I’ve spent about two hours walking from one theater to another trying to find someplace showing a film I might actually feel excited to watch. I failed, and now my feet are killing me.
This odyssey took me to five theaters in different places downtown, boasting a grand total of something like 40 different screens – and only showing seven or eight unique movies across the lot of them. Thanks Hollywood. All it takes is for me to be predisposed against the blockbuster of the week, because there are no real alternatives. “I’m in the city, I might as well go see a movie” is no longer a thought that goes through my head, because across the breadth of American film that lands on screens I can no longer guarantee that I’ll actually want to see one of them.
My movie-going habit is withering away, because the hegemonic movie industry (the American one) is going through one of its phases.
Yes, I’m a hateful, spiteful curmudgeon. But I still say Hollywood is to blame. You know why? Because television is great right now.
Not all television. Not even, perhaps, most television. But the cream of the content airing right now makes the summer-movie offerings look positively pathetic.
Let’s recap momentarily a few of the reasons why serialized television is at a high point right now: We’ve seen ambitious, culturally relevant projects like Top of the Lake not only air but hold an audience. We have a genre show – Game of Thrones – that completely challenges the traditional limitations of genre shows. We just had Veep – the best satire of American politics in years – finish a phenomenally strong second season. We have the brilliantly stupid, endlessly entertaining Defiance on the air. We’ve seen a show that pivots seamlessly between being a family drama about married life, and a cold war-era espionage thriller. We even have Mad Men, a literary television drama; how unimaginable would this phrase have been even ten years ago?
And on Hollywood’s corner we have… The third sequel to a superhero movie franchise that was never exceptional to start with. And, I don’t know, a comedy directed by Michael Bay, or something.
It’s the start of May, which is when I typically take inventory of pop culture for the year to try and get a sense of where it’s going. So far, I have albums I like, comics I think are good, books I’m anticipating reading. I have a giant pile of TV shows I’m following, more than I can keep up with. But I still haven’t seen a new, Hollywood movie this year that I feel added something to my life.
And as I look into the yawning void of Hollywood’s great sphincter, primed as it is to disgorge the annual evacuation of big, loud, vacuous cinema upon us, I can’t say I’m super excited about it.
But television? I can’t get enough of it. Even the middling shows seem great these days (Case in point: Maron, which premiered just yesterday as I write this). So I’m left wondering: Why is that?
TV Respects your Intelligence
Good TV does, and it’s doing so at an alarming rate. You wouldn’t expect cable channel execs of all people to pick up on the fact that modern-day audiences are actually fairly sophisticated. But they did, to everyone’s surprise.
People are not Twitter-addicted, brain-damaged, attention-span-deprived zombies, as many of the nerdly persuasion might think. People nowadays are not just smart, they’re armed with tools to make them smarter. We have fan wikis, recaps, comment threads, DVRs and streaming broadcasts. Viewers take in serialized TV shows much more as you would a book; there’s deliberation, there’s backtracking, there’s even a habit of discussing things as you go through them with other people. This has drastically raised the complexity that’s allowable on television. So now we have the spiralling, multi-plotted structure of Game of Thrones – a show that has so many plot threads going at any one time one might almost be forgiven for using the word “tapestry.”
Even Defiance, a show unabashedly silly, absurd fun, is happily throwing eight different flavours of rubber-forehead aliens and a big wad of backstory at viewers without so much as a second thought. Part of that is because the show’s weird MMO tie-in format allows for a lot of ‘secondary reading material’ for viewers. But it’s also because the way we consume television has changed – and the best of television is making the most of it.
Hollywood film? Still attached to a format that presumes the audience goes in knowing nothing, has the capacity to learn very little, and must absolutely be guaranteed to understand everything on first pass. When a major motion picture deviates from this pattern even mildly, this is hailed as shocking and revolutionary – remember how people acted as though Inception was somehow “complicated?”
TV Doesn’t try to be Everything to Everyone
This used to be exactly the other way around. Television was completely dependent on broad appeal; it made money by getting every family member on the couch together at the same time. Cinema, on the other hand, made its money by filling seats – and, without the tyranny of time slots, it could gauge how big a movie needed to be. Hollywood movies used to pick an audience. You could have a deeply personal relationship with a film, because it seemed to be made for someone right where you were in life when it came out. There’s Gen-Xers out there who will die clutching a pack of clove cigarettes in one hand and a VHS copy of Clerks in another; and though we rightfully mock those people, that kind of deeply-felt generational connection to a film isn’t really something that today’s Hollywood supports.
Why? Because everything must be PG-13, everything must have mass-appeal, and everything must have franchise potential.
If films have to be for everyone, that keeps them from being for you. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea of family films – some of my favorite films are family films! – but Hollywood’s relentlessly homogenized approach means we watch scripts get rewritten to fit ratings they have no business fitting into. The upcoming World War Z, a project which is ill-advised in too many ways to count, has a PG-13 rating. Again, the premise is that humanity is swarmed by a plague of contagious, aggressive, undead, flesh-eating monsters.
But executive mandate has determined that younger kids are a target audience for this film about undead flesh-eating monsters, and so shall it be.
By contrast, the ecosystem of cable, DVR, and streaming services has made it sustainable to make a television show for a very small audience. As such, television can refine its edge to find an audience. That sort of generational connection that people used to have with era-defining films is now owned by television. Even the rubbish is gifted with a near-magical specificity that makes it singularly tailored to appeal to a particular audience.
If you’ve ever seen the downright Pavlovian response that Real Housewives fans have to that show, you know what I’m talking about.
Even network shows have been able to hang on by attracting small, dedicated fan bases. Community proved that you don’t need to be charming, or funny, or competently-written, or not racist to succeed; you just need a devoted group of people who won’t ever shut up about your show on the Internet. Cable has an inherent advantage in this, and the networks have gotten better at scheduling so that television with a niche audience gets the time to develop.
In the past, shows like Grimm might have been nipped in the bud by a network hungry to make the most of prime-time slots. Nowadays, the possibility for middle-of-the-pack genre show to find an audience on DVD and streamed broadcast has given networks pause about killing promising shows before they get to finish a season. So Grimm was shuffled into a better time slot and given a seemingly interminable second season.
Of course, it helps to be on NBC, which is apparently run by blissed-out stoners way too mellow to cancel shows, no matter how hard they’re tanking.
Hollywood’s Perception Problem
I’m talking about a bunch of upcoming releases I haven’t seen yet. And I’m condemning them ahead of time. Maybe this is harsh and unnecessary. But then again, you pay to see movies before you see them; if you go in on opening night, you’re really flying blind. So when everything coming down the pipeline has red flags all over it, one gets worried. Studios seem to have completely forgotten how to pick projects.
Would you have green-lit Grown Ups 2? Would you have even waited for Adam Sandler to pitch it before saying no?
Hollywood invented the modern hype machine. Film was the first industry that relied not merely on making people want to buy a product, but on making people excited about a product. They created a whole attendant journalism industry dedicated to giving movie stars exposure.
And now this system seems to be turning on itself. Major studios rely on brand name recognition and star power to carry ticket sales and make new releases seem appealing to audiences. But we have IMDB now. We can look up the rap sheet on the people writing this crap.
Pointed example: the upcoming good-cop dead-cop action movie R.I.P.D. Looks like a fun romp, right? As it happens it’s written by Phil Hay, the man who brought us such masterpieces as Clash of the Titans and the Aeon Flux adaptation.
Still excited?
Another one: After Earth. That would be the one where Will Smith and Will Smith’s son (Played by Will Smith’s actual son, Jayden Smith) crash land on a devastated earth 1,000 years after mankind’s escape. Sounds promising?
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Is the twist that it was Earth all along?
The movie season is peppered with seemingly ill-advised projects like those. Now, the studio execs are professionals, working off better information than we have; and this is all speculation – maybe Phil Hay is just unlucky and writes great screenplays that get butchered in production. Maybe M. Night Shyamalan has re-learned how to be entertaining and given up on twist endings.
But I’m not feeling so great about betting actual money on it by paying theater price.
How to Fix This
Now, this is downright unacceptable. Television is supposed to be to audiovisual media what the state fair circuit is to rock bands: a comfortable haven for mediocrity. Television as the vanguard of filmic innovation is like Brooklyn being the vibrant center of American youth culture: an awful state of affairs that cannot be allowed to continue any longer.
There’s of course one very simple, very elegant solution to all this: Stop paying money to see rubbish films. Stop paying money, even, to see films that sound decidedly rubbish-like. Stop rewarding the industry’s consistent preference of perceived safety over quality.
Ah, if only everyone were as stodgy and vitriolic as I am.
Truth is, I’m not really sure how to make it better. The American film industry has such an unfair, disproportionate control over its distribution channels that, when Hollywood movies suck, everyone loses, including the good films hiding out among the crap. When you can’t go to the multiplex and expect to find something good, or even something entertaining, you stop coming.
It used to be that going to the cinema was one of very few entertainment options. No longer. To be seen in the environment it was meant for – the film theater – cinema will have to rely more and more on the core audience of people who have a habit of going out to the movies. And it’s really easy to lose this habit when, week after week, even at the height of what is theoretically blockbuster season, the options on offer seem decidedly unappetizing.
So the surfeit of mediocrity doesn’t just mean there’s less good films to see; it means the good films get seen less, not more. This disease comes in waves – we’ve all seen bad years for cinema, most of us multiple times. Sometimes you get half a dozen incredible, epochal films within the span of a few months. But sometimes Shakespeare in Love wins the best picture Oscar.
I worry that Hollywood – perhaps cinema as a whole – is adapting very poorly to our terrifying cyberpunk dystopia. There’s no shortage of talent or resources – a lot of the people involved with the blockbusters I’m dreading are highly capable. But the studios seem determined to shoot themselves in the foot by backing the wrong projects, supporting the wrong talent, and targeting the wrong audiences.
I don’t want to believe audiences are stupid. I think that people can generally feel that the output from the film industry isn’t looking so hot lately. 2012 wasn’t a great year for blockbusters. 2013 hasn’t had an unabashedly good big-budget film come out yet, and the upcoming releases have only a few spots of hope among them. Maybe Elysium and Pacific Rim will be actually good, but I’m dreading them almost by association. Studios have ruined more promising projects than those even in recent times.
Hollywood is getting seriously out-competed, on quality, by television and video games; in many ways it seems like the only unique thing they still have to sell is the experience of the theater itself. Cinema is a powerful experience that can’t be replicated in your living room. And the major studios have immense control over their own distribution channel; they can, in practice, get people to watch almost anything.
It is very sad indeed that they’re using that power to not only give us nonsense like Olympus has Fallen – a film with the hate of Air Force One but none of the entertainment value – but two vaguely alarmist thrillers about the White House being under attack.
I don’t think this will last forever – pouring millions into making mediocre entertainment can’t possibly be a sustainable business model – but when Hollywood climbs out of it, getting people to come to theaters again will be an uphill battle; and the studios have hardly shown that they’re ready to make the changes they need to be relevant again.
—
Bruno Dias writes about film, television, and video games as a way of voiding the unending fount of hatred nestled within his soul.
Also, he enjoys musicals.