Why data-driven creativity blows
2016, a bad year for a Hollywood driven by the numbers
To quote Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2016 was Hollywood’s “annus horribilis” of disappointing films and creative storytelling buried under the weight of cynical sequels, spreadsheets, focus groups, and studio executives with anxiety disorders.
2016, for all kinds of reasons, hasn’t been a great year in my opinion. It certainly hasn’t been great for Hollywood which from my perspective has foisted a series of duds upon the movie going populace.
I have a theory on this, more of a hunch really, but without a ton of evidence to back it up but hear me out.
Let’s put the sorry output from DC Comics in the dock. This year they gave us the much anticipated Superman vs Batman followed by the equally anticipated Suicide Squad. Both, in my opinion, were disappointing duds. Like the modern day Lothario, who posts pictures of themselves 10 years younger on a dating site with a description that will rock your world, both failed to live up to the hype.
I must confess that I wasn’t a fan of Zack Snyder’s first outing with Man of Steel. Initially excited by the Christopher Nolan connection as producer. Tantalised by the trailers, I was left disappointed by what felt like a turgid retelling of the origin story with a leading man who looked like he would be more at home in a Gillette commercial.
This was in contrast to what I feel was the stunningly executed Batman trilogy by Nolan who rebooted the franchise by erasing the camp pantomime of its predecessors, replacing it with a vision more in keeping with the darker art of Frank Miller.
The Dark Knight was a masterpiece. From my interpretation Nolan allowed the audience to question who was the hero and who was the bad guy. Bruce Wayne was depicted like the product of an Ayn Rand fantasy, a billionaire industrialist cleaning up Gotham City. This was Batman as John Galt, the mysterious, reclusive, omni-competent, super-rich industrialist who is the only hope for the future. The film though was stolen by the late Heath Ledgers immersion as The Joker, the harbinger of disruption and chaos to a world based on the neoliberal lie that things will always get better if there are good directors and a workforce willing to work. It is the Joker that shows all that is corrupt from city hall to the mob whilst the Batman comes to save the stupid teeming masses from themselves.
I could go on but there are smarter people than me who have deconstructed Nolan’s trilogy and this post isn’t intended to be a film review. I just want to put it out there that Nolan, in my opinion, was an artist at the top of his game when he directed those films. No doubt Warner Brothers, the studio behind the films and who have a partnership with DC Comics, had their say in the productions but I would also venture that Nolan was expensive enough and experienced enough to ensure that his vision made it to the theatres with a minimum of interference in the creative process from bean counters.
So zip forward to this summers “blockbusters” from the DC Comic / Warner Brothers stable. Personally speaking, the warning bells sounded early on when Ben Affleck was cast as Batman. Like many I was absolutely unconvinced that he could reach the benchmark set by Christian Bale. For me Affleck is like a male version of Jennifer Aniston, a bit Sunday afternoon matinee when the weathers bad, you’ve got the flu and you can’t find the TV remote. But time went on, I got over it (because I have a real life) and was beginning to look forward to the film after being teased by trailers and story snippets that kept appearing in my timeline.
There was a huge build-up to the weekend of the release, Batman vs Superman was everywhere, the trailers were awesome and the buzz on social media was infectious. As a result the opening weekend made a pile of coin taking more than $166 million at the US box office. Things didn’t look so bright by the second weekend when takings headed south to $50 million as word from the punters suggested it was a dud.
By the time I went to see it my expectations were pretty low and to be honest it wasn’t as terrible as I thought it was going to be. It just wasn’t very good.
From a financial point of view Warner Brothers must have been happy. The film cost north of $250 million to make and so far it’s been reported to have grossed more than $855 million worldwide. Add marketing and the film cost over $400 million suggesting that it’ll need to make $1 billion to be considered a hit in Hollywood terms.
I’m sure it’ll do fine. But the question here is not one about art or whether it was a good film but whether the marketing push was enough to get enough bums on seats before people realised that it wasn’t that great, i.e. numbers trump good art.
By contrast The Dark Knight cost $180 million to make and scored just over $1 billion at the box office. This, in my opinion, was good art that made the numbers.
Now if you’re one of the many people who enjoyed SvB please excuse me, I am simply using it as an example of how I anticipate the creative process in Hollywood is now being driven by the data generated by spreadsheet jockeys. The cost of making great films, especially those with superstar actors and state of the art special effects, is now astronomical and quite possibly far too risky to let a single director call all the shots. Better we put a data-driven technician in charge of the direction, just to be sure.
Which brings me to my biggest disappointment from Hollywood this summer, Suicide Squad. Time may prove it to have a cult film quality but I’ll go on record saying that it won’t. The build up and promotion was brilliant, the trailers superb, and what a line up of stars. I was concerned that after Ledger had owned the part of The Joker in Dark Knight that Jared Leto faced an impossible task of making the part his own. I wasn’t disappointed.
Like SvB, Suicide Squad confounded its critics by taking $465 million at it’s opening weekend. It cost $175 million to make and has made over $750 million at the box office. So nothing for Warner Brothers to worry about.
The making of the film however was not without it’s own drama. Warner Brothers signed up David Ayer to direct the film. From various reports during the making of the film it appears that Ayer, untested in the making of blockbuster or “tentpole” films, had data driven studio executives, brimming with anxiety after the critical panning of SvB, as backseat drivers. In extreme circumstances interventions from studio executives can be so aggressive that it’s hard to know what the role of the film director is.
A report in the Hollywood Reporter at the time suggested that the original cut of the film delivered by Ayers “didn’t deliver on the fun, edgy tone promised in the strong teaser trailer for the film. So while Ayer pursued his original vision, Warners set about working on a different cut, with an assist from Trailer Park, the company that had made the teaser.”
Thus we might never know Ayer’s original creative vision for the film. It went through multiple edits, different editors, new photography and millions of additional dollars trying to align the creative with the data held by the studio executives anxious to protect their asset. Apparently Leto’s role as The Joker was edited so harshly that in the end it’s practically a cameo.
From the position of the studio their actions in harnessing a novice director with focus groups and data have been justified, the film made a financial return. However it is rumoured that the film, whose original budget was $175 million, incurred such significant marketing dollars that it would need to make at least $600 million just to breakeven. So far it’s made nearly $800 million so money in the bank for Warner Brothers.
The point that I’m trying to make is we have entered the era of data-driven creativity where it is believed that rather than accept the unmeasurable nature of art and creativity we can simply throw enough spreadsheet data at it and get the result we want. Cash at the box office regardless of whether the film is pants and the consumers cheated.
I have tickets for the next Star Wars instalment, Rogue One. I hope that this will save 2016 for me.
Additional reading
A Dark Knight for public education: Using Batman as an apparatus of diffraction with neoliberal education reform
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