Welcome to the Weekly Movie Thread, your place on the Avocado to discuss films with your fellow commenters. Want to make a recommendation? Looking for recommendations? Want to share your opinions of movies, both new and classic?

I think it’s time.

I probably could keep doing this movie thread forever. I started posting — as a backup — in 2018. It was about a new movie coming out called Crazy Rich Asians. I began regularly posting this thread in 2019, starting with a prompt based on the new movie coming out called Captain Marvel.

That was a crazy five years for movies.

Perhaps the craziest?

During that span, I saw some of the highest grossing films of all time in theaters: Avatar: The Way of Water, Spider-Man: No Way Home, and Avengers: Endgame. It saw the surprise of the Barbenheimer phenomenon. (Perhaps my greatest cinematic experience as getting to see Oppenheimer in 70mm IMAX at the TCL Chinese Theater.) It was around for the conclusion of the Skywalker saga.

It also saw some of the world’s most unprecedented occurrences. In 2020, theaters everywhere shut down due to the COVID pandemic. Studios scrambled with new strategies for movie watching. Some played around with same-day streaming. Directors got lambasted for trying to be the one to bring people back into theaters.

China, which had been Hollywood’s cash cow for a decade, had now developed its own robust film industry. No longer could Hollywood take domestic audiences for granted because “it’ll be big in China.” It led to some interesting choices: Top Gun: Maverick wasn’t going to air in China anyway, so the proposal to delete the Taiwanese flag on Tom Cruise’s jacket was scrapped.

And then everyone began to reap the consequences of trying to push everything to streaming. Namely… apparently no one was getting paid. The Writers’ Guild and SAG-AFTRA went on strike for the first time in forever. the combined strike sent ripples throughout other industries where underpaid workers everywhere took to the picket lines.

And what we’re left with … is now. A moment of uncertainty where no one in the industry knows what the right path forward is.

As much as I want to see where it’s all headed, I think it’s time to move on.

There’s two reasons. The first is… hey, i got a new job! I’m moving again! I’ve gotta put everything into totes, sell things I’m not taking with me, cancel my bills, etc.

By itself, that wouldn’t stop me from posting. After all, I was laid off from my old job during the pandemic, and I still posted this thread. I was happy to do it. Thinking about movies and keeping up with the conversation was a wonderful distraction from terrible reality.

Did you know I was writing some of these threads during my breaks in the middle of a empty countryside filled with horse ranches while sitting in a delivery van? Sometime while carrying live snakes?

However, I have a second reason. While I was starting to schedule some thread that would post during my move I started to think: maybe it’s time for a new perspective.

I’m the third person to post the movie thread. Each person who does it brings their own personality and their own views on film. I love blockbusters and dabble in some big well known classics. That sort of thing was perfect between 2019-2024.

But where cinema seems to be headed probably would benefit a different perspective. The longer I run this thread, the more it becomes my way of looking at movies. I think this thread would be even better if someone shook things up with a fresh new way of looking at film.

To quote James T. Kirk, “Some people think the future means the end of history. Well, we haven’t run out of history quite yet. Your father called the future – the undiscovered country. People can be very frightened of change.”

Today’s bonus prompt: what is your favorite movie goodbye?