The fault for Hollywood's endless sequels, remakes, and remakes of the remake should probably be laid primarily at the feet of the American viewing public. We won't make the hike to the movies for artsy stuff like Birdman, but Spider-man I (Remake III)? Already got my ticket!
Yep, classic example of giving the people what they want. I was tired of super hero movies years ago. But unfortunately I'm in the minority (and even in my nerdy peer group!)
My nerdy peer group say they want e.g. better sci fi & fantasy and worship Joss Whedon. They also solidly torrented Firefly, Dollhouse, etc. Then they got bitter that Whedon can't get TV series made any more.
I don't normally go on "pop culture rants", but as an ex-whedon fan, he's the worst of the bunch for me, and I'd be more than happy to see his work relegated in favor of more unique IP. I can't deny the "technical quality" of his work, but eventually you watch enough sci-fi and realize that while of course everyone pulls heavily from their predecessors, Whedon takes the kitchen sink. Dollhouse was the breaking point for me, both in terms of it being a weak, less predictive imitation of RuR, and the fact that at the end of the day, he has a pattern. He has good actors for that pattern, but you see them enough times and seeing them more times isn't really adding to anything.
There's a lot of noise about mourning the death of sci-fi/cinema etc, but the gems have always been the outliers. Metropolis and later Dark City, Delicatessen/City of Lost Children, Firefly(yes, I'll give him that one, outlaw star has some things to say, but that plot trope was already as old as the Romans.), Primer, Dark Mirror,
I'm rambling at this point and this is totally going to spawn another sci fi binge, but my takeaway is that there's been a reasonable stream of surprisingly good sci fi that has popped up in unpredictable places over the years, even into the torrent era. I have some faith it will continue to bubble to the top. My theory is that the only reason good sci fi seems so rare now is that it has become so swamped by bad sci fi as it has begun to fill the mainstream.
There was a period in the '90s when it really felt like no sci-fi was being made (except in animé). I mean, Star Trek TNG (franchise!) carried on, but that was about it. Partly the difference seems to be the BBC (which really punches above its weight in the genre); Doctor Who had been cancelled, mostly because the creators started putting too much effort into politics and too little into telling good stories, and their less-long-running efforts seemed to disappear around the same time. Partly there was less demand for it in an age of political optimism; sci-fi has always been a way to address issues we don't dare tackle head-on (see many post-2001 shows e.g. new BSG) and there was a brief period where we really thought we'd lived through the end of history. But the theory I found most interesting is that fandom itself killed sci-fi; all the people who should have been writing stories and becoming the next generation of creators instead wrote 'zines and participated in the con scene (wish I could find the reference where I first saw this).
If you mean on TV, I think from the dawn of TV virtually no sci fi being made has been pretty much the norm. (Unless you use a broad enough definition that that wouldn't be true, even excluding ST:TNG, of the early 1990s, either.)
I think there's still a distinct dip in the '90s. In the '80s we have the last gasp of Dr Who, we have The Tripods, V, Day of the Triffids, and a bunch of one-off adaptations. In the '00s we have big remakes of Dr Who and Battlestar Galactica (hell, even V), or the aforemaligned Dollhouse which for all its flaws was more willing to engage with sci-fi themes than, I dunno, Quantum Leap.
I've neglected Babylon 5, which is probably unfair to the show, but I feel like it never had the cultural impact of those '80s or '00s shows. The '90s drought feels real to me, but maybe it's just a matter of perception.
You (and parent posts) leave out a few important mentions. SG1, of course; but then some more b-rate but still watchable shows like Andromeda. Stargate at least had some sort of impact, I like to think.
I suspect this is more a matter of what "sci fi" you like. The 1990s had lots of sci fi TV shows, including, among others:
X-Files
SeaQuest DSV / SeaQuest 2032
More Star Trek than you can shake a stick at (TNG, DS9, and VOY cover the whole decade, with most of it having two at once)
Babylon 5
Sliders
Stargate SG-1
Farscape
I think there's a better case that the 1990s were the high-point of sci fi popularity on TV than a particular drought (though I can see a case that there was something of a drought starting sometime in the mid-1980s through 1993.)
Agents of SHIELD may be part of a broader franchise, but its still Whedon's creation. And Whedon's position in TV now is hardly much like "where he was in the 80s" -- where his TV work was story editing on Roseanne and writing a handful of episodes of that same series.
For what it's worth, Birdman is doing quite well. It's not following the Be Everywhere All At Once release model that's become the norm for franchise blockbusters, but then again it's not a franchise blockbuster. Rather, it's taking the incremental release path that used to be quite common before the Giganto Kablooy Superhero Invasion overtook everything.
Major studios are after money - money from the public. If the public gives them more money fro franchise sequels than for good movies, they make more franchise sequels. If we didn't spend that way, they wouldn't do it.
Look, the rpoblem is this, hollywood isn't about art, ideas or socialism. Its all about hard cash.
The problem here is that the movies that people watch in any great number are sequels. This means that they generate cash. As alluded to above, that's all that hollywood cares about.
There are people that are prepared to take risks, like the wienstien company. However, a failure like the grindhouse (which is a terrible film) meant that they almost disappeared.
Why is that so? think about it in bandwidth terms. Studios release 5 or 6 movies every three months. Each one of those costs up to $100 million each. When a movie is released you have to pay for advertising, promotion, tedious talking head stuff. Then the movie is in theaters for 4-10 weeks. Then later on its punted to rental, and then DVD/blueray.
If a movie doesn't do well in that time, its sunk. gone along with 1/5th of the studios earnings for that quarter. most movies barely break even. Which means a studios business model has to build in a lot of loss.
A TV channel has subscribers. This means that they can take a risk. Even if a show is shit it wont hurt earnings immediately. Plus they have 3-5 blockbusters shows on a week. which means a much faster turn around. However the shit/hit ratio in TV is ironically much higher. (American TV is horrifically bad.) But because its all based on subscribers risks can be taken as one show is such a tiny fraction of the total output.
Quite. Studios have minimaxed their money making capabilities, and (generally) no longer take 70s style gambles on films like "The Godfather".
This is only exacerbated by the fact that it seems people are prepared to pay for the likes of "Transformers" but the people who claim to want more interesting/niche films aren't prepared to shell out for them, whether because they keep their money in their pockets, torrent them, or whatever.
A cult gets more extremist over time because moderates will leave. Then the definition of 'moderate' changes relative to who is still there, and the cult slides into an ever-more-narrow circle of ever-more-extreme followers. It's a feedback loop.
Except in case of movies, it is a feedback loop that promotes maximum reliability and profits. It doesn't promote "good movies" or "what the audience wants" in any way: it promotes what the _remaining_ audience is unwilling to sacrifice.
But that could work either way; movies could equally become more and more artsy over time and the audience that dislikes that would leave. Why didn't it happen that way?
That is the problem. Hollywood is producing the products that the broad audience wants. Instead, the author desires for large financial risks to be taken on what he wants instead, because art.
Another important and frightening thing about franchises is that they decouple the movie from the creators who produce it. You can buy the rights to a franchise and make something that people will want to watch, no matter who is being commissioned to make it.
This is very strange, both because it assumes that anyone can continue anyone else's work, and because it implies that the "right" to create the "official" sequel to a work of fiction is something that you should be able to buy and sell.
But would franchises be so successful commercially if that wasn't even somewhat true ? Hollywood is going down that path because it seems to work quite well financially, if it's fundamentally flawed then the problem will sort itself out quite quickly.
Could it be that this tendency, and the success of TV series (at a time when TV isn't doing particularly well) actually points to a difficulty with the traditional movie format ?
Maybe it's just the case that universes/longer time frames afforded by franchises and series make for easier storytelling than the constrained 2/3h continuous cinema sitting ?
This isn't frightening to me. If you own the rights to your work, then you should be able to sell it to whomever. If you don't own the rights, then you are most likely being paid by someone else to produce the work, in which case this also isn't scary. If I paid someone to produce a work, I would surely want to be able to sell the rights in the future.
It would be scarier to me if this wasn't the case. Imagine writing your first novel, and then a large corporation hires a writer to produce a sequel. How many Game of Thrones sequels would there be already? I'd rather George R.R. Martin have the time to create instead of having to compete.
> How many Game of Thrones sequels would there be already?
I don't find this scary. Presumably people should favor the ones written by the original author, because they would expect it to be more true to the spirit that they liked in the earlier works. However, if some people prefer to read works by competing authors, then that would be good for them, and too bad for Martin. The notion of being able to assess property rights over a universe of fiction (beyond the original copyright interpretation of ownership of the actual work and adaptations of the work in its fixed form) are a new and dangerous notion, I think.
Lots of artistic creativity is discouraged or impossible today because of the unclear legal status of fan fiction, or of works that are inspired by another work but cannot afford to pay a license for them. I find this far more worrying than the consequences of depriving rightholders from exclusivity rights on the universes created by authors.
If I paid someone to produce a work, I would surely want to be able to sell the rights in the future.
You can sell the copyright, but you can't sell your creativity, life experiences, or anything else which allowed you to make that work of art. Having the money to buy the rights to make a sequel doesn't grant you the ability of making a good one, but it does prevent everyone else from trying, even if they might be better at it.
I don't think that's very true -- franchises that have been wildly successful under one creative team can be less successful under a new team, and vice versa. Sure, as with any brand, a franchise has some (positive or negative) value attached to it, but its absolutely not the case that "you can buy a franchise and make something that people will want to watch, no matter who is being commissioned to make it".
Even with franchise films, there is often a lot of marketing around producers, directors, and cast -- because who is making the work is still important to whether people want to watch it, and which people want to watch it.
One must at least tip the cap to the sheer audacity represented by the chart of thirty-two upcoming comic book character movies. That is a giant investment, that from a psychological perspective could only be made on such comically phallic properties. It's hard to be sure that the public has such a giant appetite for this sort of thing, but someone sure is sure. One can imagine business-school case studies a decade from now including this chart while discussing the collapse of the American film industry.
Superhero action/adventure movies are solid gold right now because they not only do well in the US but internationally as well, which has become as big or bigger of a market as the US. Overall, averaging out the Marvel superhero movies made over the last decade the franchise has pulled in around a billion in revenue per year. It's practically an industry unto itself at this point.
> One can imagine business-school case studies a decade from now including this chart while discussing the collapse of the American film industry.
It's not even a film industry anymore, Hollywood has become just a "theme park" type of thing. Which would be a pretty interesting phenomenon to discuss all by itself, artistically speaking (thinking of the alien invasion movies of the 1950s, which were similar in nature), only if everything wouldn't be so grotesque because of the huge sums of money involved.
As a film buff myself I really do hope that Hollywood will manage to turn itself around. In the 1970s it got very lucky because of the Nouvelle Vague French directors, who influenced the early movies of Lucas, Spielberg or Scorsese, the guys who created the new Hollywood, but this time around I don't see any bright prospects. The European or Asian independent and artsy films are mostly only created to be showed in film festivals and to receive government money, while former huge and influential movie industries like the ones from Japan (think Kurosawa or K. Fukasaku) or Hong Kong are virtually dead. Very sad state of affairs.
Hollywood makes franchise-based movies because the profitability is much more stable. Would you rather Hollywood produce more $100 Million movies that return only $10 Million?
The elitism in these sorts of discussions is cringeworthy. I absolutely hate superhero movies, but I'm not their audience. Seriously, people don't whine about teen-audience flicks so why whine about this?
Well it's always the clash between art and commerce. Most of us would agree that Hollywood's only job is to create profitable content to be consumed by the masses. And people do vote with their wallet's pretty easily and often so these studios can fine tune the formula. There is a % of people though that wish it was also more art and less formulaic and commercial.
It's the same in tech. There's this angst/thread that expects every tech startup to change the world while 98% of them are simply iterating on a proven safe formula of a game or social app concept to maximize profitability.
Yeah, I certainly wish there were more artful movies.
However, I think the art vs commerce distinction is false. Studios making artful films are just as commercial as any, they just produce for a specific audience.
Yeah, I certainly wish there were more artful movies.
However, I think the art vs commerce distinction is false. Studios making artful films are just as commercial as any, they just produce for a specific audience.
I feel like you haven't read the article. Your first point the author admits himself. As to the second point, I don't think he's "whining" that they exist, but that there is little else:
"In 2014, franchises are not a big part of the movie business. They are not the biggest part of the movie business. They are the movie business. Period."
The studios would be fine with any lower ranked movie being in the top 14, though. People went to see what they went to see. They got what they wanted.
He explains why himself: Birdman opened in the United States on October 17. It is not, financially, a consequential movie; it was released by Fox Searchlight, the prestige, indie-ish subdivision of 20th Century Fox; it has made decent money (nearly $21 million domestic) for the kind of film it is; it will win a bunch of awards over the next three months and lose a bunch of others. It is a good movie, but the type of good movie it is has nothing to do with what the movie industry is about.
Typically a film like this loses some money at the box office once all the costs are taken into account (even though Birdman got a lot of great advance PR on the late night TV circuit and so on); the theatrical release is essentially a giant advertisement for the DVD/rental/streaming/broadcast windows.
What can you do? The market for franchises or blockbuster films (most of which either have franchise potential or big ancillary tie-in potential, like Titanic) is huge because that's what most people like - an amazing, larger-than-life spectacle. Same reason Shakespeare built so many stories around exotic locations and courtly intrigue, same reason Dickens leveraged class distinctions to ratchet up the drama between his characters. I find these complaints a bit odd considering that many of the big franchises originate in the comics world, which was the dungeon of literary publishing for decades. these franchises are successful not just because of spectacular elements but because of the highly refined storytelling skills of the creative teams. To a large extent they're building meta-narratives of multiple interconnected stories that draw on a common fictional world and are designed to reinforce each other, for both economic and aesthetic reasons - a modern panthetistic mythos that lays out a different worldview from the singular ideological perspective that was a cultural staple of the past (while also containing its own ideology, of course).
Incidentally, it's off that the piece doesn't address how Josh Whedon went from directing The Avengers in 2011 to shooting a modern adaptation of Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing in his own house/backyard, featuring several of the same actors (eg Clark Gregg, who plays Agent Colson in the Marvel superhero 'world').
Today we have a different model: The modern studio chief loves business, success, replication, and reliability, and nobody expects him to offer even the most cursory nod to anything that smacks of ideals that relate to content;
That's because the modern 'studio' is just the crown jewel in a business conglomerate, and development now happens within production companies. It's been going this way ever since Uncle Sam busted the studios' vertical market and forbade them from owning theaters or signing stars to highly restrictive contracts. There's a good albeit somewhat tendentious history of the motion picture business here: http://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/ECM_PRO_060965.pd...
fairy godmothership of independent producer Megan Ellison. The grace of billionaires is not a great business model on which to hang the hopes of an art form
Megan wants to make money as much as any other producer and just has a different strategy for doing so (and I don't mean that as a criticism). Look, the film industry is a bit like the restaurant industry: you have a few megacorporations at the top, like McDonalds, Burger King, Starbucks - everyone knows their food is of low overall quality but it remains popular. Then you have other fast food providers that do the same sort of thing but slightly better in some ways and worse in others, for a slightly smaller audience. Then you have some specialty fast food outlets like Chipotle that make pretty nice food for more money and are very successful but an order of magnitude smal...
It's not about the elitism. I, for myself, mostly loathe most of the "independent" movies that come out through festivals like Sundance, because most of the time you can see right through them from the first 15 minutes of screening. What I do miss is the middle ground, like a 20-million crime movie which would keep me stuck in my seat for its entire duration.
Yeah but screw that faux populism. Hollywood wasn't losing money even in the 70's when it was wall to wall bleak existential navel gazing. People go see what there is to see.
It's interesting to note where the real creative action is nowadays: TV. Specifically, long-form serial format that people can binge watch.
In the recent Terry Gilliam interview posted on HN, he made the point that mid-level movies are out. You can find financing for the super-huge Spiderman 47s, and you can go indie with a Red One and shoot your own stuff. What you have a really hard time doing is finding 10-20M for a mid-sized niche film.
I'm a movie fan, and I've lost what little respect I've had for Hollywood over the past few years. Too many times I've been sitting in theaters for some nth version of a comic-book movie and thought: really? Is that what the writers and directors really think of my intelligence.
Best thing I know to do is to stop watching them, even if I do love movies. I'll happily go pay to see another Sharknado before I'll pony up for the next 17 versions of whatever the Star Wars franchise has to offer.
> I've been sitting in theaters for some nth version of a comic-book movie and thought: really? Is that what the writers and directors really think of my intelligence.
What do you expect them to think, if you're sitting in theaters for some nth version of a comic-book movie? ;)
They only care about revenue. You're signalling them "I'll pay for this shit". Is it their fault?
The most interesting point for me isn't that these are all superhero movies (they sell well, simple as that) but that movie studios are announcing plans for movies that they won't release for at least five years.
What is the viewing public supposed to do with that information, really? Who knows what I'll be doing with my life. Aside from anything else it demonstrates a remarkable belief that audiences are very far away from getting sick of superhero movies.
The announcements were for (current and potential) investors, not really the viewing public. The nature of the world is that its not really possible to restrict the information to the former set without also releasing it to the latter set, but the latter group isn't the one for whose benefit the information is being released, so it doesn't really make sense to ask what that group is supposed to do with the information.
I'm not nearly as convinced that 'franchises' are a bad thing. Certainly, there's some serious cash cows there, and some of the franchise movies are mediocre movies. But they're no more or less mediocre than the all-original movies that filled the production slots before them. There's about a hundred movies released by the major studios a year; How many can you name from any given year? Five? Ten?
What franchises represent, to me, is the new search for continuity. The world is changing faster, relationships are getting more tenuous. Moving around, finding new friends, new places to hang out and eat and drink and be merry; All these things have been enabled by the internet and the sharing economy. I moved to a new town about 3 months ago, I eat out every night and I've eaten at precisely two places twice: A korean joint I like because it's named for Psy's masterpiece, and an indian place a former coworker recommended. The rest of the time, I've been trying new things, searching for the 'perfect' meal, never satisfied. In this search for novelty, something has been lost.
There's a reason why you see so many tumblr handles of the form 'harrypotterlover21' and 'twilightfan32'. People identify with these stories and universes, and find their sense of connection and emotional stability with them. It's no longer specific people that you have a connection with, but a grouping based on a shared interest; perhaps one that belies a mindset?
It ties into, as well, the current trend of TV shows to be long-form entertainment. We want to see characters grow and establish themselves. 1 1/2 hours isn't long enough. 3 hours rarely is. Franchises allow stories to be told iteratively. That's a good thing for movies and art. There's nothing special about the traditional runtime for a film that makes it more artistic; that's just how long humans are willing to sit down and focus on one thing at a time.
There was an interview with George RR Martin at least 15 years ago (that I couldn't find in 5 seconds of Googling) where he made a similar point. Some people were complaining that too many books were parts of series, but that's what people wanted: an ongoing connection to a universe.
Martin and Jordan and Goodkind ... they never shine. Their serial work is mediocre at best - the best Martin book is Tuff (sci fi short stories). Trilogy seems to be the optimal size for a big story to be told. Above that is hard. And even Zelazny was not able to pull off amber properly.
The prolific multi genre author - the one that could create a full universe for a short story and throw it away is rare beast.
So in a sense what happens to hollywood is something that for us geeks has happened before in two beloved medias - books and games. The only thing that prevented the game industry to die creatively was the tremendously low cost of entry into the PC market where the interesting stuff was happening after the 2009 [1].
[1] Owned and played on PS2, PS3, Xbox and xbox 360 next to my gaming PC.
I agree that continuity is very pleasant, both for artists and for audiences. In the past few months I've noticed that online entertainment is groping toward a new kind of business model where the artist just keeps working on a single property and never stops, escalating the ambitions and production values as the audience grows.
An example of what I'm talking about is the webcomic Homestuck, which started as some simple panels with text and now evolved to thousands of pages with intricate animations, musical pieces and even videogames spliced into one big narrative. From being written by a single person (who still has full creative control), the comic has gradually grown to have a dedicated art team, music team and gamedev studio.
An almost-example is the videogame Nuclear Throne. It's currently being developed by a two-person studio, and the creators make a point of releasing new updates every single week and interacting with the audience constantly, talking to Redditors and building good relationships with Youtubers. By now it's had 50+ weekly updates and just keeps going. A big part of me wants the game to never be "finished" but just stay in development forever, like a webcomic, becoming more ambitious as money permits. The game's universe is certainly interesting enough to allow that kind of development, you could imagine all kinds of stories set inside the game, etc.
The awesome thing about this model is that you can start very small. Homestuck started with one guy, Nuclear Throne started with two guys. If you can keep growing the audience at every step, who's to say that you can't end up with a billion dollar movie franchise, or even crazier things?
Good example! Many MMOs also follow this kind of model. Though it still feels a bit incomplete in my mind, I guess I'd prefer the updates to be more regular and "story-like". We're probably still missing some important pieces of the puzzle to make this model work really well.
There's a key difference between the Econ 101 model and the real world that I feel is not talked about enough, but is explanatory for a lot of discrepancies in the market:
People don't pay for actual utility, they pay for expected expected utility.
So franchises are a reasonable solution to this problem: Franchise Ep. 1 was good, so consumers will go to Ep. 2 because they expect the chances are it's at least almost as good, as opposed to taking a ganble on some other thing they've never heard of before. For the studios, it's also a good way to cash in on something that was not an immediate success, but grew a gradual fanbase as well.
Other solutions to this problem include: subscriptions (paying a fixed cost each month for access to a large library in which you don't have to pay an additional cost for each thing you may or may not like), bundles (paying for a group of things that includes at least one or two things you know you like, and using their quality to vouch for the other things in the group), and money-back guarantees (which doesn't work very well for consume once content).
Allow me to introduce my client, the devil. I'll be representing him in the following few bullet points. Mainly as an intellectual exercise, but hopefully, a worthwhile exercise.
- First: This is a very thoughtful and well-written article, and it raises some very valid points. Sequelmania is a creatively bankrupt strategy in the long run. (That being said, I'm a big fan of what Marvel has been able to do with its franchises, and I'm not convinced that its films are the sort of anti-creative schlock it's become trendy to describe them as. Full disclosure: a good friend is fairly high up the food chain at Marvel, and he's a brilliant and awesome exec.)
- Second: It's also a monetarily lucrative strategy. More important, it's a de-risking strategy. One sees the same pattern in the video games industry, where the decision to churn out Call of Duty 327.5 is a no-brainer, destined to reap at least a billion dollars in revenue, and the decision to make a daring, idiosyncratic, artful, niche game is liable to get a studio head fired.
- Third: In the good old days, studios were a total mess. They took wild swings in profitability, their shareholders were often fleeced, and their executives lived high on the hog. This was generally accepted as the cost of doing business in a creatively driven industry. Today, not too much has changed: but the execs currently in power are much more adept at managing brands and franchises. They're also better businesspeople (with some notable exceptions). This is actually a good thing, if you're a shareholder in a movie studio.
- Fourth: About those shareholders. Over the last 20-odd years, and especially over the last decade, Hollywood has received more and more investment capital from hedge funds and i-banks. What do finance guys want to see? For one thing, the books. "Hollywood accounting" is actually on the wane, and that's a good thing. They also want to see results. ROI. Predictable ROI, if at all possible. This goal often stands at odds with free-reined creativity and risk-taking, with plenty of the unfortunate consequences that the author points out. But it also forces studios to think more like businesses, and less like social clubs. Executives should be held accountable for their financial results, not their popularity at Soho House.
- Fifth: The indie film, the risky film, the daringly trashy film, and the eccentric film are far from dead. Big studios aren't making them anymore, but as means of production and distribution continue to democratize, especially at the small-time level, you'll see more and more true indies step in to fill this gap in the market. My off-the-cuff prediction: big studios double down on the franchise business—which, when you think about it, is probably what a "big" studio should be focusing on. Little and mid-sized players, in addition to foreign players, focus on the niche and arthouse fare. Globalization, plus interesting new distribution technology, allows these players to punch above their weight as never before.
- Sixth: By FAR the best combination creative/business executive Hollywood has had in my lifetime was Michael Eisner. This guy gets a lot of shit for the whole Michael Ovitz debacle at Disney, and it's tarnished his legacy considerably. But he almost singlehandedly revitalized and rebuilt the Disney machine. Disney is the Apple of the movie business, and he was (kinda sorta) its Steve Jobs. (Steve Jobs himself was later involved in Disney, as we know.) He had his misses, as well as his hits. But he's the sort of exec Hollywood needs more of, not less. Its development and production aspects should be run by creative executives, and its overall business units should be run by true business executives. Whenever the twain shall meet--very rarely--these people should run the shop. I'd love to say that Hollywood selects for combination creative-business people, but it doesn't. It selects for good politi...
The writing on that makes me understand that the author really loves movies. And loves them perhaps a bit too much in the sense that any entertainment medium is, at its heart, a fashion medium, and fashions change.
I agree with him that franchises get boring, but he seems to miss the part where I, the movie-goer, stop going to movies and so the studios notice and stop making them and try to make something else. My daughter and I were noting that all the TV shows seemed to be police procedurals with a police officer and a "quirky side kick" of some sort. That concept got run right into the ground. And now all of them are 'Game of Thrones' clones where their is some nominal "set" and within that set are created no fewer than a dozen inter-twined story lines of competition and intrique. And because they want to have a dozen or more story lines, many of them are just plain silly.
My point is that it sucks when something you love moves on from what you love into something new[1]. But it isn't the end of the world, nor is it necessarily the end of an industry. It is just the new, new thing.
[1] My wife laments my music tastes are stuck in the 70's and 80's :-)
I saw Captain America Winter Soldier this week, and of course it's a prime example of what the author is saying. But it did refute one of his minor points, the timeliness of current movies. It seemed perfectly in tune with the post-Snowden era.
I wonder if these movie studios, with increasing costs and ever-greater reliance on "hits", will become more and more like the recording industry, with its three major bland pop-hit consolidated companies and nothing else.
There were 5,400 new screens added and 1,000 new cinemas added in mainland China in 2014, which had a 33% rise in movie box office. Moviegoing internationally, especially in BRIC (Brazil-Russia-India-China) countries, is booming and has been for years. Moviegoing is stagnant to slowly dwindling in the US market.
The big blockbuster movies, especially the franchise films, are aimed at the global audience because they're making much more money overseas than they're doing domestically. And the studios/distributors want to make money. They don't care about art or cultural meaning. They care about money.
Several years ago, PG posted a YC article called "Kill Hollywood." I wrote a rebuttal with the mocking (and deliberately attention-grabbing) title "Kill Y-Combinator". PG and YC laid out a mission to invent new businesses and platforms that provided ways for content creators, creative types, etc, to not have to deal with the mess that is Hollywood. I replied that while I agree Hollywood is a mess -- it's a permission industry, they're obsessed with rights and are ruthlessly litigious if they sense any infringement -- I felt PG's article went too far. I suggested that all movies aren't the problem, some are, the big dumb franchise ones. I argued there is a ton of great brilliant artistic talent in the industry, but they have a hell of a time getting their work to an audience. The studios and the financiers (usually, nowadays, foreign investors; banks, oil sheiks, etc.) want big international blockbusters (read: franchise repeat hits). The artistic filmmakers/directors/acting talent is getting squeezed out. Why do you think Soderbergh stopped making movies? He got sick of the Hollywood BS. I advocated and still do that Silicon Valley ought to strive to build new platforms that facilitate the good movie content reaching audiences at sufficient scale so that good films have a future and can make a difference. I tried to do this with a startup, and got Silicon Valley money (seed round), but the resistance and loathing of anything M-word (Movie) related in the Valley is brutal. I could not get an A round, and my big seed investors walked away without even giving us a chance (lookin' at you, Google Ventures).
There remains an incredible opportunity for disruptive technology to come in and raise hell and make the moviegoing experience better for consumers, for filmmakers, for studios, and for the exhibitors. The movie theater industry--separate from the studios, I'm talking about the cinemas themselves, which they themselves call "exhibitors"--is appallingly bad and inept at embracing technology to attract larger audiences and keep them coming back. Some small chains like Austin's Alamo Drafthouse get it, and have figured out a way to make their theatres event destinations thanks to clever branding, great curation, great food and drink, and an overwhelming sense of entertainment and belonging. The AMCs of the world on the other hand exist basically to sell you insanely marked-up popcorn/soda/junk food, and could care less what is displayed on their screens as long as the entire experience is as monetized as possible. And franchise films help them keep their unimaginative business model limping along year after year.
I believe that if we could get some decent and COMMITTED funding for innovating mobile/social/local tech that relates to the moviegoing experience, we could do a lot to wake up the greedy Hollywood execs to fund better and more varied content and the exhibitors would be less fearful on taking a chance on showing that content. I would love to see this. I've already spent years of my life in this space, lost a ton of personal money in this space, but would be willing to give it a go again in a second if I could find the right alignment of stars (people, funding, filmmaker/exhibitor connections). I think it can be done without Hollywood's permission or even involvement. It's ...
Movie franchises and sequels also existed in the 30s and 40s, with series like The Thin Man and the Road to... cranking out new installments every year or so. They thrived for similar reasons to today's comic book movie franchises, and I think they will ultimately share the same fate.
Why do people go to comic book movies today?
1. They like knowing what they're signing up for. As evidence, look at how movie trailers have evolved into Cliff Notes versions of movies over the last few decades.
2. This particular market had been ill-served; so anything catering to this niche was disproportionately rewarded. Comic book fans had long lamented that there were no big budget adaptions of their favorite books.
3. It's easier to make variations on an established template from a production standpoint, and it's easier to obtain financial backing when you can point to prior successes (the "it's like Uber but for Netflix" startup syndrome).
It isn't that comic book movies are creatively bankrupt by definition (nor were The Thin Man movies, and many other franchises over the years). They have a rich well of prior stories to draw on and splash together, and a lot of what Marvel in particular is doing with ongoing narratives is interesting. But they are also racing towards a saturation point which will inevitably result in the collapse of their entire enterprise. They have attracted a lot of good actors, directors and other collaborators; but even with all of that talent they are simply producing too much, too quickly to avoid reaching a point of creative and financial exhaustion.
As others have noted, it's pretty laughable that Marvel and DC have announced slates that run all the way to 2020. They are certainly going to have to cancel or postpone some of those films when audience indifference becomes impossible to ignore. And then like other things that have oversaturated their markets (music / rhythm games), it's going to be a long, dark winter before they get to show their faces in any respect again. I am certain that within the next ten years we'll see articles and interviews talking about how "comic book movies don't sell" and "guys running around in spandex suits are passe".
Meanwhile, if you could approach this stuff in moderation, I think it might work out differently. Make a few comic book movies a year. Make them all distinct from each other. Don't tell the same stories again and again and again (origin stories of characters that have existed for 80 years, for instance). Approach the material from the perspective of telling a story in a new way, rather than rehashing the same story for new money.
Unfortunately, this isn't the way business is done in Hollywood or Silicon Valley or anywhere else. If someone makes money doing something, then thirty other people are going to try to reproduce that success, and many of them may have missed the point of how and why the original succeeded.
The franchise addiction is well known. What changed in 2014 is that studios started publicly issuing product roadmaps. The next half decade of the comic book universes has been mapped out. (Disappointingly, Black Widow doesn't get an origin movie.) A chart: (http://wac.450f.edgecastcdn.net/80450F/comicsalliance.com/fi...) This covers all the way up to the next Green Lantern movie in 2020. (The last Green Lantern dud will have been forgotten by then, like 2007's Spiderman 3).
Disney actually has a Crap Sequels Division, Disneytoons. For decades, they produced direct to VHS/DVD/BD sequels: Cinderalla 2, Mulan 2, etc., which could be found near the checkout in low-end retail stores. When Disney acquired Pixar, Disneytoons was phased out, and a number of designed-for-mediocrity projects cancelled. But it came back to life. Coming soon: Cars 3 and Tinker Bell and the Legend of the NeverBeast.
The only hope for novelty may be another big series in Young Adult books. Not much innovation there right now. The vampire and zombie books continue to come out. (Vampires down, zombies holding steady, based on bookshelf space in stores.) Teen survival stories are big, but they're mostly bad Hunger Games clones at this point. J. K. Rowling did the magical school thing so well that nobody else can compete. Greek mythology seems to have peaked outside the Marvel universe; the endless Percy Jackson trilogy stream is still coming out, but everybody is tired of it. Tom Clancy books are still coming out, even though he's dead and the ghost-writers suck.
As Comics Alliance says, "This is what the next five years of your life looks like."
50 Years ago, in 1964, My Fair Lady was #3 at the Box Office, and won the Oscar for Best Picture. In 1956, Around the World in 80 days won and was #2.
In 2014, 12 Years a Slave was #44 at the Box Office, and won the Oscar for Best Picture. In 2013, Argo won and was #22.
I think this represents that "what sells" is no longer the same "the best movies". The OP says good movies are finding it harder to get made. Good stories, good acting, good "art", are being pushed out in favor of "popular".
Not sure anything can or should be done about that. But it's definitely a trend.
Reminds me of junk food. Seems like eventually in most consumer fields marketers figure out baskets of hacks to push people's buy buttons without having to resort to quality.
Movies have done that, at least for certain reliable audiences like teenagers.
I don't see what the problem is. Franchises are less risky because they've already removed a lot of the risk. Isn't this the correct path for business?
> The problem is that it's an unfortunate situation
Unfortunate for whom? No matter what direction the industry takes it will never be all things to all people, and there will always be room on the fringes for products that don't fit that direction.
I'm surprised to see on that list some sequels to flops, Pacific Rim being the perfect example. Why would anyone go watch Pacific Rim 2, or London Has Fallen (which I assume is a sequel to Olympus Has Fallen)?
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 54.4 ms ] threadThere's a lot of noise about mourning the death of sci-fi/cinema etc, but the gems have always been the outliers. Metropolis and later Dark City, Delicatessen/City of Lost Children, Firefly(yes, I'll give him that one, outlaw star has some things to say, but that plot trope was already as old as the Romans.), Primer, Dark Mirror, I'm rambling at this point and this is totally going to spawn another sci fi binge, but my takeaway is that there's been a reasonable stream of surprisingly good sci fi that has popped up in unpredictable places over the years, even into the torrent era. I have some faith it will continue to bubble to the top. My theory is that the only reason good sci fi seems so rare now is that it has become so swamped by bad sci fi as it has begun to fill the mainstream.
I've neglected Babylon 5, which is probably unfair to the show, but I feel like it never had the cultural impact of those '80s or '00s shows. The '90s drought feels real to me, but maybe it's just a matter of perception.
X-Files
SeaQuest DSV / SeaQuest 2032
More Star Trek than you can shake a stick at (TNG, DS9, and VOY cover the whole decade, with most of it having two at once)
Babylon 5
Sliders
Stargate SG-1
Farscape
I think there's a better case that the 1990s were the high-point of sci fi popularity on TV than a particular drought (though I can see a case that there was something of a drought starting sometime in the mid-1980s through 1993.)
And this in a thread that's about Hollywood's focus on franchises, and particular superhero franchises like Marvel's?
That's...funny.
http://variety.com/2014/film/news/birdman-expansion-box-offi...
The problem here is that the movies that people watch in any great number are sequels. This means that they generate cash. As alluded to above, that's all that hollywood cares about.
There are people that are prepared to take risks, like the wienstien company. However, a failure like the grindhouse (which is a terrible film) meant that they almost disappeared.
Why is that so? think about it in bandwidth terms. Studios release 5 or 6 movies every three months. Each one of those costs up to $100 million each. When a movie is released you have to pay for advertising, promotion, tedious talking head stuff. Then the movie is in theaters for 4-10 weeks. Then later on its punted to rental, and then DVD/blueray.
If a movie doesn't do well in that time, its sunk. gone along with 1/5th of the studios earnings for that quarter. most movies barely break even. Which means a studios business model has to build in a lot of loss.
A TV channel has subscribers. This means that they can take a risk. Even if a show is shit it wont hurt earnings immediately. Plus they have 3-5 blockbusters shows on a week. which means a much faster turn around. However the shit/hit ratio in TV is ironically much higher. (American TV is horrifically bad.) But because its all based on subscribers risks can be taken as one show is such a tiny fraction of the total output.
Quite. Studios have minimaxed their money making capabilities, and (generally) no longer take 70s style gambles on films like "The Godfather".
This is only exacerbated by the fact that it seems people are prepared to pay for the likes of "Transformers" but the people who claim to want more interesting/niche films aren't prepared to shell out for them, whether because they keep their money in their pockets, torrent them, or whatever.
Related: http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beli...
A cult gets more extremist over time because moderates will leave. Then the definition of 'moderate' changes relative to who is still there, and the cult slides into an ever-more-narrow circle of ever-more-extreme followers. It's a feedback loop.
Except in case of movies, it is a feedback loop that promotes maximum reliability and profits. It doesn't promote "good movies" or "what the audience wants" in any way: it promotes what the _remaining_ audience is unwilling to sacrifice.
It sounds like you are saying it is a problem that Hollywood is making movies people want to watch.
This is very strange, both because it assumes that anyone can continue anyone else's work, and because it implies that the "right" to create the "official" sequel to a work of fiction is something that you should be able to buy and sell.
Could it be that this tendency, and the success of TV series (at a time when TV isn't doing particularly well) actually points to a difficulty with the traditional movie format ? Maybe it's just the case that universes/longer time frames afforded by franchises and series make for easier storytelling than the constrained 2/3h continuous cinema sitting ?
It would be scarier to me if this wasn't the case. Imagine writing your first novel, and then a large corporation hires a writer to produce a sequel. How many Game of Thrones sequels would there be already? I'd rather George R.R. Martin have the time to create instead of having to compete.
I don't find this scary. Presumably people should favor the ones written by the original author, because they would expect it to be more true to the spirit that they liked in the earlier works. However, if some people prefer to read works by competing authors, then that would be good for them, and too bad for Martin. The notion of being able to assess property rights over a universe of fiction (beyond the original copyright interpretation of ownership of the actual work and adaptations of the work in its fixed form) are a new and dangerous notion, I think.
Lots of artistic creativity is discouraged or impossible today because of the unclear legal status of fan fiction, or of works that are inspired by another work but cannot afford to pay a license for them. I find this far more worrying than the consequences of depriving rightholders from exclusivity rights on the universes created by authors.
You can sell the copyright, but you can't sell your creativity, life experiences, or anything else which allowed you to make that work of art. Having the money to buy the rights to make a sequel doesn't grant you the ability of making a good one, but it does prevent everyone else from trying, even if they might be better at it.
Even with franchise films, there is often a lot of marketing around producers, directors, and cast -- because who is making the work is still important to whether people want to watch it, and which people want to watch it.
It's not even a film industry anymore, Hollywood has become just a "theme park" type of thing. Which would be a pretty interesting phenomenon to discuss all by itself, artistically speaking (thinking of the alien invasion movies of the 1950s, which were similar in nature), only if everything wouldn't be so grotesque because of the huge sums of money involved.
As a film buff myself I really do hope that Hollywood will manage to turn itself around. In the 1970s it got very lucky because of the Nouvelle Vague French directors, who influenced the early movies of Lucas, Spielberg or Scorsese, the guys who created the new Hollywood, but this time around I don't see any bright prospects. The European or Asian independent and artsy films are mostly only created to be showed in film festivals and to receive government money, while former huge and influential movie industries like the ones from Japan (think Kurosawa or K. Fukasaku) or Hong Kong are virtually dead. Very sad state of affairs.
The elitism in these sorts of discussions is cringeworthy. I absolutely hate superhero movies, but I'm not their audience. Seriously, people don't whine about teen-audience flicks so why whine about this?
It's the same in tech. There's this angst/thread that expects every tech startup to change the world while 98% of them are simply iterating on a proven safe formula of a game or social app concept to maximize profitability.
However, I think the art vs commerce distinction is false. Studios making artful films are just as commercial as any, they just produce for a specific audience.
However, I think the art vs commerce distinction is false. Studios making artful films are just as commercial as any, they just produce for a specific audience.
Typically a film like this loses some money at the box office once all the costs are taken into account (even though Birdman got a lot of great advance PR on the late night TV circuit and so on); the theatrical release is essentially a giant advertisement for the DVD/rental/streaming/broadcast windows.
What can you do? The market for franchises or blockbuster films (most of which either have franchise potential or big ancillary tie-in potential, like Titanic) is huge because that's what most people like - an amazing, larger-than-life spectacle. Same reason Shakespeare built so many stories around exotic locations and courtly intrigue, same reason Dickens leveraged class distinctions to ratchet up the drama between his characters. I find these complaints a bit odd considering that many of the big franchises originate in the comics world, which was the dungeon of literary publishing for decades. these franchises are successful not just because of spectacular elements but because of the highly refined storytelling skills of the creative teams. To a large extent they're building meta-narratives of multiple interconnected stories that draw on a common fictional world and are designed to reinforce each other, for both economic and aesthetic reasons - a modern panthetistic mythos that lays out a different worldview from the singular ideological perspective that was a cultural staple of the past (while also containing its own ideology, of course).
Incidentally, it's off that the piece doesn't address how Josh Whedon went from directing The Avengers in 2011 to shooting a modern adaptation of Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing in his own house/backyard, featuring several of the same actors (eg Clark Gregg, who plays Agent Colson in the Marvel superhero 'world').
Today we have a different model: The modern studio chief loves business, success, replication, and reliability, and nobody expects him to offer even the most cursory nod to anything that smacks of ideals that relate to content;
That's because the modern 'studio' is just the crown jewel in a business conglomerate, and development now happens within production companies. It's been going this way ever since Uncle Sam busted the studios' vertical market and forbade them from owning theaters or signing stars to highly restrictive contracts. There's a good albeit somewhat tendentious history of the motion picture business here: http://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/ECM_PRO_060965.pd...
fairy godmothership of independent producer Megan Ellison. The grace of billionaires is not a great business model on which to hang the hopes of an art form
Megan wants to make money as much as any other producer and just has a different strategy for doing so (and I don't mean that as a criticism). Look, the film industry is a bit like the restaurant industry: you have a few megacorporations at the top, like McDonalds, Burger King, Starbucks - everyone knows their food is of low overall quality but it remains popular. Then you have other fast food providers that do the same sort of thing but slightly better in some ways and worse in others, for a slightly smaller audience. Then you have some specialty fast food outlets like Chipotle that make pretty nice food for more money and are very successful but an order of magnitude smal...
In the recent Terry Gilliam interview posted on HN, he made the point that mid-level movies are out. You can find financing for the super-huge Spiderman 47s, and you can go indie with a Red One and shoot your own stuff. What you have a really hard time doing is finding 10-20M for a mid-sized niche film.
I'm a movie fan, and I've lost what little respect I've had for Hollywood over the past few years. Too many times I've been sitting in theaters for some nth version of a comic-book movie and thought: really? Is that what the writers and directors really think of my intelligence.
Best thing I know to do is to stop watching them, even if I do love movies. I'll happily go pay to see another Sharknado before I'll pony up for the next 17 versions of whatever the Star Wars franchise has to offer.
What do you expect them to think, if you're sitting in theaters for some nth version of a comic-book movie? ;)
They only care about revenue. You're signalling them "I'll pay for this shit". Is it their fault?
What is the viewing public supposed to do with that information, really? Who knows what I'll be doing with my life. Aside from anything else it demonstrates a remarkable belief that audiences are very far away from getting sick of superhero movies.
What franchises represent, to me, is the new search for continuity. The world is changing faster, relationships are getting more tenuous. Moving around, finding new friends, new places to hang out and eat and drink and be merry; All these things have been enabled by the internet and the sharing economy. I moved to a new town about 3 months ago, I eat out every night and I've eaten at precisely two places twice: A korean joint I like because it's named for Psy's masterpiece, and an indian place a former coworker recommended. The rest of the time, I've been trying new things, searching for the 'perfect' meal, never satisfied. In this search for novelty, something has been lost.
There's a reason why you see so many tumblr handles of the form 'harrypotterlover21' and 'twilightfan32'. People identify with these stories and universes, and find their sense of connection and emotional stability with them. It's no longer specific people that you have a connection with, but a grouping based on a shared interest; perhaps one that belies a mindset?
It ties into, as well, the current trend of TV shows to be long-form entertainment. We want to see characters grow and establish themselves. 1 1/2 hours isn't long enough. 3 hours rarely is. Franchises allow stories to be told iteratively. That's a good thing for movies and art. There's nothing special about the traditional runtime for a film that makes it more artistic; that's just how long humans are willing to sit down and focus on one thing at a time.
The prolific multi genre author - the one that could create a full universe for a short story and throw it away is rare beast.
So in a sense what happens to hollywood is something that for us geeks has happened before in two beloved medias - books and games. The only thing that prevented the game industry to die creatively was the tremendously low cost of entry into the PC market where the interesting stuff was happening after the 2009 [1].
[1] Owned and played on PS2, PS3, Xbox and xbox 360 next to my gaming PC.
An example of what I'm talking about is the webcomic Homestuck, which started as some simple panels with text and now evolved to thousands of pages with intricate animations, musical pieces and even videogames spliced into one big narrative. From being written by a single person (who still has full creative control), the comic has gradually grown to have a dedicated art team, music team and gamedev studio.
An almost-example is the videogame Nuclear Throne. It's currently being developed by a two-person studio, and the creators make a point of releasing new updates every single week and interacting with the audience constantly, talking to Redditors and building good relationships with Youtubers. By now it's had 50+ weekly updates and just keeps going. A big part of me wants the game to never be "finished" but just stay in development forever, like a webcomic, becoming more ambitious as money permits. The game's universe is certainly interesting enough to allow that kind of development, you could imagine all kinds of stories set inside the game, etc.
The awesome thing about this model is that you can start very small. Homestuck started with one guy, Nuclear Throne started with two guys. If you can keep growing the audience at every step, who's to say that you can't end up with a billion dollar movie franchise, or even crazier things?
People don't pay for actual utility, they pay for expected expected utility.
So franchises are a reasonable solution to this problem: Franchise Ep. 1 was good, so consumers will go to Ep. 2 because they expect the chances are it's at least almost as good, as opposed to taking a ganble on some other thing they've never heard of before. For the studios, it's also a good way to cash in on something that was not an immediate success, but grew a gradual fanbase as well.
Other solutions to this problem include: subscriptions (paying a fixed cost each month for access to a large library in which you don't have to pay an additional cost for each thing you may or may not like), bundles (paying for a group of things that includes at least one or two things you know you like, and using their quality to vouch for the other things in the group), and money-back guarantees (which doesn't work very well for consume once content).
- First: This is a very thoughtful and well-written article, and it raises some very valid points. Sequelmania is a creatively bankrupt strategy in the long run. (That being said, I'm a big fan of what Marvel has been able to do with its franchises, and I'm not convinced that its films are the sort of anti-creative schlock it's become trendy to describe them as. Full disclosure: a good friend is fairly high up the food chain at Marvel, and he's a brilliant and awesome exec.)
- Second: It's also a monetarily lucrative strategy. More important, it's a de-risking strategy. One sees the same pattern in the video games industry, where the decision to churn out Call of Duty 327.5 is a no-brainer, destined to reap at least a billion dollars in revenue, and the decision to make a daring, idiosyncratic, artful, niche game is liable to get a studio head fired.
- Third: In the good old days, studios were a total mess. They took wild swings in profitability, their shareholders were often fleeced, and their executives lived high on the hog. This was generally accepted as the cost of doing business in a creatively driven industry. Today, not too much has changed: but the execs currently in power are much more adept at managing brands and franchises. They're also better businesspeople (with some notable exceptions). This is actually a good thing, if you're a shareholder in a movie studio.
- Fourth: About those shareholders. Over the last 20-odd years, and especially over the last decade, Hollywood has received more and more investment capital from hedge funds and i-banks. What do finance guys want to see? For one thing, the books. "Hollywood accounting" is actually on the wane, and that's a good thing. They also want to see results. ROI. Predictable ROI, if at all possible. This goal often stands at odds with free-reined creativity and risk-taking, with plenty of the unfortunate consequences that the author points out. But it also forces studios to think more like businesses, and less like social clubs. Executives should be held accountable for their financial results, not their popularity at Soho House.
- Fifth: The indie film, the risky film, the daringly trashy film, and the eccentric film are far from dead. Big studios aren't making them anymore, but as means of production and distribution continue to democratize, especially at the small-time level, you'll see more and more true indies step in to fill this gap in the market. My off-the-cuff prediction: big studios double down on the franchise business—which, when you think about it, is probably what a "big" studio should be focusing on. Little and mid-sized players, in addition to foreign players, focus on the niche and arthouse fare. Globalization, plus interesting new distribution technology, allows these players to punch above their weight as never before.
- Sixth: By FAR the best combination creative/business executive Hollywood has had in my lifetime was Michael Eisner. This guy gets a lot of shit for the whole Michael Ovitz debacle at Disney, and it's tarnished his legacy considerably. But he almost singlehandedly revitalized and rebuilt the Disney machine. Disney is the Apple of the movie business, and he was (kinda sorta) its Steve Jobs. (Steve Jobs himself was later involved in Disney, as we know.) He had his misses, as well as his hits. But he's the sort of exec Hollywood needs more of, not less. Its development and production aspects should be run by creative executives, and its overall business units should be run by true business executives. Whenever the twain shall meet--very rarely--these people should run the shop. I'd love to say that Hollywood selects for combination creative-business people, but it doesn't. It selects for good politi...
I agree with him that franchises get boring, but he seems to miss the part where I, the movie-goer, stop going to movies and so the studios notice and stop making them and try to make something else. My daughter and I were noting that all the TV shows seemed to be police procedurals with a police officer and a "quirky side kick" of some sort. That concept got run right into the ground. And now all of them are 'Game of Thrones' clones where their is some nominal "set" and within that set are created no fewer than a dozen inter-twined story lines of competition and intrique. And because they want to have a dozen or more story lines, many of them are just plain silly.
My point is that it sucks when something you love moves on from what you love into something new[1]. But it isn't the end of the world, nor is it necessarily the end of an industry. It is just the new, new thing.
[1] My wife laments my music tastes are stuck in the 70's and 80's :-)
The big blockbuster movies, especially the franchise films, are aimed at the global audience because they're making much more money overseas than they're doing domestically. And the studios/distributors want to make money. They don't care about art or cultural meaning. They care about money.
Several years ago, PG posted a YC article called "Kill Hollywood." I wrote a rebuttal with the mocking (and deliberately attention-grabbing) title "Kill Y-Combinator". PG and YC laid out a mission to invent new businesses and platforms that provided ways for content creators, creative types, etc, to not have to deal with the mess that is Hollywood. I replied that while I agree Hollywood is a mess -- it's a permission industry, they're obsessed with rights and are ruthlessly litigious if they sense any infringement -- I felt PG's article went too far. I suggested that all movies aren't the problem, some are, the big dumb franchise ones. I argued there is a ton of great brilliant artistic talent in the industry, but they have a hell of a time getting their work to an audience. The studios and the financiers (usually, nowadays, foreign investors; banks, oil sheiks, etc.) want big international blockbusters (read: franchise repeat hits). The artistic filmmakers/directors/acting talent is getting squeezed out. Why do you think Soderbergh stopped making movies? He got sick of the Hollywood BS. I advocated and still do that Silicon Valley ought to strive to build new platforms that facilitate the good movie content reaching audiences at sufficient scale so that good films have a future and can make a difference. I tried to do this with a startup, and got Silicon Valley money (seed round), but the resistance and loathing of anything M-word (Movie) related in the Valley is brutal. I could not get an A round, and my big seed investors walked away without even giving us a chance (lookin' at you, Google Ventures).
There remains an incredible opportunity for disruptive technology to come in and raise hell and make the moviegoing experience better for consumers, for filmmakers, for studios, and for the exhibitors. The movie theater industry--separate from the studios, I'm talking about the cinemas themselves, which they themselves call "exhibitors"--is appallingly bad and inept at embracing technology to attract larger audiences and keep them coming back. Some small chains like Austin's Alamo Drafthouse get it, and have figured out a way to make their theatres event destinations thanks to clever branding, great curation, great food and drink, and an overwhelming sense of entertainment and belonging. The AMCs of the world on the other hand exist basically to sell you insanely marked-up popcorn/soda/junk food, and could care less what is displayed on their screens as long as the entire experience is as monetized as possible. And franchise films help them keep their unimaginative business model limping along year after year.
I believe that if we could get some decent and COMMITTED funding for innovating mobile/social/local tech that relates to the moviegoing experience, we could do a lot to wake up the greedy Hollywood execs to fund better and more varied content and the exhibitors would be less fearful on taking a chance on showing that content. I would love to see this. I've already spent years of my life in this space, lost a ton of personal money in this space, but would be willing to give it a go again in a second if I could find the right alignment of stars (people, funding, filmmaker/exhibitor connections). I think it can be done without Hollywood's permission or even involvement. It's ...
Why do people go to comic book movies today?
1. They like knowing what they're signing up for. As evidence, look at how movie trailers have evolved into Cliff Notes versions of movies over the last few decades.
2. This particular market had been ill-served; so anything catering to this niche was disproportionately rewarded. Comic book fans had long lamented that there were no big budget adaptions of their favorite books.
3. It's easier to make variations on an established template from a production standpoint, and it's easier to obtain financial backing when you can point to prior successes (the "it's like Uber but for Netflix" startup syndrome).
It isn't that comic book movies are creatively bankrupt by definition (nor were The Thin Man movies, and many other franchises over the years). They have a rich well of prior stories to draw on and splash together, and a lot of what Marvel in particular is doing with ongoing narratives is interesting. But they are also racing towards a saturation point which will inevitably result in the collapse of their entire enterprise. They have attracted a lot of good actors, directors and other collaborators; but even with all of that talent they are simply producing too much, too quickly to avoid reaching a point of creative and financial exhaustion.
As others have noted, it's pretty laughable that Marvel and DC have announced slates that run all the way to 2020. They are certainly going to have to cancel or postpone some of those films when audience indifference becomes impossible to ignore. And then like other things that have oversaturated their markets (music / rhythm games), it's going to be a long, dark winter before they get to show their faces in any respect again. I am certain that within the next ten years we'll see articles and interviews talking about how "comic book movies don't sell" and "guys running around in spandex suits are passe".
Meanwhile, if you could approach this stuff in moderation, I think it might work out differently. Make a few comic book movies a year. Make them all distinct from each other. Don't tell the same stories again and again and again (origin stories of characters that have existed for 80 years, for instance). Approach the material from the perspective of telling a story in a new way, rather than rehashing the same story for new money.
Unfortunately, this isn't the way business is done in Hollywood or Silicon Valley or anywhere else. If someone makes money doing something, then thirty other people are going to try to reproduce that success, and many of them may have missed the point of how and why the original succeeded.
Disney actually has a Crap Sequels Division, Disneytoons. For decades, they produced direct to VHS/DVD/BD sequels: Cinderalla 2, Mulan 2, etc., which could be found near the checkout in low-end retail stores. When Disney acquired Pixar, Disneytoons was phased out, and a number of designed-for-mediocrity projects cancelled. But it came back to life. Coming soon: Cars 3 and Tinker Bell and the Legend of the NeverBeast.
The only hope for novelty may be another big series in Young Adult books. Not much innovation there right now. The vampire and zombie books continue to come out. (Vampires down, zombies holding steady, based on bookshelf space in stores.) Teen survival stories are big, but they're mostly bad Hunger Games clones at this point. J. K. Rowling did the magical school thing so well that nobody else can compete. Greek mythology seems to have peaked outside the Marvel universe; the endless Percy Jackson trilogy stream is still coming out, but everybody is tired of it. Tom Clancy books are still coming out, even though he's dead and the ghost-writers suck.
As Comics Alliance says, "This is what the next five years of your life looks like."
In 2014, 12 Years a Slave was #44 at the Box Office, and won the Oscar for Best Picture. In 2013, Argo won and was #22.
I think this represents that "what sells" is no longer the same "the best movies". The OP says good movies are finding it harder to get made. Good stories, good acting, good "art", are being pushed out in favor of "popular".
Not sure anything can or should be done about that. But it's definitely a trend.
Movies have done that, at least for certain reliable audiences like teenagers.
Unfortunate for whom? No matter what direction the industry takes it will never be all things to all people, and there will always be room on the fringes for products that don't fit that direction.