Marvelous Failures

Are the movies dying?

i know it was actually hello dolly but the poster goes super hard

The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think that the movies aren’t draw­ing an audience—they’re inheriting an audience. People just want to go to a movie. They’re stung repeatedly, yet their desire for a good movie—for any movie—is so strong that all over the country they keep lining up. “There’s one God for all creation, but there must be a separate God for the movies,” a producer said. “How else can you explain their survival?”

Pauline Kael, “Why Are Movies So Bad? or, The Numbers” (1980)

This week, a live action remake of Moana (a movie that came out six years ago) was announced, as well as a remake of Harry Potter. Rumors circle of a remake of Lord of the Rings too. Two big studio releases, Shazam 2: Fury of the Gods and Ant Man: Quantumania, failed horrifically - the consensus is that this points to exhaustion with superhero projects, as both movies underperformed Eternals, a dull snoozefest with no cultural impact. In other film news, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, a martial arts sci fi movie swept the last Oscars and became the first and only movie ever to win Best Picture and three acting awards, and the biggest top-line (i.e. Acting, Directing, Movie, Script) Oscars winner ever.

Is there a connection here?

Es Wird Wieder Passieren

There are a lot of reasons that movies have been so bad during the last cou­ple of years and probably won’t be any better for the next couple of years. One big reason is that rotten pictures are making money—not necessarily wild amounts (though a few are), but sizable amounts. So if studio heads want nothing more than to make money and grab power, there is no reason for them to make better ones.

Kael, “Why Are Movies So Bad?”

As you might have notices, the film industry has become extremely concentrated - just a handful of studios remain, and they (as any self-respecting oligopoly would do) produce very few movies. Lists of sequels, adaptations, and franchises dominate the box office - the highest grossing “original” movie of 2022 was an Elvis biopic.

There is, of course, a reasoning behind this: movies believe they need to come up with innovative ways to compete with television, given the (now waning) Golden Age of Television and the surge of streaming services as a major, perhaps dominant, form of entertainment. The response, of course, is to put out bigger movies with more stars, more budget, more CGI, and more franchises - to produce an experience Netflix could never match. Film studios want to create an experience that makes people leave the house, and big budget CGI blockbusters are just what they believe.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a paramount example of this. Marvel, owned by media behemoth Disney, puts out several movies a year - all of them with gigantic budgets, some making gigantic returns. Martin Scorsese, of course, deemed them “not cinema” and “theme park rides”, a controversy I’m leaving aside. But bizarrely, Marvel might be exhausting its audiences - they are simply putting out too much. The MCU churned out as many hours of content in 2021 and 2022 as they did in the preceding decade, mostly in streaming tv shows that are vital to understanding new releases. Fans are exhausted, critics are not as kind, and watching a movie that sets up a movie that sets up a tv show that sets up a movie is just not a satisfying experience. Kevin Feige, Marvel’s mastermind, knows that people are tired, and plans to do absolutely nothing about it - because, in his words, the MCU is comparable to book adaptations. Perhaps, but there are many kinds of books, and only one kind of MCU.

A more fitting comparison, perhaps, is the Western - cowboy movies absolutely dominated Hollywood for decades, until they didn’t. The only way the Western survived, and even thrived again, was by reinventing itself - going from John Wayne to Sergio Leone and the spaghetti Western. Of course, this didn’t last either, and now there’s a smattering of Westerns made every couple of years. This lesson isn’t especially obscure either - James Mangold’s Logan is all about how superheroes are the new cowboys, and cowboys had their days numbered back when Shane, a major reference for the film, came out. Logan is six years old now, and the lessons don’t seem to have especially penetrated Marvel. Film noir, another influence on Logan, became neo-noir, and then noir inspired - going from The Maltese Falcon to Chinatown to the Coen Brothers.

The best way to understand the genre might be as a bubble. Plenty of ink has been spilled on whether bubbles are rational or irrational, but fundamentally, they’re driven by the extrapolation of trends. Housing, cryptocurrency, tulips, whatever went on at Silicon Valley Bank - enormous profits were extracted from variously productive activities, and these good times were assumed to be able to continue forever. However, all good things come to an end, and speculators may live in interesting times - higher interest rates (three times!) or realizing flowers weren’t worth insane amounts resulted in a crash. Extrapolation is a dangerous game. Marvel should know how dangerous bubbles are, since it went bankrupt during the 1990s comic book bubble it created… by popping out an insane number of comic books nobody cared about until the market got saturated. It will happen again.

Gone with the times

The specific book comparison Feige chose, Gone with the Wind, is especially apt - it was a book adaptation, yes, and remains the highest-grossing movie of all time (inflation adjusted), but it was also a sweeping historical epic, a genre that was all the rage back in the halcyon days of Old Hollywood. Other box office darlings were The Wizard of Oz, or The Sound of Music, wholesome-family based entertainment produced by the same studio system.

After movies added sound, and especially after they added color, they became increasingly bigger investments, and in the years of the Depression and World War Two, studios needed to make the safest bets possible given the depressed incomes and smaller audiences. These pressures went away during the 50s and 60s, but the sanitized culture these events (and the Cold War) produced meant that experimentation was at a minimum. At the same time, television popped up, and the film industry decided that, to compete with the small screen, it needed to bet the house on increasingly big and lavish options - large-scale musicals and epics more sweeping than ever before. Save for some hits (particularly The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins, and My Fair Lady), these lavish extravaganzas started to become bigger and bigger flops, being sank by their colossal budgets and near-zero interest. Such was the scale of these failrues that many studios folded and went under.

A particularly bad choice for the studio system, that would soon implode under its own bloat, was the reliance on the roadshow format. Roadshows were premium movie screenings, accompanied by memorabilia, with intermissions, and charging higher prices. The idea was that the roadshow experience would mimic the theater, and generate word of mouth, on top of the premium ticket sales. The movies that got roadshow releases were, to nobody’s surprise, lavish spectaculars like musicals and historical epics - premium experiences for premium material. The problem was that studios began churning out a greater number of roadshows, and for larger and larger audiences, while roadshow prices became increasingly steeper to make up for underwhelming ticket sales, further depressing demand.

The studio system soon went under, pulled down by its own weight - and by an irrational overreliance on genres and formats that were no longer suited to audiences’ tastes or interests, in a desperate bid to retain relevance.

The giraffe stepped on its own penis

One of the more notable failures of the studio system was Doctor Doolittle, a 1967 movie about a doctor who can talk to animals. The production, by most accounts, was horrific, and the budget became increasingly bloated due to frequent cast changes, an overly prolonged shoot, and numerous incidents with the countless, expensive animal performers (see above). Other big projects, like Hello, Dolly and Camelot also suffered enormous losses at the box office, due to overly generous compensation packages and excessively lavish sets, costumes, and advertisement - versus underwhelming and simply uninteresting products.

Simply put, big lavish sanitzied studio fare were simply not cutting it anymore for the Baby Boom generation; demand for those products fell, and the response was to churn out more of the same, but at higher cost and with higher prices. Meanwhile, more “mature” European and Japanese movies started penetrating the market, simply because they did not have as many corny dance numbers. Of course, musicals still exist, and some (Cabaret, Chicago, La La Land) have made their way to the Dolby Theater, but they are no longer the spectacular draw they were.

Doolittle, nonetheless, received a Best Picture nomination at the 1968 Oscars - alongside four other movies that were miles apart from it: In the Heat of the Night, a neo-noir with major themes of race; The Graduate, a comedy about sex and aimlessness; Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, yet another movie about race, and Bonnie and Clyde, a film that broke most of the remaining taboos of the industry.

The 1968 Oscars are seen as the start of New Hollywood, an era where visionary auteurs (Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, etc) produced low and mid-budget movies that pushed the envelope on every aspect of the media. Timeless classics, such as The Godfather, emerged from this era. The industry went from being led by studios to being led by directors, whose vision and brilliance was put front and center.

As with any other Hollywood trend, this too would pass - startlingly quickly. A number of flops by some of the era’s luminaries (New York, New York or 1941) put pressure on studios, but it was the complete failure of Heaven’s Gate, a western (by 1980, a dead genre) with a troubled production, a bloated budget, and a director who could not stay away from controversy (Michael Cimino), that put an end to New Hollywood - the movie tanked so hard its studio went bankrupt. Instead, executives turned their gaze to a new form of movie - the special effects driven, larger-than-life, audience-attracting blockbuster, such as Jaws, Star Wars, or Third Encounters of the Third Kind. Pauline Kael writes:

It would be very convincing to say that there’s no hope for movies—that audiences have been so corrupted by television and have become so jaded that all they want are noisy thrills and dumb jokes and images that move along in an undemanding way, so they can sit and react at the simplest motor level. And there’s plenty of evidence, such as the success of Alien. This was a haunted-house-with-gorilla picture set in outer space. It reached out, grabbed you, and squeezed your stomach; it was more griping than entertaining, but a lot of people didn’t mind. They thought it was terrific, because at least they’d felt something: they’d been brutalized.

Blockbusters, of course, had their phases, but that’s mostly been the era we’ve lived in. Simultaneously, there’s been a divorce between “popular” movies and “awards” movies - especially since the backlash to Titanic’s Best Picture statue in 1997, and the win of Shakespeare in Love in 1998. The industry just changed, and it seems has been in decline for a long time since - lower box office, lower cultural impact, lower awards show viewership, and more and more consolidation. Streaming was once supposed to turn the tide by financing projects deemed too risky for the studios, and it briefly did, such as The Irishman; however, a combination of higher rates and declining user growth has meant that mid-budget movies will not transition to the small screen anytime soon, outside of specific genres such as romcoms, and that big director vanity projects are increasingly unlikely to continue being produced.

Conclusion

It seems that the film industry is in the same place it’s been before - prioritizing big budget spectacle over creativity, with low output and little interest. Unless something changes, it can be expected that things might get dire for the movies.

I do think, however, that there might be a new realignment coming to the industry - the 2023 Oscars might be a sea change like the 1968 one (perhaps not in quality). This last awards show was the first time ever that a single studio snapped up all of the acting awards - A24, behind the Best Picture winner, also produced The Whale - and it won basically every major award except for Best Adapted Screenplay, which it was not nominated for. I don’t think it was the best thing ever, but it’s pretty clear that everyone is exhausted of old fashioned Oscars fare, and audiences seemed to have rewarded studios making new things (Blumhouse’s success with Get Out is another example of both). So there might be an alternative to what everyone is exhausted of - or there might not.