The previous Mortal Kombat movies were for the most part true to the games and a bit on the light side. But this short movie is nothing if dark. See, for example, their version of the character “Reptile”:

The idea of shooting test and sample footage of a potential movie project for studio heads is of course not new (personal favorite, Tom Selleck as Indiana Jones). But including consumers in this decision making process definitely is. As you may have guessed, the clip was posted on YouTube and other video sharing sites. The clip has already gone viral and is serving as a great way for the producers to get some immediate fan reactions from the video comments to throw at the studio brass. I’ve skimmed through some of the comments, and the response seems for the most part very positive. There are also a lot of great observations, reactions and other utterances that should prove invaluable if the movie moves to production. I personally hope the movie gets made.

But the bigger question is, of course, will we be seeing more of these short movie “probes” for movie ideas? It’s something that definitely has potential and is very “co-creative”. But also could spell disaster if used the wrong way. Nobody likes cultural works made by committee, for one. You need to find a balance between consumer engagement and artistic authorship.

Here’s the whole short film:

Much of Borat’s interestingness stemmed from Borat talking with regular people, who often ended up showing their true colors in the process. Most of the interactions played out like a good qualitative interview: Borat was the researcher getting people to spill their guts, in their own words, with well-timed priming. Borat was the true outsider, wanting to learn about the American way of life, and people obliged. All Borat had to do was to nudge them into the right direction, and people would reveal their deep racist, homophobic or antisemite feelings. Often, it didn’t even require much.

Brüno, on the other hand, is almost a case example of bad anthropology. The spotlight is almost always on him, never on the people he’s interviewing or interacting with. Brüno is flamboyant. He’s irritating. He doesn’t get people to open up, he pushes them and pushes them until they lose their temper and reveal something about themselves. And most of the time, the results were predictable and uninteresting. People were genuinely uneasy with him, just waiting to get out of the situation. Most of the time, I ended up feeling sorry for Brüno’s “victims”, unlike in Borat. Only a few episodes felt free-flowing and enlightening (the talk show and the baby pictures), the rest was just shock humor.

I definitely think Cohen can make another film like this (more makeup and a new character and people won’t know who it is), but he has to tone it down and give the spotlight back to the people he’s interviewing.

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?

Thanks to Jani for the tip.

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.

I’ll definitely keep an eye on this.

From the Wall Street Journal:

“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:

All three movies had their own respective plots, but all more or less played around with the same idea: work is a drag, and responsibilities are prohibiting you (the American male) from being free and realizing your true self. It’s the old “the mainstream vs. the avant garde” rhetoric that’s been a staple of Hollywood and American culture for decades now. Money and “career” eat at your soul, and only by letting go and embracing freedom, spontaneous whims and creativity can you truly be free – just ask William Whyte and “The Organization Man”.

Beware the Organization Man, for he wears a gray flannel suit and he has no soul.

Naturally, the truth about work life isn’t as dreary as movies would have us to believe, and the avant garde isn’t all it’s cooked up to be (if you can even call it that anymore). But the myth remains.

I’m wondering if we’ll see a decline in how often this myth is featured in American cinema. All three movies I mentioned were given a green light or shot during the end of the economic boom cycle. Life was good, jobs were aplenty and secure. People had the luxury to dream about a better life (and most of all, a better job). But now we’re in a recession and people are more thankful to have a job in the first place. Will Hollywood sense this or keep rolling out films that basically declare that your job stinks? If this recession is going to be as bad as some people speculate it will be, then its impact on contemporary culture should be quite imminent, and Hollywood is usually the first to smell a cultural trend.

I’m definitely keeping my eye on the list of upcoming movies.