FRANCHISE FATIGUE as Han Solo makes loss

The empire strikes whack

The franchise model remains king - just look at the top 10 box office on a typical week, or the annual top 10s, and you'll see this domination (existing audience + brand recognition makes them easier to market, and for CGI epics costs can be spread over multiple movies - especially when planned out like the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Avatar sequels or Star Wars movies).

Great new alliterative term to be aware of though - franchise fatigue.
The legendary, nostalgia-fuelled status of the Star Wars franchise is clearly sinking under the weight of annual releases, with the poorly received Han Solo spin-off not quite a franchise killer but the 1st in the series to make a loss!

Just like the star system (Richard Dyer) that Star Wars itself is undermining, nothing is set in stone in the film industry - which is why we talk of conventions not rules!

See 'Too much, too fast': Disney to scale back production of Star Wars movies (Film Guardian - which you can read regularly via the free Guardian app; you will learn a lot more than we can cover in lessons by doing so!)

DISTRIBUTION STARS Indie straight-to-DVD until actor hits big

Tricky one to put into a short post title...
Useful examples here of how Indie movies lacking the star power to gain theatrical distribution, so restricted to straight-to-DVD (or just VOD in some cases) release ... until a then unknown cast member becomes a star. Then these cinematic horrors (as far as the newly shiny star and their agents/lawyers are concerned) find themselves plastered all over posters and trailers for (sometimes) a much belated cinema run or at least the DVD cover or VOD artwork.

There are several big names listed in this article, but there are many who aren't keen to recall their cinematic debut. For a certain Johnny Depp it was getting eviscerated in the original Elm Street. A certain rom-com flop veteran and star of 1000s of gossip mag covers, whose hair seems to be her greatest talent, made her bow in the fantastically silly slasher Leprechaun... (name revealed in tags when I get round to it!)

Brie Larson’s Basmati Blues and other lost movies A-listers wish had stayed buried https://www.theguardian.com/film/shortcuts/2017/nov/15/brie-larsons-basmati-blues-and-other-lost-movies-a-listers-wish-had-stayed-buried?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Blogger

Disney bank on franchise not A-List stars selling

Dreddful...star power meant unmasking
Sly to exploit his appeal, rather obviously
ruining the concept of the masked Dredd

I've picked up on this theme a few times, and there is strong evidence to argue the point either way, but there clearly is some doubt emerging over the continuing veracity and vigour of the star system; movie marketing being centred on attaching and selling star names.

The now well-established dominance of the franchise system appears to offer an alternative - though its only Disney currently that seems to be banking on this, its tentpole productions shaving many $10s of millions from CGI-heavy budgets by casting young unknowns in key roles - AND tying them into multi-film contracts that will keep them on relatively low salaries, avoiding awkward renegotiations where actors have a strong hand. Look at the budgets for the first two Scream movies, or BJDiary, for examples of how actors can up their demands to stay in a franchise.

The Disney examples (Star Wars: Force Awakens and much of the MarvelCU, excepting Robert Downey Jr) shouldn't, i think, be seen as typical enough to dismiss the rule #1 of the film business, and Disney currently are an exception amongst the Big Six in taking this approach.

Some franchises/IP have sufficient pre-existing audiences to cope without stars. Harry Potter and the Hunger Games are good examples, so too Twilight (as horrible as those movies are, at least to non-teen, non-girl viewers like myself!).

Shocker: critics and audience hate this movie.

Hollywood showed repeatedly before The Dark Knight kick-started the current MCU hegemony that shoving a big name into an iconic costume is often box office poison: Stallone's abysmal Judge Dredd is the classic example; whether his star brand or performance, or the script, were to blame, fans hated it and a general audience couldn't suspend belief for 90 minutes to really get into Rockie/Rambo as the meanest (robo)cop of them all.

WOMEN, DISTRIBUTION Female led film needed male star for funding

There have been a slew of stories over the past year about the unequal status of women in the film industry. I've highlighted and commented on a few, but really that's just spotlighting the tip of the iceberg.

This latest account of ingrained sexism highlights how deeply ingrained the attitudes and desires of distributors are. Seeking financing for a film, a female star finds blanket rejection until a male star is added to the package.

There we can see the primacy of the star as the continuing primary initial concern of a distributor (paying upfront, in advance of production, is often the funding device for Indies), with this added gender twist. Barring a few exceptions, race is likely to remain a factor too.

Will this change? The impact of the websites, social media and high profile media interventions by a growing number of stars, and that of the Sony hack revelations, are creating pressure for a fairer system - and in a numbers business it certainly won't pay to alienate half of your audience.

I wouldn't like to put a timescale on that though - and think it will take an organised boycott of a tentpole to make serious leeway, something that is hard to conceive of in 2015. The Hunger Games could have been that film - its a disgrace that the female star who drives the entire marketing effort is somehow not given the financially superior package to male co-stars, supporting players all in what has become a Jennifer Lawrence vehicle.

In recent months, a number of Hollywood actors have come forward to speak out about misogyny in the entertainment industry. Jennifer Lawrence recently publicly attacked the gender pay gap in the industry in an essay that went viral. And over the weekend, Sharon Stone recalled weeping over unequal salaries more than 20 years ago, following the release of Basic Instinct.On Sunday in Los Angeles, during a panel discussion dedicated to independent film at AFI festival, actor Olivia Wilde joined the chorus, recounting the hurdles she went through to get a female-led production financed independently.

Read more: Olivia Wilde: It's harder to secure funding for female-led productions.

Richard Dyer's star system

This is a simple but highly useful audience/narrative theory, which also reflects standard marketing thinking (question 1 a potential distributor will ask of a film production: who's the star?). Richard Dyer's (Amazon book list) landmark 1979 book Stars argued that the star system was central to how the media operate, and how we read texts. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (his 1986 follow-up) used case studies of Hollywood icons from the golden era, examining 'the ways in which audiences simultaneously construct and consume a particular star's persona' (Wiki). You might see parallels here with much later web 2.0 theorists such as Gauntlett and Gillmor and such declarations as "the former audience" (see this post for associated material on this).

The point here is that your text's narrative extends well beyond the film opening, 4 minute video, or even the wider promotional package.

I thought about this when reading a Film Guardian feature on Tom Cruise and director Christopher Nolan's insistence on diegetic as opposed to CGI stunts:

It goes deeper still though, into the weird contract we draw up with ourselves when we watch film. “Tom Cruise is doing that for real!” we exclaim to ourselves as we see Tom Cruise doing some casual rappelling. “Whoa!” We never truly watch blockbusters as pure narratives, but instead are constantly aware in their place in a wider ecosystem of celebrity, in which Cruise also has divorces and jumps on sofas and twinkles next to fans. We’re in awe of Cruise-as-Hunt rather than Hunt himself. (Tom Cruise, Christopher Nolan, and the new anti-CGI snobbery)

The excellent MediaKnowItAll site has a useful entry on this, considering not just the film angle but also how the music industry inculcates this approach to its modes of operation:

A star is an image not a real person that is constructed (as any other aspect of fiction is) out of a range of materials (eg advertising, magazines etc as well as films [music]).  

Their entry is copied in below, but is best appreciated on their site, where you can also click around and find further useful material.

Are stars vital for cinema success?

The simple answer is yes ... and no!
Most of the big hit movies are to some degree 'star vehicles', but then there are plenty of counter examples too, from Paranormal Activity to Bridesmaids, or Billy Elliot for that matter!
More and more films US and UK films are funded by pre-selling distribution rights to foreign markets, a strategy UK social realist filmmakers such as Ken Loach and Mike Leigh relied upon for most of their careers. In their case, they could pre-sell to European markets where they were held in very high regard as auteur filmmakers. More mainstream films, even at the low budget level, will frequently encounter foreign distributors demanding the presence of some star with appeal in their territory, reinforcing the position of stars as vital to a film's prospects even if the evidence of success is very questionable.
At the tentpole level there is also a yes and no answer: big name stars with wide international crossover appeal help sell the movie, and their appearances on major TV shows across different territories/markets, their presence at red-carpet openings, usually helps generate buzz. However, technology can be just as big a factor: Avatar wasn't reliant on big names but rather the combination of groundbreaking CGI/SFX and the brand of director James Cameron, just as Michael Bay's name and the associated guarantee of lots of spectacular explosions that the producer of such successful bilge as the Transformers franchise brings is at least as important as any star name attached.
Here's a few links for further reading on this - useful for reflecting on your own target audience too.

Michael Bay gets narked at Transformers star slagging off the movie!

After enduring the unenthused gripes of his two leads, Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox, Bay has apparently been forced to his breaking point by the recent comments from Hugo Weaving, who called his voice-acting gig as Transformers villain Megatron a "meaningless" job that he "didn't care about."

EC McMullen Jr gets rather cross at the very idea that stars sell pictures, specifically horror...

Two major factors will sell your genre movie to the fans. One is someone and something they've never seen before (so if you're dry-humping NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, ALIEN, or SAW, you lose). Two is fan recognition. Fans are more apt to go to a movie made by a director, writer, or producer (even a freaking

A beginner's guide to blockbusters

Great article from Murdoch paper The Times taking a wry, but well-informed, look at the process of making a hit movie - lots here you can reference, especially within your coursework blogs and evaluations:

From Times Online

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April 24, 2010

A beginner's guide to blockbusters

You need neither script nor star to have a box office success, it’s all just a matter of timing, chutzpah and explosives

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“The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions and all else, now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things — Bread and Games!”
So wrote the poet Juvenal in AD104, but then he never lived to witness the blockbuster movie season in America: one long canyon run stretching between Memorial Day and Labour Day, in which the studios loose one $200-million behemoth after another in what amounts to what one observer has called a “multimillion-dollar demolition derby played with Porsches”. To make sense of all this, here is a ten-point guide to surviving the summer season.
1. Pick a date. Any date, as long as it lies between May and August. The summer used to be a wasteland, the place the studios dumped dreck like Electra Glide in Blue (“He’s a good cop. On a big bike. On a bad road”); blockbusters were things that happened once in a generation, like Gone with the Wind. But then along came Jaws and Star Wars, ripping up all known box-office records, and audiences hunkered down for repeats. Blockbusters became things that happened every year. Now, a new one is expected every week. This year Iron Man 2 on May 7 is followed a week later by Robin Hood, then Shrek Forever After, then Prince Caspian, all jostling for position.
“There are more teens living in America now than in the history of this country,” says Tom Sherak, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “It’s all about when the schools are out. It’s driven by that, by how you get them into theatres