Columbus not only didn't "discover" anything, but he fiercely exploited and killed the people who were living there before him in the Caribbean. Not unlike Hollywood and IP in some ways.
It really boils down to issues of control and trust. Working with IP your studio owns outright or licenses for a good fee means you do not have to contend with outside entities representing external forces the studio doesn't want to deal with. The trust aspect comes from the studio expecting the audience will know and respect the IP, will want to view anything associated with, and mostly do as they are told. This has happened with other overexploited genres in Hollywood's past, and eventually a breaking point comes when a film flops so badly that it sends the studio reeling towards bankruptcy. That hasn't happened yet, but it may occur soon.
In contrast, when a studio underwrites a pet project from a director with little experience (or even ones with good reputations) there is going to be a constant amount of head-butting throughout the process that becomes uncomfortable for both sides. All the more reason for the studios to prefer working with filmmakers who can more closely resemble employees than artists.
David is right on here, the IP angle is about making profitable business decisions and not much else. Also, I’d argue this isn’t a new phenomenon either. Hollywood and the TV industry in its infancy was microwaving the same Western characters and plots with new names and places attached as far back as the 1940s. Film Noir, sci-fi, police procedurals, it’s all cyclical.
I would caution you against saying "It's all cyclical." People say that about Hollywood all the time and, A, it's the kind of thing people repeat to explain things they otherwise can't explain and, B, isn't as true as people think it is either. There are certainly historical trends, but we can't point to Westerns for that, for example. Everyone says that, but it's historically inaccurate. They made Westerns for 65 years, non-stop, and audiences kept showing up enough to keep making them and keep making them hits. Their stride didn't break until the mid-70s. I'd also point out the demise of something like film noir overlooks the fact that 40 to 70 of those were being made a year, a tremendous amount of variety, and were being released amongst hundreds (much higher output than we remember) of other kinds of films while hundreds of older films were still playing in theaters in case you missed them. I could say people were overwhelmed with choice, but of course that wasn't the case because theaters didn't have 10 screens each. You had your theater and you went to see what that theater was playing and, if in a big city, what maybe a few were playing. Every week was a process of discovery amongst many different genres, is my point. People didn't stop going to the movies, they just stopped going to see film noirs. The decision to stop going the movies is a wholly modern one that requires far more to explain it than it's cyclical or too much IP. As I said, this has never happened before and the phenomenon is really *only* IP.
There are a lot of takes like these that reduce the problem to one thing, but it's not one thing. It's not even close to just what you're describing from anything I've seen or historical context. For example, the first 70 years of Hollywood, directors were generally long-term contract filmmakers who did what they were told - a far from new experience. Nobody was unhappy with their output and audiences loved what these "company men" were selling because they were all generally original, either because of creative innovation or the fact that audiences hadn't yet experienced anything like them before. This is one of the reasons why I try to avoid speaking in absolutes or reductive explanations on here. Everyone wants to provide a simple answer when in the 21st century there are a good ten that are critical to what's happening. As I've written about previously, the influence of screenwriting guides and the imposition of lazy, formulaic, three-act structures has probably done more to harm the theatrical experience than "trust". I think people resent going to pay a fortune for a movie that feels predictable and boring to them. You can call that trust, but I think that would really underplay what's happening.
A very anecdotal argument from me here: I'm a regular at TIFF and have more often than not "discovered" flicks that I get others to sit in the theatre or on the couch to watch again at home. Nearly every time, it doesn't capture the same feeling. Not just because you can't recreate your first time, but the audience has a lot to do with your experience.
It can turn an underwhelming film into a good one -- and a good one into great. (See: The Artist, LA LA Land or, even, KILL from last year).
So much of it had to do with the cheers, laughs and overall vibes in the theatre that made it an experience. I don't know that we'll lose that entirely, but we'll surely have to rethink it as theatres continue to shrink and condense.
But I would counter your behavior proved my point: you evangelized and spread the word, which is the only way for a film to spread. In your case, you did it on your couch, but box office is similarly affected. That all said, the theatrical experience is so vital to what we're talking about here. It does everything you're talking about. At home, the experience is hard to replicate without, typically, a family unit or large group of friends to watch with. What I mean is, watching ARMY OF SHADOWS or MONTY PYTHON'S HOLY GRAIL for the first time with five friends at seventeen was just as much a vital communal experience for me and I had dozens of those growing up and, later, as an adult when I hosted sprawling movie marathons. It's the communal aspect of it that matters most to me...and nothing is as good at providing that as the movie theater. Nothing.
I feel the same about a good album, or a novel - anything, really, even a wild flower unexpectedly appearing in my garden that I take a quick photo of. But one is then easily thought of as 'over sharing' and 'needy'. But I think this impulse is born of generosity of spirit, not merely striking a pose to gain attention as a trend-setter. What is the point of delight if you don't go on to share it?
You wrote "their algorithms create such a curated experience for you" - I really dislike the modern use of 'curate'. When I was a kid, we had a curator at the local museum (though that was just what it said on his his business card, if he even had one: everyone called him Mr Jewell) who showed us things we least expected, but really needed to see - Rumsfeldian 'unknown unknowns'. The opposite of how AI operates, as far as I can tell.
Hi Christopher, thanks for commenting. Good thoughts here. I especially like this: "What is the point of delight if you don't go on to share it?" I'm on the fence about the curation concern, or rather the use of the word. I don't think algorithms are AI, as much as an usher at Blockbuster pointing you toward the aisle that holds all the movies you love most - except in this case the usher is a self-serving streamer that benefits from dumbing you down by also picking the film for you rather than letting you make those decisions. But I also hate that the word "curate" -- a term I also find valuable -- has had some of its worth diminished. I'm going to reflect on my own relationship to the word in my writing, because I do agree with you that it's a word with considerable value in the arts.
Thank you Cole. I think the thing is also related to how buying books online and streaming music may lead to what you think you want, but not always to what you need in that moment. I am sure you too have had the experience of going into a bookshop with a title in mind only to walk out with a very different volume, glad to have done so. Lots of the books and authors I came to love happened exactly like that. Ted Hughes, JM Coetzee, travel books on Samarkand that I could barely dream of but ended up visiting, inspired by something written many decades earlier.
Same applies with my CD collection, which I won’t swap for streaming, even though it’s handy - I might think I want to listen to Charles Mingus, maybe, but then bump into a country album I completely forgot I owned, and realise that it ticks the box more neatly today. There’s probably a word for it - maybe another over-used one like serendipity - but whatever the phenomenon is called, it makes me happier than getting the thing I initially had in mind.
Yes, I've Noted about this on here quite a bit in defense of physical media. Physical media shopping leads to discovery and growth. The same is true about physical media on your own shelf. Others, including family members such as children as they grow up, pick something "random" up and move outside their box/bubble.
100% - my father's bookcase, especially on a wet weekend at home, drove curiosity and built taste in ways I only fully appreciate now, 50 years later. When he died recently, the hard bit wasn't discarding a number of books, but the furniture itself, which still smelled redolent of discovery and sheer excitement.
We have people making decisions at studios, who control most of the revenue and flow of financing, who have never made a movie before.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. Love lies bleeding was exciting because it was new. I’m tired of marvel feeling like the same regurgitated storyline. Or all of the procedural shows on TV
The studio point is accurate and certainly part of the problem. However, Marvel, as I've written about before, is capable of tremendous innovation, I would argue. It's Christopher Colombus'd cinema on several occasions. But today, it's one of very few options we're offered when we go to the cinema or turn on our TVs. I can't criticize that comic book films exist -- though I know others do -- because I enjoy good ones. But I can criticize that too many of them exist at the expense of other films that never will.
It really comes down to the same bare bones. People want a good story. And all stories have already been told in antiquity, in some way, by someone. It's just a matter of how new authors tell variations of those same stories. In DC's case, outside of Donner's original Superman and Burton's original Batman, they failed to deliver enthralling versions of hero's journey tales. And when they did manage to land a good script and director, their tent pole actor(s) weren't exactly the right choice (Nolan's Dark Knight, Christian Bale). In Marvel's case, they hit lightning in a bottle with a good script and a good casting (Iron Man, Downey) and then ran with it. Only a handful of times did they stick the landing, most notably in Winter Soldier, Ragnarok, Black Panther, Guardians 1, Civil War, No Way Home, Shang Chi, the Loki series. Superhero entertainment need not be played out just yet, and maybe never. But they do have to nail the writing and the casting concurrently, which is super hard to do. I think you might be underestimating Deadpool Wolverine, though. Reynolds' mutant is a MacGuffin unto himself because of his 4th wall breaking. But the script still has to land. Box office aside, Deadpool 2 barely cleared that hurdle, but it did clear it. :)
The thing is, I wouldn't even describe half those Marvel titles as remotely new experiences for me. I *felt* something I'd felt at the movie theater before. I felt no need to rewatch them until my son's Marvel-a-thon led me to return to them. It's very subjective, right? Nolan's DARK KNIGHT films didn't resonate as much with you because of Bale, it seems, but they clearly did for a lot of people because the sequel made legendary amounts of money because audiences couldn't stop returning to buy more tickets. There have also been terrible Marvel and DC films that have made twice as much as they should and great ones that have made half as much as they should. My point is, I think as we interrogate this, it's very hard to say "this one thing" or even three things are the *why* of it. It's why I try to talk about how our emotional experience of things so much and rarely get into technical matters. I'm trying to talk about the experience of art rather than something as crude as box office or what's cyclical or whatever else. How do we experience all that? And that experience is as diverse and complicated as all the business talk.
It's a fair question. I would agree with you it's difficult to find high art in cinema these days. Lots of folks wouldn't qualify any art stemming from the DC/Marvel worlds since they root themselves in early 2oth century pulp comic origins. I agree that comic book movies tend not to be rewatchable, I rarely do that with movies at all, save for my very favorite ones. That might be another interesting topic, actually, which movies are fundamentally rewatchable. In the superhero world, I can't think of too many other than Burton's Batman, and that mostly because of the two leads and its uniqueness as a progenitor of all that came after. But the masses aren't really a great barometer for art, unfortunately, because along with everything else in Americana, we've dumbed ourselves down to much lower common denominators. Sensationalism and escapism beats story and parable for most folks these days.
In defense of Gunn’s Suicide Squad, it was following on the previous movie which was… just bad. I like superhero movies and I couldn’t get past 20 minutes of that first film. But I loved Gunn’s sequel — and the Peacemaker tv spinoff (with an intro so quirky it was impossible to hit that “skip intro” button). Surely the stink of the first film affected the box office of the sequel -- and that it came out during the waning era of the Covid lockdown.
I enjoyed it quite a bit and didn't see the original -- in fact, I only went because of him -- but every DC film except WONDER WOMAN and AQUAMAN underperformed to rather catastrophic degrees. Nobody cared about any of them, even before the anti-pro/Snyder stuff took place. And I've heard from more than a few people inside WB who said they always knew they were going to see second-rate next to Marvel because -- and I paraphrase -- everything they did was going to feel like "follow the leader".
I do think that, before Marvel flooded tv with rushed spin-offs and too-thick continuity storylines, they sure had a prophetic finger on the zeitgeist. The Blip sure looks in retrospect like a metaphor for the Covid lockdowns, when people just disappeared from our lives, with some of them coming back later post-lockdown. There's also a sense in which we all disappeared into our own Internet rabbit holes, like living in our own separate multiverses. Weird that.
Yes this. And also this year's New World for me has been I Saw the TV Glow. Already saw it twice and was hoping I could see it again before it disappears from cinemas, but anyway I'm absolutely buying the BluRay
Columbus not only didn't "discover" anything, but he fiercely exploited and killed the people who were living there before him in the Caribbean. Not unlike Hollywood and IP in some ways.
It really boils down to issues of control and trust. Working with IP your studio owns outright or licenses for a good fee means you do not have to contend with outside entities representing external forces the studio doesn't want to deal with. The trust aspect comes from the studio expecting the audience will know and respect the IP, will want to view anything associated with, and mostly do as they are told. This has happened with other overexploited genres in Hollywood's past, and eventually a breaking point comes when a film flops so badly that it sends the studio reeling towards bankruptcy. That hasn't happened yet, but it may occur soon.
In contrast, when a studio underwrites a pet project from a director with little experience (or even ones with good reputations) there is going to be a constant amount of head-butting throughout the process that becomes uncomfortable for both sides. All the more reason for the studios to prefer working with filmmakers who can more closely resemble employees than artists.
David is right on here, the IP angle is about making profitable business decisions and not much else. Also, I’d argue this isn’t a new phenomenon either. Hollywood and the TV industry in its infancy was microwaving the same Western characters and plots with new names and places attached as far back as the 1940s. Film Noir, sci-fi, police procedurals, it’s all cyclical.
I would caution you against saying "It's all cyclical." People say that about Hollywood all the time and, A, it's the kind of thing people repeat to explain things they otherwise can't explain and, B, isn't as true as people think it is either. There are certainly historical trends, but we can't point to Westerns for that, for example. Everyone says that, but it's historically inaccurate. They made Westerns for 65 years, non-stop, and audiences kept showing up enough to keep making them and keep making them hits. Their stride didn't break until the mid-70s. I'd also point out the demise of something like film noir overlooks the fact that 40 to 70 of those were being made a year, a tremendous amount of variety, and were being released amongst hundreds (much higher output than we remember) of other kinds of films while hundreds of older films were still playing in theaters in case you missed them. I could say people were overwhelmed with choice, but of course that wasn't the case because theaters didn't have 10 screens each. You had your theater and you went to see what that theater was playing and, if in a big city, what maybe a few were playing. Every week was a process of discovery amongst many different genres, is my point. People didn't stop going to the movies, they just stopped going to see film noirs. The decision to stop going the movies is a wholly modern one that requires far more to explain it than it's cyclical or too much IP. As I said, this has never happened before and the phenomenon is really *only* IP.
There are a lot of takes like these that reduce the problem to one thing, but it's not one thing. It's not even close to just what you're describing from anything I've seen or historical context. For example, the first 70 years of Hollywood, directors were generally long-term contract filmmakers who did what they were told - a far from new experience. Nobody was unhappy with their output and audiences loved what these "company men" were selling because they were all generally original, either because of creative innovation or the fact that audiences hadn't yet experienced anything like them before. This is one of the reasons why I try to avoid speaking in absolutes or reductive explanations on here. Everyone wants to provide a simple answer when in the 21st century there are a good ten that are critical to what's happening. As I've written about previously, the influence of screenwriting guides and the imposition of lazy, formulaic, three-act structures has probably done more to harm the theatrical experience than "trust". I think people resent going to pay a fortune for a movie that feels predictable and boring to them. You can call that trust, but I think that would really underplay what's happening.
A very anecdotal argument from me here: I'm a regular at TIFF and have more often than not "discovered" flicks that I get others to sit in the theatre or on the couch to watch again at home. Nearly every time, it doesn't capture the same feeling. Not just because you can't recreate your first time, but the audience has a lot to do with your experience.
It can turn an underwhelming film into a good one -- and a good one into great. (See: The Artist, LA LA Land or, even, KILL from last year).
So much of it had to do with the cheers, laughs and overall vibes in the theatre that made it an experience. I don't know that we'll lose that entirely, but we'll surely have to rethink it as theatres continue to shrink and condense.
But I would counter your behavior proved my point: you evangelized and spread the word, which is the only way for a film to spread. In your case, you did it on your couch, but box office is similarly affected. That all said, the theatrical experience is so vital to what we're talking about here. It does everything you're talking about. At home, the experience is hard to replicate without, typically, a family unit or large group of friends to watch with. What I mean is, watching ARMY OF SHADOWS or MONTY PYTHON'S HOLY GRAIL for the first time with five friends at seventeen was just as much a vital communal experience for me and I had dozens of those growing up and, later, as an adult when I hosted sprawling movie marathons. It's the communal aspect of it that matters most to me...and nothing is as good at providing that as the movie theater. Nothing.
I feel the same about a good album, or a novel - anything, really, even a wild flower unexpectedly appearing in my garden that I take a quick photo of. But one is then easily thought of as 'over sharing' and 'needy'. But I think this impulse is born of generosity of spirit, not merely striking a pose to gain attention as a trend-setter. What is the point of delight if you don't go on to share it?
You wrote "their algorithms create such a curated experience for you" - I really dislike the modern use of 'curate'. When I was a kid, we had a curator at the local museum (though that was just what it said on his his business card, if he even had one: everyone called him Mr Jewell) who showed us things we least expected, but really needed to see - Rumsfeldian 'unknown unknowns'. The opposite of how AI operates, as far as I can tell.
Hi Christopher, thanks for commenting. Good thoughts here. I especially like this: "What is the point of delight if you don't go on to share it?" I'm on the fence about the curation concern, or rather the use of the word. I don't think algorithms are AI, as much as an usher at Blockbuster pointing you toward the aisle that holds all the movies you love most - except in this case the usher is a self-serving streamer that benefits from dumbing you down by also picking the film for you rather than letting you make those decisions. But I also hate that the word "curate" -- a term I also find valuable -- has had some of its worth diminished. I'm going to reflect on my own relationship to the word in my writing, because I do agree with you that it's a word with considerable value in the arts.
Thank you Cole. I think the thing is also related to how buying books online and streaming music may lead to what you think you want, but not always to what you need in that moment. I am sure you too have had the experience of going into a bookshop with a title in mind only to walk out with a very different volume, glad to have done so. Lots of the books and authors I came to love happened exactly like that. Ted Hughes, JM Coetzee, travel books on Samarkand that I could barely dream of but ended up visiting, inspired by something written many decades earlier.
Same applies with my CD collection, which I won’t swap for streaming, even though it’s handy - I might think I want to listen to Charles Mingus, maybe, but then bump into a country album I completely forgot I owned, and realise that it ticks the box more neatly today. There’s probably a word for it - maybe another over-used one like serendipity - but whatever the phenomenon is called, it makes me happier than getting the thing I initially had in mind.
Yes, I've Noted about this on here quite a bit in defense of physical media. Physical media shopping leads to discovery and growth. The same is true about physical media on your own shelf. Others, including family members such as children as they grow up, pick something "random" up and move outside their box/bubble.
100% - my father's bookcase, especially on a wet weekend at home, drove curiosity and built taste in ways I only fully appreciate now, 50 years later. When he died recently, the hard bit wasn't discarding a number of books, but the furniture itself, which still smelled redolent of discovery and sheer excitement.
I'm sorry about your loss, my friend. As someone with no parents left, I understand all too well.
Many thanks indeed, Cole
We have people making decisions at studios, who control most of the revenue and flow of financing, who have never made a movie before.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. Love lies bleeding was exciting because it was new. I’m tired of marvel feeling like the same regurgitated storyline. Or all of the procedural shows on TV
The studio point is accurate and certainly part of the problem. However, Marvel, as I've written about before, is capable of tremendous innovation, I would argue. It's Christopher Colombus'd cinema on several occasions. But today, it's one of very few options we're offered when we go to the cinema or turn on our TVs. I can't criticize that comic book films exist -- though I know others do -- because I enjoy good ones. But I can criticize that too many of them exist at the expense of other films that never will.
It really comes down to the same bare bones. People want a good story. And all stories have already been told in antiquity, in some way, by someone. It's just a matter of how new authors tell variations of those same stories. In DC's case, outside of Donner's original Superman and Burton's original Batman, they failed to deliver enthralling versions of hero's journey tales. And when they did manage to land a good script and director, their tent pole actor(s) weren't exactly the right choice (Nolan's Dark Knight, Christian Bale). In Marvel's case, they hit lightning in a bottle with a good script and a good casting (Iron Man, Downey) and then ran with it. Only a handful of times did they stick the landing, most notably in Winter Soldier, Ragnarok, Black Panther, Guardians 1, Civil War, No Way Home, Shang Chi, the Loki series. Superhero entertainment need not be played out just yet, and maybe never. But they do have to nail the writing and the casting concurrently, which is super hard to do. I think you might be underestimating Deadpool Wolverine, though. Reynolds' mutant is a MacGuffin unto himself because of his 4th wall breaking. But the script still has to land. Box office aside, Deadpool 2 barely cleared that hurdle, but it did clear it. :)
The thing is, I wouldn't even describe half those Marvel titles as remotely new experiences for me. I *felt* something I'd felt at the movie theater before. I felt no need to rewatch them until my son's Marvel-a-thon led me to return to them. It's very subjective, right? Nolan's DARK KNIGHT films didn't resonate as much with you because of Bale, it seems, but they clearly did for a lot of people because the sequel made legendary amounts of money because audiences couldn't stop returning to buy more tickets. There have also been terrible Marvel and DC films that have made twice as much as they should and great ones that have made half as much as they should. My point is, I think as we interrogate this, it's very hard to say "this one thing" or even three things are the *why* of it. It's why I try to talk about how our emotional experience of things so much and rarely get into technical matters. I'm trying to talk about the experience of art rather than something as crude as box office or what's cyclical or whatever else. How do we experience all that? And that experience is as diverse and complicated as all the business talk.
It's a fair question. I would agree with you it's difficult to find high art in cinema these days. Lots of folks wouldn't qualify any art stemming from the DC/Marvel worlds since they root themselves in early 2oth century pulp comic origins. I agree that comic book movies tend not to be rewatchable, I rarely do that with movies at all, save for my very favorite ones. That might be another interesting topic, actually, which movies are fundamentally rewatchable. In the superhero world, I can't think of too many other than Burton's Batman, and that mostly because of the two leads and its uniqueness as a progenitor of all that came after. But the masses aren't really a great barometer for art, unfortunately, because along with everything else in Americana, we've dumbed ourselves down to much lower common denominators. Sensationalism and escapism beats story and parable for most folks these days.
In defense of Gunn’s Suicide Squad, it was following on the previous movie which was… just bad. I like superhero movies and I couldn’t get past 20 minutes of that first film. But I loved Gunn’s sequel — and the Peacemaker tv spinoff (with an intro so quirky it was impossible to hit that “skip intro” button). Surely the stink of the first film affected the box office of the sequel -- and that it came out during the waning era of the Covid lockdown.
I enjoyed it quite a bit and didn't see the original -- in fact, I only went because of him -- but every DC film except WONDER WOMAN and AQUAMAN underperformed to rather catastrophic degrees. Nobody cared about any of them, even before the anti-pro/Snyder stuff took place. And I've heard from more than a few people inside WB who said they always knew they were going to see second-rate next to Marvel because -- and I paraphrase -- everything they did was going to feel like "follow the leader".
I do think that, before Marvel flooded tv with rushed spin-offs and too-thick continuity storylines, they sure had a prophetic finger on the zeitgeist. The Blip sure looks in retrospect like a metaphor for the Covid lockdowns, when people just disappeared from our lives, with some of them coming back later post-lockdown. There's also a sense in which we all disappeared into our own Internet rabbit holes, like living in our own separate multiverses. Weird that.
Yes this. And also this year's New World for me has been I Saw the TV Glow. Already saw it twice and was hoping I could see it again before it disappears from cinemas, but anyway I'm absolutely buying the BluRay
Desperate to see it.