Is a Really Big New Franchise a Practical Impossibility for Hollywood?

It has long been a commonplace that contemporary popular culture is mired in reboots, remakes, sequels, prequels, spin-offs and the rest ad nauseam, in spite of the newest iterations so often proving not only artistically stale but commercially less viable than their predecessors. Indeed, many claim that movie and TV production are not just trading on old, washed-out brands and ideas in their recent offerings to an unprecedented and wearisome degree, but making new movies and shows in spite of their having little prospect of making money simply to sustain the presence and salability of the more popular works that came before them--shoring up the "back catalog" value of the earlier, more successful, installments in some franchise with new material which is commercially marginal, or even a "loss leader," rather than attempt to MAKE SOMETHING NEW FOR A CHANGE!

I do not dispute this reading of the situation--and do not deny that it is a very, very sad state of affairs. Still, it can also seem the case that, lamentable as the decisions that make for it are, all as those who make the relevant decisions never miss a chance to display their crassness, vulgarity, stupidity and never-take-responsibility-for-anything moral cowardice before the public, it does seem only fair to acknowledge that there are commercial factors that make new hits on the scale of the old--something as big as James Bond was in the '60s, or Star Wars in the '70s, or the Transformers or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the '80s--genuinely elusive, even should the Suits give a worthy artist their support, with three factors seeming to me to be of particular consequence here.

1. The Market is Unprecedentedly Fragmented and Saturated.
Consider the pop cultural world in which, for example, we saw the sensations made by so many children's cartoons of the '80s like The Transformers, G.I. Joe, Masters of the Universe. It was rather a smaller world, with fewer viewing options, and more people accordingly likely to be looking in the same direction at the same time. It was also a world of higher turnover, because if old movies and reruns of old shows comprised a larger part of people's entertainment media diet, this had its limitations. When, for example, those '80s-era cartoons were edged out of the weekday afternoon or Saturday morning line-up, fans of a particular cartoon may have retained their affections, but not easily accessed the show again, unless they had gone to the considerable trouble of getting it all on VHS. It was effectively unavailable--and as a result its fans found it that much easier to embrace something new in its stead, such that by the time Ghostbusters II hit theaters in 1989 it already looked dated in the kids at the birthday party where two down-on-their-luck former Ghostbusters appear as the entertainment wanting to see He-Man instead. (Already by 1987 the enthusiasm for He-Man had passed its peak, as the disappointing receipts for the live-action feature film version showed, while by 1989 the young had already moved on to other crazes, like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.)

However, the number of options was surging (as cable packages offered more channels, and increasingly "on demand" services as well), and as new media technologies made the old more enduring (for accessing old TV shows DVD was far handier than VHS), with the combination of choice and convenience pointedly including older fare hitting a new peak in the era of streaming (far handier than "physical media" ever was for the purpose). Even single free services like Tubi afford what not long ago would have seemed a superabundance of choices, as even this pales next to what can be had if one pays for even a handful of premium streaming services (Netflix, Hulu, etc., etc.). The collective content of those services includes the great bulk of the old stuff, in many cases carried by multiple services at once, not infrequently including a free option of some kind (perhaps in the listings of shows you can watch any time, perhaps in a channel looping the entire run of the series over and over and over again). Those '80s-era He-Man episodes? The fan can see them whenever they want for the relatively modest price of a subscription. They can at least as easily see the '80s-era incarnation of the Turtles too, all as the enduring presence of those cartoons only encourages the Suits in their obsessive remaking of everything, with the Turtles as good an example of that as any. (In the twenty-nine years since the first Turtles cartoon went off the air we have had four animated series that have so far run for a combined fifteen seasons--a new animated series airing for about half that period as a whole, all as additional specials, and live-action shows and films, were also there to sustain the franchise's presence.) Amid all that it is very, very hard to make an impression on any great number of people, the more in as they are not just consuming the barrage of more recent stuff, but older stuff also has any claim on their affections. Indeed, it can be very hard even to get noticed amid the cacophony.

2. It is Not Just Particular Franchises, but Whole Genres, That Hollywood Has Exhausted.
I first joined the argument over whether genres tend to follow a life cycle two decades ago. In doing so I took the side that holds the answer to be "Yes," and since then have not seen a single thing to make me change my mind about that, with, indeed, this seeming to me relevant enough to spell out the version of the cycle that I go by here. This begins with someone doing something new, and people becoming excited by the newness, especially insofar as it is a deep and meaningful newness--a new subject matter or new way of dealing with old subject matter, giving them a new way of looking at the world, a new pleasure, something that people may feel like they "always wanted" but just didn't know it. Artists get interested, and see what can be done with it. They realize a good many possibilities amid what may very well be a remarkable creative efflorescence, but over time there is less originality about, newer works increasingly a reworking of an increasingly recognizable set of themes and formulas and devices that come to seem the "usual" ones as these go from being familiar to being overfamiliar--for wax romantic all you like about the boundlessness of human creativity, what the human imagination is likely to come up within the bounds of a single kind of story, in a given span of years, that a very large number of people would find to be really worthwhile, is apt to be pretty finite, and the effort produce "diminishing marginal returns" before long, with nostalgia and in-joke and parody becoming increasingly prominent because "telling the story straight" just isn't all that interesting anymore a giveaway in such situations. Thus a genre that had risen and flourished declines. It may not be completely and eternally finished, it may still have its fans, but the old fecundity and inventiveness and excitement just aren't there--and on the whole people move on.

It is that vibrant period in the genre's history that gives you franchises, precisely because there is that crucial measure of discovery and novelty and excitement. Alas, considering the kinds of movies Hollywood makes franchises out of these days it seems that just about all of them are from genres that seem very far into the decadent phase of that trajectory. Certainly no one can dispute that Hollywood has been mining the action movie and science fiction movie, the space opera, the superhero tale, spy-fi, etc., etc. very intensively for a very long time. The result is a very small chance of their giving the public something it hasn't seen before through them, even the nostalgia and in-joke and parody pretty well exhausted, and accordingly that their potential for Really Big New Franchises does not seem terribly great. All of this seems that much bigger a problem in a milieu where big money is involved, and where the audiences one must interest are accordingly huge, this lowering the tolerance for risk, and raising the pressure on everyone to play it safe. (Hollywood doesn't make superhero movies looking to realize the full narrative potentials of the superhero genre. It does so to make a profit on a megabuck budget, a fact meaning that the superhero craze can be exhausted even as a lot of potentially very interesting, potentially great, superhero movies remain unmade.)

Of course, as genres decline other genres are born, aren't they? Certainly that is what happened in the past, with, for example, a Hollywood that had long had boffo b.o. from musicals and costume drama epics but found them becoming less salable finding potential in the action movie, the science fiction movie, etc. and producing a new era of blockbusters in the 1970s. (Hollywood may have been surprisingly slow to realize that potential. It took a young George Lucas to make them see what was painfully obvious to any non-idiot. But it happened.) Alas, there doesn't seem anything to compare with that these days, those hits which seem fresher--an Oppenheimer, for instance--generally not looking as if they have the makings of a formula that could be used to generate commercial successes for decades, with this underlined by how those of us attentive to such things keep hearing about the "graying" of fandom (in the sense of if you go to a fan convention you literally see a lot of gray heads). But as the situation implies the problem would seem far, far bigger than Hollywood.

After all, consider one line of thought about why genres emerge in the first place--how it is that artists come to be doing that something new to which others respond, namely that life itself changes, suggesting new possibilities. Compared with a period like the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--not coincidentally, the period in which we saw the technologies and genres of contemporary popular culture as we know it emerge (from the motion picture to the comic book to the paperback, from the crime thriller to the outer space adventure)--recent decades just did not see life change quite so much. Sneer all you like about the expectations of flying cars, protest all you like that your phone is the eighth wonder of the world, the fact remains that the change in human life entailed by the shift from an agrarian, rural civilization to an industrialized, urban one, the dawning of mass production, mass consumption and mass everything else, the electrification and mechanization of everyday life, etc., etc. has had no parallel since, as one sees comparing, for instance, the changes wrought in the Western world in the 1875-1925 period with the changes of the 1975-2025 period a hundred years later. Period, end of story, no room for argument. And if it is indeed the case that new artistic genres emerge because of gaps in culture that they fill--that they offer us new subjects because there are new subjects, show us a new way of looking at the world because a change in the world prompted such a way--well, there are apt to be a lot less gaps to fill in a static era than in a time of dramatic change. This may be all the more the case in as that era has been a time of intellectual stultification rather than ferment, exemplified by that stupidly self-satisfied postmodernist attitude which takes everything "ironically" so that nothing ever means anything. Still, it seems possible, even probable, that along with the stagnation of a whole society in most ways there is also the matter of one of the few things that has changed (yes, it does relate to your phone), namely the way that people in general "process media"--and that this has had important consequences for the media business.

3. The Decline of Print Culture.
Consider how a half century ago the pleasures of "high concept" audiovisual media were a novelty, enjoyed by people whose mentalities had been shaped, and for some time after went on being shaped, by a considerably more print-based culture, and how this interaction with high concept material reflected that. If image came ahead of story in such a film, the audience was still accustomed to think in terms of story, and if already engaging with images more than conventional elements of narrative still had some capacity to become fascinated with the bigger saga, the bigger world, the characters--for instance, building up what they have around the relatively slight presence that Boba Fett was in the original Star Wars trilogy--all as they went on to wolf down the books of an Expanded Universe. (Would you believe that when it hit the market Heir to the Empire made the New York Times hardcover list for 18 weeks?) That way of approaching such material seems less plausible in a later, more thoroughly high concept world, to the disadvantage of anyone trying to build up a big new franchise now, not only because the audience is so accustomed to such fare that it less easily makes an impression on them, but because of how it relates to "content." The young especially watch distractedly rather than absorbedly--a difference exemplified by the distance between the old-time theatrical experience and watching a movie on a cell phone screen as one sits on the bus. They are habituated to snippets of content. They react to images rather than stories. It is all a far cry from what built up old-style fan enthusiasm--while it seems symbolic of the situation that fans watched movies and wrote fan fiction. By contrast, even if the media generally pushes the "Young people love reading and writing as much as ever!" line in a spirit of mindless boosterism there is every reason to think that they actually write a whole lot less.

Meanwhile that same removal from print has meant that print media have suffered generally, publishing itself become more stagnant, closed off, less likely to present audiences with anything original, and less likely to reach much of an audience when it does--with all that means for its long hugely important role in not just creating franchises to be filmed, but furnishing makers of movies with material to render into images more broadly. (Returning to Star Wars it is worth remembering that if Lucas filmed an original script, he also drew on a half century old heritage of space operatic adventure in generating that story and its images, as one is likely to be reminded when reading a tale like Edmond Hamilton's classic "Crashing Suns.") I would say that this decline of print even carries over to the comic book, an industry which--even if standing partway between the written word and visual media, and itself dependent on print fiction (as we see when we remember how much classic DC superheroes like Batman and the Green Lantern were developments of pulp antecedents like the Shadow and the Lensmen)--has also seen far better days, with all that means for whatever potential the times may have had for generating new genres and new franchises. Indeed, one may say that in audiovisual media "killing" print culture it also killed a principal source of its own nourishment, and we are seeing some of the effects in the failure of new fandoms to materialize.

Altogether this has made for a thoroughly changed pop cultural world--one in which, I think, it is unreasonable for the media-industrial complex to try and aim for colossal hits in the "put up a tentpole and they will come" fashion to which its executives are addicted. Instead, as I have already said many a time, they would do better to aim at turning a profit on the possibility of the existence of small but enthusiastic audiences for particular movies--the carefully "targeted" success--such that if they can occasionally do well with a Deadpool & Wolverine they would do better most of the time to aim for an It Ends With Us, spending just a little money at a time but getting a very good return on it, certainly a lot better than they got on an Indiana Jones 5 or Captain Marvel 2. As the films named imply those making the decisions will do well to pay attention to what's out there, and occasionally take a risk--the more in as if they are very, very lucky they will in this period in which new ideas of any kind, and especially new ideas that can be used again and again, are very, very elusive, turn up exactly that hit that has the makings of that new genre that they so very sorely need.

Do I think Hollywood is likely to take this path to any great degree? Of course not, because what I am talking about means playing a risky, demanding game with intelligence and daring, two qualities never much in evidence there, and especially not these days, with the outlook the bleaker given that whatever talent may exist in the C-suites is subordinate to the demands of the same "shareholder value"-singing folks who have turned icons of American industrial might like General Electric and Boeing (and even Red Lobster!) into what they are now and thought it was just dandy, because, hey, they got theirs. Indeed, it seems that the industry's state of denial about the post-pandemic cinematic market endures and the ways in which it may have changed the "rules of the game" endures, the industry doubling down on its old, failing, way of doing things as it at best tweaks that way of doing things--taking advantage of the fact that a generation that grew up on video games will flock to theaters to enjoy movies that may not be very good cinema but exploit its love for those games all the same (this seems to sum up the Minecraft phenomenon), while trying to save a buck when it can as it presses ahead with its conventional blockbuster-making.