Have you been to the movies lately? If so, you may have noticed that just about every other weekend there's a new comic book movie out: Deadpool, Batman v. Superman, Captain America, X-Men. If you're a comic book fan (like me) this is pretty great.
But it may not be great for the industry. Over the weekend, I watched a short video essay called The Hollywood Crash Is Coming, which suggests that my beloved comic book movies may be killing the movie industry itself.
If you're interested in Hollywood economics and pop-culture stuff, you should watch the video. But 16 minutes is a big ask, so let me summarize the argument, which goes something like this:
The big movie studios are undergoing something like the same stresses the American middle-class has experienced over the last two decades: They're seeing radical increases in the cost of living (for them actor salaries and marketing costs), increased competition from globalization and cheap labor (in the form of cable TV, internet streaming services, and amateur videomakers), yet they're suffering from stagnant income (meaning that total movie revenues are more or less flat).
The analogy goes a step further: Just as America has witnessed rising income inequality, the same phenomenon has hit Hollywood movies. Movie revenues aren't growing much, but a smaller and smaller percentage of movies are claiming a larger and larger share of the total pie. Which movies are the 1 percent in this analogy? Comic book movies.
And so, the argument goes, at some point the studio system is going to blow up because its model simply isn't sustainable and--more importantly--because the executives in charge of the business haven't been capable of figuring out how to evolve with the market.
If this last bit sounds familiar, it should. It's an echo of William Goldman's line that in Hollywood, "Nobody knows anything." Partly, that's because many of the people who run the studios don't actually understand their own businesses. Partly it's because the movie business is essentially unfathomable anyway.
Seriously. The next time you want to dump on the stupid movie executive who gave a green light to Jupiter Ascending, consider this: People have been making movies at industrial scale for more than a hundred years and yet there's still no reliable formula for how to make a hit. As The Hollywood Crash Is Coming puts it, "Why do audiences like watching Johnny Depp do silly, fun things as a pirate, but not like Johnny Depp doing silly, fun things as an Indian?" No one knows. It's a mystery. There's a moment in the essay where director Steven Soderbergh talks about his studio's tracking numbers for Magic Mike. The studio expected the movie to open to $19 million dollars. Instead, it opened to $38 million. "So the tracking was 100 percent wrong," Soderbergh notes wryly.
That's no way to run a railroad.
On the other hand, Hollywood has looked like the wheels were coming off the cart for a long time. Smart people out there worried that the wide-release pattern would destroy the movie business. Then they worried that the blockbuster model would kill it. Then they worried that the tent-pole strategy would augur the end of the studio system. So far, the studios seem to be doing okay.
One explanation why is that Hollywood is less an industry than it is a deep state, where powerful groups (agents, unions, producers, actors, directors, mid-level execs) make everything in the business as opaque as possible so as to bamboozle the remote corporate overlords and financiers and protect their own interests.
Another explanation is that Hollywood's production model hasn't changed much because its revenue model has. As Edward Jay Epstein detailed in two fantastic books,a movie isn't really movie--it's a river of intellectual property. And box office receipts are just the first drops in the stream.
After the domestic box office comes the foreign box office. Then rights fees for showing the movie on TV or cable, all over the world. Then comes the DVD and streaming sales. Then rentals. If you make certain kinds of movies there are all sorts of other revenue opportunities: theme parks, lunch boxes, Halloween costumes. (What I wouldn't give for a roller coaster based on The Departed.)
But of course, that's another reason why there are so many comic book movies these days: They may or may not be good movies, but they are perfectly engineered to have a long flow of intellectual property revenues.
Seen from that perspective, comic book movies may not be a symptom of Hollywood's unsustainable dysfunction, but rather a sign of how it has been evolving with the market.
Either way, I'll be there on opening weekend for Suicide Squad this August.