INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
I love Hollywood box-office numbers because they provide a hard statistical view of cultural currents
Did you know, for instance, that there had never been a weekend when 8 of the top 10 movies in America were sequels — until this month Or
that, while almost 400 movies were released in the first half of 2018, nearly 40% of their total accumulated revenue came from just four
releases, all of which were superhero sequels
This is not what was supposed to happen
Ten years ago people thought that visual storytelling would be democratized; that new cameras, new editing suites, cheap streaming, and
BitTorrent would combine to render high-cost obsolete-infrastructure Hollywood irrelevant
A worldwide cohort of genius independent filmmakers would use this new generation of accessible tools to slowly supplant Hollywood studios
and producers as the drivers of visual and narrative culture.
Hoo boy, did that ever not happen
Instead we just added a few new gatekeepers to the entertainment oligarchy: YouTube, Amazon, Netflix
Instead of a new era of auteurs, of unique voices and stories, the entertainment industry has had enormous success doing the complete
opposite: doubling down on sequels, and expanding brands and franchises into massive worlds of corporate-licensed, committee-written,
producer-driven branded entertainment, often spanning movies, television, books, video games, and amusement parks
The Marvel Cinematic (and televised) Universe
The Wizarding World of Harry Potter
Jurassic World.
This is not in and of itself a bad thing
I&m a fan of most of those myself
But it worth asking; why didn''t we get that decentralized diaspora of auteurs that was once widely predicted And what are the longer-term
effects of the triumph of Branded Worlds on the grassroots, and the next generations, of pop culture
There are two answers to the first
Maybe it a lot easier to shoot and edit movies/TV than it used to be, but sets, locations, actors, scripts — those are all expensive and
Better amateur work is still far from professional
And while it true we&re seeing interesting new visual modes of storytelling, e.g
on Twitch and YouTube, it very rarely narrative fiction, and it still distributed and monetized via Twitch and YouTube, gatekeepers who
implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) shape what popular.
More importantly, though, democratizing the means of production does not increase
A 10x increase in the number of TV shows, however accessible they may be, does not 10x the time any person spends watching television
For a time the &long tail& theory, that you could make a lot of money from niche audiences as long as your total accessible market grew
large enough, was in vogue
This was essentially a mathematical claim, that audience demand was &fat-tailed& rather than ''thin-tailed.
But it seems that the demand for
entertainment is quite thin-tailed indeed
The more options we have, the more we seem to want characters we already know, in worlds with which we&re already familiar
This makes sense — it takes a lot of work to engage with a new world and a new cast, with no guarantee at all that they will be worth the
But the result is that Branded Worlds increasingly feel like vast open-world video games, even including side quests (Rogue One or Ant-Man
And The Wasp) along with the &main story,& and a seemingly endless amount of new downloadable content.
I also suspect that many-chaptered,
many-charactered worlds are more viable than they used to be because we&re more connected to them
Did you miss a Marvel movie leading up to Infinity War Well, you can recap its handful of key and killer scenes on YouTube, in fifteen
minutes, without having to rent/watch the whole thing
Did you miss the last episode of a TV show, or do you just want to skip to its conclusion If it has enough cultural resonance, Vulture or
The AVClub probably posted a recap you can use as quick Cliff Notes
We can dip our toes into Branded Worlds whenever we like, in between diving into them at a movie theater or serious bingewatching
session.
The other interesting question is: what does the growing supremacy of Branded Worlds mean for the next generation of writers,
directors, and producers Obviously producers will try to turn tentpoles into sequels, and sequels into franchises, as before; but now they
have a new goal, that of transforming a franchise into the apotheosis of a Branded World
(Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, and Westworld are obvious candidates, though each faces its own set of hurdles.)
Obviously writers and
directors are incentivized to create what is most likely to be successful
This doesn''t mean the complete absence of standalone one-offs — we&ve also seen that horror, long a springboard for auteurs breaking into
the biz, seems to give us one surprise crossover hit every year, such as Get Out and A Quiet Place
But it does mean that creators will focus on worlds as much as stories, and that fanfiction will become a completely viable path into the
industry — after all, writing within a Branded World is simply paid fanfiction
(Creators will also be incentivized to write stories which might do well in China burgeoning market, but that a different post.)
Again, none
of this is intrinsically bad
What I worry about a little, though, is whether the demand for entertainment is so thin-tailed that, as the number of Branded Worlds
increases, that demand begins to end with them
It pretty clear that once a Branded World gets big enough it doesn''t necessarily have to be good to be successful
(See Age of Ultron, Batman v Superman, the bad Star Trek movies, arguably Solo, etc.) Left-field hits like Get Out are funded because their
collective batting average is acceptably high
If Branded Worlds take enough of the mindshare of the masses that the batting average of original works drops faster than their production
cost, then we&ll start seeing even fewer of those.
Will that happen I can''t say — but I can tell you that a good way to measure whether
it happening is to look at the weekend box office a few years from now and see if, for the first time, fully 9 out of the top 10 are sequels
Watch the numbers; they rarely lie.
