4 ms·

Hollywood makes franchise-based movies because the profitability is much more stable. Would you rather Hollywood produce more $100 Million movies that return on

Hollywood makes franchise-based movies because the profitability is much more stable. Would you rather Hollywood produce more $100 Million movies that return only $10 Million? 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?

jusben1369 12y ago
Well it's always the clash between art and commerce. Most of us would agree that Hollywood's only job is to create profitable content to be consumed by the masses. And people do vote with their wallet's pretty easily and often so these studios can fine tune the formula. There is a % of people though that wish it was also more art and less formulaic and commercial. It's the same in tech. There's this angst/thread that expects every tech startup to change the world while 98% of them are simply iterating on a proven safe formula of a game or social app concept to maximize profitability.
- seizethecheese 12y ago
  Yeah, I certainly wish there were more artful movies. However, I think the art vs commerce distinction is false. Studios making artful films are just as commercial as any, they just produce for a specific audience.
- seizethecheese 12y ago
  Yeah, I certainly wish there were more artful movies. However, I think the art vs commerce distinction is false. Studios making artful films are just as commercial as any, they just produce for a specific audience.
vvpan 12y ago
I feel like you haven't read the article. Your first point the author admits himself. As to the second point, I don't think he's "whining" that they exist, but that there is little else: "In 2014, franchises are not a big part of the movie business. They are not the biggest part of the movie business. They are the movie business. Period."
- seizethecheese 12y ago
  I referred to "these sorts of discussions" in my comment, not the article itself. Yeah, I only skimmed the article. Congrats, caught me!
- AndrewDucker 12y ago
  Which is a fair point. Looking at 2014 you have to go to the 15th most popular movie to find one that's not associated with a pre-existing property: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2014&p=.htm http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2014&p=.htm
  - waterlesscloud 12y ago
    The studios would be fine with any lower ranked movie being in the top 14, though. People went to see what they went to see. They got what they wanted.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  He explains why himself: Birdman opened in the United States on October 17. It is not, financially, a consequential movie; it was released by Fox Searchlight, the prestige, indie-ish subdivision of 20th Century Fox; it has made decent money (nearly $21 million domestic) for the kind of film it is; it will win a bunch of awards over the next three months and lose a bunch of others. It is a good movie, but the type of good movie it is has nothing to do with what the movie industry is about. Typically a film like this loses some money at the box office once all the costs are taken into account (even though Birdman got a lot of great advance PR on the late night TV circuit and so on); the theatrical release is essentially a giant advertisement for the DVD/rental/streaming/broadcast windows. What can you do? The market for franchises or blockbuster films (most of which either have franchise potential or big ancillary tie-in potential, like Titanic) is huge because that's what most people like - an amazing, larger-than-life spectacle. Same reason Shakespeare built so many stories around exotic locations and courtly intrigue, same reason Dickens leveraged class distinctions to ratchet up the drama between his characters. I find these complaints a bit odd considering that many of the big franchises originate in the comics world, which was the dungeon of literary publishing for decades. these franchises are successful not just because of spectacular elements but because of the highly refined storytelling skills of the creative teams. To a large extent they're building meta-narratives of multiple interconnected stories that draw on a common fictional world and are designed to reinforce each other, for both economic and aesthetic reasons - a modern panthetistic mythos that lays out a different worldview from the singular ideological perspective that was a cultural staple of the past (while also containing its own ideology, of course). Incidentally, it's off that the piece doesn't address how Josh Whedon went from directing The Avengers in 2011 to shooting a modern adaptation of Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing in his own house/backyard, featuring several of the same actors (eg Clark Gregg, who plays Agent Colson in the Marvel superhero 'world'). Today we have a different model: The modern studio chief loves business, success, replication, and reliability, and nobody expects him to offer even the most cursory nod to anything that smacks of ideals that relate to content; That's because the modern 'studio' is just the crown jewel in a business conglomerate, and development now happens within production companies. It's been going this way ever since Uncle Sam busted the studios' vertical market and forbade them from owning theaters or signing stars to highly restrictive contracts. There's a good albeit somewhat tendentious history of the motion picture business here: http://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/ECM_PRO_060965.pdf http://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/ECM_PRO_060965.pd... fairy godmothership of independent producer Megan Ellison. The grace of billionaires is not a great business model on which to hang the hopes of an art form Megan wants to make money as much as any other producer and just has a different strategy for doing so (and I don't mean that as a criticism). Look, the film industry is a bit like the restaurant industry: you have a few megacorporations at the top, like McDonalds, Burger King, Starbucks - everyone knows their food is of low overall quality but it remains popular. Then you have other fast food providers that do the same sort of thing but slightly better in some ways and worse in others, for a slightly smaller audience. Then you have some specialty fast food outlets like Chipotle that make pretty nice food for more money and are very successful but an order of magnitude smaller than megacorporations. Then you have smaller chains (often family owned or closely held), then a wide variety of regular restaurants, and scrappy disruptive food trucks on the outside. It's your typical power-law distribution. If you're running some sort of artisinal restaurant, you're in competition with McDonalds insofar as they also sell food and dollars spent there are not winding up in your register. But in another sense you're not, because you don't want to make your living selling $5 meals off plastic trays, you want a more intimate relationship with your customers, you like having little boozy gourmet parties with the wait staff after the customers have left, and you like starting work at 11am instead of 5am. MARK HARRIS is the author of Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood and Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War. Gee, sounds like Mr Harris is trying to put together a little franchise of his own. If you're planning to write pop film criticism you'd probably do well to pick some other number of films to analyze besides five.
paganel 12y ago
It's not about the elitism. I, for myself, mostly loathe most of the "independent" movies that come out through festivals like Sundance, because most of the time you can see right through them from the first 15 minutes of screening. What I do miss is the middle ground, like a 20-million crime movie which would keep me stuck in my seat for its entire duration.
- serge2k 12y ago
  You still have things like that. Look at Nightcrawler.
skuhn 12y ago
Personally, I would rather than Hollywood produce more $10 million movies that return $12 million.
Avshalom 12y ago
Yeah but screw that faux populism. Hollywood wasn't losing money even in the 70's when it was wall to wall bleak existential navel gazing. People go see what there is to see.

jusben1369 12y ago

Well it's always the clash between art and commerce. Most of us would agree that Hollywood's only job is to create profitable content to be consumed by the masses. And people do vote with their wallet's pretty easily and often so these studios can fine tune the formula. There is a % of people though that wish it was also more art and less formulaic and commercial. It's the same in tech. There's this angst/thread that expects every tech startup to change the world while 98% of them are simply iterating on a proven safe formula of a game or social app concept to maximize profitability.

seizethecheese 12y ago
Yeah, I certainly wish there were more artful movies. However, I think the art vs commerce distinction is false. Studios making artful films are just as commercial as any, they just produce for a specific audience.
seizethecheese 12y ago
Yeah, I certainly wish there were more artful movies. However, I think the art vs commerce distinction is false. Studios making artful films are just as commercial as any, they just produce for a specific audience.

vvpan 12y ago

I feel like you haven't read the article. Your first point the author admits himself. As to the second point, I don't think he's "whining" that they exist, but that there is little else: "In 2014, franchises are not a big part of the movie business. They are not the biggest part of the movie business. They are the movie business. Period."

seizethecheese 12y ago
I referred to "these sorts of discussions" in my comment, not the article itself. Yeah, I only skimmed the article. Congrats, caught me!
AndrewDucker 12y ago
Which is a fair point. Looking at 2014 you have to go to the 15th most popular movie to find one that's not associated with a pre-existing property: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2014&p=.htm http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2014&p=.htm
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  The studios would be fine with any lower ranked movie being in the top 14, though. People went to see what they went to see. They got what they wanted.
anigbrowl 12y ago
He explains why himself: Birdman opened in the United States on October 17. It is not, financially, a consequential movie; it was released by Fox Searchlight, the prestige, indie-ish subdivision of 20th Century Fox; it has made decent money (nearly $21 million domestic) for the kind of film it is; it will win a bunch of awards over the next three months and lose a bunch of others. It is a good movie, but the type of good movie it is has nothing to do with what the movie industry is about. Typically a film like this loses some money at the box office once all the costs are taken into account (even though Birdman got a lot of great advance PR on the late night TV circuit and so on); the theatrical release is essentially a giant advertisement for the DVD/rental/streaming/broadcast windows. What can you do? The market for franchises or blockbuster films (most of which either have franchise potential or big ancillary tie-in potential, like Titanic) is huge because that's what most people like - an amazing, larger-than-life spectacle. Same reason Shakespeare built so many stories around exotic locations and courtly intrigue, same reason Dickens leveraged class distinctions to ratchet up the drama between his characters. I find these complaints a bit odd considering that many of the big franchises originate in the comics world, which was the dungeon of literary publishing for decades. these franchises are successful not just because of spectacular elements but because of the highly refined storytelling skills of the creative teams. To a large extent they're building meta-narratives of multiple interconnected stories that draw on a common fictional world and are designed to reinforce each other, for both economic and aesthetic reasons - a modern panthetistic mythos that lays out a different worldview from the singular ideological perspective that was a cultural staple of the past (while also containing its own ideology, of course). Incidentally, it's off that the piece doesn't address how Josh Whedon went from directing The Avengers in 2011 to shooting a modern adaptation of Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing in his own house/backyard, featuring several of the same actors (eg Clark Gregg, who plays Agent Colson in the Marvel superhero 'world'). Today we have a different model: The modern studio chief loves business, success, replication, and reliability, and nobody expects him to offer even the most cursory nod to anything that smacks of ideals that relate to content; That's because the modern 'studio' is just the crown jewel in a business conglomerate, and development now happens within production companies. It's been going this way ever since Uncle Sam busted the studios' vertical market and forbade them from owning theaters or signing stars to highly restrictive contracts. There's a good albeit somewhat tendentious history of the motion picture business here: http://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/ECM_PRO_060965.pdf http://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/ECM_PRO_060965.pd... fairy godmothership of independent producer Megan Ellison. The grace of billionaires is not a great business model on which to hang the hopes of an art form Megan wants to make money as much as any other producer and just has a different strategy for doing so (and I don't mean that as a criticism). Look, the film industry is a bit like the restaurant industry: you have a few megacorporations at the top, like McDonalds, Burger King, Starbucks - everyone knows their food is of low overall quality but it remains popular. Then you have other fast food providers that do the same sort of thing but slightly better in some ways and worse in others, for a slightly smaller audience. Then you have some specialty fast food outlets like Chipotle that make pretty nice food for more money and are very successful but an order of magnitude smaller than megacorporations. Then you have smaller chains (often family owned or closely held), then a wide variety of regular restaurants, and scrappy disruptive food trucks on the outside. It's your typical power-law distribution. If you're running some sort of artisinal restaurant, you're in competition with McDonalds insofar as they also sell food and dollars spent there are not winding up in your register. But in another sense you're not, because you don't want to make your living selling $5 meals off plastic trays, you want a more intimate relationship with your customers, you like having little boozy gourmet parties with the wait staff after the customers have left, and you like starting work at 11am instead of 5am. MARK HARRIS is the author of Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood and Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War. Gee, sounds like Mr Harris is trying to put together a little franchise of his own. If you're planning to write pop film criticism you'd probably do well to pick some other number of films to analyze besides five.

paganel 12y ago

It's not about the elitism. I, for myself, mostly loathe most of the "independent" movies that come out through festivals like Sundance, because most of the time you can see right through them from the first 15 minutes of screening. What I do miss is the middle ground, like a 20-million crime movie which would keep me stuck in my seat for its entire duration.

serge2k 12y ago
You still have things like that. Look at Nightcrawler.

skuhn 12y ago

Personally, I would rather than Hollywood produce more $10 million movies that return $12 million.

Avshalom 12y ago

Yeah but screw that faux populism. Hollywood wasn't losing money even in the 70's when it was wall to wall bleak existential navel gazing. People go see what there is to see.