Well…
In the 1990s, Steven Spielberg, on the set of Hook, proclaimed that big films like that would soon be a thing of the past because of production costs. A year later, he was making Jurassic, and thanks to CGI, production costs were able to be reduced, or at least stabilise for a long while. But I often wonder if Jurassic hadn’t been the giant zeitgeist swamping megabeast it was, what would have happened?
CG might not have caught on as much as it did. Would people trust Zemeckis and Cameron to make Gump and Titanic the way they did with a technology that people had rejected? It would certainly have slowed the progression into CG, and the advent of CG animated films, down some. Yes, Toy Story would have happened, but maybe that reaction might have been more muted, too, although to be fair, Disney was on a roll — the film was sold as a Disney, not Pixar, film initially — so the chances are it would have still made an impact.
However, the giant cost of those films might have seen megeblockusters go the way of the dinos if those earlier films hadn’t been huge hits, and largely sold on the back of their CG effects. T2, Jurassic, Gump, Toy and Titanic laid the groundwork and changed the industry over the course of the 90s in the way sound did in the late 20s.
There have, basically and arguably, only been a slim number of seismic shifts throughout cinema history after the invention of the medium in the late 1800s: the dawn of sound in the 20s, introduction of widescreen and stereophonic sound in the 50s, the marketing of future blockbuster pictures throughout the 70s (The Godfather, The Exorcist, The Towering Inferno, Jaws, Star Wars, Superman) and the CG revolution in the 90s. All those moments changed the way films were made, released, promoted and made. Yes, I said made twice.
We're going through that again now, which is about right as things seem to happen on a twenty to thirty-year generational cycle. It’s a combinational effect:
1) films are getting more costly to make again. They have to keep getting bigger and bigger, to top what came before, and some filmmakers frankly don’t know what they are doing, so they go the Chaplin route of making it up as they go.
2) films are not as "good" as they used to be. In getting bigger and bigger to top what came before, they are all becoming more homogenised to appeal to more people and, as a result, more people are realising they’ve seen it all before.
3) audience numbers are down. The pandemic, I fear, only escalated what was happening anyway, with more people having their entertainment time split between other distractions, such as videogames, internet videos and…
4) streaming. While this gets the brunt of the "blame" for changing audience habits, I believe the shift was slowly happening long before the pandemic made us all streaming bingers. And there's another cultural thing happening, too…
Years ago, awesome Orson Welles suggested something along the lines that the idols of the day were only as big as the medium that was popular at any given time. He was talking in the late 1970s, when films were at a bit of a downturn, before the multiplexes opened up, and music was king in entertainment. He supposed that the biggest stars have always been the ones making the most popular magic: from composers and opera singers back in theatrical times, the actors and personalities of the early film era, and so forth. Later on, a face on television was just as popular, of not more so, than the biggest film faces of the 50s and 60s, when the *films* themselves were the stars.
We are going through this again now. Yes, we have big stars, and famous faces. But increasingly they are becoming unable to open (to "sell") a film. In the 70s, when Welles was speaking, stadium rock and concerts made musicians much bigger stars than those appearing on cinema screens. And, it’s true, he’s actually right when you think about it. All those singer-songwriters of the time were making much more money and had their pictures on many more walls than Redford, Newman, Hoffman, or any of the biggest movie stars of the decade.
Now it’s the turn of the influencers, or as I call them, the influenzas. These often vacuous, often no-talent hacks with their YouTube "shows" have become the faces that (mostly younger) people are watching all the time now. Movies are down, television is down. There's too much noise going on, and entertainment has become a throwaway commodity, that only a few people, the new "stars" are going to break through. The (gosh it hurts me to say so) Kardashians, etc. Hideous, fake people that, shockingly, "regular, normal" people want to emulate, for some reason, rather than be their own thing.
All of which gets us back to animated films and films in general. Yes…there was a point to this after all.
Films are getting too costly to make again, based on the smaller returns they are generating. Because people are not going to see them in the numbers they once were. Because the films are, generally, not very good. But no-one challenges this. Everyone, it seems, is happy to accept the mediocrity of most blockbusters that come along, with the usual "it was okay". How many times have I wheeled out my "good enough should never be good enough" maxim recently?
It seems every film gets some sort of pass, like it’s the "best" the filmmakers could do. So with this acceptance, we are then going to get the films we deserve. Which is why it's kind of great to see audiences finally waking up and rejecting these things en masse: The Flush and Pile Of Density being the obvious losers this summer. They should have been better films. At $250m+ cost, they really should have been better films!
Yes, there are outliers: Avatar 2, I think, built upon a huge audience expectation and appetite for a sequel that was so long in coming that I think a lot of that film's success was an inner need to try and reclaim a bit of what life was like 15 or so years ago, and to try and get that feeling back. After the pandemic, we needed to remind ourselves that things might be how they once were. Afterwards, everyone did wake up to the fact that they’d seen the exact same film all that time before, but it didn’t matter: the audience wanted something safe, big and, yes, mindless, just to take their minds off things.
It could, have course, gone the other way, and been a massive, massive flop. Now that Cameron's one trick has somewhat been exposed, it’ll be interesting if that can be sustained over another three sequels. The movie landscape will again be much changed before the final of those films is released. My own local cinema is currently under threat, looking to close possibly at the end of this year. It’ll be the first time since cinemas opened in the UK that Elstree and Borehamwood — one of the original film towns and once dubbed "Britain's Hollywood" because of its *six* major studios (2001, Star Wars, Indy, Roger Rabbit, the list goes on and on) — does not have a cinema within its borders.
So films, including animated films, are going to have to go through another rethink. And at the first post, this unfortunately means cutting the bottom line. Which means restructuring. Illumination famously makes its films for between $75-100m, and has a high budget to hit ratio. DreamWorks and Disney, on the other hand, have films routinely costing around $200m to produce, and haven’t been seeing the best of returns, for various reasons: yes, the pandemic, but also because the films have not exactly been classics in waiting. Enjoyable? Sure. "Pretty good"? Again, maybe. But nothing that’s been a breakout hit since Frozen II, another sequel.
Illumination, on the other hand, can weather a couple of lesser grossing films, since their model is cheaper to begin with. Universal, now owning both Illumination and DWA, must be asking if one studio can do this, why can’t the other one? And there is, somewhat unfortunately, logic there. The demand for more content means more content needs to be made, but that that content needs to be made more cheaply and be more successful. So there’s a vicious circle of cheapening out production while making films to try and appeal to most people. So they all become the same, and become more cookie-cutter.
Which means more predictable stories, lesser audience engagement, and more desperation from producers who will latch on to more sequels, remakes and product properties to try and cut through to sell you something you might have heard of or remember. And so it goes on. I haven’t seen it, but this can be the only explanation as to why Barbie cut through so big this year: despite being ostensibly a product feature, it became a hit by stealthily subverting those expectations and being something quite different — very different if what I have heard is true — to what could have been another routine, Lego Movie type franchise movie made for the masses.
Ironically, it became embraced by those masses, perhaps exactly because it was so different, maybe "shocking", and surprising. But then here’s where things get obvious and predictable again. Warners wants more Barbie. There will be a sequel, one way or another. Other toy movies will follow, some of them animated, I’m sure. But most of them won’t have that Barbie sparkle, and most of them won’t be that good at all, and many of them will be shunned by audiences off watching whatever next influenzas tell them to go watch (which, currently, won’t be Snow White).
So film returns will be lower again, which in the old days meant fewer films would be made. But now content is king, so more movies will be made. But cheaper and lazier. All of which isn’t really great for our own cultural tastes, or for the industry that is making them.
Interesting times… Interesting times…
