The High Concept Model of Popular Filmmaking and its Decline

Reading Justin Wyatt's High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood I was surprised by just what a variety of film he classed as "high concept." After all, the judgment of whether a film is or is not high concept is a matter of their salability in a brisk and visual way rather than anything else, and not necessarily restricted to a particular theme, or genre. Yet it is undeniable that high concept has since Wyatt's day come to be associated much more with certain themes and genres than others. The selling of films on the basis of sex, for example, became a good deal rarer and more circumscribed and less effectual than before, while comedies of various kinds--romantic comedies, ultimately comedies in general--also became less likely to make the cut. And so forth. As a result the main kinds of content that counted as high concept were megabudgeted sci-fi action-adventure spectacles of the superhero, space opera or spy-fi type; or similarly megabudgeted films connected with brand-name animation, generally light-hearted adventure stuff directed at a family audience. As 2023 showed, even that is a tougher sell than it used to be, with Disney, which had become the outstanding player of the game by these rules, conspicuous for its lack of hits and abundance of box office failures when Deadline put out its lists of most and least valuable blockbusters these past couple of weeks. In that it can seem that high concept as we knew it has run its course--though I do see a "high concept 2.0" emerging.

Look for my thoughts on that in an upcoming post.