Here’s the thing: I firmly believe that now should be Superman’s time. As The Dark Knight took all of our Bush-era worries and concerns and made them into an action movie, so should Superman be around right now to embody Obama’s (still-resonant, even a year after campaigning) message of hope and positive change and being the best we can be. Instead of using Superman’s inherent positivity against him, or thinking that it pushes him out of step with today’s world, focus on the way in which he personifies that which we want to believe in, and the people that we want to be. If we elected a president because we believed in the ideals of Yes We Can and Hope and Change and all those buzzwords, I refuse to believe that we wouldn’t want to see a movie that sold us the same message but with added punching, flying and action.
(I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again; Star Trek’s success comes as much from it being positive and colorful and optimistic escapism as it being a good movie, this time around. Superman has those qualities in spades.)
Is Superman damaged goods? To an extent, yes, but he shouldn’t be; there’s nothing wrong with the character, or the concept, when done right, and I think that the audience is more ready for what he’s selling now than they have been in years. What damages him most, perhaps, is the attitude from his owners that he’s a problem that they don’t know how to solve. The first step to stopping him being damaged goods is to stop treating him that way.
In the old days — like, until yesterday — movie studios judged the success of their big pictures by how much they grossed on the opening weekend. But in the age of Twitter, electronic word-of-mouth is immediate, as early moviegoers tweet their opinions on a film to millions of “followers.” Instant-messaging can make or break a film within 24 hours. Friday is the new weekend.
That appears to be the lesson from the studio estimates issued on July 13 for the weekend box office. Brüno, the Sacha Baron Cohen docu-comedy in which an Austrian fashion journalist shoves his flamboyant gayness in the faces and other body parts of unsuspecting Americans, won the weekend with $30.4 million, a bit above most industry expectations for an R-rated provocation whose star was unknown to the mass audience until his Borat became a surprise hit in 2006, earning more than $260 million at theaters worldwide on an $18 million budget. Yet Brüno’s box-office decline from Friday to Saturday indicates that the film’s brand of outrage was not the sort to please most moviegoers — and that their tut-tutting got around fast. Brüno could be the first movie defeated by the Twitter effect.
The Twitter effect might be a tad overstated. To me it’s more the “Facebook status effect” than anything, but since tweets are public it’s easier to measure buzz this way. I already speculated in the earlier post that Hollywood is going to battle this “Twitter effect” by banking on more sure things, like sequels and (comic) book adaptations. But I’m sure there’s another way, one that’s more dynamic and not too much on the nose. Perhaps film studios will scale down on mid-level film budgets (especially advertising) a bit and look for the new “Juno” time and time again? Maybe this new age will bring a new polarity of 200 million dollar superfilms and a huge selection of indies, that some make it big and most don’t?
Thought I’d feature something funnier this time. I’m a bit late to the party as this campaign is already a bit old, I need to decrease my draft-to-published number. Via American Copywriter:
That is Denny’s new ad promoting their All Nighter offering or campaign. And yes, as American Copywriter noted in his blog, the unicorn is indeed high.
Of course, the unicorn plays the role of the stoner to a T. Overall the campaign plays well with modern nuances of the fast food diner. The boys (uh, mythical creatures) have been to a rock concert, and have come to gorge some fast food as their buzz is coming down a bit. The works in the sense that Denny’s isn’t making an ass of itself by trying to be cool and “speaking like the young people do”.
But why the unicorn, the T-Rex and the leprechaun? The main reason would probably be that the campaign is going for a quirky, “WTF?” effect. I guess it does make it potentially more viral. But what I have been thinking about is that with make-belief characters like that, you can say pretty much anything. It’s the old ventriloquist effect: the puppet can say anything, but the person is playing the straight man role. A regular stoner being high as a kite in a Denny’s probably been too much for the bosses at Denny’s. A stoner unicorn? Hilarious!
The campaign deserves some major points though for having profile pages for all the characters on Facebook. The content there is top-notch contemporary and “on character” all the time.
This is a continuation of my last post on Hollywood’s new business model. I’m thinking about writing an academic article on the subject, so any interesting links or data is very welcome.
I just saw the new Terminator film yesterday. While it was not really my cup of tea, the tone of the movie was considerably different from the previous films. The film was dark and rugged, in its own way “realistic” even. This is the new aesthetic Hollywood has embraced when making these all these sequels and prequels for familiar franchises. It goes without saying that the phenomenal success of the two new Batman films is a major reason for this, but I think the Matrix trilogy also played a part in this resurgence.
It seems that Hollywood has gone a bit mad even for this new aesthetic. If you search for the keyword “reboot” on Slashfilm you’ll find a LOT of familiar titles being in development. One interesting case is one of Fantastic Four, which came out in 2005 (with a sequel in 2007), and it is already being rebooted. From Slashfilm:
Marvel has changed the game, and the way studios are looking at superhero properties. Fox now wants to reboot the series in a tone described as “less bubble gum” and more in the vein of Marvel’s Iron Man than Nolan’s The Dark Knight.
It’d be interesting to clearly identify when the cultural balance “tipped” towards this darker take on superhero myths. I’m sure there was latent demand for “less bubble gum”, as Fox put it, films even before Batman, but Hollywood was doing just fine before it. It could also be a simple case of demographics: a lot of moviegoers (such as myself) who grew up reading the comic books we’re now seeing on the big screen are just too old for teen pop art, and maybe Hollywood has understood that. I’m sure the recession and general pessimism about the world’s state have contributed to the aesthetic as well.
“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.
My good friend and T-shirt enthusiast Jani tipped me off on a pretty cool t-shirt shop called Last Exit to Nowhere. Their idea is simple: create t-shirts that borrow from classic movies, but in very obscure and clever ways. For example:
The list goes on and on, each shirt more inventive than the next. The designs are also top notch, making them beautiful to watch even if you don’t get the cultural reference.
The “logo” for Tony Montana’s company from Scarface
Coolness and aesthetics aside, what I really like about Last Exit to Nowhere is that it basically encapsulates perfectly two hallmarks of contemporary culture into one great case study.
First, it’s a great example of pop culture becoming smarter and increasingly self-referential. For example, in my recent guest lecture I featured a Simpsons episode that had 13 references to other pop culture works that were vital to the jokes and plot. In the same lecture, I also showed two ads that heavily borrowed from pop culture, from Pepsi and Jordan Brand. Pop culture stereotypes or archetypes work as excellent shorthands in storytelling and often they make for better and more engaging storytelling.
Increased use of pop culture refernces also requires higher cultural literacy and sophistication levels from consumers, as you have to “get” at least some of the references to fully understand the story (for lack of a better word). However, Henry Jenkins has argued that some brands and cultural franchises are also using cultural references to offer fans that little something extra, where as the “basic story” can be made sense with just a basic cultural knowledge. This is I think key for Last Exit To Nowhere: their t-shirts work as “normal” shirts just fine, but they also offer a tremendous reward for those who get it, because the references are so obscure.
For more on pop culture becoming smarter and more self-referential, Grant McCracken (again, I know) has written about this extensively, especially in his latest book Transformations, which I highly recommend.
The second aspect of Last Exit To Nowhere relates to copyright. Copyright holders and especially movie studios are guarding their intellectual property very strictly. Jenkins’ book has some pretty eye-opening stories on movie studios going after fan pages, of all things, who use their copyrighted material without permission. But what’s so ingenious about Last Exit To Nowhere, it’s that they’ve discovered a clever way to basically go around the movie studios. The things they are referencing from the movies are so obscure that they don’t usually have any graphic materials, so they have been free to create them themselves. They’re just swiping the name or idea from the movie, and creating something original from it.
Of course, even if they were allowed to borrow from the movies, these t-shirt designs would be pretty cool and worthy of printing. But I think because they have to go about this way, it adds an extra level of meaning to the shirts.
All in all Last Exit to Nowhere has a fantastic business idea that is as contemporary as they get. I think this blurb from Playboy magazine summed it up best:
Last Exit understands both the urge to represent and the need for discretion.
And oh, to my friends reading this, I ordered the design below, so don’t even think about ordering a similar one and ruining my illusion of individuality!
Watching “State of Play,” I couldn’t help but think that I was witnessing the dying of a cinematic archetype: the Hero Journalist. It feels like a bookend to “All the President’s Men,” with Crowe’s worn-down, worn-out reporter character, Cal McAffrey, as the earnest-but-embittered descendant of Robert Redford’s and Dustin Hoffman’s dashing young Woodward and Bernstein. Hollywood’s going to stop making movies like this because, let’s face it, newspapers — those that are left — are in no position to inspire yarns like this anymore.
I concur that the internet has indeed changed how we view journalism. As my Twitter post showed, traditional news outlets are sometimes slow to react to emerging stories that are being talked about in Twitter, for example. This is one key driver for stripping journalism of some of its allure, but to me the biggest reason is the multitude of viewpoints the blogosphere offers on any given topic; an interested person can read blog posts (of severely varying quality, granted) that cover a happening from different angles, something that most newspapers simply can’t match. Or rather: after reading on a topic extensively in a variety of blogs, the “generalist” view that newspapers offer can seem quite lacking.
I do slightly disagree with Ad-Age’s piece in the sense that the hero journalist archetype is not likely going to face a fast and sudden death. More “extinct” archetypes still emerge in films every now and then (especially those having to do with gender). But it’s still a very astute observation they made.
Here’s the second guest lecture I did for the “Brands in Strategic Marketing” course at HSE. A lot of stuff crammed into 45 minutes, but I think I got the message through.
There were a few example videos I used, and here they are, in order of presentation. They’re in the embedded presentation as well, but some folks might want the direct links.
In my last post I talked about how the copyright wars were reframing the meaning of “criminal”, and in a post before that, I had expressed my worry that on the internet, being “in the know” or even being “first” were values that trumped even empathy. Both of these phenomena represent (to me at least) the darker side of the web, or at least they are an indication of still-developing social codes.
Both of these relate to a subject I had sworn I wouldn’t touch because it has been covered to death in other blogs and I found the subject just a tad too sensationalist for this blog, but the conclusion of this phenomenon and how it highlights contemporary culture was just too important for me to ignore.
Here in Finland, the ad world has been abuzz about a certain 20 000€ personal ad that was taken out in the leading Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat. In the ad, some man is calling after a woman he had seen and fallen for in a bar here in Helsinki. The buzz around the ad has been basically regarding if it is a viral campaign or not, and if it is, which agency did it and for whom?
Well, to the joy of romantics all over, behind the ad was a real person actually looking for his lost love. But what gave me a real pause was the way the man was discovered. The folks at Muro BBS had hacked his gmail account (which he had posted in the ad) by conning Google and thus salvaging the account’s password. This way they were able to discover the true identity of our digital Romeo.
I’m shocked that I have yet to see a single blog post or news piece condemning the way the identity was dug up, the only backlash I’ve seen was one poster at Stealthunit voicing his disapproval (his post was the inspiration for me writing about this). The method the Muro folks used was nothing short of a felony. The yellow press was more than happy to jump on the discovered identity and publish the man’s photo (albeit with his face blurred); I guess falling in love is no longer a private act in modern society, or at least one person’s right for privacy is secondary to the curious mob’s thirst for gossip. This is, to me at least, both a severe lapse of media literacy (the ad has been in the media, ergo he gets the celebrity treatment) and lack of social precedent guiding behavior. Since when has taking out a personal ad (granted, a 20 000€ personal ad) qualified as becoming a celebrity and forfeiting your privacy?
What I find ironic is that the Muro folks fit the demographic who are very vocal about protecting their own privacy on the web. But I guess compromising someone’s privacy is OK as long as it doesn’t happen to me. This is all very troubling to me, and I think it’s going to be a while until at least somewhat civil social codes are established on the internet.
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