DIGITISATION, GLOBALISATION, CONVERGENCE Superhero hegemony in brief

Another critic (Jason Wilson) rather irked at the hegemony of superhero tentpoles. If you use the superhero tag in particular you'll find several linked articles analysing the rise of these films and this me-too strategy.

A quick summary follows of key points you can utilise to show your understanding of how (British and global) cinema functions ...

CONVERGENCE All the world's a Marvellous stage/silver screen

See Marvel section below for analysis; image source.

Age Of Ultron marks Whedon’s swan song in the Avengers director chair but it’s hardly the end of the saga. The two-part Infinity War story has been set in stone for 2018 and 2019, along with eight other Marvel titles. DC, looking to get its comic-book universe up and running, has also announced a hefty release schedule. In tandem with a fresh batch of X-Men sequels, Spider-man spin-offs and Fantastic Four reboots, that’s at least 25 new superhero movies over the next five years.  - Bernstein, 2015.  See later sections below for analysis of the Marvel universe, UGC, web 2.0 and extended narratives...

I'll add to this shortly [done!]; having blogged on convergence (TV-film) this morning, this caught my eye, and made me think of theatrical adaptations of Bridget Jones, Billy Elliot and such. This can go the other way - West Side Story being an early example, Les Miserables  a more recent (Working Title) example. WT have a long track record of exploiting IP (intellectual property), especially novels, for adaptation (Atonement, BJD...).

Do you believe in fairies? Does Harvey Weinstein?
The famously fractious producer has spent millions of dollars and run through a couple of casts and creative teams in a diehard attempt to transform the 2004 Miramax film Finding Neverland into a Broadway show. - Soloski (2015) - Finding Neverland review – Gary Barlow's dull songs sink muddled show.

Once more, if we consider Working Title and Warp, we can see how a process evangelised by some (take a bow Dan Gillmor, or Chris 'long tail theory' Anderson) as democratising, levelling the playing field, actually seems to favour the conglomerates (...take a bow Andrew Keen, John McMuria, maybe even Anita 'blockbuster [ie tentpole] strategy' Elberse)!

Global, not US, market dominates Hollywood (Obst, 2013)

Look out for useful terminology/neologisms below: pre-awareness and tentpoles and tadpoles

$101m global box office, $21m budget (1993)

A few useful nuggests from this article by Phil Hoad, which highlights and critiques some of the points raised by one-time Hollywood hit producer Lynda Orbst in her bio (given an excoriating review by an unimpressed David Thomson, here), but the really important point concerns WHY Hollywood has turned to tentpole CGI/SFX spectaculars, usually within franchises and/or using 'pre-known' brands/books.

Her line of attack, that Hollywood has wrongly turned its back on medium budget concept movies, where the script, not CGI, is king, is a common one - especially from industry veterans...

If it wasn't startling enough when, in 2011, Universal president Ron Meyer commented on the amount of "shitty movies" on his own slate, founding fathers Steven Spielberg and George Lucas stepped up in the same week as Obst's book was published to denounce Hollywood's blockbuster dependency. ... The reckoning – led by baby boomers attacking the recent homogenisation drive in mainstream films – has exposed a generation gap in Hollywood.

Digitisation emerges as one key cause in this shift:

the shrinking of DVD revenue in the mid-noughties halved the studios' profit margins and reduced their appetite for risk

Joe Queenan: Superhero tentpoles killing cinema?

Queenan argues women are used as mere ornamentation

Highly recommend Joe Queenan's writing - I don't necessarily agree with all of his arguments, but the opinioniated style of it is refreshing and enjoyable (try Confessions of a Cineplex Heckler - selling for 1p on Amazon!)

A subject he's given views on before, he returns here to the issue of the dominance of superhero tentpole franchises (+ other sundry fantasy/sci-fi epics):

As Steven Soderbergh recently complained, these films are sucking the life out of motion pictures, diverting virtually all of the industry's resources into insanely expensive "tentpole" films that supposedly prop up other projects.

In this article he's particularly focussed on nailing the questionable ideology that he sees as underpinning most of these films. Here's an excerpt - do you agree?

This thing is starting to get old. There are too many superhero films: their storylines are all beginning to run together. It is a genre dominated by the thoroughly unoriginal notion that you cannot trust the government. Even when you can trust the government, you cannot trust all of it. And even the branches you can trust aren't much help, because they are incompetent. To save humanity, one must rely on a bootstrap operation headed by a dedicated go-getter and self-starter. At heart, all superheroes are Republicans.

He also addresses the very much secondary, window-dressing or ornamental role of female characters:

In superhero movies, women are almost always accessories. This is true even if they themselves are superheroines. The men do the heavy lifting; the women serve an ornamental function. This is why we are all the way up to Iron Man 3 and Batman 7, but have not seen a Supergirl film since 1984, or a Wonder Woman film ever (supposedly, it is coming this year). The 12-year-old boys for whom superhero movies are made are not interested in women. They may not even be interested in girls. They are certainly not interested in girls with superpowers.

(read the full article)

Cinema in 2013 will be...

Lengthy feature, broken down into shorter themed sections, from the Gdn Film Blog (if you don't already follow it you should!) here on what 2013 will bring for the cinema industry: read the article here or (partially reproduced) below.  

Care to add your own predictions as a comment? Will the 3D boom continue or tail off? Will home cinema 3D once again undermine cinema? Will streaming overtake DVD sales as a source of revenue? Will the window between exclusive theatrical exhibition and DVD/TV/streaming continue to shrink? Will the US audience continue to shrink as a % of Hollywood revenues for its own films - and if so, will this lead to greater multi-ethnicity in the casting of leads, or a shift away from depicting American power (surely a key tool of US political hegemony)? Will digitisation open up greater opportunities for Indie producers ... or will the tentpole strategy (closely tied to franchising sequels, prequels and remakes/reimaginings) continue to maintain big 6 global dominance? Will YOU go to see any film in the cinema in 2013 - or turn increasingly to viewing film on tablets, laptops etc?

Brits in Spandex and girl power: movie trends that will keep us talking in 2013

Last year, Hollywood was flush with international cash and films starring Matthew McConaughey. What will this year hold?

Tom Shone, 3.1.13, http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2013/jan/03/brits-spandex-movie-trends-2013 

Angelina Jolie as Maleficent represents the latest trend for Actresses of a Certain Age Who Aren't Really That Old: playing the bitch. Photograph: Disney

Time travel was popular. Prequels were hot. As were guns-for-hire, vampires and movies set on boats. Which of the year's cinematic trends, people, cultural avatars and epiphenomenon are most likely to set the agenda for 2013?

Jennifer Lawrence

In X-Men First-Class, Jennifer Lawrence wore the lightly stunned look of someone suffering from an acute case of Newcomer Bends. But then she narrowed her eyes, strung her bow and fired The Hunger Games towards $686m: Lawrence's imperturbability was revealed as the genuine article. The scene in Silver Linings Playbook where she walks into de Niro's lair and has him eating out of her hand in under five minutes may just win her an Oscar at the tender age of 22. If that weren't reason enough for New York magazine to put her at the top her their "Celebrity Brunch League" – the lost of famous people they'd most like to have pancakes with – the editors listed a few more:

She complains about her fussy premiere clothes; she crashes into cars while looking for Honey Boo Boo. There was that time that her entire family went to Sleep No More in search of orgies … Jennifer Lawrence cannot be contained by your Movie Star Rules of Decorum; Jennifer Lawrence has too much to share.

We concur. She's like Liz Taylor without the alimony.

Girls

Jennifer Lawrence wasn't the only ballsy princess of 2012. We also had the flame-haired, cinch-waisted Princess Merida in Pixar's Brave, the studio's first female protagonist; plus Kristin Stewart riding, fighting, and shooting her way through Snow White and the Huntsman, not to mention her swan song for beloved Bella, now a momma grizzly protecting her vampire cub in the last Twilight movie. They all added up to "an interesting new breed of warrior princesses," said the New York Times' AO Scott, "whose ascendance reflects the convergence of commercial calculations and cultural longings."
Much of the credit must go to Lionsgate, who released both Breaking Dawn Part 2 and The Hunger Games, thus proving conclusively that young female actresses can 'open' and power a movie move way past the $100 million mark. "Girls actually need superheroes much more than boys," said Gloria Steinem, approvingly. Boys aren't the only ones to play Han Solo.
Princess Merida – and her bow and arrow – were big hits in 2012. Photograph: Pixar