How slop started with special effects and eventually crept its way into screenwriting. And how you can inoculate yourself against the virus.
I was muscling through a particularly successful spate of procrastination the other day when I stumbled upon this tweet: “You can go back and observe that Season 1 of Stranger Things actually had kinda decent, dark brooding True Detective vibes. Then each subsequent season, it basically morphed into Marvel Avengers Universe slop.”
I don’t know why that statement landed so hard, but it did. I’ve been hearing the word “slop” everywhere, but it largely registered as background noise. This time was different. It stuck in a way that felt clarifying. It wasn’t just a trendy term people like tossing around, like “mid.” It felt like a diagnosis. A real problem in an industry that’s losing ground to other forms of media every day.
I stopped watching Stranger Things somewhere around Season 3 or 4. Not because of any specific creative decision. More because I’ve learned that TV series built around a story meant to conclude in a single season lose their footing once they push past that point. With each new episode, I could feel the writers struggling to justify the story’s existence. I understood why others stayed with it (the characters). But I need a good plot to keep me entertained. And this plot was deader than Barb.
So what is “slop?”
The easy answer is: “slop” is short for “sloppy.” And you could certainly end the definition there. But it feels like there’s so much more to it. In my assessment of the birth of slop, ground zero is the Marvel franchise.
I know some of you might not remember this but Marvel actually used to put a lot of time and care into their movies. In those early days, regardless of whatever bumps and bruises a Marvel movie had, you could tell that a lot of love and care had been put into films like Iron Man, Spider-Man, and Captain America. Even as the sequels rolled out, with the occasional exception, I always wanted to see what Marvel came out with next because I felt like the people working on those movies cared.
But I remember the exact Marvel moviegoing experience where everything shifted. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. I walked out of that theater with a clear, unsettling thought: some Rubicon had been crossed. That movie didn’t feel made with care. It felt assembled. Like something stitched together with popsicle sticks, bobby pins, and scotch tape. The end result was a Frankenstein-like contraption that played less like a film and more like a sideshow attraction at a circus.
It was also the first time you could feel the internal attitude toward the visual effects shift from, “let’s do the best job possible” to, “fuck it, this’ll do.” Gone was the obsessive attention to detail that had turned Marvel into the most dominant force in Hollywood history. Overnight, slop was born.
For a while, none of it seemed to matter. Box office expectations were still being met. But that success turned out to be bad news. It told Kevin Feige that what they were doing was okay. It got logged, somewhere on a spreadsheet, as “the audience will tolerate this.”
What they didn’t realize was that they’d just locked in the main ingredient of the meal. From that point forward, if anything went wrong, weak or careless visual effects would never be considered the problem.
Which brings us back to Stranger Things. Even though I wasn’t watching anymore, it was impossible to miss the endless promotions for the final season, or the final part two of the final season, or the final part three of the second part of the final season. That kind of slicing alone feels like its own strain of slop. And then I saw the image of Eleven flying up and leaping straight into the dragon’s mouth. In that moment, I knew exactly what that tweeter had been talking about. Stranger Things hadn’t just drifted off course. It had fully, unmistakably become slop.
What began as special-effects slop didn’t stay contained, however. It evolved. Once Marvel realized we would still show up for superhero movies made with fewer effects artists and less experienced labor, they began to test the boundaries. Consciously or not, they started asking where else they could cut corners. It didn’t take long to find the next place to skimp.
The writing.
And once they made that decision, they were doomed. Because audiences will forgive a lot of crappy things going on on screen if the story is good and the characters rock. But the second you get sloppy in the writing, the rose colored sunglasses get torn off. Watch as every fan you so carefully pulled in turns on you. And not because the audience is “toxic” or whatever other coping mechanism you want to use. They have turned on you because you have gone full slop. There isn’t a single part of your movie that you are giving 100% to.
And that’s why reining in slop is so elusive for studios. Slop isn’t a total collapse of effort. It isn’t the moment a project falls apart entirely. It’s a small, steady loosening of standards that quietly becomes the default.
The real problem with slop, and why studios don’t seem to be in a rush to eliminate it, is that slop lives in the average. It lives in the absence of total commitment. You can work on a script and a movie and feel like you’re consistently giving 80% to the plot, the characters, the scenes, the dialogue. And that feels like a lot. But what you’re actually doing is stacking small percentages of missing effort, and when you add them all up, you end up with a product that feels lazy. And laziness is slop’s main source of fuel.
Which I believe is the best definition of slop. It is: A LACK OF EFFORT. Because there is nothing that audiences can spot from further away than a lack of effort. And once they see it, they no longer trust you. That slop is the reason they then start checking their phones, the reason they watch your movie in patches. Because you’ve said to them. “We haven’t committed everything to this. So why should you?”
And where this has truly become alarming is that the industry is changing, and Hollywood is losing more and more ground to other forms of entertainment every day. This is the time, more than ever, that we can’t afford to embrace a “slop” mindset. If anything, we should be giving more of ourselves, pushing harder, and laying even more of our soul on the page.
So, what’s the formula for combating slop, then?
It’s two-fold.
Part 1: SLOP IS WHAT OCCURS WHEN YOU LOOK FOR SHORTCUTS
When you say, “I don’t need 200 special effects guys. I only need 100.” Guess what? There’s going to be a cost for that. And this is true in writing as well. If you write one draft of a key scene and say, “That’s it, I’m done.” That scene will be slop. So never take shortcuts.
Part 2: SLOP IS WHAT OCCURS WHEN YOU EMBRACE CLICHE
Writing is the act of respecting the past while refusing to copy it. The single biggest image that screams “slop” in that Stranger Things trailer is Eleven jumping into the dragon. Why? Because 7 million 3 hundred thousand Marvel movies have had that exact same image in their films. The second we see that you are not trying to be you. That you are, instead, embracing the easiest route, then we see you as slop.
I would go so far as to say that effort is the last wall standing between the movie industry and irrelevance. I’m specifically talking about studios. I know that in the indie space, where you’re scratching and clawing every day, a lot of writers are pouring their entire lives onto the page. But indie movies don’t prop up the movie business. Studio movies do. So it’s there where they need to hold themselves to a higher standard.
And the great thing you can do is show them what their product could look like if you were writing it. Show them what real effort and real blood on the page looks like. They need a reality check, and you’re the only ones who can give it to them.
