Soulless ‘slop' is ruining cinema (and making my job impossible)

Telegraph

2 days ago

In 1967, humanity basked in the Summer of Love; in 2020 it writhed through the Summer of Rage. And this year's warmer months have another cultural phenomenon in store: prepare your snouts for the Summer of Slop.
This particular S-word – as fun to say as it is revolting to think about – is having something of a moment right now, as online commentators baulk at the next few months of blockbuster releases.
'Sequel Slop: Hollywood Does Not Respect You' and 'The Era of Slop Entertainment' are typical of the titles of recent YouTube video essays to cast a sceptical eye over the major studios' 2025 slates.
By its nature slop is hard to pin down, but as someone who watches a lot of films for a living, I can confirm that its oozy rise has been going on for some time. It might best be described as the sort of content for which the term 'content' doesn't feel like an insult: bland and uniform and corporately pumped out at volume and speed, yet just satisfying enough to keep its consumers waddling back to the trough.
That's why it's so hard (and some would argue futile) for a critic to review. It doesn't outrage and only rarely dismays because it is expressly designed not to provoke either of those emotions in anyone. I have enjoyed some films which I also recognise to be slop because they hit the spot in ways their more interesting rivals might not.
Take the recent Snow White remake: I had more fun watching it than I did the latest Almodóvar, even though the latter is obviously the more nourishing work, despite (or perhaps because of) its odd little wrinkles and frustrations.
But then slop is a cinema of contradictions. It looks cheap, yet costs untold millions to produce. It employs huge stars who might as well be anyone, and often look faintly embarrassed to be involved. It dominates cultural discourse yet vanishes from the memory the moment the credits start to roll.
Remember Cate Blanchett's star turn in the demented sci-fi romp Borderlands? Dwyane Johnson's attempt to become a superhero in Black Adam? Netflix's $200 million Ryan Gosling spy thriller The Gray Man? Of course you don't, and nor do I, despite having watched all three while scribbling furiously in a notebook on my lap.
Slop, as a word, has been used to condemn individual films for decades: even the modern classic Clueless was daubed with it by one critic after its 1995 release. But these days, slop has become its own genre, and once you're aware of it, you'll spot it everywhere you look.
The new live-action remake of the DreamWorks animation How to Train Your Dragon is a great – by which I mean horrible – example. The film just sort of squelches along for two hours, mimicking the experience of watching the 2010 original but without any of the distinctive flavours, colours or textures that made it so beloved in the first place.
'If you loved the first one, you'll…well, recognise a lot of this' and 'you'll remember none of this in half an hour' may not sound like winning pitches in straitened times such as these. But in fact these are slop's two big selling points, and audiences are guzzling with abandon. Disney's wildly successful new live-action take on Lilo & Stitch is unapologetic slop, as were the last two Ghostbusters and three Jurassic World films.
Deadpool & Wolverine was meta-slop; Avatar: The Way of Water Slop 3D. Super Mario Bros was slop of such a staggeringly flavourless vintage it made the feebler Minions films look like the work of surreal Czech visionary Jiří Trnka. Wicked mulched down a distinctive and characterful stage show to the point that it could be strained through a fine-mesh sieve. Slop may be dismal, but every example above ranks among the most successful films in its year of release.
So do we all love slop, or have we simply grown used to it? The case for the latter looks more convincing when you notice it really began to proliferate during Hollywood's quote-unquote 'woke era', when every other sci-fi and fantasy blockbuster was sold as protest art to court terminally online Gen-Zs and younger millennials.
But now the political posturing is drying up – commercial expediency cuts both ways, kids! – and pulling in every pig in the sty has become the industry's main priority. Hence, for instance, the endless reshoots to depoliticise Disney's formerly girlboss-themed remake of Snow White – which, thanks to months of divisive publicity, went on to bomb earlier this year regardless. Yet the result is, in its way, a landmark film: perhaps the great transitional woke-to-slop work.
Like slop, woke was a word put to work by a particular moment. At the end of the 2010s, an easy catch-all pejorative was suddenly needed to describe various new and interconnected currents in art and media which had begun to cheese off many non-believers. And woke, which had been used as a positive term in black American political discourse since the 1930s, was the one on which the broader discourse settled.
By contrast, slop has been used in relation to art for around 150 years, but that was a relatively recent twist in its story, which stretches all the way back to Old English.
'We have evidence from around 1400 that it was used to describe a muddy place or mud-hole,' explains Craig Leyland from the Oxford English Dictionary's new words team. 'Then by the 1600s it was being used to describe food of a weak or unappetising kind given to convalescents, and in 1805, we have a quote identifying it as kitchen refuse fed to cattle or pigs.'
Low-grade, homogenous dross fit only for consumption by docile livestock: it's a useful metaphor for low-grade popular culture, though it was only in the 19th century that a link was formally made. The first recorded usage came in a March 1866 newspaper article by Mark Twain about a visit to Honolulu, who poked fun at 'slop about balmy breezes and fragrant flowers'. Within 50 years, along with the more common 'nausea', it had become an unlovely film industry term for dialogue written for female characters. (Gemma Arterton is tasked with churning out the stuff in the 2017 period drama Their Finest.)
Even so, only this year do we find slop discussed as a trend – and only then after the recent spread of generative AI created a sudden need for a label for digital audiovisual gunk.
In a way, it's odd that it took so long, since sludgy homogeneity has been a keystone of the Hollywood business model for the past 20 years. It began with the rise of the so-called Save The Cat beat sheet in the mid-2000s, in which the scripts for every major release began to be built around the same heavily road-tested and focus-grouped 15-part plot structure. (This is why so few contemporary blockbusters' stories feel fresh.)
A few years later came the advent of franchise film-making, which held that every instalment of any given series had to look and behave much like the last. (And its successful rivals by extension, which is why Marvel looks like Minecraft, which looks like Wicked.) And the international success of these mega-projects brought about the demise of many formerly popular genres – romantic comedies, courtroom dramas, family adventures – that had given mainstream cinema much of its texture and bite.
The lure of potentially lucrative overseas markets, and China specifically, couldn't be ignored. Like Starbucks lattes, films suddenly had to sell as well in Shanghai as they did in Santa Monica, despite the local customers' vastly different attitudes and frames of reference. So out went the cultural specificity that made 1980s and 90s popcorn movies so evocative; in came more interchangeable superhumans cracking wise while mashing up CG cities.
At the same time, three online revolutions were further reining in film-makers' visions. The ascent of streaming meant that close-ups became the default shot of choice in dialogue scenes, since they were easier to read on television-sized screens.
Rising stars' double role as influencers meant that a tight in-group of popular players – Timothée Chalamet, Florence Pugh, Jacob Elordi, Zendaya, Austin Butler, Pedro Pascal, and so on – suddenly kept cropping up everywhere, as studios tried to shepherd their devoted followings towards auditoriums. (This is why character actors are a dying breed.)
On the script side, meanwhile, social media's brittle intransigence and disproportionate sway over the news agenda meant that ambiguity and provocation were no longer worth the trouble. Why ask your audience to grope their own way through a moral grey zone when you can present the world in black and white and dodge a Twitter storm in release week?
When all of the above became the industry default, slop was the unavoidable outcome, though the future may be sloppier still. Writers and editors are now muttering darkly about 'second screening': a new practice of scripting and cutting films and television shows so they can still be followed well enough by viewers whose eyes keep darting down to their phones – or only rarely dart up from them.
'It's grim,' says an editor with extensive experience of working with major studios and streamers. 'We're sometimes now asked to make sure characters are constantly announcing what they've just done and are about to do, because everyone's attention spans are shot.'
It is, of course, impossible to say which individual lines are there by studio mandate, and which have been lovingly crafted in pursuit of great cinema. But one can draw one's own conclusions about the scene in the recent Netflix production Irish Wish in which Lindsay Lohan tells a suave English suitor: 'I admit it was a beautiful day filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn't give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I'm marrying Paul Kennedy.'
'Fine,' her suitor replies. 'That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over I'm off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.'
'It's like cinema and TV is becoming the new background music,' the editor adds. 'The idea isn't to make people actually want to watch your work, it's to not give them a reason to switch it off.'
A film you can watch without watching feels like the slop era's logical end point, though our palates aren't entirely fried yet. The recent success of Ryan Coogler's Sinners – a ravishing, star-driven thriller whose genre-blending unpredictability is one of its greatest assets – suggests a market still exists for stylish, distinctive mass entertainment. Of course, if it's to flourish, audiences will have to continue to support it – and put their phones away while they're at it.
2025's top of the slops
1. How to Train Your Dragon
A perfect summation of the slop aesthetic: everything in this DreamWorks remake is recognisable, and often spectacular in purely technological terms, but not an atom of it seizes the soul. Short-term commercial success seems a given, though in a few months, let alone 15 years, this won't be the version anyone's rewatching.
2. A Minecraft Movie
The opening Earthbound 20 minutes suggested a charming small-town family comedy as Hollywood used to make them. Then the cast saunter through a portal into Familiar Franchise Environment #834 and the heavily branded, crushingly formulaic shenanigans begin.
3. The Electric State
In adapting a niche graphic novel for Netflix, Marvel's Russo brothers turned their plaintive source material into a splashy sci-fi caper starring Gen-Z favourite Millie Bobby Brown. Far more fun than the bridling critical reception suggested, though slop is unquestionably what it is.
4. Captain America: Brave New World
Watch cinema's mightiest franchise swill around for two hours as it tries to Do Politics without touching on any remotely contentious themes while half-heartedly tying up plot threads from a 17-year-old Incredible Hulk film.
5. Disney's Snow White
This modernised remake of a very of-its-time classic was an amazingly misbegotten project that ended up squandering untold millions putting out the very fires it had willingly set. Nightmarish CG dwarfs aside, the result was perfectly watchable, though the discourse around it became the real cultural event.