Hollywood’s Ugly Mutation
The genetic winds of change have swept through Tinsel Town’s DNA, and Hollywood is mutating into a two headed monster. One head, an artist driven, organic being that lives on a diet of quality cinema, is increasingly shrinking in the shadow of the other–a studio born, over-inflated creature of the night that doesn’t survive on mere movies alone. It now craves only entire franchises and has begun to devour them at a catastrophic rate. Its blood thirst only swells with each new victim, and like Dracula himself, its body can no longer survive without it.
It’s hard to pinpoint when exactly this mutation may have started. Through the 60’s and 70’s, James Bond and Planet of the Apes proved that a franchise can carry a studio, but in the late 70’s and early 80’s the franchise concept began to really “catch hold” with Star Wars, Star Trek, Superman and Rocky leading the pack. During the same period, Jaws, Alien, Indiana Jones and Rambo were born. Despite even these successful sagas, it was still different back then, and whether conscious of the approach or not, a movie had to prove itself worthy of a Hollywood sequel. No one but George Lucas knew Star Wars would be so monumental, and for sure the studio wasn’t prepared to activate the second film before analyzing the box office numbers of the first. In fact, in an unprecedented maneuver to retain control over his franchise, George Lucas personally borrowed $33 million to finance The Empire Strikes Back. By beating major motion picture studios to the punch, Lucas may have unintentionally planted the virus that led to our current disease–Acquired Copycat Tendency Syndrome.
In the late 80’s and 90’s, Hollywood continued to simultaneously expand its sequel game, while launching numerous new franchises. Back To The Future, The Terminator, Ghostbusters, Lethal Weapon, Mad Max, Police Academy, Friday the 13th, Halloween, Batman and many more movies wearing sequel colored underwear arose. Back to the Future II and III marked the first time two movies had ever been filmed at the same time, a trend that now continues. It appeared that Executives were half as willing to bank on a new concept as they were to reproduce films from franchises they already owned. Why pay for the rights of a new vision, when we can just reboot-rehash-remake and re-sequel? The disease known as ACTS had now mutated into Re-ACTS.
From the mid 90’s to the present, the disease spread systemically. If a studio was to bank on a franchise, the possibility of a sequel needed to be written into the original script. If original scripts were short in supply, Hollywood need only to move towards proven literary fiction and then comic books. Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter and Twilight were extremely profitable, turnkey opportunities for Hollywood. The stories were in place for multiple anthologies, and the terrible hunger was dangerously overfed–even before the terrible Hunger Games. Re-ACTS had officially caused a giant, overgrown head to sprout from the same body that had previously produced brilliant works of independent thought, and the giant head was now consuming all the food.
Things took an unpredictable turn for the worse, when Marvel Films schooled every little kid on the studio back lot with a string of superhero blockbusters, right before selling to Disney for billions, who in turn had just bought Star Wars. If you’re the other guys like Warner, Fox, Paramount and Universal, what do you do? Well, you have the disease, so you have no choice— you react. Warner Brothers went hard on their own DC comic universe, Fox held on to what few superheroes it had left on loan from Marvel/Disney, and Paramount, who lost the Marvel brand in the Disney deal scrambled to reboot Star Trek, The Terminator, an endless stream of Transformers, and is now planning a new Indiana Jones movie. Remake, reboot, and repeat. That left Universal, who defied odds last year by having its biggest year ever despite not releasing any superhero movies, as the only non-comic affiliated major. I wish I could tell you that Universal concocted a bold strategy to break Hollywood free of its disease at last, but that ain’t how it went down. Universal’s huge ticket sales were due in large part to three movies that earned over a billion dollars each worldwide–Jurassic World, Furious 7, and Minions. Oh, the humanity.
What’s even more appalling to me is that Universal will now move forward with its own brand of “forever” franchise, Dark Universe. It’s already begun. With last years, Dracula:Untold, the studio kicked off its planned cinematic universe featuring stand alone films like The Mummy, The Invisible Man, The Wolfman and Van Helsing which will inevitably crossover. It’s as if some first year intern stood up at an executive board meeting and said, “Don’t we own horror comics?”, and then they gave him a promotion.
I’m not saying I don’t love the great franchises. I adore them, but the difference for me is that the great ones earned it one movie at a time, at very least in the beginning, and were sure to tell great stories first and foremost. If you don’t believe me, ask George Lucas. Marvel has taken over a decade to get where a movie like Captain America: Civil War can be relevant, and now every studio is scrambling to play catch up. What Hollywood doesn’t realize is that they will never catch up, because Disney owns the two runners who started the race eons before the rest. They don’t need to catch up, they need to make a big enough explosion of their own to get Disney to stop and turn around, and they need to do something about that thing growing out of their neck. My ultimate fear is that the art of telling a new, original story will in essence be irrelevant, because it will either not be supported by the mega-industry or will be forcibly anthologized into a forever story. Not all stories are forever, that’s why we all wait for the ending. Worse yet, has the giant head not begun to wonder what the little head might taste like?
'Well, uh, for Paulie, I really want to get him a snow cone machine. You like snow cones, don'tcha?'- Rocky Balboa
