There’s at Least One Studio Doing it Right
Added on to the general horribleness of 2016 for humanity (but FAR less important) has been a mostly crummy movie slate, especially the summer crop. It’s just been a lumpy, over-polished blur of noise and color. Hardly any of it sticks to the roof your brain.
Hey! They finally got Spider-Man right, after roughly 45 reboots. So there’s that!
(Seriously though — Tom Holland and the costume and effects team fucking nailed it. You can trust me — I started “reading” Spidey books in 1978, before I could actually read).
Traditionally, we get one or two gems from the Studio Cash Money Merchandise Machine©, despite the fact that it’s not even run by actual humans anymore (but rather by trading algorithms in server clusters on Wall Street). I truly believe that most of these studio decision makers live in perpetual fear not of human bosses, but rather some vague notion of failure before the Old God, Mammon. If Big Dumb Movie 4 fails, will it negatively impact their ability to hoard obscene amounts of personal wealth and materials? Will “the board” (which kneels cravenly before the Old God as well) throw me to the wolves with a measly $300 million dollar severance package? These are precisely the kind of people you want to sponsor your contributions to the Western canon.
I crunched some numbers for the top 50 films in 2016 at the box office:
- 42% are sequels
- 12% are comic book based, but 5 of them are in the top 10
- 20% are animated, 5 of which are also in the top 10
- 62% are based on pre-exisiting IPs
Also of note — four of the movies are faith-based and three are Zach Efron raunch machines — so those two genres are killing it for someone.
Somewhat heartening is the success of two totally original IPs — The Secret Life of Pets and Zootopia, but neither is one for the ages. They’re cute and sweet and okay. For kids.
The only film in the top 10 that MIGHT have cultural legs (big maybe, given it’s time stamping of itself with pop references) is Deadpool, which was crass, clever and quippy in all the right amounts, and simply honored the source material instead of trying to make it “grittier” or more “family friendly”. It’s just a really, really good R-rated action comedy based on a comic book about an insane assassin who knows he’s in a comic book. Easy enough, right? (I’m kidding — that’s an incredible high-wire act to’ve pulled off, so hats off to Spanky AND the fucking Gang. Nice work, kids).
As far as movies that will last or even be remembered in 20 years, you need to expand out into the top 100 to find some candidates:
- The Lobster
- Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
- Eddie the Eagle
- Midnight Special
- Hunt for the Wilderpeople
- Everybody Wants Some!!
- The Witch
- 10 Cloverfield Lane
- The Nice Guys
Those movies are all exceptional in some way (they’re not all great but all have some whiff of greatness) and they all bring a fresh HUMAN perspective.
They also have (I would say) far better PRODUCTION VALUES than just about any of the mega-studio dross.
So, if I include Deadpool in my tally, 10% of the top 100 are worth a shit. And all of those big tent pole, movies-by-committee/Wall Street Bot movies cost so much money — they’re averaging out around $150M for the production alone (not to mention the even MORE costly marketing pushes required by such heavy investments) — that it hardly seems worth it (until you remember the toys and lunchboxes). But these are insane gambles. I don’t see how it can last.
So what is the point of this? Clearly the market is built around the money of the parents of 5–18 year-olds, but that was the same essential market when I was kid — and the major studios definitely made better product back then — by just about every metric (critical opinion, audience opinion and ROI). Even into the 1990’s (the summer of ’98 was a true bumper crop for mega studio quality).
What this meant for me as a consumer was that I got to know which studios I could trust year-in-and-year-out: you saw a trailer that teased a story and you were then given that story and — most critically — the product was mostly well made. Now, studios chase trends instead of good ideas. They produce trailers that say one thing (blowing all of the good parts in the process) but deliver something else entirely, and the something else is usually a wholesale artistic disaster — like a version of what humans would like as decided upon by aliens from deep space.
Studios entrust these immense enterprises (which are literally, some of the most ambitious and public creations in all of human history) to cheaper, idiosyncratic film school creatives — because no veteran director is gonna put their entire life on hold for 5 years to watch Paul Rudd pull sweaty Under Armor out of his crack in an abandoned mall parking lot in Tax Break City, Michigan. No fucking way is Doug Liman falling for that shit. Then — GASP! — these kids make film-school, somber, heartfelt “action dramas” with the stink of a distinct, human consciousnesses upon them — and these gutless, money hunters panic, re-cut, re-shoot and sell an entirely different product than the one they have (“It’s fun! It’s super heroes!” Then it ends up being grim, disjointed and interminable). Then people show up and are — SPOILER ALERT! — disappointed. The brand gets a bad rep. Over time, this will impact their ability to attract good talent.
So, I’ll prop up the one company that seems to really, really have some intelligence and taste behind the wheel: A24. Check ’em out and get excited when you see that logo. They’ve earned our trust, as an audience.