Zachary Levi Calls Out Hollywood “Garbage”

Movies

Zachary Levi is feeling honest. In an appearance at Fan Expo Chicago, Levi took aim at the quality of movies coming from Hollywood and encouraged fans to stop seeing them to affect change. Here are his comments, courtesy of Entertainment Weekly:

“I personally feel like the amount of content that comes out of Hollywood that is garbage — they don’t care enough to actually make it great for you guys. They don’t… How many times do you watch a trailer and go, ‘Oh my God, this looks so cool!’ Then you go to the movie and it’s like, ‘This was what I get?’… They know that once you’ve already bought the ticket and you’re in the seat, they’ve got your money. And the only way for us to change any of it is to not go to the garbage. We have to actively not choose the garbage. It’ll help. It’ll help a lot.”

Levi doesn’t sound all that different from a lot of people in this space of the internet, does he? That’s because it’s common sense. What he’s saying is exactly right, but people in his position rarely admit to it – partly because they have a vested interest in their movies being profitable and partly because they know the industry and its media cronies will come after them if they’re honest. And that’s what will happen to Levi; for evidence, read the whole Entertainment Weekly piece, which immediately mocks him and calls him a hypocrite because Shazam!: Fury of the Gods got mostly bad reviews and bombed at the box office. EW also brings up recent comments he made about the actors’ strike, in which he said it was “so dumb” that he and others can’t talk about past films or shows in which they appeared. He quickly clarified that he supports the strike (possibly because he woke up with a horse’s head in his bed the next morning), although he did make clear that the actors should think about their fans and how their support makes stardom possible, which I’m sure won’t endear him to his colleagues.

But Fury of the Gods’ failure is irrelevant; he’s saying what many moviegoers feel at an event where he’s speaking directly to fans. That he’ll take flack for this is not an indictment of Zachary Levi but of the rest of Hollywood, who are tacitly acknowledging that he’s right, especially about them not caring. He’s also right about the tactics; a lot of trailers nowadays are cool, and way better than the movies end up being. And they often tease a different film experience than the finished product will provide, like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania promising a dark, serious film about moral compromises and sacrifice that would introduce a big bad to rival Thanos. When it opened, Quantumania delivered a ridiculous jokefest that cemented Kang as a lame-o villain who won’t go away. To hear Levi validate their frustration likely meant a lot to those fans. But don’t get used to it because unlike the odd exception like Zachary Levi, most of them hate the audience.