Hollywood's toxic addiction to franchises

What franchises represent, to me, is the new search for continuity. The world is changing faster, relationships are getting more tenuous. Moving around, finding new friends, new places to hang out and eat and drink and be merry; All these things have been enabled by the internet and the sharing economy. I moved to a new town about 3 months ago, I eat out every night and I've eaten at precisely two places twice: A korean joint I like because it's named for Psy's masterpiece, and an indian place a former coworker recommended. The rest of the time, I've been trying new things, searching for the 'perfect' meal, never satisfied. In this search for novelty, something has been lost.

There's a reason why you see so many tumblr handles of the form 'harrypotterlover21' and 'twilightfan32'. People identify with these stories and universes, and find their sense of connection and emotional stability with them. It's no longer specific people that you have a connection with, but a grouping based on a shared interest; perhaps one that belies a mindset?

It ties into, as well, the current trend of TV shows to be long-form entertainment. We want to see characters grow and establish themselves. 1 1/2 hours isn't long enough. 3 hours rarely is. Franchises allow stories to be told iteratively. That's a good thing for movies and art. There's nothing special about the traditional runtime for a film that makes it more artistic; that's just how long humans are willing to sit down and focus on one thing at a time.

In 2014, 12 Years a Slave was #44 at the Box Office, and won the Oscar for Best Picture. In 2013, Argo won and was #22.

I think this represents that "what sells" is no longer the same "the best movies". The OP says good movies are finding it harder to get made. Good stories, good acting, good "art", are being pushed out in favor of "popular".

Not sure anything can or should be done about that. But it's definitely a trend.

People don't pay for actual utility, they pay for expected expected utility.

So franchises are a reasonable solution to this problem: Franchise Ep. 1 was good, so consumers will go to Ep. 2 because they expect the chances are it's at least almost as good, as opposed to taking a ganble on some other thing they've never heard of before. For the studios, it's also a good way to cash in on something that was not an immediate success, but grew a gradual fanbase as well.

Other solutions to this problem include: subscriptions (paying a fixed cost each month for access to a large library in which you don't have to pay an additional cost for each thing you may or may not like), bundles (paying for a group of things that includes at least one or two things you know you like, and using their quality to vouch for the other things in the group), and money-back guarantees (which doesn't work very well for consume once content).

What is the viewing public supposed to do with that information, really? Who knows what I'll be doing with my life. Aside from anything else it demonstrates a remarkable belief that audiences are very far away from getting sick of superhero movies.

The problem here is that the movies that people watch in any great number are sequels. This means that they generate cash. As alluded to above, that's all that hollywood cares about.

There are people that are prepared to take risks, like the wienstien company. However, a failure like the grindhouse (which is a terrible film) meant that they almost disappeared.

Why is that so? think about it in bandwidth terms. Studios release 5 or 6 movies every three months. Each one of those costs up to $100 million each. When a movie is released you have to pay for advertising, promotion, tedious talking head stuff. Then the movie is in theaters for 4-10 weeks. Then later on its punted to rental, and then DVD/blueray.

If a movie doesn't do well in that time, its sunk. gone along with 1/5th of the studios earnings for that quarter. most movies barely break even. Which means a studios business model has to build in a lot of loss.

A TV channel has subscribers. This means that they can take a risk. Even if a show is shit it wont hurt earnings immediately. Plus they have 3-5 blockbusters shows on a week. which means a much faster turn around. However the shit/hit ratio in TV is ironically much higher. (American TV is horrifically bad.) But because its all based on subscribers risks can be taken as one show is such a tiny fraction of the total output.

Disney actually has a Crap Sequels Division, Disneytoons. For decades, they produced direct to VHS/DVD/BD sequels: Cinderalla 2, Mulan 2, etc., which could be found near the checkout in low-end retail stores. When Disney acquired Pixar, Disneytoons was phased out, and a number of designed-for-mediocrity projects cancelled. But it came back to life. Coming soon: Cars 3 and Tinker Bell and the Legend of the NeverBeast.

The only hope for novelty may be another big series in Young Adult books. Not much innovation there right now. The vampire and zombie books continue to come out. (Vampires down, zombies holding steady, based on bookshelf space in stores.) Teen survival stories are big, but they're mostly bad Hunger Games clones at this point. J. K. Rowling did the magical school thing so well that nobody else can compete. Greek mythology seems to have peaked outside the Marvel universe; the endless Percy Jackson trilogy stream is still coming out, but everybody is tired of it. Tom Clancy books are still coming out, even though he's dead and the ghost-writers suck.

As Comics Alliance says, "This is what the next five years of your life looks like."

In the recent Terry Gilliam interview posted on HN, he made the point that mid-level movies are out. You can find financing for the super-huge Spiderman 47s, and you can go indie with a Red One and shoot your own stuff. What you have a really hard time doing is finding 10-20M for a mid-sized niche film.

I'm a movie fan, and I've lost what little respect I've had for Hollywood over the past few years. Too many times I've been sitting in theaters for some nth version of a comic-book movie and thought: really? Is that what the writers and directors really think of my intelligence.

Best thing I know to do is to stop watching them, even if I do love movies. I'll happily go pay to see another Sharknado before I'll pony up for the next 17 versions of whatever the Star Wars franchise has to offer.

This is very strange, both because it assumes that anyone can continue anyone else's work, and because it implies that the "right" to create the "official" sequel to a work of fiction is something that you should be able to buy and sell.

I agree with him that franchises get boring, but he seems to miss the part where I, the movie-goer, stop going to movies and so the studios notice and stop making them and try to make something else. My daughter and I were noting that all the TV shows seemed to be police procedurals with a police officer and a "quirky side kick" of some sort. That concept got run right into the ground. And now all of them are 'Game of Thrones' clones where their is some nominal "set" and within that set are created no fewer than a dozen inter-twined story lines of competition and intrique. And because they want to have a dozen or more story lines, many of them are just plain silly.

My point is that it sucks when something you love moves on from what you love into something new[1]. But it isn't the end of the world, nor is it necessarily the end of an industry. It is just the new, new thing.

[1] My wife laments my music tastes are stuck in the 70's and 80's :-)

The elitism in these sorts of discussions is cringeworthy. I absolutely hate superhero movies, but I'm not their audience. Seriously, people don't whine about teen-audience flicks so why whine about this?

Why do people go to comic book movies today?

1. They like knowing what they're signing up for. As evidence, look at how movie trailers have evolved into Cliff Notes versions of movies over the last few decades.

2. This particular market had been ill-served; so anything catering to this niche was disproportionately rewarded. Comic book fans had long lamented that there were no big budget adaptions of their favorite books.

3. It's easier to make variations on an established template from a production standpoint, and it's easier to obtain financial backing when you can point to prior successes (the "it's like Uber but for Netflix" startup syndrome).

It isn't that comic book movies are creatively bankrupt by definition (nor were The Thin Man movies, and many other franchises over the years). They have a rich well of prior stories to draw on and splash together, and a lot of what Marvel in particular is doing with ongoing narratives is interesting. But they are also racing towards a saturation point which will inevitably result in the collapse of their entire enterprise. They have attracted a lot of good actors, directors and other collaborators; but even with all of that talent they are simply producing too much, too quickly to avoid reaching a point of creative and financial exhaustion.

As others have noted, it's pretty laughable that Marvel and DC have announced slates that run all the way to 2020. They are certainly going to have to cancel or postpone some of those films when audience indifference becomes impossible to ignore. And then like other things that have oversaturated their markets (music / rhythm games), it's going to be a long, dark winter before they get to show their faces in any respect again. I am certain that within the next ten years we'll see articles and interviews talking about how "comic book movies don't sell" and "guys running around in spandex suits are passe".

Meanwhile, if you could approach this stuff in moderation, I think it might work out differently. Make a few comic book movies a year. Make them all distinct from each other. Don't tell the same stories again and again and again (origin stories of characters that have existed for 80 years, for instance). Approach the material from the perspective of telling a story in a new way, rather than rehashing the same story for new money.

Unfortunately, this isn't the way business is done in Hollywood or Silicon Valley or anywhere else. If someone makes money doing something, then thirty other people are going to try to reproduce that success, and many of them may have missed the point of how and why the original succeeded.

The big blockbuster movies, especially the franchise films, are aimed at the global audience because they're making much more money overseas than they're doing domestically. And the studios/distributors want to make money. They don't care about art or cultural meaning. They care about money.

Several years ago, PG posted a YC article called "Kill Hollywood." I wrote a rebuttal with the mocking (and deliberately attention-grabbing) title "Kill Y-Combinator". PG and YC laid out a mission to invent new businesses and platforms that provided ways for content creators, creative types, etc, to not have to deal with the mess that is Hollywood. I replied that while I agree Hollywood is a mess -- it's a permission industry, they're obsessed with rights and are ruthlessly litigious if they sense any infringement -- I felt PG's article went too far. I suggested that all movies aren't the problem, some are, the big dumb franchise ones. I argued there is a ton of great brilliant artistic talent in the industry, but they have a hell of a time getting their work to an audience. The studios and the financiers (usually, nowadays, foreign investors; banks, oil sheiks, etc.) want big international blockbusters (read: franchise repeat hits). The artistic filmmakers/directors/acting talent is getting squeezed out. Why do you think Soderbergh stopped making movies? He got sick of the Hollywood BS. I advocated and still do that Silicon Valley ought to strive to build new platforms that facilitate the good movie content reaching audiences at sufficient scale so that good films have a future and can make a difference. I tried to do this with a startup, and got Silicon Valley money (seed round), but the resistance and loathing of anything M-word (Movie) related in the Valley is brutal. I could not get an A round, and my big seed investors walked away without even giving us a chance (lookin' at you, Google Ventures).

There remains an incredible opportunity for disruptive technology to come in and raise hell and make the moviegoing experience better for consumers, for filmmakers, for studios, and for the exhibitors. The movie theater industry--separate from the studios, I'm talking about the cinemas themselves, which they themselves call "exhibitors"--is appallingly bad and inept at embracing technology to attract larger audiences and keep them coming back. Some small chains like Austin's Alamo Drafthouse get it, and have figured out a way to make their theatres event destinations thanks to clever branding, great curation, great food and drink, and an overwhelming sense of entertainment and belonging. The AMCs of the world on the other hand exist basically to sell you insanely marked-up popcorn/soda/junk food, and could care less what is displayed on their screens as long as the entire experience is as monetized as possible. And franchise films help them keep their unimaginative business model limping along year after year.

I believe that if we could get some decent and COMMITTED funding for innovating mobile/social/local tech that relates to the moviegoing experience, we could do a lot to wake up the greedy Hollywood execs to fund better and more varied content and the exhibitors would be less fearful on taking a chance on showing that content. I would love to see this. I've already spent years of my life in this space, lost a ton of personal money in this space, but would be willing to give it a go again in a second if I could find the right alignment of stars (people, funding, filmmaker/exhibitor connections). I think it can be done without Hollywood's permission or even involvement. It's about the consumer and about the exhibitor. Hollywood only gives people what they believe they want. Better tech could make audiences way more aware of good movies they're not hearing about now. If they know about it, and hear their friends wanna see it too, guess what: you get scalable demand. An exhibitor will do ANYTHING where there is demand. You just have to show it's there. Who's with me?

- First: This is a very thoughtful and well-written article, and it raises some very valid points. Sequelmania is a creatively bankrupt strategy in the long run. (That being said, I'm a big fan of what Marvel has been able to do with its franchises, and I'm not convinced that its films are the sort of anti-creative schlock it's become trendy to describe them as. Full disclosure: a good friend is fairly high up the food chain at Marvel, and he's a brilliant and awesome exec.)

- Second: It's also a monetarily lucrative strategy. More important, it's a de-risking strategy. One sees the same pattern in the video games industry, where the decision to churn out Call of Duty 327.5 is a no-brainer, destined to reap at least a billion dollars in revenue, and the decision to make a daring, idiosyncratic, artful, niche game is liable to get a studio head fired.

- Third: In the good old days, studios were a total mess. They took wild swings in profitability, their shareholders were often fleeced, and their executives lived high on the hog. This was generally accepted as the cost of doing business in a creatively driven industry. Today, not too much has changed: but the execs currently in power are much more adept at managing brands and franchises. They're also better businesspeople (with some notable exceptions). This is actually a good thing, if you're a shareholder in a movie studio.

- Fourth: About those shareholders. Over the last 20-odd years, and especially over the last decade, Hollywood has received more and more investment capital from hedge funds and i-banks. What do finance guys want to see? For one thing, the books. "Hollywood accounting" is actually on the wane, and that's a good thing. They also want to see results. ROI. Predictable ROI, if at all possible. This goal often stands at odds with free-reined creativity and risk-taking, with plenty of the unfortunate consequences that the author points out. But it also forces studios to think more like businesses, and less like social clubs. Executives should be held accountable for their financial results, not their popularity at Soho House.

- Fifth: The indie film, the risky film, the daringly trashy film, and the eccentric film are far from dead. Big studios aren't making them anymore, but as means of production and distribution continue to democratize, especially at the small-time level, you'll see more and more true indies step in to fill this gap in the market. My off-the-cuff prediction: big studios double down on the franchise business—which, when you think about it, is probably what a "big" studio should be focusing on. Little and mid-sized players, in addition to foreign players, focus on the niche and arthouse fare. Globalization, plus interesting new distribution technology, allows these players to punch above their weight as never before.

- Sixth: By FAR the best combination creative/business executive Hollywood has had in my lifetime was Michael Eisner. This guy gets a lot of shit for the whole Michael Ovitz debacle at Disney, and it's tarnished his legacy considerably. But he almost singlehandedly revitalized and rebuilt the Disney machine. Disney is the Apple of the movie business, and he was (kinda sorta) its Steve Jobs. (Steve Jobs himself was later involved in Disney, as we know.) He had his misses, as well as his hits. But he's the sort of exec Hollywood needs more of, not less. Its development and production aspects should be run by creative executives, and its overall business units should be run by true business executives. Whenever the twain shall meet--very rarely--these people should run the shop. I'd love to say that Hollywood selects for combination creative-business people, but it doesn't. It selects for good politicians on the creative side, and good bean-counters on the business side. It needs to rethink its talent-cultivation pipeline, and I'd be lying if I said I knew where to begin.