This is more of a rant, so take it as such. I’m just starting to conceptualize this subject, so there will probably be more posts to follow.
“Rebooting movies after the success of Batman is only logical, Kirk.”
The new “Star Trek” movie, opening next month, boldly goes where no “Trek” film has gone before: back to the beginning. It’s set in the decades before the start of the TV series, returning to the young adulthoods of space adventurers James T. Kirk and Spock and their first voyage on the Starship Enterprise.
Some of Hollywood’s biggest franchises, including “X-Men” and “Terminator,” are taking a similar back-to-the-future approach this summer. To refresh familiar film sagas and grab new audiences, studios are increasingly offering up stories that trace the early years of popular characters and tell epics from their beginnings.
Sami had spotted an interesting article about “cultural latency”, which made me think about the current state of Hollywood productions, and especially reboots and comicbook movies.
Digital distribution removes many of the friction points within the distribution system – making it more efficient, economically speaking.
But this also seems to lead to far more rapid cultural decay rates – sales charts now are driven almost exclusively by novelty – top selling DVDs are just what came out that week.
A reboot or a superhero movie has a clear business logic: you leverage a known cultural product and an existing fan base to assure you have an inbuilt audience before you even start advertising it. There’s a very clear reason why Hollywood is going for more predictability in its revenue: as the movie is released on the big screen, it’s just a matter of time when a pirate version is out there on the streets or on the internet. That’s why the opening weekend smash has become so important: get most of the money early, wait a few weeks and then start working on the home theater version, as the article stated.
Getting people to come on an opening weekend requires a lot of advertising and buzz, which has helped inflate film budgets considerably. It’d be interesting to see how much advertising is taking proportionally from a film’s budget nowadays. My guess is that the proportion has grown considerably.
Given all this, we should look for more movies in the Da Vinci code, Marvel or reboot variety. However, there’s a countering to the old “common denominator” theory. What Henry Jenkins calls “transmedia storytelling“, where a cultural product (film, book, comic etc.) is just one entry point to the franchise’s “world”, is becoming an increasing trend in storytelling. Think Star Wars and the Matrix: these franchises feature multiple products: games, books, comics etc. and they all work as individual works, but together they all tie in to the parent mythology. This is making storytelling deeper and more engaging, even as average Joe’s can enjoy just the individual works one at a time. The fans have their work cut out for them in mining the worlds and making sense of them.
Relating to this, Grant McCracken has argued that popular culture is becoming more and more self-referential, and thus smarter all the time. Star Trek was peppered with small references (albeit to Star Trek mythology) throughout the film. It’s becoming more and more rewarding watching Hollywood films if you have a wide range of pop culture knowledge.
It’s going to be interesting to see how we see and interpret movies is going to change if more and more movies are going to be safe bets. But on the other hand, Batman proved that a complex and darker movie could also make it big, and I think you could see a bit of risk taking in how Star Trek was done. I doubt that even Watchmen would have been greenlit without Batman’s success.
But on that note, here’s the trailer on the new adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, by Guy Ritchie:
“Grant McCracken has argued that popular culture is becoming more and more self-referential, and thus smarter all the time.”
i guess the “smartness” depends on what you consider smart. the star trek self-referencing is also very heavily *nostalgic*, which i’d argue is not often considered to be very smart.
my fear: if you end up having a world in which the dominant pop. cultural pattern is the self-reference, you will end up building traditions and legacies. by its nature, this kind of cultural work is pretty efficient and ecological, with all the recycling going on, but it is also ultimately a dead end and in need of continuous rebooting.. or push starting?
Ville, tv shows self-referencing is just a small fraction of how pop culture has gotten smarter.
Even in the 1970s, writers had quite strict guidelines for scripts because audiences weren’t as sophisticated back then. For example, if a person died writers HAD to write in a character to “confirm” the death (“My god, he’s dead!”), otherwise people wouldn’t get it. Now the same thing is done with camerawork, and the right choice of music. We’ve become so much better at reading pop culture, that a lot of can be left out, because we can take them as given. We can use stereotypes, archetypes and familiar cues to guide the plot etc.
I’m not too worried about pop culture becoming too self-referential and thus too limited. I think current fashion has been recycling stuff a bit too much lately, but otherwise I think we’re golden. I think it’s impossible to build lasting legacies that won’t feel dated at least at some point, because people’s rising media literacy levels require that you push the limits of storytelling.