When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced it would introduce a “Popular Film” award category for big budget films, the news was met with a collective groan. Ultimately, the Academy scrapped the award, at least for 2018. But one can see the motivation behind it – to reward films like Wonder Woman and Black Panther, the hugely successful cash cows that prop up studios yet are unlikely to receive critical accolades.
But the question is, do superhero and franchise films need their own reward when they dominate at the box office? It’s movies like Spotlight, Moonlight, arguably even La La Land, artistically-minded mid-budget dramas unlikely to reach the half-billion-dollar mark, which need the support.
As Ben Fritz notes in The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of the Movies, in 2016 alone almost every mid-budget drama flopped, including Eddie the Eagle, Free State of Jones, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot and The Nice Guys. It’s no wonder that studios are playing it safe and making films based on characters and universes that have a mass audience.
Indeed, the Cinematic Universe is the buzz word for Ben Fritz’s comprehensive account. Contemporary film-making is quite different than that of the glory days of the 1970s, a decade of risk-taking and experimentation. As Fritz says: “Today, anything that’s not a big-budget franchise film or a low-cost, ultra-low-risk comedy or horror movie is an endangered species at Hollywood’s six major studios.”
As well as being a technical exploration of modern movie producing in the big-six film studios, The Big Pictureis a fascinating story of senior executives whose careers were made or lost by changes to the film industry, particularly Amy Pascal, who was fired by Sony in 2015.
The book was triggered by the infamous Sony email hack of 2014, and Fritz uses some of those email trails to explore the strategy of Pascal, a cinephile who wanted to make films with heart, but was pushed to find the most lucrative franchises to compete with Warner Brothers and Disney. These studios shaped their businesses around franchise movies that were ripe for sequels, spin-offs, toys and other products, with Disney focusing on Pirates of the Caribbean, and more recently live-action fairy tale films like Cinderellaand Beauty and the Beast, while Warner Brothers invested in the DC Extended Universe.
Sony Pictures in the 2000s struggled to compete. It was actually Sony, and Pascal, that sparked the huge industry for superhero movies, with 2002’s Spiderman. The book details how Sony rejected a deal to own the rights to almost every Marvel character along with Spiderman, because, as one executive, who lacked obvious foresight, said: “Nobody gives a shit about any of the other Marvel characters.” It was a multi-billion-dollar mistake resulting in Marvel Studios achieving its own success and dominating with the Iron Man and Avengers series of films.
Sony was known as the studio that encouraged talent, and was responsible for two of the biggest names that could be guaranteed to sell a movie – Will Smith and Adam Sandler. But as Fritz recounts, these A-listers have lost their power – with audiences now having franchise-loyalty rather than star-loyalty.
One of Sony’s biggest disappointments was After Earth, the Will Smith and son Jaden Smith sci-fi vehicle. Intending to make it the next big franchise, a team of people worked out of a “war room” to create a whole universe with concept art and a plan for a “transmedia universe.” But the film bombed and indicated that Smith could no longer be guaranteed to sell a film.
There’s a fascinating but strikingly cynical account of how Marvel held a focus group with children, to find out which toys they would prefer to play with – Iron Man, Ant-Man or Hawk Eye. Iron man was overwhelmingly chosen as the favoured toy, and so was selected as the first movie to be made by Marvel, produced with a relatively tight budget. As Fritz notes, “The opening weekend ended up blowing away everyone at Marvel and throughout Hollywood.”
Safe to say, it’s the way we consume entertainment at home that has made the biggest impact on movies. In the 2000s, DVD sales were as important as cinema seats. Buying a DVD provided extras for exploring a movie in a deeper way – fans relished watching the deleted scenes and the director and actor commentary to provide insight into favourite films. 2009 brought the rude awakening for studios, with a sudden, unexpected drop in DVD sales as a result of illegal downloading, and this trend has continued with the phenomenon of streaming sites.
Television in recent years has experienced a renaissance. While cinema plays it safe with franchises and remakes, the TV shows that are are often original, creative, and thought-provoking. Breaking Bad and Orange is the New Black are two of the binge-watch shows that pushed Netflix into the stratosphere, where it is so well-known it has become a verb and a dating cliché. Amazon focused its business on arthouse films and intelligent drama like Manchester by the Sea, which are given a theatre run first to reassure its audience of their quality. As Fritz says, “Most people, particularly middle-aged adults, simply don’t go to the movies for sophisticated character dramas anymore. Why would they, when there are so many on their DVR and Netflix and Amazon queues at home?”
Fritz also devotes space to exploring China’s major role in financing the film business, describing how the Chinese market demands Hollywood action movies over drama and romance. It reminds me of this year’s Jason Statham action blockbuster The Meg, which was filmed in a beach resort in China and starred Chinese actress Lee Bingbing as the female lead – a film created for China but with the bonus of being an unanticipated US success.
For those who sigh at the state of film offerings and wonder where the intelligent movies have gone, The Big Picture offers a well-researched background into the industry, the economy behind all those superhero franchises, and what the future holds for cinema.
[Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, March 6, 2018. 304 pages, $27.00 hardcover]