The Day the Movies Died, "Top Gun" Review, and Popcorn Shortage, Netflix, Tarantino Podcast News
Weekly Reel, June 6
The following essay argued something that I continually point out to this day. You may be familiar with it if you’ve been reading often.
I didn’t expect this issue to be so Top Gun themed, yet here we are. While the streaming wars are taking up all the oxygen in the room, it would be worthwhile to see what’s changed in the medium-to-long-term, why studios are on the defensive. Author and journalist Mark Harris wrote the following essay for GQ over ten years ago, the Winter after Inception impressed critics and dominated the Summer box office. At the time it was a minor, to some scandalous, think piece designed to appeal to a smaller slice of Hollywood than its target. Reading it again today, it’s as if the piece was released last week, on the heels of the new Top Gun: Maverick release. It fits somewhere between prescient and Nostradamus.
It began in Winter 2011. As Harris judged it, some journalists and critics perceived the windfall in the opposite direction that Inception indicated: a strong, original story from a popular director starring Oscar winners with a massive budget. The $800 million gross justified the risk, but that was the exception to the new Hollywood rule. As Inception was about to be released, the major studios justified it in several ways; Warner Bros. was appeasing Christopher Nolan for his Batman trilogy, it was too smart for the audience, Nolan is over-hyped, or, after it grossed a smaller amount than expected on opening weekend, that all the Nolan fans saw it early and it’ll do poorly thereafter.
Inception went on to be a top ten box office hit for eleven weeks in peak Summer-moviegoing time, showing the power of word-of-mouth in person and online. The tepid buzz from studios after that became: “Huh. Well, you never know.”
"Huh. Well, you never know" is an admission that, put simply, things have never been worse.
It has always been disheartening when good movies flop; it gives endless comfort to those who would rather not have to try to make them and can happily take cover behind a shield labeled "The people have spoken." But it's really bad news when the industry essentially rejects a success, when a movie that should have spawned two dozen taste-based gambles on passion projects is instead greeted as an unanswerable anomaly. That kind of thinking is why Hollywood studio filmmaking, as 2010 came to its end, was at an all-time low—by which I don't mean that there are fewer really good movies than ever before (last year had its share, and so will 2011) but that it has never been harder for an intelligent, moderately budgeted, original movie aimed at adults to get onto movie screens nationwide.
Tenet certainly received the “The people have spoken” treatment after Warner Bros. botched its release—though I wouldn’t go as far as arguing that it was a good movie that flopped. But if it had done well financially, it would have entered that awkward stage of whether Warner Bros. should keep giving Nolan blank checks. Luckily for both parties, Warner Bros. upset all their filmmakers by releasing all films in theaters and on HBO Max the same day, which sent Nolan to other studios.
Looking at the final line again, that it’s harder for smart, mid-budget films to get theatrical releases, it shows how much of a no-brainer it was for the rise of streaming services to pick up the slack. Netflix was the first to strike by getting David Fincher early, then Prime Video started cornering the indie, auteur market, and by now most prestige filmmakers have made mid-budget films at streaming services. (Nobody will ever get film supremacists Nolan or Tarantino at any price.)
Now with this:
With that in mind, let's look ahead to what's on the menu for this year: four adaptations of comic books. One prequel to an adaptation of a comic book. One sequel to a sequel to a movie based on a toy. One sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a movie based on an amusement-park ride. One prequel to a remake. Two sequels to cartoons. One sequel to a comedy. An adaptation of a children's book. An adaptation of a Saturday-morning cartoon. One sequel with a 4 in the title. Two sequels with a 5 in the title. One sequel that, if it were inclined to use numbers, would have to have a 7 1/2 in the title.
This was 2011. It could have also been 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, or this year. It literally hasn’t changed. But now, many of these sequels and adaptations are made as direct-to-streaming series to boost subscription numbers, which is now more important than box office numbers.
Finally, to incorporate this piece into the current era full-circle:
How did hollywood get here? There's no overarching theory, no readily identifiable villain, no single moment to which the current combination of caution, despair, and underachievement that defines studio thinking can be traced. But let's pick one anyway: Top Gun.
It's now a movie-history commonplace that the late-'60s-to-mid-'70s creative resurgence of American moviemaking—the Coppola-Altman-Penn-Nichols-Bogdanovich-Ashby decade—was cut short by two movies, Jaws in 1975 and Star Wars in 1977, that lit the fuse for the summer-blockbuster era. But good summer blockbusters never hurt anyone, and in the decade that followed, the notion of "summer movie season" entered the pop-culture lexicon, but the definition of "summer movie" was far more diverse than it is today. The label could encompass a science fiction film as hushed and somber as Alien, a two-and-a-half-hour horror movie like The Shining, a directorial vision as singular as Blade Runner, an adult film noir like Body Heat, a small-scale (yes, it was) movie like E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, a frankly erotic romantic drama like An Officer and a Gentleman. Sex was okay—so was an R rating. Adults were treated as adults rather than as overgrown children hell-bent on enshrining their own arrested development.
Can you remember the last film you’ve seen in theaters that catered to someone with the emotional capacity of an adult? Even quiet hits like Everything Everywhere All At Once requires a demographic that leans young.
Then came Top Gun. The man calling the shots may have been Tony Scott, but the film's real auteurs were producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, two men who pioneered the "high-concept" blockbuster—films for which the trailer or even the tagline told the story instantly. At their most basic, their movies weren't movies; they were pure product—stitched-together amalgams of amphetamine action beats, star casting, music videos, and a diamond-hard laminate of technological adrenaline all designed to distract you from their lack of internal coherence, narrative credibility, or recognizable human qualities. They were rails of celluloid cocaine with only one goal: the transient heightening of sensation.
Well said. This is the “bigloud” film.
Top Gun landed directly in the cortes [sic] of a generation of young moviegoers whose attention spans and narrative tastes were already being recalibrated by MTV and video games. That generation of 16-to-24-year-olds—the guys who felt the rush of Top Gun because it was custom-built to excite them—is now in its forties, exactly the age of many mid- and upper-midrange studio executives. And increasingly, it is their taste, their appetite, and the aesthetic of their late-'80s post-adolescence that is shaping moviemaking. Which may be a brutally unfair generalization, but also leads to a legitimate question: Who would you rather have in charge—someone whose definition of a classic is Jaws or someone whose definition of a classic is Top Gun?
Most commentators and critics entirely avoid this aspect. Even today, Millennials and Gen Z would approach Jaws with boredom and Top Gun with adrenalized fist-pumps—as evidenced by the reaction to Top Gun: Maverick. These executives mentioned are now in their fifties, with more influence as studio executives, so it was inevitable that Top Gun would get facelift around the same time as Tom Cruise.
The Top Gun era sent the ambitions of those who wanted to break into the biz spiraling in a new direction. Fifteen years earlier, scores of young people headed to film schools to become directors. With the advent of the Reagan years, a more bottom-line-oriented cadre of would-be studio players was born, with an MBA as the new Hollywood calling card. The Top Gun era shifted that paradigm again—this time toward marketing. Which was only natural: If movies were now seen as packages, then the new kings of the business would be marketers, who could make the wrapping on that package look spectacular even if the contents were deficient.
Disney used this strategy to great effect with Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm in the decade since Harris’s piece. Former CEO Bob Iger revealed the basic strategy behind their film production line in this Forbes piece. Although Ratatouille made more money and received better critical reviews than Cars, the latter sold more toys. Therefore, Cars received the franchise treatment—sequels, spinoffs, theme park rides, more merchandise. A pure marketing strategy that sold more toys and theme park tickets than the films made at the box office.
With so much money at stake, the marketer's voice at the studio table is now pivotal from the day a studio decides whether to make a movie—and usually what that voice expresses is trepidation. Their first question is not "Will the movie be good?" but "Can it be sold?" And by "sold," what they mean is "sold on the first weekend." Good movies aimed at adults tend to make their money more slowly than kid stuff, and they're helped by good reviews and word of mouth, which, from a marketing standpoint, are impossible to engineer. That's one reason studios would rather spend $100 million on a franchise film than a fraction of that on an original idea.
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Such an unrelenting focus on the sell rather than the goods may be why so many of the dispiritingly awful movies that studios throw at us look as if they were planned from the poster backward rather than from the good idea forward. Marketers revere the idea of brands, because a brand means that somebody, somewhere, once bought the thing they're now trying to sell…Pirates of the Caribbean is a brand because it was a ride. Harry Potter is a brand because it was a series of books. Jonah Hex is a brand because it was a comic book. (Here lies one fallacy of putting marketers in charge of everything: Sometimes they forget to ask if it's a good brand.) Sequels are brands. Remakes are brands. For a good long stretch, movie stars were considered brands; this was the era in which magazines like Premiere attempted to quantify the waxing or waning clout of actors and actresses from year to year because, to the industry, having the right star seemed to be the ultimate hedge against failure.
More on the “movie stars were considered brands” in the following section’s review.
But after three or four hundred cases in which that didn't prove out, Hollywood's obsession with star power has started to erode. In the last several years, a new rule of operation has taken over: The movie itself has to be the brand. And because a brand is, by definition, familiar, a brand is also, by definition, not original. The fear of nonbranded movies can occasionally approach the ridiculous, as it did in 2006 when Martin Scorsese's The Departed was widely viewed within the industry as a "surprise" hit, primarily because of its R rating and unfamiliar source material. It may not have been a brand, but, says its producer Graham King, "Risky? With the guy I think is the greatest living director and Nicholson, Matt Damon, Wahlberg, and Leo? If you're at a studio and you can't market that movie, then you shouldn't be in business."
Is anybody surprised that Scorsese went to Netflix to make his $225 million gangster epic? (Although I think he should have gone to Amazon Studios, which has that kind of money and caters more to auteurs. Especially now with Netflix singling this movie out for its new strategy of not funding “vanity” projects.)
The money-making audience, which showed up BIG for No Way Home:
That leaves one quadrant—men under 25—at whom the majority of studio movies are aimed, the thinking being that they'll eat just about anything that's put in front of them as long as it's spiked with the proper set of stimulants. That's why, when you look at the genres that currently dominate Hollywood—action, raunchy comedy, game/toy/ride/comic-book adaptations, horror, and, to add an extra jolt of Red Bull to all of the preceding categories, 3-D—they're all aimed at the same ADD-addled, short-term-memory-lacking, easily excitable testosterone junkie. In a world dominated by marketing, it was inevitable that the single quadrant that would come to matter most is the quadrant that's most willing to buy product even if it's mediocre.
Top Gun: Maverick did something extraordinary: it retained its ADD-addled, short-term-memory-lacking, easily excitable testosterone junkie audience from Top Gun’s 1986 release while adding all the ADD-addled, short-term-memory-lacking, easily excitable testosterone junkies that have come since.
[The] good news is that the four-quadrant theory of marketing may now be eroding. The bad news is that it's giving way to something worse—a new classification that encompasses all ages and both genders: the "I won't grow up" demographic. As recently as 1993, three kid-oriented genres—animated movies, movies based on comic books, and movies based on children's books—represented a relatively small percentage of the overall film marketplace; that year they grossed about $400 million combined (thanks mostly to Mrs. Doubtfire) and owned just a single spot in the year's top ten. In 2010, those same three genres took in more than $3 billion and by December represented eight of the year's top nine grossers.
Let me posit something: That's bad. We can all acknowledge that the world of American movies is an infinitely richer place because of Pixar and that the very best comic-book movies, from Iron Man to The Dark Knight, are pretty terrific, but the degree to which children's genres have colonized the entire movie industry goes beyond overkill. More often than not, these collectively infantilizing movies are breeding an audience—not to mention a generation of future filmmakers and studio [executives]—who will grow up believing that movies aimed at adults should be considered a peculiar and antique art. Like books. Or plays.
And here it is, we’ve been fully colonized.
So cable has become the custodian of the "good" niche; entities like HBO, Showtime, and AMC have found a business model with which they can satisfy a deep public appetite for long-form drama. Their original series don't need to attract huge audiences; and as a result, any number of ambitious writers, directors, and producers who might long ago have pitched their best stuff to studios now turn to the small screen, because one thing nobody in cable television will ever say to them is "We don't tell stories anymore."
And now streaming services, the blend between cable services and movie studios. But with Netflix’s latest shakeup, the winds could be changing direction again. They indicated a decrease in high-budgeted and low-budgeted films to corner the mid-budget, targeted film. We’ll see.
The call to action:
Which brings us to the embarrassing part. Blaming the studios for everything lets another culprit off too easily: us. We can complain until we're hoarse that Hollywood abandoned us by ceasing to make the kinds of movies we want to see, but it's just as true that we abandoned Hollywood. Studios make movies for people who go to the movies, and the fact is, we don't go anymore—and by we, I mean the complaining class, of which, if you've read this far, you are absolutely a member. We stay home, and we do it for countless reasons: A trip to the multiplex means paying for parking, a babysitter, and overpriced unhealthy food in order to be trapped in a room with people who refuse to pay for a babysitter, as well as psychos, talkers, line repeaters, texters, cell-phone users, and bedbugs. We can see the movie later, and "later" is pretty soon—on a customized home-theater system or, forget that, just a nice big wide-screen TV, via Netflix, or Amazon streaming, or on-demand, or iPad. The urgency of seeing movies the way they're presumably intended to be seen has given way to the primacy of privacy and the security of knowing that there's really almost no risk of missing a movie you want to see and never having another opportunity to see it. Put simply, we'd rather stay home, and movies are made for people who'd rather go out.
There will always be a moviegoing audience, no matter how amazing home viewing becomes, but it’s no surprise that newly built movie theaters are resembling your living room’s reclining chairs and larger, comfier arm rests more and more.
My hot take on Top Gun: Maverick can be found on Letterboxd, which I wrote in a frenzy that night I saw it. My opinion hasn’t changed.
Cruise is the ageing lion devouring cubs, waiting to be taken off by the younger males of another pride, or, the more likely outcome, to be taken off by old-age death. It’s the anxiety of a declining military power—wrongly perceived in my opinion. Why would Americans feel like a declining power while it still has global military bases and a never-declining Pentagon budget? The anxiety of Baby Boomer decline, who are now unwelcomingly past their prime, seems the likelier target. Cruise was the baby-faced Boomer continually showing through Mission Impossible and others that this generation has an enduring character, facelifts and Scientology and all.
As the piece above indicates, the plot is easily ignored, the convenient come-down between thriller set pieces, a distraction at best. The characters are given the lowest possible amount of details. With a single hair out of place, the caricatures would wither. But it learned from other reboots how much it should rely on bringing back the past (Val Kilmer), and what isn’t necessary (Kelly McGillis and Meg Ryan). Otherwise we’d have another Star Wars: The Force Awakens mess.
The enemies are a jumbled, shadowy mess. What’s supposed to allude to vague North Korea baddies building nukes underground against international orders is really just an even vaguer allusion to increasing Chinese power. Why would the US Navy waste their best pilots on NK? Would the Democratic People’s Republic have advanced (what’s with this fifth generation nonsense?) fighter planes that make the great Maverick’s boots shake? Only China and the US have those. It’s still cute to see military men scared of a power with half as many fighter jets and three times as many aircraft carriers. The filmmakers carefully hid all Chinese references to avoid the inevitable clash with China’s censors, but that created a jingoism without a target. A paranoid resilience against its own notions of strength. The biggest enemy in the film is a pentagon budget cut.
Top Gun isn’t a franchise, but Cruise is. The same goes for Mission Impossible: have you heard anybody talk about these films not reference the fact that Cruise does all his own stunts? (Though the actors were sitting in the cockpits for Top Gun: Maverick, none of them, including Cruise, were allowed to touch the controls. They were, ironically, just drones.) They didn’t even bother calling this Top Gun 2—no, just Maverick will do. There are things Cruise can do that others can’t: doing stunts while making $20 million per film, getting Gen X and Boomers back to theaters through vicarious Viagra trips, and being Tom Cruise. You try doing any of these. In this film especially, Cruise brandishes the indistinguishable trademark of American power: restraints and rules are unnecessary, slow, and therefore deadly.
It’s true that when the economy slumps, franchises are more potent (Star Wars post-stagflation seventies, Marvel post-2008). Now we have post-Covid Spider-Man for boys and Top Gun: Maverick for older boys.
News:
Popcorn and other concessions are in short supply at movie theaters because of inflation, low labor numbers, and supply chain disruptions. Even popcorn containers are in short supply, so other plastic and metal containers are being used. Popcorn farmers will likely switch to the more lucrative soybean, which will further reduce the supply.
Netflix is flipping its quantity > quality strategy to a more disciplined quality > quantity strategy after its record quarter loss and staff layoffs. This comes as a surprise considering they were the industry leaders in throwing a ton of shit against the wall to see what keeps people subscribed.
Tarantino is launching a podcast, Video Archives, based on a Manhattan Beach video rental store with that name he used to work. He and co-host Roger Avary (Oscar-winning co-writer for Pulp Fiction) will watch an original VHS from Video Archives and discuss them.
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