A movie should be about something. I don’t mean this in a particularly philosophical way – a filmmaker should just be able to explain at any given moment why the thing that is currently happening on the screen is currently happening on the screen. Like, logically. This may come across as an embarrassingly low bar to clear, but more and more movies genuinely struggle to present a coherent series of events that are both causally related to one another and which unfold on a plane of existence recognizable to a human. It’s hard to enjoy your popcorn when objective reality is collapsing around you. The insanity makes the butter taste weird.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
We’re pretty clearly at the end of an epoch in Hollywood. It’s not even the first time we’ve been at the end of this particular epoch, which is kind of neat if you dig on ouroboros. But the mechanics behind the studio system’s latest headlong plunge into a woodchipper isn’t my focus here – I’m more interested in how the films themselves are affected by that most treasured of all corporate responses to conflict: frothy, diaper-shitting panic. The rich are truly the best of us.
Listen: you don’t have to be smart to make money. If anything, you should probably be stupid. This is because the best way to produce anything at scale is to find a formula that seems to have worked for someone else and shamelessly mash the copy + paste buttons until your fingers are bloody stumps and there’s an airport named after you and you have more mistresses than seems either necessary or practical.
The Hollywood version of this system is well-understood: watershed film leads to avalanche of imitators leads to losing sight of what made the original film work leads to compensating for lack of ideas by cranking up the superficial aspects of the original film leads to entries so bloated they barely qualify as movies leads to audience fatigue leads to plummeting profits leads to a private equity firm scooping up the studio on the cheap leads to everybody’s fired leads to once-proud corporate executives reduced to hobo knife fights over who gets to sleep in the big dumpster tonight. Capitalism, baby. The system works.
This is what’s currently happening in the world of franchise films. Studios have been smashing the Cinematic Universe button for so long and to such diminishing returns that now whenever they hit that sweet, sweet money button instead of being showered in easy Benjamins they’re mostly treated to a low, long, mournful fart. See those budgets? A simple way to tell when a cinematic bubble is about to go Krakatoa is when the amount of money pumped into the production of a picture keeps going up even as market stability keeps going down. It seems counter-intuitive to increase financial exposure during turbulent times but, remember, we’re dealing with dumb people here, and dumb people only have two settings: grift, and panic. And it’s in that panicked state that these nimrods convince themselves to spend $350 million on an Indiana Jones movie, or to buy the rights to two entries in the Knives Out franchise for half a billion.
And the inability to come up with any plan besides The Thing We Are Currently Doing, Except Larger weighs in on the actual construction of these movies, too. When studio executives panic and start pumping such ungodly amounts on money into a production it becomes nearly impossible to make a movie in any traditional sense. On the scale we’re talking about movies are more assembled, pre-fabricated parts snapped into sorta-kinda alignment by different teams who have all been working in isolation from one another and don’t even know what the final product is supposed to look like. If this sounds unsustainable, it’s because it is.
The End
There’s no point in issuing a clarion call against this system because the system is a product of human nature – everybody only ever learns their lesson for as long as it takes them to work up the necessary momentum to run into the same fucking wall again. Way more fun is to think about what interesting new cinematic flora will grow out of the composted remains of the studio system’s latest collapse. The next Scorsese is out there, somewhere, waiting for their chance, and they just need a few more studios to somehow think spending $400 million on a Gem and the Holograms reboot is a good idea. They probably won’t have to wait long.
(Oops, I forgot to say something about Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny! It’s three fucking hours long! That’s a sick joke! I wish Archimedes would send me back in time to before I watched this movie so I could tell myself not to watch this movie!)