Big-ticket movie franchises are failing lately. Have audiences gotten tired of them? Or are franchise movies just sucking all the oxygen out of the room?
The movie business is in transition and has been for some time. Even before the pandemic, attendance at movie theaters was waning, as big-screen televisions and home theaters drew away more and more viewers. Why go to a theater, pay tens of dollars apiece for admission and popcorn, only to have some idiot sit in front of you talking on his cell phone the whole time?
In the last few decades, the movie business has morphed away from general audiences and towards young people. Young people - under age 30 - are the target audience for explosion movies and franchise pictures. Movie theaters have tried to attract older audiences with various promotions. For example, a theater in Florida was simulcasting the Metropolitan Opera. It was nice, but the multiplex theater next door was playing Ford v. Ferrari, and the sound was coming right through the thin walls. I enjoyed the Ford movie (on television, later) but it was jarring to hear car crashes during Madam Butterfly - to say the least!
Plus, the de-luxe recliner chair, while comfortable, had been sat in by a sweaty "incel" IT guy before me. So that was kind of gross. Then the pandemic hit and I haven't been back, and the theater doesn't care, because old people don't go to movies. Movies are aimed at young people, so old people don't go, and thus they aim movies at young people - it forms a perfect loop.
Recently, there have been a number of articles online questioning the future of some of these movie "franchises" - Star Wars, the Marvel and DC "Universes" the Fast-and-the-Furious, and so on and so forth. Of course, the granddaddy of franchise movies has to be James Bond, which went on for decades, nearly died out, and then was brought back to life in the new franchise era. We are destined to watch Bond films in perpetuity.
Or are we? At what point does the entire Bond paradigm no longer make sense, particularly in a post-Brexit world where the significance of British Intelligence is so much more diminished. As Blofeldt said in Diamonds are Forever, "your little island hasn't even been threatened!" Even Cubby Broccoli knew that the entire premise of the movie series was laughable. The UK simply doesn't matter anymore. Not to Russia, not to China, not to the US, not to Europe. The days of the Empire are over and done, period.
Recently, there have been ripples in the movie multiverse as some of these franchise movies haven't done as well as expected, and others were cancelled in mid-production "for a tax write-off." I wrote about that phrase before and how poor people and blue collar workers think that somehow losing money is a way to make money. At GM and UTC, I would hear the hourly drones repeat this, after some spectacular expensive project failed. "They'll take a tax-write off and still make money!" they would say, as if to excuse their own malfeasance (laziness, poor quality, restrictive union work rules, obscene union wages - at the time).
The reality is, you can't make money from a write-off, but you might ameliorate losses, I guess. I suppose if you have $50 Million into production of an explosion movie and it really looks like it will suck badly, you might take that $50M write-off as opposed to finishing the project and tying up even more capital ($100M), only to lose $25M at the box-office. But no, unlike The Producers, you don't make more money from a flop than a hit. And no, you don't make money by pulling the plug on a movie project after throwing millions of dollars at it. And no, car companies don't make cars and then immediately crush them "to keep the economy going." Stop believing in poverty stories!
But it makes me wonder whether there is a sea change in the movie business. The "tent pole" franchises have taken over Hollywood to the point where "movies" consist of nothing else. Something has to give. Not every movie has to be a tent-pole franchise! Nor can it be. You can't just keep on making middle-earth or sci-fi or comic-book movies forever. Eventually, people get bored and you have to find something new. What that "new" is, is the million-dollar question!
The weird thing about movies is they never make money. In Hollywood, you never want a "percentage of the net" as studios will always show a net loss on a picture by factoring in the losses from other pictures and overhead. Even a percentage of the gross is suspect - which is why mega-stars demand flat fees in the millions - often forcing the picture in to the red.
Even if a picture makes back its costs, it still loses money. Distribution fees often exceed production costs - it can cost more to promote a film than it does to make it - which makes no sense to me. Adding to the problem is that these Explosion Movies cost so much to make in the first place - with the credits going on for page after page, listing the guys and gals who did "hair effects" in CGI. It would cost less to just hand-draw this crap as animation!
The future of movies isn't in theaters. Televisions get bigger and bigger and cheaper and cheaper. Only the stupidest of rednecks or ghetto-dwellers shells out (or steals) thousands of dollars to have the latest eight-foot screen, when, by next time this year, the same screen will be $400 on sale and the ten-foot screen the new ideal. Over time, though, people will catch on. I have straight friends who ask me about sound bars and I always tell them to get one with a subwoofer (they don't). With a basic screen of four feet or more and a subwoofer sound bar, you have a theater experience - no need to drive to a cinema and pay top dollar for the new releases and deal with truculent teenagers with their cell phones and shitty attitudes.
The problem is, of course, that no one wants to pay for video in the home. Someone will pay $12 for a theater ticket (some will, I won't) but balk at an all-you-can-eat monthly premium of $12 for a streaming service. Problem is, most are watching on their stupid phones. It just isn't the same. So they don't see the value.
Streaming services are responding by reducing content, which I guess cuts their licensing costs, but does little to make the services more attractive. It is akin to the early years of the automobile or computer industries - so many brands and a shakeout in the works. Maybe a few of these streaming services need to go away or cross-licensing needs to become more common. Maybe it will be cheaper for a studio to just license their content to a low-cost streaming service than to run a service on their own.
Disney, are you listening? Because your streaming engine is one of the worst! Defaulting to 4K resolution (1 GB per hour!) is just stupid. Just license your content to Netflix and let them deal with the consumer end and cash those royalty checks. So much easier than re-inventing the wheel. YouTube has a super streaming engine as well. Check it out sometime. Makes Disney+ look like an Atari computer from 1982.
But beyond that, maybe the franchise model has to end - they all have to end sometime. Eventually, it is mathematically certain that if franchise movies dominate the scene, they will snuff out any new content or new ideas. It is one reason "independent" filmmakers are the real engine that drives Hollywood - with new ideas and low costs. The problem is, of course, that Hollywood tries to buy up these small studios and then make them corporate. Or worse yet, like Hallmark Cards creating "Shoe-Box Greetings" as a "Tiny Division of Hallmark" the studios try to create their own "independent" wings which have all the authenticity of a manufactured "micro-brew" dreamed up in the corporate headquarters of Anheuser-Bush or Miller SAB. Fake, fake, fake! And consumers see right through it, too.
Of course, no fears - the market will eventually sort this out, but not before a few studio executives get their golden parachutes and a few more comic-book explosion movies bomb at the box office. Eventually, the studios will have to go where the audience goes - whatever that may be. And maybe that will be more comic book or explosion movies.
Or maybe not. Maybe they will find a new direction to go in - one based less on CGI (and AI) and based more on storytelling the old-fashioned way.
Nah! That would never work!
