Have you noticed? Nearly all of the big movies coming out of Hollywood seem to be sequels based on cartoon characters, animated figures, toys, video games or superheroes. This summer has seen Iron Man 3, Despicable Me 2, Star Trek: Into Darkness, and Fast & Furious 6. A new Superman movie is out, and it’s never long between Batman films.
Characters and plot don’t make much of an appearance. The explosions and car chases are the real stars.
Whatever happened to movies that were about people? You know, like Saving Private Ryan and Sleepless in Seattle?
Such films almost can’t get made and distributed by major studios today, say Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. “The pathway to get into theaters is really getting smaller and smaller,” Lucas told students at the University of Southern California in June. Spielberg’s Lincoln, nominated for 12 Oscars, just barely got into theaters last year. The director says that’s only because he co-owned the studio.
What’s going on? Lynda Obst, a producer of Sleepless in Seattle, Contact, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and other films, has the answer in an eye-opening book called Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the New Abnormal in the Movie Business.
Hollywood is run by six big studios — Disney, 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros. — which think and behave alike and are in a similar state of panic. (The last three also own most of the music industry, which should tell you something.)
Obst explains that movies generally cost so much to make that a few wildly successful films have to cover the cost of all the others. For a time, DVD sales brought in enough money to allow the studios some flexibility. Then piracy sent the profit margins way down.
Representatives of the studios met to compare notes and to try to think of a way to get profits back up. What they realized was that more and more of their moviegoing audience lived outside the United States — mainly in Asia. The films that Asian audiences particularly liked were films with lots of stunts, explosions, and especially comic-book characters — but usually only if they’d heard of the actors or of the story the films were based on.
In short, the decision was taken to make not films, but franchises — never-ending series without much plot, dialogue or acting, and no discernible moral or political message.
With its massive population, China is now a huge market for US films. Until 2012, it allowed only 20 American movies inside its borders each year. It now allows 14 more, but only if they are in 3-D or IMAX — preferably both. Western audiences have already grown tired of 3-D, but the Chinese love it. Guess whose drum the studios are now dancing to!
What’s next?
Spielberg says this can’t continue indefinitely. He predicts that the Hollywood film industry will implode when several very expensive movies fail at the same time. After that, or even before, movie theaters will have to vary their pricing. Lucas says seeing a movie may become like seeing a Broadway play; fewer films will be produced, they’ll stay in theaters longer, and ticket prices will be much higher.
Ironically, it was Lucas who created this whole problem by showing Hollywood how to take an individual film — Star Wars — and make money hand over fist with sequels, toys and spin-offs.
Something to keep in mind is that Hollywood isn’t the whole movie industry. Hollywood’s avarice and failure represent a big opportunity for independent and non-US filmmakers. The best directors and actors are already migrating to TV, particularly to the cable channel HBO, where they can make real cinema on a smaller budget for a smaller audience on a smaller screen.
The full 46-minute interview with Lynda Obst, embedded above, is quite fruitful and comes highly recommended.
More on originality in the entertainment industry
- We haven’t learned anything
- The day the Visitors came
- Star Wars: the never-ending story
- The music industry’s men in black
