"The Hollywood Franchise in Winter"; or, "The Studios Have Run Every Franchise into the Ground!"

A little while ago it occurred to me that it was entirely possible that no live-action movie this summer, or this year, will break the $1 billion barrier (a failure the more glaring as at least a half dozen such films managed the feat in 2019, at a time when a dollar was worth $1.17 today). This is not for lack of big franchise films of the kind that we are endlessly reminded are just about all that gets people to the theater these days--but because the films from which the franchises hail are long past their best days. I have written a lot here about the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) lately, but it would be unfair to treat it as unique in this. The truth is that, for all the intensity of its prolonged exploitation, they're still, after hitting truly extraordinary highs, doing better than all their rivals, as one is reminded looking at the offerings of the summer of 2023, be it the already officially dead DC Extended Universe, the Fast and Furious, the Transformers, Mission: Impossible, etc., etc.--they are all a decade old or older (in most cases, much older), with many, many entries behind them. (Fast and Furious 10? Seriously? Transformers 6? Or is it 7? Back to the Future II's joke about Jaws 15 looks less and less like satire and more like prognostication all the time.)

Of course, that raises the question of why this is the case--why the studios are so determined to feed the public not only installments in booming franchises, but increasingly risky offerings from increasingly aged and run-down film franchises. There is an undeniable disinterest on their part in doing so that bespeaks their management's laziness, cowardice or stupidity, to the point of being eager to throw hundreds of millions away on sequels no one asked for. (Thus did we get a Terminator 6.) Meanwhile, where they have been willing to make the attempt, they have displayed extraordinary incompetence. (Would you believe that Will Smith's After Earth was supposed to launch a cinematic universe?)

Yet even fully acknowledging the stupidity and incompetence involved one has to admit that the Suits have not been given so much to work with as they might have, depriving them of material that had some possibility of helping inject some freshness into their production.

Consider, for example, publishing. When did we last see a literary blockbuster really suitable for their purposes? The YA fantasy/sci-fi boom of the late '90s and early 21st century gave us such colossi as Harry Potter, Twilight, the Hunger Games. But that was a long time ago, such that the studios have gone on trying to exploit them (with the awkward Fantastic Beasts spin-off of Harry Potter, with a Hunger Games prequel coming your way this year) to questionable result.

TV? Alas, TV is these days living off of what it can derive from, besides its past (with remake after remake after remake after revival of old TV shows), film, taking more than giving (thus are films of yesteryear that are not big action blockbusters endlessly remade for the small screen, like Fatal Attraction). Meanwhile the market is ever more fragmented, stuff that would bring a general audience to the theater elusive--which is why we still traffic in references to the Simpsons and Seinfeld and Star Trek all these years later, because that is the only thing those of us of a certain generation have seen that we can expect others to recognize. This means not only a lack of ready-made franchises they can turn into the next Mission: Impossible or Transformers, but a smaller chance of new ideas in a more general or abstract way gaining any traction.

The result is that, while by no means letting the folks in Hollywood off the hook for their failure, their failure has been a matter of a broader failure on the part of a generally stagnant pop culture industry in which the technological and commercial INNOVATION on display ("How do we squeeze the customer for a few more pennies?") have far outstripped the creativity of the "content" that is their raison d'etre.