Disney's movie dominance has a dark side, independent theatre warns
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With antitrust enforcement so weak today, Disney could probably buy theaters. They probably wouldn't. The margins are not very good.
The Marvel Overextended Universe looks tired. Star [Wars|Gate|Trek] has been done to death. Coming up from Disney: another Winnie the Pooh movie, another Wreck-It Ralph movie, another Mary Poppins movie, another Aladdin movie, another Toy Story Movie, another Avengers movie, another Lion King movie, another Frozen movie... Disney used to have an official Crap Sequels Division called Disneytoons, which cranked out Cinderella 2, Lion King 2, Mulan 2, and other direct to the DVD bargain bin products. Disneytoons was supposedly shut down after the Pixar acquisition, but the Disneytoons sequel mania seems to have taken over the company.
They're in a rut in beautiful downtown Burbank.
Of course, this will all be subverted when the sequel comes out, but I can at least enjoy it for now.
I've come to accept the Marvel movies on the basis that they're a giant subsidy program for the industry at large. Talented actors and directors can phone it in and make huge salaries, which enables them to choose an interesting, low budget project next. I'd still rather those low budget movies got even a tenth of the budget that the average Marvel movie does, but oh well.
Like you said, the sequel to Infinity War will probably undo this and be disappointing in comparison, but I'm enjoying what we got.
Also Chris Hemsworth's comic timing is great, he was a real highlight in Ghostbusters too. It reminds me of Ryan Gosling in the Nice Guys, a rare surprise that an actor can do comedy too that you weren't expecting.
As for Marvel baddies, yes, I generally agree with you. Their best baddies have been in the TV shows, namely Wilson Fisk's Kingpin and David Tennant's Kilgrave.
The movies improve on the original in that regard, where Thanos gets the Infinity Gauntlet and murders half the universe just to impress a woman.
Also, considering what happened in the Infinity War arc in the comics, I don't think they could have done otherwise.
Fundamentally if all major conflicts don't revolve around it they are either completely out of its reach or being stupid.
I'm not arguing the Marvel movies are the perfect movies or that they should displace and divert funding from other movies like say Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Dunkirk, or The Big Sick, and maybe 3 of them per year is a bit too much, but c'mon, "sterile as still packaged surgeon gloves"? Marvel's Overhyperbolic Universe?
But where they are not necessarily daring, they are at least challenging the genres they take on. Kevin Feige and co. have found a way in the 2010's to make blockbuster movies that have real heart, story, and messages. They don't hire the Michael Bays of the industry, but the James Gunns, Ryan Cooglers, and Taikas (and whoever is directing Captain Marvel, they're so under the radar that I don't remember their names). Infinity War was truly a spectacle; a roller coaster from beginning to end that gave its fans a new experience and a real punch to the gut. That takes guts. There has never been a movie of that scope & scale, with such a collection of actors, with such an enormous budget -- and it almost entirely focused on the story and character development, and let the big action grow from those two things.
Marvel's made the biggest movie franchise ever, and it's not from tricking audiences. This is what puts people in theater seats. Those of us who like "film" are staying at home to watch, more and more. What they've done sounds really hard to me. It's not apples-to-apples, but would anyone argue that, although strictly pop and mass appeal, the likes of Elvis, MJ, Madonna, and even Lady Gaga don't have their moments of real musicianship?
yesterday's vertical of studio+theaters today is studio+streaming, and thus studios are trying to get streaming while streaming/cable rushing to get studios/content.
What matters is what's underneath the surface. Winter Solder, examined the role of covert operations, the military-industrial complex, and nationalism. Civil War was about the motivations for regulation, patriotism, and even terrorism. Black Panther examined the role of fathers and environment on the black community. Antman satirized the situation of released convicts and the drives of divorced fathers. Spiderman Homecoming took a dive into the lives and drives of teenagers, showing how teenage conflicts were just as meaningful (to teenagers) as the Avengers and Captain America stuff was to adults. Infinity War examined the extremes of authoritarianism and conservationism and the costs of all-out conflict. Wreck-It Ralph was about chasing the American Dream. Each Toy Story movie has examined a different phase of its characters lives over the course of decades, and has explored the topics of inclusion, purpose, death, family, and commercialism.
You say rut? I say that we are in a glorious age of movies...as long as you can look beneath the surface to what the movies are really about.
Yes, they are on the surface summer popcorn fluff movies, but there's plenty of room for that in a society that relentlessly wants to deconstruct and subvert everything good and wholesome about our society.
Yes, but look at the financial results: this strategy is working very well for them. You may bemoan the current state of the movie industry with all the sequels and remakes, but apparently, this is what moviegoers want. They're happy to spend their hard-earned cash on it.
I don't like it either, which is why I haven't seen a movie in theaters in years, but apparently I'm not representative of the general population.
I think They’ll survive and eventually make great movies again.
And while their sequels aren't the best thing in cinema, they are much better than their old straight-to-vhs sequels.
I think they used straight-to-vhs sequels to train their new hires.
Aladdin 1 magic carpet:
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/disney/images/f/f4/Magic...
Aladdin 3:
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/aladdin/images/d/d1/C.A_...
Note, I am not saying American films are the best, I am just saying that film quotas make it easier for mediocre films to be exhibited because they aren’t competing against a full slate of imports. Look at the current French film industry as an example — pretty much crap except for the occasional standout. Although to be fair, the quota system in Korea actually resulted in a pretty vibrant cinema industry, but that seems to be an exception.
They don't need a given series to be a smash investment if they control the actors/actresses/clothing choices/product placements, etc.
The great thing about films like that is that if they do age, they age very well, and there are hundreds of films by auteurs you'd probably enjoy.
AFI Top 100 movies, the Criterion collection, or just going through a director's previous films.
If you liked Dunkirk, have you seen the Band of Brothers TV series?
I highly recommend checking out a film festival if you like seeing original films. Most film festivals only show movies that have yet to be public. There are hundreds of movies a year that are shown at film festivals and never seen again.
If someone would provide a streaming service that cared about video quality, even basic things like compression artifacts, I'd pay more for it.
* Won't You Be My Neighbor?
* Sorry to bother you
* Leave No Trace
* Eight Grade
* The Rider
A film that can combines fun and avant-garde is a rare thing, and it does so brilliantly.
There's a personal positive side for me. I used to watch a lot of movies from more genres, but I haven't enjoyed a lot in the last years besides Marvel and Star Wars, so that's all I watched at the cinema as well. Would prefer they didn't dominate the market and act like assholes, but at least I have some movies I like...
- Time Warner owns Warner Bros Pictures, DC Films, New Line Cinema, CNN, etc, etc.
- Comcast owns Universal Pictures, DreamWorks, Working Title Films, NBC, etc, etc.
Disney is actually behind Comcast in revenue. And of course Disney also got in on the whole 'buy a news company' agenda - they own ABC. This practice of these mega corporations merging and acquiring ever larger shares of the entire media (and news) industry is a large part of the reason that they are in the state that they are.
- List of Time Warner Assets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_Warner...
- List of Comcast Assets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_Comcas...
- List of Disney Assets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_Disney
Those lists should not be viewed as all encompassing.
Media and news is just media; news has always been part of the media industry.
By contrast, the fact that the news is in large part quite literally just a branch of these huge corporate conglomerates is certainly something that I think does matter. In many cases the interests of these corporate conglomerates and the average person can come into conflict, yet the average person then goes and consumes their information from the conglomerate. That's not really a great system.
Is it another battle for the attention of the consumer?
Why, exactly I'm not sure ... because they're worried they'll themselves be taken over, if not?
I was not trying to say Time Warner etc are less focused on hypercapitalism, market share and so on. It feels less winner-takes-it-all.
Disney kills the possibility of companies and individuals creating stories of the cultural content of their own youth.
Do you like "Monkey Island"? Copyright doesn't allow you to create your own content. (And I know that it is also owned by Disney)
Children grow with 100-year-old stories not because they are better or more relevant, but because it is the only legacy that they receive.
The people that got Pinocchio, Alice in Wonderland, The Wizzard of Oz, and other stories for free are the ones that allowed the next generation to be stolen of that privilege.
Copyright is designed so anyone that cares and will pay for content, is long dead before making anything public domain.
While the stories from the EU were of varying quality, at least they were interesting. These Disney sequels are so predictable and uninteresting it's not even funny.
Fortunately, each of us gets to pick their own canon. For me, it will always be books by Timothy Zahn, and Disney can't do anything at all to the physical copies that I have on my shelf.
Which by itself is fine, I guess, but there wasn't any depth in it beyond the effects' wow factor.
Until a little green man call a lightning bolt on it ;).
I deeply hate all this shitty culture: cinema theatres in shopping malls, popcorn, DVDs, bluerays, MPAAs, bearded actors' snouts all looking the same, posters all looking the same, obsession with rotten 50s scifi setting ad nauseam, sequels, prequels, triquels.
"Not only do we have to play it for four weeks straight, we have to play it four times a day," said Roper, adding that with only one screen available, it would be "very difficult" to play a single movie for a month without losing money due to lack of audience.
Sounds to me like the kind of business practices that is getting Google sued by the EU, and despite their necessarily being different rules for monopoly, the above is a case of applying blanket rules for a 50-screen cinema complex as for a single-screen independent cinema because Disney doesn't need to zoom in to that level of detail. Fine lines. The law is an ass.
Similar situation for a Disney-exclusive streaming service. That'd be similar to Disney buying up a chain of cinemas and only showing their <s>films</s> movies in those cinemas.
The flipside is that independent cinema's should make these sorts of anti-competitive behaviours known to their customers: "Sorry, we can't show Star Wars: The Last Jedi because Disney has enforced conditions that we, as a small, independent cinema, can't comply with whilst remaining profitable. We do, however, recommend the following great movies that we have the freedom to screen at our discretion..."
The aggregator doesn’t care, it’s not their problem, in fact the only way it becomes the aggregator’s problem is when the companies who use the aggregator as part of their sales funnel, that means big movie studios pulling advertising revenue from aggregators that don’t do what they like.
If the cinema can get enough “organic traffic” then the rules are different but the majority of cinemas these days other than specialists, like Arthouse or foreign film focused theatres, seem increasingly beholden to the aggregator driven customers. But I’m not an industry expert so I could be wrong.
And the vast majority of people have stopped reading.
As a matter of fact, they didn't even begin reading. Because they looked up showtimes for what they wanted to see elsewhere and went to a theater that is showing what they want to see.
Here's the deep, dark secret you are ignoring: No one cares. And that's why the studios can pull these tactics. They have the product that people want. If a theater doesn't show it, the customer will just go to a theater that does. They don't want to see "a movie", they want to see "The Last Jedi".
John Roper is general manager of the Phoenix Theatre in Fort Nelson, which is home to about 4,000 people.
In other words: Blah blah unrealistic idealistic blah blah. But it makes me feel better.
I mean, Disney does have the power in this regard. They're the ones with the product. Theaters are just technically middle-men in this regard.
I have read the comics. The stories are better. But to maintain a big corporation, stories need to be dumbed down to appeal to as many people as possible.
Everybody gets to see a good movie, but nobody gets to see the movie they would like the best.
> It’s possible that Disney is the only reason Star Wars is back too.
Disney and extended copyright is the reason you don't see more Star Wars content. If Star Wars copyright had expired, you will see a lot more content about that fictional universe.
Look for "Alice in Wonderland" and you will find card games, video games, reeditions, new interpretations in comic, film, and books (https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/27554.Best_Retellings_of...)... Because it is part of the public culture.
Star Wars is part of a lot of people youth. If Star Wars was free to use it will have one hundred times more content than an old book, even a very famous one, like "Alice in Wonderland".
Disney has its own negative word to describe how negative is that impact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyfication
Disney does good movies, indeed. But it doesn't mean that it is the best option to do so.
When Disney acquired LucasFilms my first thought was that they will probably kill the Star Wars Extended Universe and in a sense they did. There was a tremendous amount of Star Wars comics from Dark Horse during the 90s and 00s that built upon the whole Star Wars mythology. The "Old Republic" series (including the games) is probably the most enjoyable Star Wars story I've ever encountered but alas everything was rendered non-canon when Disney worked their magic. Now everything Star Wars revolves around the original chronology rehashing the same things over and over again in a "panem et circences" manner with no hope of seeing any new stories of any kind.
It's a shame
Star Wars's copyright would have only expired if we were still under copyright law from before 1909. And even then, that would technically be only for the first movie. So the characters from that movie could be used, but not any characters in the later movies. You could have Han Solo, but not Lando. Obi-Wan, but not Yoda, etc.
And you'd likely also have to deal with trademark issues, which are separate from copyright.
And there is still plenty of Star Wars content out there and being made.
Copyright is as anti-capitalism as it gets. Copyright in its actual expression is part of corporativism. "Corporatism is the organization of a society by corporate groups and agricultural, labour, military or scientific syndicates and guilds on the basis of their common interests."
Copyright was extended to benefit a special interest group. It has nothing to do with improving market efficiency. If any, it damages market efficiency introducing an artificial monopoly enforced by the state.
(Fixing Copyright: Is Copyright A Part Of Free Market Capitalism?) https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121204/02422821219/fixin...
This is exactly the kind of movies you would expect to be created by a vast entertainment conglomerate that is too big to fail.
The industry is greatly in need of a shake up.
I didn't see any of the Star Wars movies until I was in my twenties, and I think the new movies are absolutely fine. Nothing earth shattering, but neither were the originals.
And it's unfortunate because what they seem to object to is taking risks with the material. They only want the EU on screen, nothing else. I'm as old as the franchise and I want to see something new done with the universe. Don't pander to the old guard, challenge them and undermine their expectations.
It's a big problem with Star Trek. It uses up all the oxygen available for the genre and so we get more Star Trek, even to the point where Spock crosses universes on a regular basis.
Both studios used to be owned by the same company, but they split a few years ago, around the time Enterprise was ending its run on TV. A rumored merger of CBS and Paramount vis-a-vi the Viacom merger would have reunited the rights, but it looks like that is permanently off the table (see the Redstone litigation).
Guardians of the Galaxy was a surprise, though, but even that was a rebuild of an existing property.
There are certainly plotting issues, like the entire detour to the gambling planet. But there aren't any major plot holes. (The hyperdrive kamikaze attack is brought up as a big one--but closer examination shows why it isn't a plot problem and why hyperdrive torpedoes aren't a thing in SW. The attack actually fails to destroy its target--it merely slices through it. It only succeeds in causing any sort of meaningful damage because the NR's ship is so massive, which rules it out as a weapon of general use.)
[0]https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-of-the-plot-holes-in-the-...
[1]https://uproxx.com/movies/what-was-lukes-plan-star-wars-retu...
Face it, none of the Star Wars movies are particularly well written.
I'd love an EmpireDidNothingWrong movie or two.
I know personally that I see just about every Marvel movie in theaters, but for any no-big-name movie, I wait until I can see it on Netflix or just never see it at all. I cannot complain without being a hypocrite.
In The Third Wave he provides a historical context and background for the evolution of technology and it's impact on society; In Future Shock he talks about the growing pains as technology enables the individual to do things the group (government, education, business) could only do before; In Powershift he discusses the shift in power from those at the top to the individual; In Revolutionary Wealth he discusses the new producer-consumer business models.
If you look at social media and businesses such as YouTube, Kickstarter and Patreon they are the future, and traditional businesses can only survive by embracing and capitalizing on their value to these new models, or by clinging to the old models as they die off which means Disney buying up as much content as possible as distribution costs drop and channels approach infinity. They are trying to lock up as much popular content as they can for the built in audience and brand because they are a goliath that can't compete with an army of Davids.
This has all happened before, all you have to do is look at the history of print, live performances, radio, television, cable, even web portals. It's a predictable cycle of growth and consolidation with an existing system as it spawns new systems independent of but predicated upon the systems that came before it. Marshall McLuhan spoke a lot about such things as well as Neil Postman.
Tropes get recycled, new genres come and go, are rediscovered, and then fade. Formula has always been important in cranking out the volume of productions. The odds are stacked against any one movie being a success, either critically or financially. Who would have thought that Spielberg would follow up Jurassic Park with such a stinker?
The studio system was no ideal world; actors were stuck in their contracts and had horrible bargaining power. Censorship was the norm, writers were not given much leeway. Today's movie industry is far healthier, with more outlets, more customers, and more opportunities.
The problem today isn't on the distribution side, but on the production side. Creating a movie is just so expensive. Same problem facing the video game industry. Think you can create a movie for $4M? That's the inflation adjusted budget for American Graffiti. Or Star Wars at $47M. Not a chance. The FX alone would probably cost that. Rogue One was over $200M...
Despite my love for movie theatres and the feel good sensation they used to provide me in the past, they have moved away from this and the experience has become less enjoyable than an actual home watch. The endless amount of brainwashing commercials prior to the actual movie when going to the theatre is only one of the problems. The lack of choice in movies is another.
One can hope that theatres will first become extinct because of streaming platforms coming up, then will get reborn as proper theatre with a renewed purpose of showing movies rather than brainwashing people with commercials, force-feeding them that Deutsche Bank is a great bank for their next mortgage, and having them waste their money on 10 EUR nachos/soda bundles, etc...
Theatres that just elect to follow the requirements lose money if they are small markets. Theaters that refuse the requirements also lose money. Consumers dont get to make the choice, and suffer only variations of the consequences. (I may be annoyed that nothing else is showing, or I may be annoyed that I have to go to another theater to see what I want, but DISNEY isnt likely to be impacted by how my theaters decision impacts me.
What is the proper response here? And not just here...if Pepsi and Coke both incentivise exclusive contracts, they aren't the ones to suffer if my favorite restaurant goes with the one I prefer least. Etc.