Whatever Happened To YA Dystopias?
Whatever Happened To YA Dystopias?
Competition in the film industry? Less likely than you think
A new Hunger Games movie came out recently (it was good), which made me reminisce about the YA (Young Adult) dystopian fiction era, i.e. that period in 2012-2015 with a ton of media for teenagers built around awful futuristic societies. Economics-wise, what the hell was that about?
You are never gonna sell this house…
Let’s start with another weird niche microgenre with a five-year shelf life called “hagsploitation” (also known as Hag Horror or Psycho Biddies or Grande Dame Guignol, all of which are infinitely less exciting), which was popular mostly in the second half of the 1960s. The premise for a surprisingly high number of movies was that an older woman, almost always played by an aging Hollywood star, would be in some gruesome, shlocky scenario or another.
Besides the gender politics of this genre or how it influenced one Ti West, exactly how hagsploitation became a thing seems baffling, but it’s not: in true Hollywood fashion, it mostly comes as imitation of one extremely successful film. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane is (was?) a 1962 low-budget sensation starring (Oscar winner) Joan Crawford and (two-time Oscar winner) Bette Davis. The two main characters (the titular Baby Jane and her sister, played by Davis and Crawford respectively) were some of the biggest names of Old Hollywood, to the point where Joan Crawford had been a mainstay in the big screen basically since the Silent Era. Baby Jane was a box-office hit, and also received a surprisingly positive critical reception, to the point where Bette Davis almost won a third Oscar for her role.
Obviously the quality of the movie was a major draw, as were its high profile stars and the constant media speculation over their seemingly hostile relationship. But a major selling point, at least at the time, was that horror was a genre where cinemas had a commanding advantage over tv, in addition to the fact that such movies required (in the eyes of studios) lower budgets. Baby Jane’s success, inevitably, meant that a slew of imitators followed: Hush Hush, Sweet Charlotte, a sequel of sorts, with the same director and originally the same core cast (Crawford was later replaced with Davis’s BFF Olivia de Havilland as part of the Crawford-Davis beef), Lady in a Cage, where De Havilland reenacted me getting my pants stuck in the escalator that one time, and a bunch of others even weirder and more derivative ones. 1
What’s the point of bringing this up, besides bragging that I watched a Ryan Murphy show six years ago? Well, because it ties into a crucial dynamic in Hollywood that has happened many many times before: a studio latches onto a formula, keeps churning it out, and when people start to get sick of it they double and triple and quadruple down. The biggest example were westerns, historical epics, and especially musicals, which were the biggest genres in the 40s and 50s, and started winding down in popularity by the 60s - to which studios replies by making bigger, better, more lavish versions. Many studios went so far above their heads that the movies they made bombing dragged them into bankruptcy - Cleopatra and Hello, Dolly were the biggest examples. They were replaced by New Hollywood, where auteur filmmakers were given command and creativity, only to turn into another such “bubble” after a series of high profile bombs (this time, Heaven’s Gate) and focusing on a more blockbuster-centric model.
There’s been other such developments in the film industry, such as mass-appeal movies and high-brow movies becoming increasingly separated after a big critical backlash to Titanic winning best picture, or very expensive For Your Consideration awards campaigns bloating up “serious dramas” (this was the work of Satan Himself, aka Harvey Weinstein), but the dynamic is very clear: to compete with home entertainment options (tv, VHS, video games, “tv” again, social media), movies have to get bigger and larger and that means bloated budgets and fewer releases.
Modern Hollywood is doing pretty much the same thing: superheros, franchises, IP, adaptations, prequels and spinoffs. Is Hollywood dead seems to be a frequent question, and it might be going there. The movie industry appears to have an Austrian business cycle, where the boom creates the bust - firms stagnate and bloat up, until they’re all swept out by creative destruction. Of course, the boom is much shorter than the bust - creativity gets gobbled up pretty quickly.
This was precisely, in fact, what happened to the niche YA dystopia: it got stale. The Hunger Games was a gigantic hit, but even diehard fans don’t remember the fourth movie. I didn’t - for the simple reason that I was 13 when I watched the first one with my dad, and 16 when the last one came out. Different stages and such. In fact, 2016 (I was already drinking at that age) was the final nail in the YA coffin, after Allegiant, the third Divergent movie (the Divergent series was like a blatantly commercial and more derivative mashup of Harry Potter and the Hunger Games) flopped massively while the genre that was already winding down - The Hunger Games grossed around 2.7 billion in the global box office (for comparison, the MCU made around 5.3 billion in the same period, and the Star Wars sequels made 4.7 bn), but Divergent made 0.7 billion, and The Maze Runner barely cracked a billion. None of the other movies, either, captured the imagination as much (mainly due to being less good and more shameless cash grabs). Simply put, cultural preoccupations shifted from teenagers solving giant mazes for a contrived dystopian government’s even more contrived plans to other more pressing issues, like suicide.
… and you are never gonna leave it, either
There’s fewer films than before, made by fewer studios, and they have bigger and bigger budgets so they can command bigger and bigger returns - franchise after franchise after reboot after reboot. We have a Willy Wonka origin story, and The Hunger Games themselves are back - with a President Snow origin story, for crying out loud!2 But why not branch out into alternatives, then? Wouldn’t Hollywood want fresh ideas, more movies, new talents? No.
The answer comes not from history, but from industrial organization: Hollywood is an oligopoly. In general, the fewer companies in a marketplace, the fewer products they put out, because they can then charge higher prices. If there’s many companies, in what’s known as perfect competition, they all have to charge basically equal to cost, because otherwise they’d get outcompeted; meanwhile, if there’s a single seller (a monopoly), thenyou’re charged the highest price that’s still profitable: you have nowhere to go (apt for a horror-themed post).
A big factor in how competitive a market is comes from fixed costs: if you need a big disbursement to start producing, there’s going to be fewer competitors, and therefore higher prices because of the fewer options. Hollywood projects have high fixed costs, while smaller flicks have lower barriers to entry - the whole “paranormal found footage” trend of the late 90s and then again in the late oughts came almost exclusively from two movies (The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity) making hundreds of millions off a five figure budget (as in, low tens of thousands of dollars). In fact, just looking at fixed costs creates a bigger paradox, because some of the more successful movies of all time (in terms of profit vs cost) have been “alternative”: the two above, obviously, but the fifth most successful movie of all time by this metric was David Lynch’s Eraserhead, which is like not pleasant or enjoyable or comprehensible, and there’s also Kevin Smith’s Clerks.
In fact, the upwards lurch of fixed costs seems almost entirely un-economic: why would you make fewer, bigger movies that raise the stakes of each movie? The main reason appears to be that companies don’t expect the film market to grow, due to the fact that streaming, tv, and video games are taking up more and more of the media landscape. Expectations of a future
Holding the number of firms in the market fixed, at “few” (this isn’t actually how it’s done because of obvious reasons), we can take an interesting look at what happens to innovation and quality. The relationship is pretty nonlinear, because it can cut both ways: if margins are too small, there just isn’t any money left for innovation. But if there isn’t much competition, then there are no incentives to innovate - the key determinants of profits, costs and revenue, wouldn’t change that much.
If firms that aren’t in the business can enter the business, then the dynamics get even more tricky. Innovation can, firstly, create a firm that is so advantaged it’s a monopoly - a “good” one, because it has its origins in “good” things, but still. Secondly, it could be possible for firms to copy each other’s innovations, at which point more competition discourages innovation because the cost advantages just don’t translate into more profits (in this market, nobody innovates, which is the general argument for intellectual property protections). Thirdly, and in a more niche type of case, it’s possible that it benefits firms in other markets even in the second case, meaning it could still be profitable.
In general, it can be seen that there are some levels of competition where more competitors increase innovation, while at others they decrease it. This implies that the relationship between innovation and competition (let’s not get into the methodological weeds) is inverted U-shaped, i.e. there is a lot of competition in the middle, but monopolies nor extremely competitive sectors innovate much. This obviously depends on intellectual property rights, since stronger or weaker enforcement can in fact modify the incentives to innovate at any given level of competition. Which is why monopolies can even lobby for more regulation!
Why is there blood all over your hair?
As stated immediately above, competition and innovation have a complicated and non-linear relationship, and the general competition has extremely nuanced macro-level effects, particularly on productivity.
In general, though, concentrated markets have lower investment than competitive ones, both in R+D and in other productive activities, due to the fact that not very many markets are that competitive in the first place. While it might seem puzzling that very large firms not invest, since they would stand to benefit the most from innovation and they have the most resources for it in the first place and the stand to lose the most to new competitors, it’s also true that investment strengthens the position of a company in an industry, and big leaders in markets with low entry simply don’t have that much to lose.
Generally speaking, too, firms are entering the market at a slower pace, meaning that there are fewer incentives to actually innovate, which also coincided with a much lower propensity of small firms to grow fast. In the pharmaceutical industry, for example, big firms actually paid off smaller ones to not enter the market in agreements known as “pay-for-delay”, which are actually responsible for reductions in R+D investment literally right after the agreements are signed.
In this vein, considering the possibility of companies outright buying each other makes the picture much more complicated. If it’s possible for firms to buy each other, then the dynamics get even more confusing, since the question is whether a merger of the two firms would increase or decrease their joint output - if there are gains in efficiency, then the bigger new company would produce more than two smaller ones, which would benefit consumers. Contrarily, if the two new companies produce less, then they would hurt consumers. In this sense, having one bigger company with deeper pockets for research would be beneficial, but as long as the market as a whole still can incentivize it to innovate. A very special case of a merger is a “killer acquisition”: a company being purchased with the intention of not releasing its products. The logic is that the innovations cooked up by the small company would endanger the profitability of most projects by the bigger one, meaning that it would not generate profit on net.
Going back to the “film quality” as a market output idea from earlier, it could be possibly said that the concentration exhibited among movie studios to have this dynamic: bigger and bigger studios requiring larger scales of production (i.e. bigger budgets), which harms smaller movies; at the same time, they would actively work against smaller productions to ensure that whatever derivative franchise drivel they spit out would be competitive.
This helps make sense of why Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming Frankenstein movie was so hard to get made, or why Sofia Coppola went as far to consider auctioning off a pickleball game with the stars of her upcoming-ish Priscilla to raise money. It also explains why, in recent months, it’s come out that Greta Gerwig, of Barbie movie fame (or Little Women or Lady Bird), will do some Narnia adaptations for Netflix. This follows announcements that Oscar winner Sarah Polley will direct a live action Bambi adaptation, Oscar winner Barry Jenkins will follow his pseudo live action Lion King adaptation with a pseudo live action Mufasa prequel, and Oscar nominee Dean Fleischer Camp will direct a live action Lilo and Stitch movie. Plus, you had Oscar winner Chloe Zhao in the MCU doing Eternals, Sundance and Cannes film festival awards winner Ryan Coogler doing Black Panther, and Satan AKA Rian Johnson doing Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
Conclusion
Ultimately, it seems that Hollywood operates in cycles of coming up with a good idea, milking it for maximum profit, and then continue to try exploiting it long after its run dry. Having several major bombs is not enough, since a new formula has to be found. But last time I tackled this topic I said that new alternatives were on their way, and I think I was right: obviously Oppenheimer made just shy of a billion dollars despite being a three hour black and white biopic, Napoleon is doing great, and while Killers of the Flower Moon isn’t precisely successful, it also made three times more than The Fabelmans last year. And a few other big surprise hits, like Barbie, Into the Spiderverse, Super Mario, or the new Hunger Games are not original movies, but don’t really square with big established franchises - which are underperforming, such as pretty much all superhero movies (except Guardians of the Galaxy 4), or even standard studio fare like Disney movies3.
There’s a Bette Davis movie called Dead Ringers but it’s apparently unrelated to the Rachel Weisz tv show, which is a shame because it would have been such an illustrative case.
I have been actually more excited for the Hunger Games prequel than for, say, Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, but that’s mostly because I’m a fan of THE Hunter Schafer. Napoleon was also not very good, either.
Worth pointing out that I think Wish, which is struggling (and also being panned by critics), is eventually going to do well (as Elemental did earlier this year) mostly because it releases on a different date in international markets (Elemental’s box office was 2/3rds international and mainly happened long after its mid June premiere)