers, Starwars, Godzilla in what to expect after seeing so many glowing reviews on said movies.... It's headscratching too after the amount of crap the Transformers series gets yet the said movies aren't much different with nonsensical plot, characters, etc etc.. I mean Avengers 1 from my perspective was a glorified Transformers movie with super heroes..

Depends. I watch mostly comedies, which typically aren't big budget.

Blockbusters.

I generally expect nothing amazing from them, but I do expect a good time and they generally deliver.

With indies, I expect good acting, great plot, excellent writing, and unique directing. Generally you don't get any of that, or worse, they try way too hard to do something new and it just ruins everything.

I think somewhere along the line I got the wrong idea about indie movies in my head. They're much better now, though, as they're becoming much less pretentious.

Wholly agreed. The best indie films seem to put a emphasis on story and characters, then the indie/"original" tricks of filming, rather than the inverse. If a new gimmick or style obscures or interrupts the storytelling, it has to be scrapped. The best indie films use those gimmicky moments to enhance the storyline, rather than detracting from it.

One of my favorite examples of this is in this scene of 500 Days of Summer, which still holds up in my mind as a damn good indie romantic comedy (dramady?).

^In this, the main character Tom is in the "hopeless" stage of breaking up, in that any interaction with his ex may or may not prompt them to get back together and ride off into the sunset. It was painful, literally, how accurate of a scene it was, and was a clever approach to show what that cognitive dissonance is like.

A bit of both for me. In terms of blockbusters, prefer Chinese and HK films over Hollywood. Unfortunately though, most of them do not get global releases. Thankfully IP Man 3 has a UK release date for January 15th. Probably will be looked upon as being an indie rather than blockbuster. Hopefully Warcraft will be a biggie next year.

the only blockbusters that I like Include : The MAtrix , 2001 : A space odyssey , Inception , Lord of the rings and Empire strikes back . other than these is just movies like " Last tango in paris ,three colors: Blue , Damage , mullholland Drive and movies like these .

For me it depends on the movie. The main problem i have with big blockbuster movies is that they all tend to focus on the spectacle and massively overuse CGI rather than a good story, there are obviously exceptions but generally big movies all tend to follow the same formula.

I like the star wars saga cause the story is there, at least in the first 3 (non prequels), the later 3 prequels were ok but didnt grab me as much. I like Martin Scorcese movies like Goodfellas and Casino cause they have a good story with good actors and are not full of pointless flashy CGI every 30 seconds.

One of my all time favorite movies is The Usual Suspects, the story and acting in that movie hooks me in every time i watch it, unlike most new movies.

Both, actually. I love blockbusters, but indie films can sometimes experiment. They can be weirder, they can be darker, etc.

I saw The Lobster recently with Colin Farrell, a film about a future society where if you aren't with a partner, you have 45 days or you get turned into an animal.

A film like that could not possibly be mainstream because of it's absurdity.

Remember, films like Drive are actually indie, and they've access mainstream success. There can be a balance between conventional film making and artistic style.

Usually I'm more on the indie spectrum, because they tend to have more interesting stories. Unfortunately blockbusters are often quite formulaic, luckily there are exceptions.

I usually just watch whatever I think will be good, regardless of the movie's budget. Most of the movies that seem good to me tend to be blockbusters, though.