Avengers, MCU, Game of Thrones, and the Content Endgame
May 1, 2019 8:49 AM Subscribe
As a huge fan of the MCU, Disney animation, and Star Wars, I'm looking forward to the rollout of the Disney+ streaming service, but it's in much the same way that Gollum looks forward to re-acquiring the One Ring: there's an element of despair to the whole thing. The Disney/Fox merger is going to be very bad for movies in the long run, I think.
And the shift that MZS is describing may be inevitable. I signed up for the Criterion Channel the day it was announced several months ago. I couldn't help noticing, however, that among the clips from Kurosawa and the French New Wave and David Lynch, they were including in their launch trailer several clips from a documentary...about Stan Lee! That worried me a bit.
posted by Ipsifendus at 9:23 AM on May 1, 2019 [8 favorites]
And the shift that MZS is describing may be inevitable. I signed up for the Criterion Channel the day it was announced several months ago. I couldn't help noticing, however, that among the clips from Kurosawa and the French New Wave and David Lynch, they were including in their launch trailer several clips from a documentary...about Stan Lee! That worried me a bit.
posted by Ipsifendus at 9:23 AM on May 1, 2019 [8 favorites]
This is a wonderfully written ode to how we consume media in the modern era.
I have no problem with the current age of serialization that we're living in because I've grown up reading fantasy and science fiction novels that are in always in sets of trilogies that span decades. What I am not a fan of is how this current era of media is so reactive to the fandom. Apologies while I sit down here on my lawn in my lawnchair, but I just dislike how we often do not seem to tell stories for the sake of a story but because we need to satisfy a feeling or a moment that pays off that rewards the viewer. Maybe it's just me, but this is my big criticism of this current era of film & television.
As a personal aside, I've noticed that the way I consume film & television has changed and I dislike it. I know it's likely a result of social media and having everything be instantly available to me at any time in any place. I'm re-learning how to consume film and television and I've started to try to put down my devices when I watch something. To set my Switch or my phone aside.
Who knows how we'll be consuming things in the future, maybe we'll all be living in a VR nightmare of our own creation.
An interesting essay, thanks for sharing it with us.
posted by Fizz at 9:34 AM on May 1, 2019 [11 favorites]
I have no problem with the current age of serialization that we're living in because I've grown up reading fantasy and science fiction novels that are in always in sets of trilogies that span decades. What I am not a fan of is how this current era of media is so reactive to the fandom. Apologies while I sit down here on my lawn in my lawnchair, but I just dislike how we often do not seem to tell stories for the sake of a story but because we need to satisfy a feeling or a moment that pays off that rewards the viewer. Maybe it's just me, but this is my big criticism of this current era of film & television.
As a personal aside, I've noticed that the way I consume film & television has changed and I dislike it. I know it's likely a result of social media and having everything be instantly available to me at any time in any place. I'm re-learning how to consume film and television and I've started to try to put down my devices when I watch something. To set my Switch or my phone aside.
Who knows how we'll be consuming things in the future, maybe we'll all be living in a VR nightmare of our own creation.
An interesting essay, thanks for sharing it with us.
posted by Fizz at 9:34 AM on May 1, 2019 [11 favorites]
In the end, I think, we'll find that a storyteller is much more likely to tell a coherent and meaningful story over a period of hours - two, maybe three - rather than over literally hundreds, as is the case of many of our modern media properties.
These modern media properties are propped up by the trick of the cliffhanger, which is essentially that we as human beings are curious to see how a story resolves, even if that resolution is not necessarily meaningful. (But those stories that inspire curiosity are not necessarily the stories that we find meaningful years later.)
It feels like we've been through this already, with the empty serials of the 30s and 40s inspiring STAR WARS (ahem, Episode IV), which inspired a series of beloved trilogies, which then inspired even longer story forms, which will be considered to be, well, the empty serials of the aughts.
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 9:44 AM on May 1, 2019 [4 favorites]
These modern media properties are propped up by the trick of the cliffhanger, which is essentially that we as human beings are curious to see how a story resolves, even if that resolution is not necessarily meaningful. (But those stories that inspire curiosity are not necessarily the stories that we find meaningful years later.)
It feels like we've been through this already, with the empty serials of the 30s and 40s inspiring STAR WARS (ahem, Episode IV), which inspired a series of beloved trilogies, which then inspired even longer story forms, which will be considered to be, well, the empty serials of the aughts.
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 9:44 AM on May 1, 2019 [4 favorites]
These things come and go. In the late 30's episodic, serialized feature-length films were a big thing. The Jones Family, Andy Hardy, Dr. Kildare, Joe Palooka, Rin-Tin-Tin.
Disney needs to make 6 more MCU films to catch up to Blondie. Blondie! A comic strip that was turned into a 28 movie series.
Want to talk about churning out content? They made 17 Jones Family movies between 1936 and 1940.
posted by thecjm at 9:46 AM on May 1, 2019 [56 favorites]
Disney needs to make 6 more MCU films to catch up to Blondie. Blondie! A comic strip that was turned into a 28 movie series.
Want to talk about churning out content? They made 17 Jones Family movies between 1936 and 1940.
posted by thecjm at 9:46 AM on May 1, 2019 [56 favorites]
Disney needs to make 6 more MCU films to catch up to Blondie. Blondie! A comic strip that was turned into a 28 movie series.
And 26 of those were just a guy making a large sandwich.
posted by Sangermaine at 9:49 AM on May 1, 2019 [25 favorites]
And 26 of those were just a guy making a large sandwich.
posted by Sangermaine at 9:49 AM on May 1, 2019 [25 favorites]
Ironman 132: [Tony Stark] making a large sandwich.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 9:51 AM on May 1, 2019 [15 favorites]
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 9:51 AM on May 1, 2019 [15 favorites]
These things come and go. In the late 30's episodic, serialized feature-length films were a big thing. The Jones Family, Andy Hardy, Dr. Kildare, Joe Palooka, Rin-Tin-Tin.
Yeah, sure, but a lot of those were cheap or fillers to draw some cash for studios in support of their bigger budget films that were intended to draw the major audiences. Now the cliffhanger based "fillers" have the become draw with ever lessening alternatives.
posted by gusottertrout at 9:52 AM on May 1, 2019 [4 favorites]
Yeah, sure, but a lot of those were cheap or fillers to draw some cash for studios in support of their bigger budget films that were intended to draw the major audiences. Now the cliffhanger based "fillers" have the become draw with ever lessening alternatives.
posted by gusottertrout at 9:52 AM on May 1, 2019 [4 favorites]
I have a bit of a vested interest in the old-school movie experience. I'm one of those people who will be lurking in the second-run film theaters until the bitter end.
I see this as just one end of one swing of a pendulum, though; moviemaking has been dominated by one or a handful of mainstream studio titans before, and upstarts came along to upend everything and make it all over new and then over time they became the titans that needed to get upended. The sheer size of Disney's empire has me a little uneasy, but there will always come a time when people start itching for "something.....I dunno, different" and flock to a new technology or story.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:53 AM on May 1, 2019 [9 favorites]
I see this as just one end of one swing of a pendulum, though; moviemaking has been dominated by one or a handful of mainstream studio titans before, and upstarts came along to upend everything and make it all over new and then over time they became the titans that needed to get upended. The sheer size of Disney's empire has me a little uneasy, but there will always come a time when people start itching for "something.....I dunno, different" and flock to a new technology or story.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:53 AM on May 1, 2019 [9 favorites]
How long until Amazon buys Disney?
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:55 AM on May 1, 2019
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:55 AM on May 1, 2019
but there will always come a time when people start itching for "something.....I dunno, different" and flock to a new technology or story.
That's true, as thecjm mentioned, things do go in cycles, but this cycle might be signalling the end of movies as movies, for good or bad, meaning what will come next may be something quite different and, as the article suggests, possibly more solitary for being online.
posted by gusottertrout at 10:01 AM on May 1, 2019
That's true, as thecjm mentioned, things do go in cycles, but this cycle might be signalling the end of movies as movies, for good or bad, meaning what will come next may be something quite different and, as the article suggests, possibly more solitary for being online.
posted by gusottertrout at 10:01 AM on May 1, 2019
These things come and go. In the late 30's episodic, serialized feature-length films were a big thing. The Jones Family, Andy Hardy, Dr. Kildare, Joe Palooka, Rin-Tin-Tin.
This seems a bit disingenuous. Those films were b films with b actors. The main problem with Cinema the last 25 years is that B films have become the A films and the A films have mostly disappeared.
Robert Downey Jr used to be a great actor. Josh Brolin, decent actor. Rian Johnson, reliable diector. And on and on. Now, I'm mostly embarrassed for these people. How many damn millions do you need?
And yes, I get it: they don't care that I'm embarrassed. They don't work for me and I don't live under their roof. My money will never line their pockets and my opinion is irrelevant. i get it.
posted by dobbs at 10:04 AM on May 1, 2019 [8 favorites]
This seems a bit disingenuous. Those films were b films with b actors. The main problem with Cinema the last 25 years is that B films have become the A films and the A films have mostly disappeared.
Robert Downey Jr used to be a great actor. Josh Brolin, decent actor. Rian Johnson, reliable diector. And on and on. Now, I'm mostly embarrassed for these people. How many damn millions do you need?
And yes, I get it: they don't care that I'm embarrassed. They don't work for me and I don't live under their roof. My money will never line their pockets and my opinion is irrelevant. i get it.
posted by dobbs at 10:04 AM on May 1, 2019 [8 favorites]
Robert Downey Jr used to be a great actor. Josh Brolin, decent actor. Rian Johnson, reliable diector. And on and on. Now, I'm mostly embarrassed for these people. How many damn millions do you need?
Why, exactly, are you embarrassed? You're fundamentally making a "slumming" argument - and that should be what embarrasses you.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:09 AM on May 1, 2019 [44 favorites]
Why, exactly, are you embarrassed? You're fundamentally making a "slumming" argument - and that should be what embarrasses you.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:09 AM on May 1, 2019 [44 favorites]
Robert Downey Jr used to be a great actor.
I'll bet you could convince your average 16 year-old that Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is an Iron Man prequel.
posted by East14thTaco at 10:09 AM on May 1, 2019 [11 favorites]
I'll bet you could convince your average 16 year-old that Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is an Iron Man prequel.
posted by East14thTaco at 10:09 AM on May 1, 2019 [11 favorites]
The distinction between "content" and "cinema" the writer tries to define here is meaningless. People have always gone to movies for reasons other than what's in the movie. They followed directors, or stars, or studios, or characters. In what way is seeing a Marvel movie because a) characters I like from comic books, and b) because this particular studio makes competent and entertaining films different?
We've always had ways to enjoy entertainment in different forms. As Seitz points out serialized movies used to be the norm. Everyone remembers Columbo as a TV show, but it was presented as movies for TV. 19th Century novels were serialized and only later collected into the books we know today. Lots of great films of the 30's and 40's were rediscovered by audiences when they played on TV in the 50's and 60's.
I'm also annoyed by the cinema purists who insist that not having to sit in an actual theater and pay $20 to see their movie somehow does a disservice to film-making in general. My home theater setup is superior (to me) than going to almost any multiplex in my area. The last time I saw something in a movie theater I had to sit next to a guy who could not stop talking to the screen. I'd honestly rather watch a movie on a good VR headset that replicates a theater than go to an actual theater.
Also, and this is just my own personal opinion obviously, but most old movies are boring as hell. I went to film school and I fell asleep during almost every screening of a "classic" of cinema.
On preview, this whole thing also smacks of the worst kind of cultural elitism. How dare you sully our precious cinema with your popular comic books characters and your cellular telephones and your... gasp... television.
posted by runcibleshaw at 10:15 AM on May 1, 2019 [15 favorites]
We've always had ways to enjoy entertainment in different forms. As Seitz points out serialized movies used to be the norm. Everyone remembers Columbo as a TV show, but it was presented as movies for TV. 19th Century novels were serialized and only later collected into the books we know today. Lots of great films of the 30's and 40's were rediscovered by audiences when they played on TV in the 50's and 60's.
I'm also annoyed by the cinema purists who insist that not having to sit in an actual theater and pay $20 to see their movie somehow does a disservice to film-making in general. My home theater setup is superior (to me) than going to almost any multiplex in my area. The last time I saw something in a movie theater I had to sit next to a guy who could not stop talking to the screen. I'd honestly rather watch a movie on a good VR headset that replicates a theater than go to an actual theater.
Also, and this is just my own personal opinion obviously, but most old movies are boring as hell. I went to film school and I fell asleep during almost every screening of a "classic" of cinema.
On preview, this whole thing also smacks of the worst kind of cultural elitism. How dare you sully our precious cinema with your popular comic books characters and your cellular telephones and your... gasp... television.
posted by runcibleshaw at 10:15 AM on May 1, 2019 [15 favorites]
On preview, this whole thing also smacks of the worst kind of cultural elitism.
One comment on not liking the comic book movie era and the elitism charge comes out. The article says things will be different in unknown ways, but points to some troubling aspects of the current media landscape that we might do well to account for, the rest of the comments here do much the same, but elitism is always the go to charge even in the face of the overwhelming defeat of the "elitist" forces and the near total victory of the "low brow" as art in nearly every facet of the culture. Sure there still might be some holdouts, clustered around Criterion's streaming service and the few arthouse theaters that still manage to exist, but given time I'm sure they can be driven completely underground as well.
posted by gusottertrout at 10:29 AM on May 1, 2019 [19 favorites]
One comment on not liking the comic book movie era and the elitism charge comes out. The article says things will be different in unknown ways, but points to some troubling aspects of the current media landscape that we might do well to account for, the rest of the comments here do much the same, but elitism is always the go to charge even in the face of the overwhelming defeat of the "elitist" forces and the near total victory of the "low brow" as art in nearly every facet of the culture. Sure there still might be some holdouts, clustered around Criterion's streaming service and the few arthouse theaters that still manage to exist, but given time I'm sure they can be driven completely underground as well.
posted by gusottertrout at 10:29 AM on May 1, 2019 [19 favorites]
Robert Downey Jr used to be a great actor.
....What is leading you to say "used to be" instead of "is"?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:34 AM on May 1, 2019 [13 favorites]
....What is leading you to say "used to be" instead of "is"?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:34 AM on May 1, 2019 [13 favorites]
I'm fascinated by how he spent the entire article trying to draw a contrast between "cinema" and "content", but never once actually defined "cinema".
I can't be the only one who thought that was a little weird, right?
I was left with the assumption that by "cinema" he meant "old movies I like, not modern trash", but he doesn't really seem opposed to the modern movies, just insistent that somehow they belong in a radically different category than the (presumably) older "cinema".
It's all moving pictures on a screen, so to me it looks like one of those porn vs. "erotica" debates.
posted by sotonohito at 10:34 AM on May 1, 2019 [9 favorites]
I can't be the only one who thought that was a little weird, right?
I was left with the assumption that by "cinema" he meant "old movies I like, not modern trash", but he doesn't really seem opposed to the modern movies, just insistent that somehow they belong in a radically different category than the (presumably) older "cinema".
It's all moving pictures on a screen, so to me it looks like one of those porn vs. "erotica" debates.
posted by sotonohito at 10:34 AM on May 1, 2019 [9 favorites]
On preview, this whole thing also smacks of the worst kind of cultural elitism. How dare you sully our precious cinema with your popular comic books characters and your cellular telephones and your... gasp... television.
Yep, the rant seems to be "how dare the B movie content rise above its station!"
How dare, indeed. If you think that an actor or director is somehow "slumming" because they're doing "genre fiction" over the sort of "highbrow" period piece the Academy loves, that's on you. And if you're really concerned about the fall of "cinema", you'd be better served by looking at the hollowing of the movie industry, and the disappearance of the mid-tier, mid-budget movie like the ones Eisner famously used to help resurrect Disney.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:37 AM on May 1, 2019 [9 favorites]
Yep, the rant seems to be "how dare the B movie content rise above its station!"
How dare, indeed. If you think that an actor or director is somehow "slumming" because they're doing "genre fiction" over the sort of "highbrow" period piece the Academy loves, that's on you. And if you're really concerned about the fall of "cinema", you'd be better served by looking at the hollowing of the movie industry, and the disappearance of the mid-tier, mid-budget movie like the ones Eisner famously used to help resurrect Disney.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:37 AM on May 1, 2019 [9 favorites]
Orson Welles is in 6 Criterion films. And that doesn't count Citizen Kane.
ORSON WELLES PLAYED A GIANT ROBOT-PLANET THAT ATE PLANETS IN A FEATURE LENGTH TOY COMMERCIAL.
But yes let's discuss how RDJ and Rian Johnson have lost all of their cultural currency due to working for Disney.
posted by thecjm at 10:38 AM on May 1, 2019 [38 favorites]
ORSON WELLES PLAYED A GIANT ROBOT-PLANET THAT ATE PLANETS IN A FEATURE LENGTH TOY COMMERCIAL.
But yes let's discuss how RDJ and Rian Johnson have lost all of their cultural currency due to working for Disney.
posted by thecjm at 10:38 AM on May 1, 2019 [38 favorites]
I don't think anyone can seriously argue that 99% of television isn't visually uninteresting, which is part of the criticism he's making about the MCU movies taking influences from television. In fact, in the last year of television I've watched, I can only think of a handful of memorable shots, and they're all from one show, Better Call Saul.
But that's okay--that's not what television in general is trying to do. Nor is it what the MCU movies are trying to do.
posted by Automocar at 10:38 AM on May 1, 2019 [6 favorites]
But that's okay--that's not what television in general is trying to do. Nor is it what the MCU movies are trying to do.
posted by Automocar at 10:38 AM on May 1, 2019 [6 favorites]
Also, the winner for Most Unaware Statement has to go to this:
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:41 AM on May 1, 2019 [10 favorites]
Showrunners love to tell reporters that they're "really" making X-hour-long movies, probably because, 20 years after the storytelling innovations of TV dramas like "The Sopranos," television is still carrying around an artistic inferiority complex left over from the 1970s, when American New Wave cinema was producing complex, challenging art, often on a huge scale, while broadcast networks were still forcing prime-time showrunners to use stock footage in action scenes, wrap up stories at the end of each hour, and regularly reassure the audience that the heroes were all decent at heart.Gee, I wonder why television show runners might still have an inferiority complex when we still get articles wishing that they were still the movie theaters' little sibling. You know, like the one you literally put that comment in.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:41 AM on May 1, 2019 [10 favorites]
I finally got to see Collette this month, courtesy of Amazon Prime. And it reminded me that both Willy and Dumas had multimedia empires including ghostwriters cranking out novels on demand and theatre connections. So I'm not convinced that this is entirely new.
Speaking of Collette, commercial cinema in my city has become an AMC monopoly in the last two years, with three locations closing, and one of the two remaining AMC outlets apparently on minimal life support in terms of maintenance and staffing. So we'll get at least one showing for every Conservative propaganda flick released but little else that isn't a blockbuster or market-triangulated.
So yes, while I think there's a lot to criticize about Amazon and Netflix as venues for cinema, they're picking up stuff that's not able to muscle in screentime alongside the Warner, Disney, or Sony of the month. And the TV renaissance includes a lot of interesting experimentation, since streaming isn't necessarily constrained by the need to deliver on a 13- or 26-episode order with beats dictated by the rhythm of advertising.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 10:43 AM on May 1, 2019 [6 favorites]
Speaking of Collette, commercial cinema in my city has become an AMC monopoly in the last two years, with three locations closing, and one of the two remaining AMC outlets apparently on minimal life support in terms of maintenance and staffing. So we'll get at least one showing for every Conservative propaganda flick released but little else that isn't a blockbuster or market-triangulated.
So yes, while I think there's a lot to criticize about Amazon and Netflix as venues for cinema, they're picking up stuff that's not able to muscle in screentime alongside the Warner, Disney, or Sony of the month. And the TV renaissance includes a lot of interesting experimentation, since streaming isn't necessarily constrained by the need to deliver on a 13- or 26-episode order with beats dictated by the rhythm of advertising.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 10:43 AM on May 1, 2019 [6 favorites]
Robert Downey, Jr. was an eighties actor known more for being the son of an avant-garde director and for usually-entertaining but lightweight roles (such as one of the bullies in Weird Science and for being on one of the worst seasons of SNL before he did Chaplin; after that, he was known mostly for being a drug casualty with a few flashes of his old charm, until he put on the fancy suit. Josh Brolin was likewise the son of a more famous guy for the longest time; there wasn't an awful lot worth remembering between The Goonies and No Country for Old Men. The MCU movies, and Brolin's turn in Deadpool 2, have helped raise their profiles considerably.
I usually like MZS's pieces, but this is a weak, fussy, and overly nostalgic bit that recycles the same argument that cineastes have been making since Star Wars, at least. Spielberg used to be the guy who was killing true cinema, until he hung around for a while and did the likes of Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan and became a national treasure. Now, it's peak TV, I guess. Even the bit about "content" is borrowed from the latter years of the dot-com boom, when any number of well-designed sites with cute names all of a sudden realized that they actually had to have a reason for people to visit the site. That was also when the big bad conglomerate was AOL/TimeWarner. How'd that work out for them?
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:43 AM on May 1, 2019 [14 favorites]
I usually like MZS's pieces, but this is a weak, fussy, and overly nostalgic bit that recycles the same argument that cineastes have been making since Star Wars, at least. Spielberg used to be the guy who was killing true cinema, until he hung around for a while and did the likes of Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan and became a national treasure. Now, it's peak TV, I guess. Even the bit about "content" is borrowed from the latter years of the dot-com boom, when any number of well-designed sites with cute names all of a sudden realized that they actually had to have a reason for people to visit the site. That was also when the big bad conglomerate was AOL/TimeWarner. How'd that work out for them?
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:43 AM on May 1, 2019 [14 favorites]
Orson Welles is in 6 Criterion films. And that doesn't count Citizen Kane.
ORSON WELLES PLAYED A GIANT ROBOT-PLANET THAT ATE PLANETS IN A FEATURE LENGTH TOY COMMERCIAL.
Bob Chipman has an excellent video on that very point.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:43 AM on May 1, 2019 [3 favorites]
ORSON WELLES PLAYED A GIANT ROBOT-PLANET THAT ATE PLANETS IN A FEATURE LENGTH TOY COMMERCIAL.
Bob Chipman has an excellent video on that very point.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:43 AM on May 1, 2019 [3 favorites]
I think, we'll find that a storyteller is much more likely to tell a coherent and meaningful story over a period of hours - two, maybe three - rather than over literally hundreds.
It took more than a couple hours to recite the Iliad, or the Odyssey. Plus ca change!
posted by monotreme at 10:45 AM on May 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
It took more than a couple hours to recite the Iliad, or the Odyssey. Plus ca change!
posted by monotreme at 10:45 AM on May 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
I think globalization has a piece of this story of consolidation and "rich-getting-richer" -- Netflix, HBO and the modern movie blockbuster need overseas $, and so storytelling that sells to a global audience is going to get the $. Fast and Furious 8 didn't even break even on US domestic box, but cleared $1B with its overseas take. Avengers: Endgame made over $300M in China alone its first weekend.
Couldn't say exactly why serial sequels, Walmartization, gargantuanism in "content" plays better in a global market but clearly it does. It's clearly a weird moment in the big $ of entertainment.
posted by PandaMomentum at 10:46 AM on May 1, 2019 [3 favorites]
Couldn't say exactly why serial sequels, Walmartization, gargantuanism in "content" plays better in a global market but clearly it does. It's clearly a weird moment in the big $ of entertainment.
posted by PandaMomentum at 10:46 AM on May 1, 2019 [3 favorites]
I was left with the assumption that by "cinema" he meant "old movies I like, not modern trash", but he doesn't really seem opposed to the modern movies, just insistent that somehow they belong in a radically different category than the (presumably) older "cinema".
He spent a healthy chunk of the article explaining his enjoyment of Endgame and some of the other "modern trash", so I don't think that was quite the point. Maybe more about the attempted monopolization of the culture by Disney or a duopoly if you add in Netflix, the changes suggested by serialized drama versus the old concept of "a" movie, and the shift in how media is consumed and shared are the real points being made, to an end we can't yet entirely see, but with some concerns built in for the way its proceeding.
posted by gusottertrout at 10:58 AM on May 1, 2019 [9 favorites]
He spent a healthy chunk of the article explaining his enjoyment of Endgame and some of the other "modern trash", so I don't think that was quite the point. Maybe more about the attempted monopolization of the culture by Disney or a duopoly if you add in Netflix, the changes suggested by serialized drama versus the old concept of "a" movie, and the shift in how media is consumed and shared are the real points being made, to an end we can't yet entirely see, but with some concerns built in for the way its proceeding.
posted by gusottertrout at 10:58 AM on May 1, 2019 [9 favorites]
I know I've already commented on this point, but I have another perspective:
Robert Downey Jr used to be a great actor. Josh Brolin, decent actor. Rian Johnson, reliable diector. And on and on. Now, I'm mostly embarrassed for these people. How many damn millions do you need?
The whole idea of artists having to occasionally do some work to pay the bills is well-trod ground. And RDJ and Brolin and Rian Johnson are far from the only people who've had to do this - Orson Welles' being a planet is above. Liam "I was Oskar Schindler" Neeson now does a ton of action films. Anthony "Hannibal Lector won me the Oscar, dammit" Hopkins did an action film as well. Every actor has some "this one is just to pay some bills" credits on their resume. Or sometimes the "this is just to pay some bills" projects are the way they raise money for their own pet projects - the biggest reason that Bill Murray did Ghostbusters was because he really wanted to make The Razor's Edge, and him appearing in Ghostbusters was part of the deal that the studio cut with him for them to greenlight that project.
Robert Downey, Jr. was an eighties actor known more for being the son of an avant-garde director and for usually-entertaining but lightweight roles (such as one of the bullies in Weird Science and for being on one of the worst seasons of SNL before he did Chaplin; after that, he was known mostly for being a drug casualty with a few flashes of his old charm, until he put on the fancy suit. Josh Brolin was likewise the son of a more famous guy for the longest time; there wasn't an awful lot worth remembering between The Goonies and No Country for Old Men. The MCU movies, and Brolin's turn in Deadpool 2, have helped raise their profiles considerably.
You're talking about their profiles, not their talent. Those are two very different things. Vanishingly few actors are in blockbusters right out of the gate - they spend time slumming in dumb stuff until they get "known", and they may slum in stuff throughout their careers as a tradeoff to get to work on passion projects or because they need to pay bills (they're human, they pay taxes and have kids to put through college and shit like that), and sometimes they may just make really boneheaded choices about roles to play. None of that is any indication of their talent.
Handy illustrative example A - I just saw an anniversary screening of Say Anything last night. That was one of the films that made me a full-on John-Cusack-is-my-dreamboat fan back in 1989; I signed on to his career and signed on hard. However, my devotion has not been all that well rewarded in recent years; the dude has been involved in some piss-poor projects in the past decade or so that haven't even appeared in theaters, and seem to go straight to video. But there have also been gems, like his turn in Love And Mercy a couple years back.
And I was sitting there last night watching him as Lloyd Dobler again - and calling to mind his performance in Love and Mercy, and comparing both of those to his turns in Grace is Gone and Max and High Fidelity and....and I'm not seeing any increase or decrease in the skill of the actor in those performances. The talent is consistently there. It may be in a shitty film, or a film you don't like, but it's still there.
If you're going to find fault with anything, find fault with the industry that promotes the corny stuff to a greater level than the higher-brow stuff you like.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:00 AM on May 1, 2019 [12 favorites]
Robert Downey Jr used to be a great actor. Josh Brolin, decent actor. Rian Johnson, reliable diector. And on and on. Now, I'm mostly embarrassed for these people. How many damn millions do you need?
The whole idea of artists having to occasionally do some work to pay the bills is well-trod ground. And RDJ and Brolin and Rian Johnson are far from the only people who've had to do this - Orson Welles' being a planet is above. Liam "I was Oskar Schindler" Neeson now does a ton of action films. Anthony "Hannibal Lector won me the Oscar, dammit" Hopkins did an action film as well. Every actor has some "this one is just to pay some bills" credits on their resume. Or sometimes the "this is just to pay some bills" projects are the way they raise money for their own pet projects - the biggest reason that Bill Murray did Ghostbusters was because he really wanted to make The Razor's Edge, and him appearing in Ghostbusters was part of the deal that the studio cut with him for them to greenlight that project.
Robert Downey, Jr. was an eighties actor known more for being the son of an avant-garde director and for usually-entertaining but lightweight roles (such as one of the bullies in Weird Science and for being on one of the worst seasons of SNL before he did Chaplin; after that, he was known mostly for being a drug casualty with a few flashes of his old charm, until he put on the fancy suit. Josh Brolin was likewise the son of a more famous guy for the longest time; there wasn't an awful lot worth remembering between The Goonies and No Country for Old Men. The MCU movies, and Brolin's turn in Deadpool 2, have helped raise their profiles considerably.
You're talking about their profiles, not their talent. Those are two very different things. Vanishingly few actors are in blockbusters right out of the gate - they spend time slumming in dumb stuff until they get "known", and they may slum in stuff throughout their careers as a tradeoff to get to work on passion projects or because they need to pay bills (they're human, they pay taxes and have kids to put through college and shit like that), and sometimes they may just make really boneheaded choices about roles to play. None of that is any indication of their talent.
Handy illustrative example A - I just saw an anniversary screening of Say Anything last night. That was one of the films that made me a full-on John-Cusack-is-my-dreamboat fan back in 1989; I signed on to his career and signed on hard. However, my devotion has not been all that well rewarded in recent years; the dude has been involved in some piss-poor projects in the past decade or so that haven't even appeared in theaters, and seem to go straight to video. But there have also been gems, like his turn in Love And Mercy a couple years back.
And I was sitting there last night watching him as Lloyd Dobler again - and calling to mind his performance in Love and Mercy, and comparing both of those to his turns in Grace is Gone and Max and High Fidelity and....and I'm not seeing any increase or decrease in the skill of the actor in those performances. The talent is consistently there. It may be in a shitty film, or a film you don't like, but it's still there.
If you're going to find fault with anything, find fault with the industry that promotes the corny stuff to a greater level than the higher-brow stuff you like.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:00 AM on May 1, 2019 [12 favorites]
It's all moving pictures on a screen, so to me it looks like one of those porn vs. "erotica" debates.
I think the argument here is about framerate and visual texture, particularly the former.
If you want a more in-depth version, the linked essay The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema is a full-throated get-off-my-lawn-you-mediocrities, which goes into the likely consequences of the switch from film to digital, seen from the perspective of a cranky asshole from the very very end of the 90s. It even has some highly dubious speculation on the different effect of film and TV framerates on the human brain!
Anyway, it’s an interesting bit of writing, and it’s definitely more deserving of the bad feelings currently being directed at the author of the OP essay (who is... actually pretty positive about the MCU and the “content” revolution? And who makes exactly the same point in the essay itself about historical examples of serialisation that so many posters in this thread are falling over themselves to make).
In the end, it seems like it should be uncontroversial to say that our entertainment products are driven by commercial considerations in how to allocate resources for maxim long-term profit, which in turn are driven by technical and cultural considerations.
Digital filming, streaming and big flatscreens, the emergence of prestige TV, the ascendance of “nerd culture”, the importance of catering to the Chinese market, etc etc, are factors that really have changed the type of cinema and TV being produced.
It’s fine to recognise that some people obviously get a lot out of the new era and others don’t.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 11:03 AM on May 1, 2019 [11 favorites]
I think the argument here is about framerate and visual texture, particularly the former.
If you want a more in-depth version, the linked essay The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema is a full-throated get-off-my-lawn-you-mediocrities, which goes into the likely consequences of the switch from film to digital, seen from the perspective of a cranky asshole from the very very end of the 90s. It even has some highly dubious speculation on the different effect of film and TV framerates on the human brain!
Ebert is concerned that the technological revolution is being rushed into place without the industry having done (or made public) any studies about its likely effects, especially on the psychological level. He mentioned data (cited in Jerry Mander's famous polemic Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television) indicating that film creates a beta state of alert reverie in the brain, where tv provokes an alpha state of passive suggestibility.And, like all good futurism, the rest of the essay is a mixture of eerie prescience (yes, TV and movies have converged on an artistic and technical level; yes, ticket and concession prices have gone up much faster than inflation; yes, big screen TVs are universal and have affected the industry; yes, CGI is massively more prevalent on digital than on film)... and the totally bonkers (no, people do not go to cinemas to watch interactive versions of the Oprah Winfrey show).
Anyway, it’s an interesting bit of writing, and it’s definitely more deserving of the bad feelings currently being directed at the author of the OP essay (who is... actually pretty positive about the MCU and the “content” revolution? And who makes exactly the same point in the essay itself about historical examples of serialisation that so many posters in this thread are falling over themselves to make).
In the end, it seems like it should be uncontroversial to say that our entertainment products are driven by commercial considerations in how to allocate resources for maxim long-term profit, which in turn are driven by technical and cultural considerations.
Digital filming, streaming and big flatscreens, the emergence of prestige TV, the ascendance of “nerd culture”, the importance of catering to the Chinese market, etc etc, are factors that really have changed the type of cinema and TV being produced.
It’s fine to recognise that some people obviously get a lot out of the new era and others don’t.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 11:03 AM on May 1, 2019 [11 favorites]
This argument has been made so many times and will be made many more times and honestly..I just don't get it. I like the big flashy movies, and the more thoughtful pieces and you'd have to be close to god to convince me that more of one means less of the other.
I've watched some great movies, and great TV in the past 3-4 years. I consume a lot of screen-media, and even I don't feel like i'm in some sort of cinema desert.
posted by FirstMateKate at 11:05 AM on May 1, 2019 [6 favorites]
I've watched some great movies, and great TV in the past 3-4 years. I consume a lot of screen-media, and even I don't feel like i'm in some sort of cinema desert.
posted by FirstMateKate at 11:05 AM on May 1, 2019 [6 favorites]
Woops sorry to double post, but I'm also just .. ugh at this guy deciding the cinema is dying at a time when women and black people are finally getting the stage they deserve
posted by FirstMateKate at 11:08 AM on May 1, 2019 [16 favorites]
posted by FirstMateKate at 11:08 AM on May 1, 2019 [16 favorites]
I made a long long comment in a post about surveillance a while back that is relevant here, and I think might explain why some people are nervous about 'content'.
TL;DR: Targeted advertising/product placement constantly grows in sophistication. Amazon gathers data on how consumers react to advertisements. They have outlined and patented techniques of using this data to customize relevant product placement/advertising and methods of inserting it into existing 'content'. It’s not unlikely that this will eventually happen in real-time with some/most of our digital media (including live events/communications).
For more see this patent.
posted by soy bean at 11:16 AM on May 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
TL;DR: Targeted advertising/product placement constantly grows in sophistication. Amazon gathers data on how consumers react to advertisements. They have outlined and patented techniques of using this data to customize relevant product placement/advertising and methods of inserting it into existing 'content'. It’s not unlikely that this will eventually happen in real-time with some/most of our digital media (including live events/communications).
For more see this patent.
posted by soy bean at 11:16 AM on May 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
It's also interesting that right in the middle of this onslaught of serial MCU content are movies like Black Panther and Spider-Man: Homecoming (and Into the Spider-Verse), which are largely self-contained stories with satisfying conclusions, and these are both very successful and some of the most well-regarded Marvel movies.
posted by straight at 11:18 AM on May 1, 2019 [8 favorites]
posted by straight at 11:18 AM on May 1, 2019 [8 favorites]
"These make a much stronger impression on the public than cinema comprised of feature films that are approximately 90 minutes to three hours long, that have their own freestanding narrative and stylistic integrity, and that are meant to be contemplated as freestanding objects ...While I think Seitz (Zoller Seitz? IDK) has some valid complaints/observations in this piece, on the whole it seems like a mess all of which comes down to "they ain't makin' 'em like they used to." I guess I'd note that the emphasis on the very idea of "art" as an archive of discrete "art objects" which can/should be contemplated individually before moving on to the next one is itself largely a product of the later 19th/20th centuries and not some necessary quality of art.
I mean, I think it's true that blockbuster economies of scale have done no favors to the directors and producers of smaller and more idiosyncratic/marginalized films, but those projects continue to be made and if it's true that these kinds of films are more likely to be shown in larger cities—and I'm not certain that it is true—well, that's always been true to a greater or lesser degree.
And this
"Is there still a place in mass culture for that kind of entertainment?might come as a surprise to the people who still write sonnets, paint with brushes, and work in watercolor. The real complaint here sounds more like a complaint about authority—a complaint that a particular kind of aesthetic experience has lost (or never had) a status that it deserves to have.
For now, yeah, kind of.
But probably not in the long run, except as a knowingly retro experience—the audiovisual equivalent of writing a sonnet, or painting with a brush and watercolor."
So yeah, much of this piece feels like a an argument over the validity or preeminence of aesthetic experiences masquerading as an argument over the validity or preeminence of aesthetic objects and I don't think he ever quite sorts out the two.
posted by octobersurprise at 11:19 AM on May 1, 2019 [4 favorites]
Robert Downey, Jr. was an eighties actor known more for being the son of an avant-garde director and for usually-entertaining but lightweight roles
He was in the Ian McKellan Richard III, which was basically a what-if-Oswald-Mosley-had-won production. Very pretty, very dumb, very murdered.
posted by praemunire at 11:19 AM on May 1, 2019
He was in the Ian McKellan Richard III, which was basically a what-if-Oswald-Mosley-had-won production. Very pretty, very dumb, very murdered.
posted by praemunire at 11:19 AM on May 1, 2019
Just thought of handy illustrative example B:
Timothee "I am a freakish wunderkind whose first leading role got me an Oscar nomination" Chalamet is about to go the sci-fi route in a 2020 remake of Dune.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:27 AM on May 1, 2019
Timothee "I am a freakish wunderkind whose first leading role got me an Oscar nomination" Chalamet is about to go the sci-fi route in a 2020 remake of Dune.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:27 AM on May 1, 2019
I know it's completely unlikely, but shouldn't studios and streaming services be separated the same way studios had to divest of their theater chains?
TV and old serials had to be made cheap because they had to fill time. You have X hours of broadcast time and you want to maximize viewership to maximize ad revenue, but advertising will only bring so much. You also want to keep advertisers content (avoid shocking sensibilities) and to keep your viewership predictable. With subscription services you want to attract and keep subscribers, so the calculus is different.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 11:28 AM on May 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
TV and old serials had to be made cheap because they had to fill time. You have X hours of broadcast time and you want to maximize viewership to maximize ad revenue, but advertising will only bring so much. You also want to keep advertisers content (avoid shocking sensibilities) and to keep your viewership predictable. With subscription services you want to attract and keep subscribers, so the calculus is different.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 11:28 AM on May 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
One comment on not liking the comic book movie era and the elitism charge comes out. The article says things will be different in unknown ways, but points to some troubling aspects of the current media landscape that we might do well to account for, the rest of the comments here do much the same, but elitism is always the go to charge even in the face of the overwhelming defeat of the "elitist" forces and the near total victory of the "low brow" as art in nearly every facet of the culture. Sure there still might be some holdouts, clustered around Criterion's streaming service and the few arthouse theaters that still manage to exist, but given time I'm sure they can be driven completely underground as well.
This seems like a really bad faith reading of what I wrote and also a really weird take on "high brow" versus "low brow". It presupposes that the rise in popularity of one kind of entertainment necessitates the destruction of some other type and that I somehow am in favor of this? I reject this idea that the two are at odds. Just because I'd rather watch Killer Klowns from Outer Space than Citizen Kane doesn't mean I want all copies of the latter to be burned.
Seitz' piece is also making a similar argument to yours, although more obliquely. He claims that changes to how movies and TV are made, promoted, and distributed, in part because of the popularity of comic book superhero films, means that movies will no longer be movies as we know them. Although he says that this is neither a good nor a bad thing, it's hard to read this piece without thinking that Seitz is also of the opinion that whatever he considers "cinema" will be somehow diminished by the popularity of so many handsome Chrises in spandex. His "art" will be made less by our "entertainment".
This is the elitism I'm talking about. Whatever you define as "art" or "high brow" is somehow better or more pure and must be protected against assault of the popular. It's a false dichotomy. If that's not his point, and he's just saying that movies are changing because we can watch them in different ways and a different kind of movie is becoming more popular, then that's just a waste of 3700 words.
posted by runcibleshaw at 11:35 AM on May 1, 2019 [4 favorites]
This seems like a really bad faith reading of what I wrote and also a really weird take on "high brow" versus "low brow". It presupposes that the rise in popularity of one kind of entertainment necessitates the destruction of some other type and that I somehow am in favor of this? I reject this idea that the two are at odds. Just because I'd rather watch Killer Klowns from Outer Space than Citizen Kane doesn't mean I want all copies of the latter to be burned.
Seitz' piece is also making a similar argument to yours, although more obliquely. He claims that changes to how movies and TV are made, promoted, and distributed, in part because of the popularity of comic book superhero films, means that movies will no longer be movies as we know them. Although he says that this is neither a good nor a bad thing, it's hard to read this piece without thinking that Seitz is also of the opinion that whatever he considers "cinema" will be somehow diminished by the popularity of so many handsome Chrises in spandex. His "art" will be made less by our "entertainment".
This is the elitism I'm talking about. Whatever you define as "art" or "high brow" is somehow better or more pure and must be protected against assault of the popular. It's a false dichotomy. If that's not his point, and he's just saying that movies are changing because we can watch them in different ways and a different kind of movie is becoming more popular, then that's just a waste of 3700 words.
posted by runcibleshaw at 11:35 AM on May 1, 2019 [4 favorites]
this onslaught of serial ... content
Myself - my only concern with the consolidation of media conglomerates and the giant inter-connected universes is really if we stop seeing more unique/independent stories. Remakes, sequels and known quantities make complete financial sense for studios.
Yet - as the cost of independent effects and digital filming continue to go lower, we will see many interesting things to come. (and already are). Myself - the difference between "art" and "content" are things that stay with you and make you think - but that is completely subjective...
but shouldn't studios and streaming services be separated the same way studios
I completely disagree - Netflix has gone gang-busters in producing better and better media. And so their calculus is to prepare excellent material, or lose subscribers. It took a few years, but Netflix learned that people don't want filler.
posted by jkaczor at 11:37 AM on May 1, 2019 [6 favorites]
Myself - my only concern with the consolidation of media conglomerates and the giant inter-connected universes is really if we stop seeing more unique/independent stories. Remakes, sequels and known quantities make complete financial sense for studios.
Yet - as the cost of independent effects and digital filming continue to go lower, we will see many interesting things to come. (and already are). Myself - the difference between "art" and "content" are things that stay with you and make you think - but that is completely subjective...
but shouldn't studios and streaming services be separated the same way studios
I completely disagree - Netflix has gone gang-busters in producing better and better media. And so their calculus is to prepare excellent material, or lose subscribers. It took a few years, but Netflix learned that people don't want filler.
posted by jkaczor at 11:37 AM on May 1, 2019 [6 favorites]
EmpressCallipygos: You're talking about their profiles, not their talent.
That was the point that I was trying to make; maybe I didn't frame it well enough. Taking popular and maybe less-challenging jobs doesn't "ruin" artists; to cite another example, Jack Nicholson did some of his best work (About Schmidt, A Few Good Men, The Departed) after a lot of people had thought that he was basically going to just phone it in for the rest of his career.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:46 AM on May 1, 2019 [3 favorites]
That was the point that I was trying to make; maybe I didn't frame it well enough. Taking popular and maybe less-challenging jobs doesn't "ruin" artists; to cite another example, Jack Nicholson did some of his best work (About Schmidt, A Few Good Men, The Departed) after a lot of people had thought that he was basically going to just phone it in for the rest of his career.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:46 AM on May 1, 2019 [3 favorites]
I've long suspected (and probably mentioned before) that the skill the British Shakespearean classical training gives actors that Hollywood respects is the ability to speak lines that are to all intents and purposes gibberish in such a way that the audience feels they understand what's being said. So much easier to hire a Shakespearean actor to do the villainous exposition than rewrite the script again. A great actor is still a great actor in a terrible movie, though they might not pull the performance off - it's not a magical quality, it's a set of skills. The archetypal example would be Alan Rickman in Robin Hood - Prince of Thieves, but there's really not a shortage.
I think it was Truffaut who suggested there was Cinema, there was Film and there were Movies, and I believe his point was that they were three quite distinct things with their own rules and qualities, not a ranked hierarchy of the same thing. You can have terrible Cinema (pretty much anything by Jean Luc Godard after 1970 IMO) and you can have a great Movie (I think Endgame might be a Great Movie. Fury Road certainly is).
Going to see Mulholland Drive in a packed cinema last year brought home to me that there is a palpable difference between a roomful of people being silent and a room that's quiet simply because there's no one there. The former is what I go to cinema for. Hopefully if I'm watching a movie it's loud enough that it doesn't matter if the audience are chattering.
posted by Grangousier at 11:52 AM on May 1, 2019 [4 favorites]
I think it was Truffaut who suggested there was Cinema, there was Film and there were Movies, and I believe his point was that they were three quite distinct things with their own rules and qualities, not a ranked hierarchy of the same thing. You can have terrible Cinema (pretty much anything by Jean Luc Godard after 1970 IMO) and you can have a great Movie (I think Endgame might be a Great Movie. Fury Road certainly is).
Going to see Mulholland Drive in a packed cinema last year brought home to me that there is a palpable difference between a roomful of people being silent and a room that's quiet simply because there's no one there. The former is what I go to cinema for. Hopefully if I'm watching a movie it's loud enough that it doesn't matter if the audience are chattering.
posted by Grangousier at 11:52 AM on May 1, 2019 [4 favorites]
(Of course if it was Godard rather than Truffaut who said that... ha ha ha.)
posted by Grangousier at 11:54 AM on May 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by Grangousier at 11:54 AM on May 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
Maybe some of the problem here is that what's being called "content" is something that doesn't really have a name yet. I'm ridiculously thrilled to learn that Amazon is dramatizing Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art. It's like something made for me, something I can't imagine any TV or movie studio taking on 20 years ago. But what is it? A TV series? A serialized movie? Neither seem quite adequate to describing these things, tho I suppose the closest resemblance is to the old PBS productions of I, Claudius or Last Of The Mohicans.
posted by octobersurprise at 11:56 AM on May 1, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by octobersurprise at 11:56 AM on May 1, 2019 [3 favorites]
It presupposes that the rise in popularity of one kind of entertainment necessitates the destruction of some other type
. . . because that's true? There are only so many studios, budgets, and screens available. On that front, the article clearly laments the fact that those limited resources are increasingly devoted to gigantic, serialized franchises and crowding out standalone movies. If you want to call that concern elitist, so be it. For my part, I'd rather not continue to be bludgeoned by fundamentally the same movie over and over again but with different stupid names for the villain. I've read some people breathlessly speculating that the next phase of the MCU will bring us Annihilus, a big bad from the Negative Zone, and wondered at my youthful naivete thinking that Ego the person-planet who wanted to turn everything in the universe into himself was as on-the-nose as it would get.
(Now I must stop myself before this snowballs into a rant on how the MCU is crowding out actual sci-fi)
posted by sinfony at 12:00 PM on May 1, 2019 [10 favorites]
. . . because that's true? There are only so many studios, budgets, and screens available. On that front, the article clearly laments the fact that those limited resources are increasingly devoted to gigantic, serialized franchises and crowding out standalone movies. If you want to call that concern elitist, so be it. For my part, I'd rather not continue to be bludgeoned by fundamentally the same movie over and over again but with different stupid names for the villain. I've read some people breathlessly speculating that the next phase of the MCU will bring us Annihilus, a big bad from the Negative Zone, and wondered at my youthful naivete thinking that Ego the person-planet who wanted to turn everything in the universe into himself was as on-the-nose as it would get.
(Now I must stop myself before this snowballs into a rant on how the MCU is crowding out actual sci-fi)
posted by sinfony at 12:00 PM on May 1, 2019 [10 favorites]
This is the elitism I'm talking about. Whatever you define as "art" or "high brow" is somehow better or more pure and must be protected against assault of the popular. It's a false dichotomy. If that's not his point, and he's just saying that movies are changing because we can watch them in different ways and a different kind of movie is becoming more popular, then that's just a waste of 3700 words.
At least on my read, this isn't his argument.
He doesnt really go into this, but it's well-established at this point that the middle-budget studio movie has essentially died. Movies are pretty much all made for sub $40 million or they have enormous budgets. Take a popular example in this thread, Rian Johnson. Looper was made for $30 million, The Last Jedi for something like $200 million. If Johnson wanted to make a $75 million movie about... I don't know, anything, he'd have a very hard time getting funding for it. The financial risk/reward calculation is entirely out of whack. Why fund 3 $70 million movies when you can fund movie 10 in a successful franchise for $200 million and make back a billion?
What means is that all the classics from new directors in the '70s (for example) are basically impossible to make today.
posted by Automocar at 12:14 PM on May 1, 2019 [26 favorites]
At least on my read, this isn't his argument.
He doesnt really go into this, but it's well-established at this point that the middle-budget studio movie has essentially died. Movies are pretty much all made for sub $40 million or they have enormous budgets. Take a popular example in this thread, Rian Johnson. Looper was made for $30 million, The Last Jedi for something like $200 million. If Johnson wanted to make a $75 million movie about... I don't know, anything, he'd have a very hard time getting funding for it. The financial risk/reward calculation is entirely out of whack. Why fund 3 $70 million movies when you can fund movie 10 in a successful franchise for $200 million and make back a billion?
What means is that all the classics from new directors in the '70s (for example) are basically impossible to make today.
posted by Automocar at 12:14 PM on May 1, 2019 [26 favorites]
I think there's another angle to consider, which is what kinds of stories lend themselves to what format, and what kind of money can be made from those stories. TV obviously is set up for more episodic content, where each episode is around an hour (network TV clocks in at just about 45 minutes when you subtract out ads; premium cable and streaming shows tend to be around 45-60 minutes depending). A movie is a 90-120 minutes-long proposition (again, I'm talking about the typical movie, there are outliers) and tends to be more self contained. The MCU is kind of a weird hybrid of the two, where each film is fairly self-contained as a story but fits into a larger continuity. I think there's a way you could try to reorganize the events of the films of the MCU into a TV-like format (it's work out to about four seasons of a netflix-like show) but probably it doesn't monetise nearly as well that way.
Anyhow, what I was originally driving at was that what are often considered the best TV series (Sopranos, The Wire, and so on) often simply could not shoehorn their story lines into coherent films. The format of a season-long story arc allows one to create your art in a space that breathes moreso than a movie. Movies are great for stories where the bite sizes are about two episodes of TV long, and often that's all you've got to say. Nobody was trying to turn The Usual Suspects or Schindler's List into a franchise (at least god I hope not). The things that really make a ton of money are of course franchises (Star Wars, Marvel, Fast & Furious, Harry Potter, Hobbits) but those sometimes exist in TV format too (GOT). I think probably the producers of Game of Thrones probably wish they'd had the foresight to set it up as a movie franchise instead, because I bet it makes more money that way, though I don't watch the show so maybe something about it just couldn't be cajoled into that format.
There's room in the world for both and I find stuff to like in both arenas. I don't think the mouse is going to completely kill non-franchise filmmaking any time soon, simply because there are always going to be stories that only make sense to do in that format, and pose the best chance of making money in that format as opposed to say a TV movie.
posted by axiom at 12:17 PM on May 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
Anyhow, what I was originally driving at was that what are often considered the best TV series (Sopranos, The Wire, and so on) often simply could not shoehorn their story lines into coherent films. The format of a season-long story arc allows one to create your art in a space that breathes moreso than a movie. Movies are great for stories where the bite sizes are about two episodes of TV long, and often that's all you've got to say. Nobody was trying to turn The Usual Suspects or Schindler's List into a franchise (at least god I hope not). The things that really make a ton of money are of course franchises (Star Wars, Marvel, Fast & Furious, Harry Potter, Hobbits) but those sometimes exist in TV format too (GOT). I think probably the producers of Game of Thrones probably wish they'd had the foresight to set it up as a movie franchise instead, because I bet it makes more money that way, though I don't watch the show so maybe something about it just couldn't be cajoled into that format.
There's room in the world for both and I find stuff to like in both arenas. I don't think the mouse is going to completely kill non-franchise filmmaking any time soon, simply because there are always going to be stories that only make sense to do in that format, and pose the best chance of making money in that format as opposed to say a TV movie.
posted by axiom at 12:17 PM on May 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
There are only so many studios, budgets, and screens available.
Really? Let's quantify that. I mean, I understand that in the very most literal way, that's true, but I really don't think that the problem is that America only has so many multiplexes. In fact--and this was one of the few bits that MZS really got right, IMO--Disney is probably keeping what's left of America's movie theaters open as it is. If Disney decided to cut its output in half, I severely doubt that whatever arthouse flicks the cineastes favor would make up those ticket sales.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:29 PM on May 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
Really? Let's quantify that. I mean, I understand that in the very most literal way, that's true, but I really don't think that the problem is that America only has so many multiplexes. In fact--and this was one of the few bits that MZS really got right, IMO--Disney is probably keeping what's left of America's movie theaters open as it is. If Disney decided to cut its output in half, I severely doubt that whatever arthouse flicks the cineastes favor would make up those ticket sales.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:29 PM on May 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
What means is that all the classics from new directors in the '70s (for example) are basically impossible to make today.
That's a really interesting and informative comment that quantifies some of the effects of the age of the superhero blockbuster. I think you should have written this article, because Seitz does not make this clear at all.
posted by runcibleshaw at 12:32 PM on May 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
That's a really interesting and informative comment that quantifies some of the effects of the age of the superhero blockbuster. I think you should have written this article, because Seitz does not make this clear at all.
posted by runcibleshaw at 12:32 PM on May 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
Absolutely. And furthermore, because people will always come out and yell:
"Dunkirk!" (which yes, cost about $100 million to make but was essentially self-funded by Nolan's own production company who made their money, on, you guessed it, the Batman movies), or,
"Spielberg!" (who almost couldn't get Lincoln made, yeah, Steven fucking Spielberg had trouble getting a $65 million movie made), or,
"Peele!" (whose 2 movies had budgets of $4.5 million and $20 million, respectively) or,
"Anderson!" (who has never made a movie that cost more than Magnolia, released in 1999)
etc etc etc I could go on forever.
Now, does more money ipso facto equal a better movie? No, of course not. But it does constrain the vision of the filmmaker. $20 million to make a movie intended for a wide audience is basically nothing. All the money is being sucked up by Hot New Franchise and yes, the art of film is suffering because of it. You can call that handwringing or nostalgia or old man syndrome or pretentiousness or or or whatever you want, but it doesn't mean it's not true.
posted by Automocar at 1:01 PM on May 1, 2019 [7 favorites]
"Dunkirk!" (which yes, cost about $100 million to make but was essentially self-funded by Nolan's own production company who made their money, on, you guessed it, the Batman movies), or,
"Spielberg!" (who almost couldn't get Lincoln made, yeah, Steven fucking Spielberg had trouble getting a $65 million movie made), or,
"Peele!" (whose 2 movies had budgets of $4.5 million and $20 million, respectively) or,
"Anderson!" (who has never made a movie that cost more than Magnolia, released in 1999)
etc etc etc I could go on forever.
Now, does more money ipso facto equal a better movie? No, of course not. But it does constrain the vision of the filmmaker. $20 million to make a movie intended for a wide audience is basically nothing. All the money is being sucked up by Hot New Franchise and yes, the art of film is suffering because of it. You can call that handwringing or nostalgia or old man syndrome or pretentiousness or or or whatever you want, but it doesn't mean it's not true.
posted by Automocar at 1:01 PM on May 1, 2019 [7 favorites]
In effect, Disney+ will become the content library version of the final battle in "Endgame," or the first big chase sequence in the pop culture-saturated "Ready Player One" (which conspicuously was not allowed to include Disney-owned characters), where there are so many recognizable characters, or creatures, or robots, or "properties" onscreen at the same time, filling every pixel of the image from foreground to deep background, that it's impossible to process it all in real time.
"Now look at it -- gaze upon my empire of joy!"
posted by wildblueyonder at 1:04 PM on May 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
"Now look at it -- gaze upon my empire of joy!"
posted by wildblueyonder at 1:04 PM on May 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
The Ten Worst Films of 1942 as Reviewed by Ezra Pound Over Italian Radio
posted by East14thTaco at 1:21 PM on May 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by East14thTaco at 1:21 PM on May 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
gusottertrout He spent a healthy chunk of the article explaining his enjoyment of Endgame and some of the other "modern trash"
Yes, as I noted in the sentence you quoted he doesn't seem opposed to "content". But since he declined to offer any definition of "cinema" as it might exist as a separate category, his insistence that we must acknowledge this categorical difference between the two is both odd and forces us to try and guess what he might possibly mean by "cinema".
Since he didn't provide a definition, we have to try to pick it out from the negative space of his writing, and the only conclusion I could see was "cinema is older and high art", but again I'm not at all sure because I'm not sure he's sure.
And I think that's where his argument breaks down. Because he can't actually define the difference between these categories he insists are extremely important. Which makes the categories he's trying to define suspect at best.
Again, I agree that he doesn't seem opposed to films like Endgame. But he does very explicitly argue that they are categorically different from movies of the past without ever explaining what his criteria is.
I disagree strongly with people who whine about higher frame rates, but at least they're making a coherent argument with firmly defined terms. Anything higher than a flickery 24fps is bad and they don't like it. I think they're wrong, and snobby, and elitist, and fossilized Luddites, but they're not hiding their argument.
This guy though, he seems vaguely concerned about monitization, vaguely concerned about people watching "content" on their phones, vaguely concerned about media conglomerates, but it's all mushy because he won't define his terms.
I got that he wants us to stop calling things like Endgame "cinema" and start calling it "content", and that he thinks this distinction is extremely important. What I didn't get is any explanation of what "cinema" was and what distinguished it from "content".
posted by sotonohito at 1:33 PM on May 1, 2019 [3 favorites]
Yes, as I noted in the sentence you quoted he doesn't seem opposed to "content". But since he declined to offer any definition of "cinema" as it might exist as a separate category, his insistence that we must acknowledge this categorical difference between the two is both odd and forces us to try and guess what he might possibly mean by "cinema".
Since he didn't provide a definition, we have to try to pick it out from the negative space of his writing, and the only conclusion I could see was "cinema is older and high art", but again I'm not at all sure because I'm not sure he's sure.
And I think that's where his argument breaks down. Because he can't actually define the difference between these categories he insists are extremely important. Which makes the categories he's trying to define suspect at best.
Again, I agree that he doesn't seem opposed to films like Endgame. But he does very explicitly argue that they are categorically different from movies of the past without ever explaining what his criteria is.
I disagree strongly with people who whine about higher frame rates, but at least they're making a coherent argument with firmly defined terms. Anything higher than a flickery 24fps is bad and they don't like it. I think they're wrong, and snobby, and elitist, and fossilized Luddites, but they're not hiding their argument.
This guy though, he seems vaguely concerned about monitization, vaguely concerned about people watching "content" on their phones, vaguely concerned about media conglomerates, but it's all mushy because he won't define his terms.
I got that he wants us to stop calling things like Endgame "cinema" and start calling it "content", and that he thinks this distinction is extremely important. What I didn't get is any explanation of what "cinema" was and what distinguished it from "content".
posted by sotonohito at 1:33 PM on May 1, 2019 [3 favorites]
I never really see this sort of thing being about "highbrow" vs "lowbrow". It's more about unique, interesting art vs. Branded Content. I want plenty of room for b-movies alongside the classics alongside everything else weird and wonderful and hopefully that doesn't all get snuffed out by whatever the algorithms churn out next.
posted by dreamlanding at 1:33 PM on May 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by dreamlanding at 1:33 PM on May 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
Orson Welles is in 6 Criterion films. And that doesn't count Citizen Kane.
ORSON WELLES PLAYED A GIANT ROBOT-PLANET THAT ATE PLANETS IN A FEATURE LENGTH TOY COMMERCIAL.
But yes let's discuss how RDJ and Rian Johnson have lost all of their cultural currency due to working for Disney.
Please don't besmirch Unicron lest you summon Unicron praise be to Unicron.
posted by UltraMorgnus at 1:43 PM on May 1, 2019 [7 favorites]
ORSON WELLES PLAYED A GIANT ROBOT-PLANET THAT ATE PLANETS IN A FEATURE LENGTH TOY COMMERCIAL.
But yes let's discuss how RDJ and Rian Johnson have lost all of their cultural currency due to working for Disney.
Please don't besmirch Unicron lest you summon Unicron praise be to Unicron.
posted by UltraMorgnus at 1:43 PM on May 1, 2019 [7 favorites]
I love MZS's criticism so much. It's weird to see so many of the comments here just looking for the correct angle to tilt at him.
posted by prize bull octorok at 1:44 PM on May 1, 2019 [12 favorites]
posted by prize bull octorok at 1:44 PM on May 1, 2019 [12 favorites]
I want to see a streaming service release a new season of a completely episodic show with a shuffle function, so that every time you start watching the series you start with a random episode. I'd watch it.
posted by showbiz_liz at 1:45 PM on May 1, 2019
posted by showbiz_liz at 1:45 PM on May 1, 2019
Since he didn't provide a definition, we have to try to pick it out from the negative space of his writing, and the only conclusion I could see was "cinema is older and high art", but again I'm not at all sure because I'm not sure he's sure.
I agree with you the essay would've improved if this was more clearly stated, but what I took away from it is:
"Content" is made to push forward something else: a series or franchise, a streaming platform, an actor's career, whatever. Because of that, it tends to be more episodic in structure—to leave open the path for more content to come. It's also made without too much concern for the viewing experience—they expect that you'll watch it on any device you want, wherever and whenever you want, and it's not really their primary concern.
"Cinema" is made for itself. Even when there are sequels, each piece tends to stand more on its own. It's made with the expectation that a theater is the ideal way to see it—and while not everybody will do that, in general the closer you get the better. (Because of this, I think it's possible to latch onto technical questions like film vs. digital or framerate as proxies for the real question, but they're just proxies. Cinema will care about what provides the best viewing experience for this film in a theater. Content will care about what provides the best viewing experience across the broadest range of devices.)
I feel like there ends up being some overlap with "high art" vs. "low art" here, but it's not just about that. Definitely with these lines you can have both high art and low art cinema. Whether you can have high art content is an interesting question. In principle I think you can, but it seems like the market forces that drive the production of content will generally avoid it.
From here, I would bounce off Automocar's point about budgets. Not only has the middle been squeezed out; it's also a problem that Cinema is mostly constrained to the smaller budgets, while Content is mostly constrained (and I use that word very intentionally) to the big budgets. This is yet another limitation on what kinds of stories you can tell through film—and increasingly television—as a medium.
posted by brett at 2:40 PM on May 1, 2019 [13 favorites]
I agree with you the essay would've improved if this was more clearly stated, but what I took away from it is:
"Content" is made to push forward something else: a series or franchise, a streaming platform, an actor's career, whatever. Because of that, it tends to be more episodic in structure—to leave open the path for more content to come. It's also made without too much concern for the viewing experience—they expect that you'll watch it on any device you want, wherever and whenever you want, and it's not really their primary concern.
"Cinema" is made for itself. Even when there are sequels, each piece tends to stand more on its own. It's made with the expectation that a theater is the ideal way to see it—and while not everybody will do that, in general the closer you get the better. (Because of this, I think it's possible to latch onto technical questions like film vs. digital or framerate as proxies for the real question, but they're just proxies. Cinema will care about what provides the best viewing experience for this film in a theater. Content will care about what provides the best viewing experience across the broadest range of devices.)
I feel like there ends up being some overlap with "high art" vs. "low art" here, but it's not just about that. Definitely with these lines you can have both high art and low art cinema. Whether you can have high art content is an interesting question. In principle I think you can, but it seems like the market forces that drive the production of content will generally avoid it.
From here, I would bounce off Automocar's point about budgets. Not only has the middle been squeezed out; it's also a problem that Cinema is mostly constrained to the smaller budgets, while Content is mostly constrained (and I use that word very intentionally) to the big budgets. This is yet another limitation on what kinds of stories you can tell through film—and increasingly television—as a medium.
posted by brett at 2:40 PM on May 1, 2019 [13 favorites]
It took more than a couple hours to recite the Iliad, or the Odyssey.
Illiad and Odyssey are themselves parts of the larger story arc of the Trojan War.
The Homeric Cinematic Universe:
Phase I: Illiad
Phase II: Odyssey
Prequels/"A TW Story"s: half of the Greek tragedies
Phase III/sidequel/reboot: Aeneid
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 2:42 PM on May 1, 2019 [8 favorites]
Illiad and Odyssey are themselves parts of the larger story arc of the Trojan War.
The Homeric Cinematic Universe:
Phase I: Illiad
Phase II: Odyssey
Prequels/"A TW Story"s: half of the Greek tragedies
Phase III/sidequel/reboot: Aeneid
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 2:42 PM on May 1, 2019 [8 favorites]
If people would be interested in talking about the changes that have happened to the entertainment industry in the last decade or so while sidestepping the fraught conversations around MCU, Star Wars and other Disney franchises, can I suggest Blumhouse as a topic?
Their big insight was that filming on digital has dropped barriers to entry, and their model is to fund small horror movies on sub-$5m dollar budgets and tightly controlled (but not unreasonable) shooting schedules. Depending on the quality of the finished product, they then go for a wide theatrical release or recoup as much of their money as possible through direct-to-streaming deals. This way they’ve had some big commercial hits, which they’ve spun into “content-y” serials with lots of sequels (Paranormal Activity, Insidious, The Purge) alongside cult and critical successes (Creep, The Gift, Get Out, Us).
Now perhaps they’re going to move out of horror into the more general indie space (they produced BlacKkKlansman last year) while looking at larger budgets for stuff with name recognition, while staying under the $40m ceiling identified by Automocar (BlacKkKlansman: $15m; Halloween: $10m; Glass: $20m; Us: $20m).
Interestingly, they’ve also opened a TV production company, and properties like The Purge are now making the full transition to series.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 3:25 PM on May 1, 2019 [6 favorites]
Their big insight was that filming on digital has dropped barriers to entry, and their model is to fund small horror movies on sub-$5m dollar budgets and tightly controlled (but not unreasonable) shooting schedules. Depending on the quality of the finished product, they then go for a wide theatrical release or recoup as much of their money as possible through direct-to-streaming deals. This way they’ve had some big commercial hits, which they’ve spun into “content-y” serials with lots of sequels (Paranormal Activity, Insidious, The Purge) alongside cult and critical successes (Creep, The Gift, Get Out, Us).
Now perhaps they’re going to move out of horror into the more general indie space (they produced BlacKkKlansman last year) while looking at larger budgets for stuff with name recognition, while staying under the $40m ceiling identified by Automocar (BlacKkKlansman: $15m; Halloween: $10m; Glass: $20m; Us: $20m).
Interestingly, they’ve also opened a TV production company, and properties like The Purge are now making the full transition to series.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 3:25 PM on May 1, 2019 [6 favorites]
It presupposes that the rise in popularity of one kind of entertainment necessitates the destruction of some other type
. . . because that's true? There are only so many studios, budgets, and screens available.
If the number of films produced are rising over time, more blockbusters doesn't necessarily mean fewer non-blockbusters. This is not my area and I'd be interested in anyone who could point in the direction of more specifics than the article I've linked has (how much of the massive increase in non-studio stuff is direct-to-DVD, etc.). How static, really, is the amount of money flowing into film-making? Is what money can buy (in terms of special effects, especially) changing as well? How has an expanding non-US viewing audience altered things?
Without data, the purely subjective experience I've had over the past few years is that the quality and especially the variety of what both TV and film have to offer has swelled enormously beyond what I remember from, say, my high school and college days - but then for the past few years I've consistently watched more direct-to-streaming films than I have been to the theater as well. Maybe if the latter was my primary way of consuming this stuff my experience would be different, and more in line with the FPP article's author is describing.
posted by AdamCSnider at 4:52 PM on May 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
. . . because that's true? There are only so many studios, budgets, and screens available.
If the number of films produced are rising over time, more blockbusters doesn't necessarily mean fewer non-blockbusters. This is not my area and I'd be interested in anyone who could point in the direction of more specifics than the article I've linked has (how much of the massive increase in non-studio stuff is direct-to-DVD, etc.). How static, really, is the amount of money flowing into film-making? Is what money can buy (in terms of special effects, especially) changing as well? How has an expanding non-US viewing audience altered things?
Without data, the purely subjective experience I've had over the past few years is that the quality and especially the variety of what both TV and film have to offer has swelled enormously beyond what I remember from, say, my high school and college days - but then for the past few years I've consistently watched more direct-to-streaming films than I have been to the theater as well. Maybe if the latter was my primary way of consuming this stuff my experience would be different, and more in line with the FPP article's author is describing.
posted by AdamCSnider at 4:52 PM on May 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
People have always gone to movies for reasons other than what's in the movie. They followed directors, or stars, or studios, or characters.Hell, when I visited the Housing and Living Museum in Osaka, one thing that really stuck with me was learning that a lot of woodblock prints were effectively just the Edo-era equivalent of posters of bands and actors you like.
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:57 PM on May 1, 2019 [7 favorites]
It's all good, UltraMorgnus. I met Unicron when he was bartending and catch his band every one in a while.
posted by thecjm at 5:18 PM on May 1, 2019
posted by thecjm at 5:18 PM on May 1, 2019
Chappel, ambrose you make a good point - that's something that's been on my mind since recently listening to an early Chapo Trap House episode where Amber appeared in a pre-hosting role and spoke about the decline of mid-budget cinema caused by increased risk aversion on the part of studios. She was specifically contrasting the budgets of the two flavours of Ghostbusters (144M in 2016 vs. 30M in 1986, or about 70M adjusted for inflation).
posted by MarchHare at 7:07 PM on May 1, 2019
posted by MarchHare at 7:07 PM on May 1, 2019
Maybe this is historical revisionism talking, but I was under the impression Robert Downey Jr was frequently seen as a name to watch, and his descent into addiction was seen by a significant minority as a tragic waste of talent.
Then again, I'm not entirely sure the MCU post-about Iron Man 3 has really been the best showcase for that talent, but on the gripping hand, Phase 1 and 2 MCU were essentially built on Robert Downey Jr's charisma.
posted by Merus at 8:06 PM on May 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
Then again, I'm not entirely sure the MCU post-about Iron Man 3 has really been the best showcase for that talent, but on the gripping hand, Phase 1 and 2 MCU were essentially built on Robert Downey Jr's charisma.
posted by Merus at 8:06 PM on May 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
Not to abuse the edit window here:
If people would be interested in talking about the changes that have happened to the entertainment industry in the last decade or so while sidestepping the fraught conversations around MCU, Star Wars and other Disney franchises, can I suggest Blumhouse as a topic?
Blumhouse's business model has been on my radar for a while, in that they're exactly the kind of model that seems to work well as a counterpoint to big CGI blockbusters. They're also fairly brave: the principles get pretty significant percentages of the gross profit, the director gets a small budget with no strings, and when they run out of money, that's it. If the film is unfinished, Blumhouse cut their losses immediately instead of trying to rescue it. That's surprisingly rare in the film industry, apparently. They focus on horror because there's an audience for bad horror, you can make something watchable for fairly cheap, and you don't need a lot of ticket sales to recoup $5 million. And then sometimes you make something like Paranormal Activity - or Get Out - that covers all the losses and then some.
I wonder if the model'd translate to other genres. Thrillers can be done fairly cheaply, but they're a bit more dependent on a good script.
posted by Merus at 8:13 PM on May 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
If people would be interested in talking about the changes that have happened to the entertainment industry in the last decade or so while sidestepping the fraught conversations around MCU, Star Wars and other Disney franchises, can I suggest Blumhouse as a topic?
Blumhouse's business model has been on my radar for a while, in that they're exactly the kind of model that seems to work well as a counterpoint to big CGI blockbusters. They're also fairly brave: the principles get pretty significant percentages of the gross profit, the director gets a small budget with no strings, and when they run out of money, that's it. If the film is unfinished, Blumhouse cut their losses immediately instead of trying to rescue it. That's surprisingly rare in the film industry, apparently. They focus on horror because there's an audience for bad horror, you can make something watchable for fairly cheap, and you don't need a lot of ticket sales to recoup $5 million. And then sometimes you make something like Paranormal Activity - or Get Out - that covers all the losses and then some.
I wonder if the model'd translate to other genres. Thrillers can be done fairly cheaply, but they're a bit more dependent on a good script.
posted by Merus at 8:13 PM on May 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
How dare, indeed. If you think that an actor or director is somehow "slumming" because they're doing "genre fiction" over the sort of "highbrow" period piece the Academy loves, that's on you.
The two kinds of stories, genre fiction and period pieces?
(I wasn't sure how much of this was supposed to be a response to the original article but treating it as an issue of genre vs. highbrow snobbery is a pretty iffy response to the original article, which used Jordan Peele's horror movies as the leading example of traditional filmmaking that remains culturally relevant.)
posted by atoxyl at 8:54 PM on May 1, 2019 [8 favorites]
The two kinds of stories, genre fiction and period pieces?
(I wasn't sure how much of this was supposed to be a response to the original article but treating it as an issue of genre vs. highbrow snobbery is a pretty iffy response to the original article, which used Jordan Peele's horror movies as the leading example of traditional filmmaking that remains culturally relevant.)
posted by atoxyl at 8:54 PM on May 1, 2019 [8 favorites]
Everyone knows there are three kinds of stories: genre fiction, period pieces, and art, which is defined as stories where a young, nubile woman is inexplicably attracted to the author stand-in
posted by Merus at 12:34 AM on May 2, 2019 [8 favorites]
posted by Merus at 12:34 AM on May 2, 2019 [8 favorites]
-Avengers: Endgame Is Exactly the Movie You Want It to Be
-The Narrative Experiment That Is the Marvel Cinematic Universe
posted by kliuless at 6:23 AM on May 2, 2019 [1 favorite]
-The Narrative Experiment That Is the Marvel Cinematic Universe
posted by kliuless at 6:23 AM on May 2, 2019 [1 favorite]
This describes to me what the main takeaway points are:
posted by ZeusHumms at 12:38 PM on May 2, 2019 [2 favorites]
Whether what's truly being aped here is television, the theatrical cliffhangers of the 1940s and '50s, the serialized fiction of Charles Dickens and other 19th century magazine writers, or comic books and comic strips is ultimately a distinction without a difference. They're all manifestations of the same commercial/artistic impulse, to keep audiences on the hook, constantly craving dopamine rush that comes with narrative closure, even when it proves to be temporary, just a setup for the next cliffhanger. The takeaway here should be that television and cinema have merged into the endless, insatiable content stream, and the biggest, baddest examples of image-driven entertainment—the works that have the power to unite large sections of an otherwise fragmented society—are the ones that are more reminiscent of television as we've always known it.It's like particles and waves, or a discrete versus continuous function. Discrete works have space between them; they aren't automatically connected to other works, and such connections aren't inherently strong. Continuous works are by definition part of a greater whole.
posted by ZeusHumms at 12:38 PM on May 2, 2019 [2 favorites]
How anyone got "elitist who hates comic books" from this article, I really don't know. The author has no problem with "content" (serialized, never-ending narratives that keep audiences hooked). The author's only problem is that the space for "cinema" (the stand-alone movie that tells a "complete" story) is rapidly diminishing, and that this narrows the range of types of stories that ever reach beyond a tiny boutique audience.
What I am not a fan of is how this current era of media is so reactive to the fandom. Apologies while I sit down here on my lawn in my lawnchair, but I just dislike how we often do not seem to tell stories for the sake of a story but because we need to satisfy a feeling or a moment that pays off that rewards the viewer. Maybe it's just me, but this is my big criticism of this current era of film & television.
This, 100000x. When creators start to respond in-the-moment to fan feedback, the story loses its independence and becomes an instant gratification machine. It provokes a simple emotional need and then satisfies it, pacifying the media consumer with fantasy fulfillment, pure escapism. You want your favorite character back? You got it! You want those two characters to fall in love? You got it! The late capitalist entertainment machine gives you enough pleasure to make waking up and going to work the next day manageable. Netflix gives you exactly what you want, and that makes up for getting fucked by the system in every other way.
Some of my students will complain about reading stories they don't like. I've had complaints about Things Fall Apart ("their culture was too confusing, the main character was mean"); Slaughterhouse-Five ("the main character was a pussy, I like action"); Beloved ("I don't like reading chick stuff/stuff about racism"); The Road ("This is stupid, there isn't a real ending").... I could go on and on. Lately I've taken to basically saying: I don't give a fuck if you don't like it, I don't give a fuck if it's not the kind of story you want to read, I don't give a fuck if you wanted a different ending -- that's the goddamn point, to experience something outside yourself, to try to understand the world beyond the limited horizon of your 19 years of experience on the planet. Although I usually don't say "fuck" and "goddamn," but sometimes.
Although my attitude towards such reactions varies depending on the students. Female students who are tired of reading male-centric stories? Minority students who are sick of reading white European authors and stories? I totally sympathize, and I try to give them the tools to read such texts (when they are part of the syllabus) "against the grain." But the straight white male student who has clearly never had to look at anything from a different perspective, who has watched bro-stories all his life -- nah, sorry dude, I don't care if you think it's a "chick story," or if you don't want to read about racism from a black person's perspective, you're going to fucking read it.
posted by Saxon Kane at 3:58 PM on May 2, 2019 [11 favorites]
What I am not a fan of is how this current era of media is so reactive to the fandom. Apologies while I sit down here on my lawn in my lawnchair, but I just dislike how we often do not seem to tell stories for the sake of a story but because we need to satisfy a feeling or a moment that pays off that rewards the viewer. Maybe it's just me, but this is my big criticism of this current era of film & television.
This, 100000x. When creators start to respond in-the-moment to fan feedback, the story loses its independence and becomes an instant gratification machine. It provokes a simple emotional need and then satisfies it, pacifying the media consumer with fantasy fulfillment, pure escapism. You want your favorite character back? You got it! You want those two characters to fall in love? You got it! The late capitalist entertainment machine gives you enough pleasure to make waking up and going to work the next day manageable. Netflix gives you exactly what you want, and that makes up for getting fucked by the system in every other way.
Some of my students will complain about reading stories they don't like. I've had complaints about Things Fall Apart ("their culture was too confusing, the main character was mean"); Slaughterhouse-Five ("the main character was a pussy, I like action"); Beloved ("I don't like reading chick stuff/stuff about racism"); The Road ("This is stupid, there isn't a real ending").... I could go on and on. Lately I've taken to basically saying: I don't give a fuck if you don't like it, I don't give a fuck if it's not the kind of story you want to read, I don't give a fuck if you wanted a different ending -- that's the goddamn point, to experience something outside yourself, to try to understand the world beyond the limited horizon of your 19 years of experience on the planet. Although I usually don't say "fuck" and "goddamn," but sometimes.
Although my attitude towards such reactions varies depending on the students. Female students who are tired of reading male-centric stories? Minority students who are sick of reading white European authors and stories? I totally sympathize, and I try to give them the tools to read such texts (when they are part of the syllabus) "against the grain." But the straight white male student who has clearly never had to look at anything from a different perspective, who has watched bro-stories all his life -- nah, sorry dude, I don't care if you think it's a "chick story," or if you don't want to read about racism from a black person's perspective, you're going to fucking read it.
posted by Saxon Kane at 3:58 PM on May 2, 2019 [11 favorites]
When creators start to respond in-the-moment to fan feedback, the story loses its independence and becomes an instant gratification machine. It provokes a simple emotional need and then satisfies it, pacifying the media consumer with fantasy fulfillment, pure escapism. You want your favorite character back? You got it! You want those two characters to fall in love? You got it!
I think this is impossible in practice because of how fragmented fandoms are. Every choice to please a segment of your fanbase will infuriate another segment. You can't win.
There's a concept in professional wrestling called kayfabe, where the wrestlers maintain the integrity of the story and allow fan reaction to happen without seeing it as a problem. Many professional wrestlers will deliberately act as 'bad guys' in a ways that real people wouldn't tolerate - the idea that the audience fucking hates this wrestler would normally be seen as an issue, but in wrestling, that's seen as the person playing them doing their job right. I think a lot of creators think like that - people really objecting to the way the story is going might just be really invested in it. It's not necessarily a problem to fix.
posted by Merus at 12:42 AM on May 3, 2019 [2 favorites]
I think this is impossible in practice because of how fragmented fandoms are. Every choice to please a segment of your fanbase will infuriate another segment. You can't win.
There's a concept in professional wrestling called kayfabe, where the wrestlers maintain the integrity of the story and allow fan reaction to happen without seeing it as a problem. Many professional wrestlers will deliberately act as 'bad guys' in a ways that real people wouldn't tolerate - the idea that the audience fucking hates this wrestler would normally be seen as an issue, but in wrestling, that's seen as the person playing them doing their job right. I think a lot of creators think like that - people really objecting to the way the story is going might just be really invested in it. It's not necessarily a problem to fix.
posted by Merus at 12:42 AM on May 3, 2019 [2 favorites]
I think this is impossible in practice because of how fragmented fandoms are. Every choice to please a segment of your fanbase will infuriate another segment. You can't win.
It happens all the time, more noticeably in "TV" shows like Sherlock playing with the audience regarding Holmes and Watson's relationship, Hannibal, which was like three different shows as each season they tweaked the formula a little to fit fan theories and interests, Star Trek Discovery kept moving the ideas of the show to keep up with fans, and in movies the studios have obviously been listening to fan demands for representation.
Hollywood, as a general rule, wants to stay a few feet ahead of the zeitgeist. In the older model that meant new movies would be fit to whatever they saw as the coming trends, but in serial model storytelling it means constantly tweaking the formula to keep fan interest high, while maintaining the brand needs of the studio. It's how they've slowly been adding better representation to the film worlds, but doing it in a way that tries to maintain the old audience, uninterested in those concerns as well. It's why we keep getting stories where the new black hero is "mentored" by an old school white character or has one along as a quasi-surrogate for the white audience to keep their bearings. For women characters they keep the same basic outlines of the old male heroes, but tweak the package to fall more in line with past proven successes to maintain audience familiarity with the package.
This all points a bit to why the superhero/serial story model isn't just "genre" movies in the old sense. Westerns, for example, could cover a wide range of topics and methods in telling their stories as each western, outside of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry type serials were separate entities. Some characters would come up frequently, like Jesse James, but there was no expected continuity for the most part other than in rare exceptions of sequels to unexpected successes like The Magnificent Seven. The new model maintains character and "world" from film to film as that's how the money is made now. Streaming services require repeat engagement to be profitable in a different manner than the old movie studio model. The goal now is to keep the audience on a "channel" as much as possible, instead of the idea audiences would go see a movie at a theater and them maybe see it again or choose an entirely different film next time they went out. That's the point of the cliffhanger and ongoing series concept, to hold the audience to a story world for as long as possible to monetize the entirety of it.
A bit ironically perhaps, that's also partly why the spoiler thing really has taken hold. Audiences today are constantly catered to by revisiting the familiar. Old shows, toys, comics, and movies are remade more and more to tell the audience what to expect and to draw on a sense of nostalgia for the adults that gets passed on to their kids in a repeating loop of viewership. So many of the biggest properties of recent years have been either old franchise-esque concepts revisited or popular books made into series of films. The more familiar the product, the more important the minimal variations on the themes and events are for the audience already knowing pretty much where every story is going to go and all the plot beats they'll hit along the way to reach that end. The thing that matters then is more in how they hit each expected beat more than the events shown themselves. You can see how this plays out a bit reading fan reactions to movies, where they so often "rewrite" the big moments that they didn't think worked to hit the beats better.
posted by gusottertrout at 2:23 AM on May 3, 2019 [3 favorites]
It happens all the time, more noticeably in "TV" shows like Sherlock playing with the audience regarding Holmes and Watson's relationship, Hannibal, which was like three different shows as each season they tweaked the formula a little to fit fan theories and interests, Star Trek Discovery kept moving the ideas of the show to keep up with fans, and in movies the studios have obviously been listening to fan demands for representation.
Hollywood, as a general rule, wants to stay a few feet ahead of the zeitgeist. In the older model that meant new movies would be fit to whatever they saw as the coming trends, but in serial model storytelling it means constantly tweaking the formula to keep fan interest high, while maintaining the brand needs of the studio. It's how they've slowly been adding better representation to the film worlds, but doing it in a way that tries to maintain the old audience, uninterested in those concerns as well. It's why we keep getting stories where the new black hero is "mentored" by an old school white character or has one along as a quasi-surrogate for the white audience to keep their bearings. For women characters they keep the same basic outlines of the old male heroes, but tweak the package to fall more in line with past proven successes to maintain audience familiarity with the package.
This all points a bit to why the superhero/serial story model isn't just "genre" movies in the old sense. Westerns, for example, could cover a wide range of topics and methods in telling their stories as each western, outside of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry type serials were separate entities. Some characters would come up frequently, like Jesse James, but there was no expected continuity for the most part other than in rare exceptions of sequels to unexpected successes like The Magnificent Seven. The new model maintains character and "world" from film to film as that's how the money is made now. Streaming services require repeat engagement to be profitable in a different manner than the old movie studio model. The goal now is to keep the audience on a "channel" as much as possible, instead of the idea audiences would go see a movie at a theater and them maybe see it again or choose an entirely different film next time they went out. That's the point of the cliffhanger and ongoing series concept, to hold the audience to a story world for as long as possible to monetize the entirety of it.
A bit ironically perhaps, that's also partly why the spoiler thing really has taken hold. Audiences today are constantly catered to by revisiting the familiar. Old shows, toys, comics, and movies are remade more and more to tell the audience what to expect and to draw on a sense of nostalgia for the adults that gets passed on to their kids in a repeating loop of viewership. So many of the biggest properties of recent years have been either old franchise-esque concepts revisited or popular books made into series of films. The more familiar the product, the more important the minimal variations on the themes and events are for the audience already knowing pretty much where every story is going to go and all the plot beats they'll hit along the way to reach that end. The thing that matters then is more in how they hit each expected beat more than the events shown themselves. You can see how this plays out a bit reading fan reactions to movies, where they so often "rewrite" the big moments that they didn't think worked to hit the beats better.
posted by gusottertrout at 2:23 AM on May 3, 2019 [3 favorites]
And before the pitchforks come out, that's not all bad, having some serial fiction is fine, the sheer amount of it though is changing the media landscape radically.
posted by gusottertrout at 2:34 AM on May 3, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by gusottertrout at 2:34 AM on May 3, 2019 [1 favorite]
« Older Revenge of the Card Catalog | The Profound and Peculiar Sport of Competitive Air... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
Also, that Disney owns a frightening amount of the franchises that lend themselves to this kind of monetisation.
The essay finishes on a positive note about how change is to be welcomed and how we can’t wallow in misery, harking back to ages past and models of film-making that are no longer economically viable. I’d have liked to reach this point earlier, and hear more about some of the ways that good storytelling can survive and thrive in this new environment of beat-driven entertainment that relies on familiarity with recurring characters.
To me, it feels as though it’s not enough to cite the Sopranos and say that TV shouldn’t suffer an inferiority complex any more: the lucrative equilibrium point that we’ve reached (the triumph of “content”, in the author’s words) does seem to favour safer narratives with more fan service, which personally makes me think of the bad old days of TV. And it’s not great if that’s where films are ending up, too.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 9:21 AM on May 1, 2019 [22 favorites]