Sultan Knish
Hollywood has no problem being dumb, sleazy and violent. Those are all
known and marketable qualities. What it does not look is appearing
desperate. Desperation however is what the Oscars of this year and last
year have in common. They stink of an industry desperately racing its
own age and irrelevance reaching for gimmicks to try and hang on to a
younger audience.
The dirty little secret is that Hollywood hardly exists anymore. The
industry is bigger than ever, but its bread and butter consists of 200
and 300 million dollar special effects festivals filmed in front of
green screens and created in Photoshop and three-dimensional graphics
programs. They star obscure or mildly famous actors and they do
two-thirds of their business abroad.
America is still the official headquarters of the global entertainment
industry, but many of the bigger projects are filmed internationally
with foreign money and intended for foreign markets. What the American
corporations bring to the table is the intellectual property which is
why the latest spasm of mergers and buyouts has focused on taking
control of every treasury of classic marketable properties.
Disney has put Star Wars, Mickey and Marvel Comics under one roof. It's
impressive from a business standpoint, but bankrupt from a creative
standpoint. Old Americana is being milked dry for the sake of turning
out another disposable movie starring familiar characters. The movies
are actually still the same.
The blockbuster has mutated into its final stage. The "individual" movie
is almost dead. Forget Jaws or Raiders of the Lost Ark. The modern
blockbuster is seamless and soulless. An impersonal work that renders
the director and cast irrelevant. The criticism has been made before,
but what is new now is the percentage of special effects and the cost.
The more expensive a movie becomes, the more risk averse its producers
are.
If a movie is going to cost 200 million dollars to make, then it has to
be identical to the other 200 million dollar movies that were
profitable. The template is there. All that's left is to plug in another
talented Korean, British, Russian or even perhaps American director,
and then roll out the same movie with characters from another property.
The movie must have collapsing skyscrapers, massive explosions and a few
slumming character actors. What it cannot have is too much dialogue or
plot, because those don't translate well. How a movie will play in
Topeka or even Los Angeles doesn't matter nearly as much as how it will
play in Beijing, Moscow and everywhere else.
Hollywood makes movies on the side. What it really does is manufacture
special effects theme parks for other countries whose own entertainment
industries are not yet ready for prime time. And the types of movies
that it makes can be made nearly anywhere. And will eventually be made
anywhere. Tinseltown is pretending to be artistic and creative, even
while both qualities are dead as doornails.
These days Hollywood resembles the decline of the British film industry,
kept alive by state subsidies and used as a talent base for other
countries. At some point, American actors and directors will move on to
next conglomeration of capital and audiences in Asia, the way that
British actors and directors moved on to Hollywood. The next Hollywood
will speak Mandarin. Its executives will buy up American properties and
film them in China. The casts will be diverse, the plots will not exist
and every movie will be mostly the same. In other words it will be
exactly like Hollywood is now.
The blockbuster of 2025 will be Made in China. It will feature 1. Aliens
2. Robots. 3. Buildings collapsing. It will have a pro-China message,
but the Western writers hired to insert some topical dialogue for
Western audiences will throw in a few relevant lines for the version
that is released here. The Indian, Russian and South American writers
will do the same thing for their versions.
Hollywood will become the American distribution arm of a new global film
industry that can make the same bad movies more cheaply and easily. Its
executives will recommend properties for the head office in Beijing to
buy up. Occasionally they may even be allowed to make some of their own
movies. There will be plenty of nostalgia and the usual tawdry
independent movies funded by taxpayer subsidies that you can find in
Europe's own buggy whip movie industries.
The big wheels of the industry already know this. But they don't have
much of a choice. Hollywood has been frantically chasing the youth
market with each new incarnation of entertainment technology. Hollywood
spent decades making movies bashing television for competing with it for
its audience. Eventually the electronics companies that fielded the
first television networks dumped their products into the same pool as
the movie studios, but by then the internet had begun to take off. And
all the movies demonizing the internet haven't done anything to stop it.
The movie/television/comic book conglomerates are competing for younger
audiences against video games and the internet. And the internet is
winning. The median age for most of the entertainment industry's
products is old. Some of that can be attributed to demographic
collection technologies that rely too much on traditional viewership,
but much of it is just reality. Hollywood may bring in James Franco or
the creator of Family Guy to host its industry party, but that doesn't
change how old it is.
The entertainment industry dumbed down its products to the lowest common
denominator to target the teenager. And in the process the
entertainment industry destroyed itself. Television networks killed
family hour to chase upscale twenty-somethings and wiped out their own
viewership. Their big brothers destroyed the movie theater by making it
indistinguishable from an amusement park ride. The television network
model killed networks and the cable networks that adopted that same
model are about to get whacked by the collapse of the cable bundle
business model. The movie model made the movie easy to reproduce by any
country with enough capital and digital artists. These days that's the
People's Republic of China.
Hollywood movies are already being made to Chinese specifications,
complete with Communist censorship, and that's only the beginning. If
China's economy does not collapse, then it will become the tail that
wags the Hollywood dog. And Hollywood will be history.
The death of Hollywood would have been a tragedy once, but these days
it's almost a relief. It leaves behind a lot of great movies, almost all
of them made in the past, and the best proof of that is the compulsive
flood of remakes, reboots and reinventions of old properties. The spirit
of the industry is gone and all that's left is a shambling zombie
picking over its own brains and living off past glories while throwing
elaborate industry parties that are little more than an expensive
glorified reality show.
Hollywood is still chasing relevance and the youth market. The theater
conglomerates are figuring out new ways to squeeze twenty bucks out of
customers in a bad economy to cover their own expenses which include
revamping their theaters for youth-oriented gimmicks like 3D. But the
problem is that in an economy where the under 20 and 30 crowd is out of
work, those gimmicks are struggling to pay for themselves. Add in the
high levels of unemployment among minority young males, who are the
industry's best customers, and the picture looks even bleaker.
The Chinese kid has some money to spend after getting through a long
shift of making iPads or grinding for virtual money in an online game.
American kids have less money than they used to and the internet offers
entertainment, including the latest pirated movies, for free, often
offered by sites run by some of those same Chinese kids.
In this solipsistic environment, does the movie theater even have a
future? How much room is there for a business model built around digital
entertainment that doesn't run on the internet? Despite the
billion-dollar grosses, theater owners are not entirely certain. There's
a reason that a thimble's worth of soda and popcorn is so expensive and
it's not because movie theaters are doing well. It's because everyone
is behind and running up debt.
Movie studios throw fortunes into mediocre blockbusters and then spend
the next three years wrangling over the profits, and cheating everyone
from the director to the stars to their distributing partners of their
fair share. Movie theaters pay out most of the money from the opening
weekends to the studios and count on extended engagements to make money,
but the modern blockbuster is one opening weekend after another with no
extended engagements.
Everyone is deep in debt and counting on a string of hits to bring in
audiences and save their business model. Everyone is merging and
clustering together to limit the risk, while increasing the drag.
There's no future in that and Hollywood knows it. The industry is
locking down intellectual properties because it knows that it's about to
turn into Kodak after the digital revolution. An outdated business with
nothing to offer except its rights to certain properties that more
successful industries will want to make use of.
Hollywood is dead, but its corpse is still trying to carry on with
business as usual. The inventive industry that mixed together vaudeville
and adventure books into an entire industry that spanned the globe has
long ago run out of ideas. Instead it's marking the time, deadening its
nerves and doing everything it can to appear youthful. The parties are
still being thrown as if the industry has not changed, as if it's still a
band of salesmen and theater owners who opened their own studios and
made and lost fortunes betting on geniuses and big concepts.
What we think of as Hollywood was a byproduct of the need to fill
theaters, but the technology of filling theaters is being broken down on
a more sophisticated level, without the need for creativity. What the
big computers did to Wall Street, they are also doing to Hollywood. The
future isn't a silver screen, it's a behavioral map of the most reliable
ways of getting the industry's best customers into a theater to watch a
product created in slave-labor countries based on templates that run on
numbers, not creativity, even of the three-act kind.
Hollywood's past glories may live on as nostalgia, but it has no future. The industry is history.
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