From The New Yorker:
Sony, which from 2002 to 2012 had generally been one of the top earners at the box office, was failing as a studio. Under Pascal’s leadership, Sony released a mix of tentpole films—the latest James Bonds, “Da Vinci Code” sequels—and star-driven vehicles often featuring Will Smith or Adam Sandler. (“Will and Adam bought our houses,” Sony execs liked to say.) Sprinkled among these were mid-budget, low-concept movies aimed at adults. Pascal had taken pride in Sony’s reputation as a “relationship studio,” built on its connections with talent. She was literate and smart, and alive to what makes a story click. Sony owned the rights to Spider-Man, and Pascal made intelligent use of them—her choices for director (Sam Raimi, of “Evil Dead” fame) and star (dewy-eyed Tobey Maguire) were unexpected, and together they made a movie that honored fans and non-fans alike. (“Spider-Man 2” was good, too.)
In the long run, it didn’t matter. Sony did not own the intellectual property, or “I.P.,” necessary to build out Spider-Man into a “cinematic universe”—that is, a fictional world that transfers from picture to picture, so that, instead of a single story line with a new installment every few years, a studio can release two or three “quasi-sequels,” as one Marvel executive has put it, in the span of a single year. Marvel pioneered the cinematic universe, hatching a plan in 2005 that it launched with the release of “Iron Man,” three years later. Without the requisite I.P., Sony couldn’t compete. “I only have the spider universe not the marvel universe,” Pascal explained to a colleague, in a 2014 e-mail. (The studio had had a chance to buy nearly all Marvel’s big characters, on the cheap, in the late nineties, but declined.) In another e-mail, Pascal suggested that she was trying to create an “un-marvel marvel world that is rooted in humanity.”
As Sony faltered, its rival, Disney, was enjoying an embarrassment of I.P. riches. First, it began remaking its animated classics as live-action features; then, in 2009, Disney bought Marvel, for four billion dollars. In 2012, it acquired Lucasfilm, the parent company of “Star Wars,” for another four billion. By 2015, Disney was releasing one new movie from the “Star Wars” universe and two or more movies from the Marvel universe every year.
Located nowhere in actual history or geography (or, maybe, human experience), a cinematic universe need not be limited by cultural specificity or nuance. What plays in Sioux City plays in Bayonne will play in Chongqing. The rise of the cinematic universe is inseparable from the rise of a truly global cinematic marketplace, dominated by China. In “The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of the Movies” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), the Wall Street Journalreporter Ben Fritz shares a startling fact: in 2005, the highest-grossing film in China was “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” which took in just under twelve million dollars. In 2017, a “Fast and the Furious” sequel made almost four hundred million there.
. . . .
Until blockbusters arrived—starting in 1975, with Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws,” in its time the most commercially successful film in history—Hollywood released movies gradually, one set of theatres after another. In the “run-zone clearance system,” a movie would begin with a heavily publicized first run in downtown theatres in major cities, continue on to smaller houses in less affluent or less fashionable parts of the city, and then move out to the suburbs, to smaller cities and towns, and, finally, to rural communities. A movie that was disliked by its first wave of viewers might not continue through the system, and the urban sophisticates who made the initial decision to see it were heavily influenced by the critics.
In the nineteen-twenties, the producer Irving Thalberg recognized that a pattern of distribution implies a pattern of taste-making. From his position, first at Universal and then at M-G-M, he turned Hollywood in the direction of prestige pictures—movies that “emphasized glamour, grace, and beauty,” as one critic put it. As much as three-quarters of M-G-M’s productions were A-class features feeding into the most deluxe of the downtown movie palaces, a business practice that was fortified, year after year in that decade, by an urban industrial boom. A version of this approach to distribution survived for much of the twentieth century—as late as the mid-seventies, a movie could take six months, or even a year, to finish its theatrical run. By then, however, suburbanization had transformed the country. The studios were stuck with a release pattern designed to flatter a social landscape that, by and large, no longer existed. “Jaws” was a masterpiece by a wunderkind director, but it also proved out a new business model: a gimmicky idea, bankable stars, and aggressive television ad campaigns, all of it designed to trigger audience anticipation and drive a massive Friday-night opening across thousands of screens—critics and snobs be damned.
It did not take Hollywood long to see the commercial possibilities, and the blockbuster came to dominate the movie industry.
. . . .
For most of Hollywood history, the movie business has needed a hostage buyer, a customer with little choice but to purchase the product. First, this was the theatre chains, which the studios owned, or controlled, until 1948, when the Supreme Court forced the studios to sell them on antitrust grounds. In the eighties and nineties, video stores partly filled the role. But, increasingly, the hostage buyer is us.
Today, the major franchises are commercially invulnerable because they offer up proprietary universes that their legions of fans are desperate to reënter on almost any terms. These reliable sources of profit are now Hollywood’s financial bedrock. The business model began to take shape, gradually, in the eighties; it solidified a decade ago, when a writer’s strike recalibrated Hollywood’s tolerance for risk. (The global financial crisis played a role as well.) At the same time, digital distribution was on the rise; Netflix, which launched its streaming service early in 2007, after years as a mail-order company, began eating into DVD sales. As the major studios faced the loss of a large and predictable revenue stream, they trimmed their release schedules and focussed more of their efforts on the global mega-brands: Marvel, DC, “Harry Potter,” “The Fast and the Furious,” “Star Wars.” The movie business transitioned from a system dominated by a handful of larger-than-life stars to one defined by I.P.
. . . .
The preëminence, during the past ten years, of the superhero movie has been accompanied by the loss of the actor as hero, or heroic type. “According to Marvel’s philosophy,” Ben Fritz writes, “the characters, not the actors, were the stars, and pretty much everyone was expendable.” There was no separating Powell from Nick Charles, or Humphrey Bogart from Sam Spade. Is there any connecting Batman to—fill in the blank? The quality of film acting has never been higher, and there is still a craft in scriptwriting and directing that makes one regularly bow in awe. But a minimal standard of human relatability is not being met, on a routine basis, in the medium’s most dominant genre. People who are nothing like us rescuing a world that is nothing like ours is not a recipe for artistic renewal.
Link to the rest at The New Yorker
This is wrong on so many levels…
Sony has exclusive rights to enough Marvel characters that they are currently building their own “Marvel Universe” completely separate from Disney’s MCU. They just won’t be using Spiderman because they cross-licensed the rights back to Disney so that Spidey is in the Disney MCU.
What Sony didn’t have was the vision necessary to pull this off before Marvel/Disney did it. They didn’t have The Vision either, but I don’t think that was the issue…
Technically true, but…
I don’t think you can really expect billion dollar grosses from the Marvel characters Sony controls (Silver Sable — an israeli Black Widow; Black Cat, a Catwoman knock-off; Morbius–a quasi vampire; SpiderGwen – gender bended Spider-man from a parallel universe; Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham, and the like.)
They do control a few useful villains (Mysterio and Kinpin might carry a noir drama) but before SUICIDE SQUAD nobody in Hollywood (even Marvel) thought there might be money in a villain-based movie.
In today’s blockbuster-obssessed Hollywood a movie can gross $800M and be considered a failure.
Where Sony missed the boat was in not buying Marvel outright when they were available cheap.
SpiderGwen isn’t a genderbent Spider-Man. She’s Gwen Stacy from a universe where Gwen got bitten by the spider instead of Peter. And while I haven’t read any of her books, from what I’ve seen on the internet, she’s got a lot of fans. If Sony was smart, they could build a successful franchise off of her. If it can be done for Guardians of the Galaxy, it can be done with Spider-Gwen. Of course, it takes getting a lot of other things right, which is mostly the problem. Too often, studios expect people to flock to a movie just because it’s about Superman or some other first-tier character, so they get lazy and make bad movies. I think they could use any of those characters you listed (aside from Spider-Ham) to make successful movies. But they probably won’t, because studios are lazy and stupid.
Oh, I know she’s supposed to be Gwen Stacy instead of Peter Parker. And I’ve sampled the stories. They are not particularly different than the Parker stories. Just a gender and name swap. At least Gwenpool is genuinely different from Deadpool.
Considering neither Sony nor Marvel are willing to do Miles Morales who really is different, the odds of them doing SpiderGwen or Silk or SpiderGirl are pretty low.
None of the money guys are going to commit mid-eight to nine figures to those kinds of derivative characters. We’ll sooner see Spider-ham.
Can’t blame the latest Superman on laziness. It’s Zack Snyder deciding to mess with the formula and declare that his vision of the Man of Steel is what people want to see. Uh, no. I’m still annoyed that Superman fought with Zod and the others, destroying Smallville and half of Metropolis while he was at it, and didn’t get a lick of conscience until Zod forced Superman to either kill him or let a bunch of civilians be zapped by his heat vision. Um. Superman just ignored ALL the damage he and Zod and company had done, but suddenly he gets all upset that he has to kill Zod.
It’s like the really stupid John Byrne decision to make Superman kill because you can’t have a code against killing if you don’t understand what killing is like. Because yeah, I can’t possibly have a code against hitting people with my car because I’ve never hit someone with my car. Same logic, right?
As a comic book fan, honestly, all I want is the basics. Good guys, bad guys, fights, maybe the world at risk, hero wins. There you go.
That’s the Marvel formula.
The DC movies tend to be a bit deeper and subtler.
They run risks and ask questions.
They may draw criticism for not following the Marvel formula but they still make bundles of money and they have something to say about our world.
In Man of Steel in particular, Supes is new to the business and he is facing equals in power with actual combat skills. He is fighting for his life and the fighting takes all his focus. They are steel in a world of cardboard, giants among ants.
It is the first act in a three act drama.
To fully appreciate what Snyder intended we’ll have to wait for the release of the Snyder cut of JL which, apparently, does exist.
Note that while JL is an enjoyable movie and the most Marvel-like to date, it is also the least successful of the recent DC movies. The DC audience expected more than just a fun lightshow.
The two franchises appeal to different audiences for different reasons, which should be a good thing. DC has been carving its own distinct market. If DC were imitating Marvel they would be dinged for “copying” Marvel.
As is, they’re still making money hand over fist in 9-digit bundles, anyway.
And when the MCU started, everybody said that Marvel was stuck with their B team (Iron Man, Thor, etc.) because they had sold off the rights to their big draws (Fantastic Four, Spiderman, and X-Men).
There is no connection between the quality and/or success of the movies with the iconic status of the comic book characters. Black Panther has outgrossed any of the Superman solo movies and probably all of them combined. It’s also a far better movie than any of them.
The OP probably sees The Wizarding World as another shared universe in the making. Warner Bros isn’t churning them out every year because Rowling won’t allow it but they are into the tenth movie in the series without a single loser.
Worse, from his point of view, the last one starred mostly lesser known actors and succeeded on the strength of the writing and the special effects. There was good acting in it but that was just an optional bonus.
That is in fact a trait of most of the blockbuster franchises that he glosses over; except for the (idiot plot) TRANSFORMERS franchise, the story matters more than the actors and the light show effects matters more than either, which means that, yes; they are technology-driven.
A lot of these movies might even be more properly described as animated movies with motion capture than live action since typically CGI is more than half the screen time and over three quarters the cost.
“… CGI is more than half the screen time and over three quarters the cost.”
And the cost is still coming down. Better programs and smaller/faster computers are getting CGI into the hands of the hobbyist. It’s already getting very hard to tell a lightly photoshopped photo from some CGI shots.
I wonder what this guy thinks of the Harry Potter World?
I read the entire piece. I really am not getting what the author is upset about the most, as the Hollywood studio system has been dead for a long, long time.
Really? There’s been some amazing acting in every generation since the advent of film.
Honestly, I don’t get it. Is the complaint that cinematic universes are destroying the star vehicle, or that they’re ruining “artistic renewal” (whatever that is) or that the acting isn’t being utilized because of the superhero film? Pick a point and stick to it, please.
Soon enough all the ‘actors’ will be CGI and they’ll be able to use the same hero’s ‘face’ forever. (That last terminator movie comes to mind. 😉 )