Of "Armchair Movie Executives": Further Thoughts

Recently taking up the topic of the "armchair movie executive" my focus was on the ways in which, apart from the relevant information having become much more widely available, the way movies are made and promoted ceaselessly encourages those with any such inclinations to think about that information in a quasi-movie executive-like way. (Indeed, I was struck by how the New Yorker's recent epic-length recounting of the Marvel Cinematic Universe basically asked us to be in awe of what was in the end a marketing achievement rather than an artistic one.)

However, it also seems to me that this is partly motivated by the way that those interested in the subject may not be entirely satisfied with the ways that the "pros" to whom those whining about the "armchair executives" would like to see the job left. The fact that the entertainment press is basically a pack of claqueurs (and the ways in which Hollywood has so consistently disappointed or annoyed the public) means that there is plenty of room for other views--which they express themselves, and which find an audience.

Is the Reason Streaming Shows Don't Make it into the "Zeitgeist" That Nothing Does?

Quentin Tarantino recently remarked that streaming content fails to make it into the "zeitgeist."

I don't think he's wrong about that.

But that still leaves the question of why that is the case.

My first thought was that it is because there are so many streaming services dividing up the market between them. But some streaming services really are used by really large proportions of the country. We are told that 62 percent of American households subscribe to Netflix. A significant majority of the country, that is a bigger subscriber base than HBO has--which has so often seen its shows acquire "zeitgeist" status, as revealed not just by older hits like The Sopranos and Sex and the City and Band of Brothers and Game of Thrones.

But then the newest of those shows, Thrones, made its debut over a decade ago--even before Netflix got heavily into the production of original content, whereas more recent shows have had less traction that way. We are endlessly told by entertainment writers euphoric over Euphoria the way they sang The Sopranos that it draws massive audiences--but does it really have that kind of zeitgeist status? They say that it does, but it seems to me that whereas I remember getting positively sick of hearing about HBO hits of the past wherever I turned it seems that, apart from the entertainment press' ravings about these things, I can forget that it exists at all in a way that seemed impossible with talk about THE SOPRANOS THE SOPRANOS THE SOPRANOS THE SOPRANOS blaring at us from every direction all day.

That being the case the issue seems something else--not that streaming services are chopping up the market so that very few people are watching any one thing, but that even when a lot of them are watching something the rest of us are able to ignore the fact as we go about our lives, pop culture too crowded and fragmented for any really recent thing, even when successful, to impose itself on our attention in the same way.

At least, when we get older and stop pretending that we care about following this stuff along anymore so that we no longer need go very far out of our way.

Quentin Tarantino's Recent Deadline Interview

The Hollywood news site Deadline recently published a two-part interview with Quentin Tarantino--dealing with, among much else, his experience with attempting to film a version of Casino Royale back in the '90s, his thoughts on the age of streaming, and his plans for his next, tenth and (he has long declared) last, film, The Movie Critic.

I will have more to say about this in upcoming posts--but perhaps what was most striking was, arguably, how Tarantino, who in many ways epitomized and represented the '90s indie film scene that was supposed to be the "cool new thing," bringing a measure of vibrancy to the recorporatized, stultified and stultifying post-New Hollywood Hollywood, sixty years old now, is now the old man longingly looking backward as the world changes and giving the impression that it has passed him by as he talks about the theatrical experience, and the ephemeral, never-making-it-into-the-zeitgeist character of streaming content.

Gladiator 2? Seriously?

The original Gladiator was a visual marvel, while being absolutely silly stuff from the standpoint of history. (Its plot was more like alternate history, and clumsily wrought alternate history at that, while it made Roman politics look like the spectacles of the WWE so in vogue about the time of the film's making.)

The result is that despite gestures in the direction of Anthony Mann-like historical epic it worked mainly as an action movie, and at that an '80s-style "You killed my favorite second cousin" action movie (betrayed super-soldier goes for revenge) with the novelty of a period setting--and its story wrapped up tidily at the end.

Especially as other such films having comparable success seems a long shot (thus did the attempts at imitation peter out fairly quickly in the early '00s), there seems no good reason to revisit it--especially a quarter of a century on when enthusiasm for any such idea must have declined, as the American public grew only more reserved toward period pieces.

But revisit it is what they are doing--the movie not only greenlit but actually in production.

My expectation is that extending an already silly narrative will produce something sillier still--all as few of the public show up, and the Hollywood Suits whose courtiers in the press ceaselessly talk them up to the general public as the "smartest guys in the room" will put another gaping hole in their studio's books.

The Flow of Time on TV (The Supposed "Realism" of Friday Night Lights)

It is a truism that the characters we see on TV tend to be far more affluent than the overall audience--the "First World," "middle-class" viewers of the shows only able to fantasize about having such homes and clothes and disposable income as those they see on the screen.

Those characters also tend to have much more disposable time on their hands.

Of course, this can seem a narrative convenience. People who don't have so much time are less likely to be able to have a wacky adventure or piece of melodrama every week.

Still, it can get ridiculous, with one case that has always seemed to me especially glaring Friday Night Lights--what I saw of it in reruns, anyway. This was in part because the "sell" here was so strongly based on its "realism," which such devices as the "shaky cam" were supposed to consider.

Think, for a moment, about the football players. In real life an intelligent, dedicated and energetic high school student has their hands quite full just keeping up decent grades while putting the hours into their sport. But we were constantly given the impression that this "realistic" show's football players were all, or if they weren't could be if they cared to be, honors students and state champions, all while putting in long hours on part-time jobs, and coping with levels of family melodrama that drive adults to nervous breakdown, while having immense amounts of time for hobbies, girlfriends, and "hanging with their buds" for endless hours in a bar (guess they don't "card" in this time), all without anyone ever apparently suffering from exhaustion.

Yet no one has ever remarked all this in the slightest.

Some grasp of reality, that, on the part of those who called it "realistic."

AI and the Artists

It was a cliché of science fiction that a high-tech world of advanced automation would see the inhabitants relieved of drudgery, and free to pursue what calling truly attracted them--a scenario that for many doubtless looked attractive, with one possibility a world where a very large number of people were artists of some type or other. (Certainly those kept from their genuine vocations by the inability to make enough money at them seem to have expected, or hoped for, something of the kind.)

However, it looks as if artists--a group which has, on the whole, not done very well out of an era in which science triumphed over letters, and engineering over artisanship--are going to see even less opportunity to be an artist as a result of automation. Already we are hearing of the Chinese video game industry dispensing with its artists in favor of AI-generated art, with artists who had recently been making a fairly good living at their craft finding demand for their work collapse as they are reduced to providing "small fixes, like tweaking the lighting and skewed body parts" in AI-generated art for a small fraction of their prior income.

What is already happening to artists in China is unlikely to be confined to China--while I would imagine that generators of words are even more vulnerable to displacement than generators of images, with one reflection the way the matter has entered into the big WGA strike out in Hollywood.

Considering this those whose intellectual bent is Luddite are likely to simply feel that "technology" has, once again, played humans a dirty trick. However, those who know better--who know that, contrary to Margaret Thatcher, there is such a thing as society--recognize a more complex reality, one where technological change, for all its potentials, has not been about liberating humans from drudgery or anything else but serving the needs of the powerful, as by cutting their wage bills, which is, of course, something that replacing an artist with an app does.

The situation bespeaks alongside this not only the successes of artificial intelligence research, but its failures. AI researchers have long struggled to develop systems which can cope with the demands of "perception and manipulation," and "finger" and "manual" dexterity--struggled so ineffectively for so long that their progress has been outstripped by efforts in other areas, like those at which the chatbots seem to excel, such that rather than automation's relieving humans of the drudge works frees humans to be artists, our art-making will be automated as humans go on enduring the drudgery required to keep the world running.

The Relevance of the Novel to Our Thinking About Society

Reading my way through the more popular sociology of the 1950s I remember that one of the minor surprises was the extent to which its authors--a William Whyte or a C. Wright Mills, for example--was able to cite a good deal of contemporary fiction for the sake of illustrating what they discussed. (Mills, for example, brings up works like Mark Benny's The Big Wheel.)

One doesn't see that anymore.

One reason may well be that social scientists, just like everyone else, read less fiction, which would mean that even if they did read more fiction it would be less useful as a point of reference as they tried to explain themselves.

However, while this seems to me very plausible it is also the case that contemporary fiction is a good deal less useful for such purposes than it used to be. The industry's extreme turn to escapist genre work without any interest in the lives of almost everyone on the planet; and the postmodernist dominance of the remainder, including what most call "literature" today; mean that there is unlikely to be any sociological substance or interest in what they produce--or the heads of its writers, as an examination of the sad and sorry work of the most celebrated of them goes to show.

On "Failure," Again

Recently considering the words "success" and "failure" I remarked the logic underlying the use of the words. This is a matter not just of respect for the outcomes allotted by "the system" and by extension society (as Daniel Bell put it in his classic of centrist thought, The End of Ideology, society is in the end nothing but "an organized system for the distribution of rewards and privileges"), but sanctification of those outcomes. Thus are those who have been given a great deal of reward and privilege glorified, with the more the case in as those who have not been so gifted are not only put on the wrong end of an invidious comparison, but pointedly insulted and humiliated.

In the process they underline that they deserve what they get, and get what they deserve, such that they have no right to complain, and no claim on anyone else's attention or sympathy.

Some practice, that.

The Movies of 2024 (What We Know So Far)

The recent announcement that the whole slate of upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe films will be subject to significant delay had me checking out the releases presently scheduled for 2024--which was even more appalling than I expected, especially when considering the higher-profile releases. A sequel to 1996's Twister? (How many people even remember the original now?) A Lion King prequel being compared to Godfather II? Transformers One (because that franchise didn't have enough numerical confusion as it was) and Gladiator 2 (really, who asked for this?) and, someone clearly not having got the memo about the poor chances of adaptations of TV shows from yesteryear in today's market, a big-screen version of The Fall Guy?

I fear that by the time we see the full list it will be even worse than all this portends.

But I'm sure we can count on the media claqueurs to do as they are instructed and talk up the freight train of garbage headed out way as they assure us that the Hollywood Suits are all both lovers of cinema, and geniuses at what they do.

On "Success" and "Failure"

"Success" is a rather relativistic term. One can only speak of success--and its opposite, failure--in relation to some object.

Yet told that someone is "successful" at something people do not ask "Successful at what?" Rather it is taken for granted that the object is individual socioeconomic advancement, with success at that game the attainment of some given level of income and position.

There is a lot to unpack here. There is the implicit assumption that individual socioeconomic advancement is the sole proper focus of a person's endeavor--that anyone who has other priorities is behaving aberrantly. Also implicit is the idea that an individual's outcomes in this area reflect on themselves as a person--that one's choices and efforts are what make for success or its lack, all this mattering far, far more than background or chance, or for that matter, scruples or the lack thereof; that this makes the pursuit of success a "tough" but essentially fair game. Indeed, this is so much the case that those who are not "successful" are dismissed as, sneered at, as failures, without a second thought given to the cruelty involved in that.

The result is that the language of "success" and "failure" that pervades our culture is ultimately an ultra-conformist expectation that the world is some big meritocracy that rewards people according to their deserts, with those not doing so well as they would like not worth bothering about, and every utterance of these words and their derivatives in the sense discussed here reinforcing the deep roots all this has in contemporary speech, thought, feeling and action.

Is the English Major in Decline Because Young People Less Often Aspire to Become Writers?

Some time ago I wondered at why we did not see more young people attracted to STEM subjects the way they were for a long time (this is changing) attracted to, for example, literature--getting degrees in the field in spite of what they are ceaselessly told are their poor income prospects.

My thought was that it was because they read for pleasure, and had opportunities to get to like reading, and writing, and even aspire to do that professionally--and that one of the problems the STEM field had was fewer opportunities for young people to get to enjoy numbers the same way. Thus math ends up something they just do for school, and unsurprisingly few develop any deep attraction to it.

Now (I did say this was changing) one sees fewer young people pursuing English degrees--plausibly because they may have been put off of them by increasingly dire warnings about an increasingly dire economy, but also because in the age of the smart phone fewer had those pleasurable experiences with reading and writing that may drive them to try and become a writer, and maybe fall back on teaching, as they went about that.

From the standpoint of gaining a living income they may well be better off for this. But it does bespeak developments that are less than happy intellectually and culturally.

On Athletes and Celebrity Today: A Few Thoughts

Recently writing about Aces: Iron Eagle III I found myself thinking about the niche that athletes like Rachel McLish (the film's female lead) used to occupy pop culturally, and how these days it seems smaller than it used to be. That can seem a matter of the ever-intensifying pop cultural fragmentation we now take for granted--one aspect of which has been that all but the most popular spectator sports have seen their profiles fall greatly. ("What ever happened to tennis?" I wondered not so long ago. "What ever happened to anything but football, baseball, basketball?" I could have easily asked instead.)

Going along with that was the way in which certain aspects of the entertainment world where athletes could reach an audience extending beyond their sport's fan base have declined in visibility, or disappeared altogether. In the '90s, for instance, there was an abundance of fitness shows on ESPN, and American Gladiators on the air, while World Wrestling Entertainment was in its sensationally popular "Attitude Era" all of them helping make their names known to people who paid no attention whatsoever to their sports. (Even if one did not watch wrestling, they knew who the Rock was and what he was cooking.) More broadly television tended to the use of a 22-episode-a-season "standalone" episodic structure that was accommodating of the use of "special guests" who did not really have to be able to act to perk up interest, a bill that prominent sports figures could and did fit. (Thus did the Rock play his own father in an episode of That '70s Show in an early stage of his crossover to acting--and prophesy great things for his son.) This especially went for the more action-oriented shows, especially the kind that did not take themselves too seriously (like those syndicated action hours), where the physical presences and skills of, for instance, bodybuilders, were often a natural. (McLish's fellow Ms. Olympia Cory Everson was quite the regular here in those days, as in her recurring character of Atalanta on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, and other spots on shows like Renegade, Tarzan: The Epic Adventures, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, The Adventures of Brisco County Jr., and even Home Improvement, where she appeared as herself.*)

If bits of it remain that media world is gone now, without anything quite replacing it. One consequence is that, apart from it being harder to point to a latterday McLish (or Rock, or Cory Everson), one might notice how just as all this has meant that the actors of earlier years, like Tom Cruise or Harrison Ford, overshadow newer, younger performers with regard to public recognition (even movie stars aren't "movie stars" in the old way), so does it go with sports celebrities. Thus are they the spokespersons in commercials, with Shaquille O'Neal on the screen so often to be seen hawking everything from pizza to car insurance that one might scarcely realize that he retired back in 2011--precisely because a younger, more recent, player, whatever their ability or accomplishment, simply does not have the same opportunity to become as recognizable to the public, even in sports still as popular as basketball.

* McLish held the title in 1980 and 1982, Everson in 1984-1989.

The Drug War-as-Actual-War Craze of the '90s and Aces: Iron Eagle III

The use of the phrase "War on Drugs" not as a rhetorical expression of seriousness of intent on the part of the speaker or analogy between an un-war-like activity and war intended to convey the intensity of the effort to which they aspired (as with a "War on Poverty"), but somehow actually a war to be fought with conventional military means, was very much in the air in the late 1980s and early 1990s. And as may be expected, military techno-thrillers, in a moment where their books were still very strong sellers, but the longtime favored choice of enemy, the Soviet Union, was passing from the scene (and which was not a particularly likely group to examine such ideas critically), rushed to depict exactly that. Thus Tom Clancy's Clear and Present Danger had accounts of the same satellites with which the U.S. spied on the Soviets listening in on drug lords' cell phones, the Air Force using an F-15 to swat drug-runners' planes from the skies, the U.S. Navy mounting a strategic "Flight of the Intruder" against the drug cartels' leadership the way Coonts' Jake Grafton targeted the leadership of North Vietnam, and minigun-armed Pave Low helicopters infiltrating special forces into Colombia who end up fighting a not-so-small-unit action against hundreds of drug cartel soldiers. Dale Brown, making his Drug War more war-like still, equipped his drug-runners with MiGs and Mirages and anti-ship missiles to make a . . . well, make a Dale Brown novel out of it.

Hollywood, which on top of the problems faced by the novelists was trying to figure out ways to keep making their increasingly decadent-looking action movies bigger and better and hitting on incorporating lots of "heavy metal" military hardware to do it, was thinking along similar lines, with at least two major features coming out of the tendency, notably the "Top Gun for Army aviation," Fire Birds (1990)--and the second sequel to Iron Eagle, Aces: Iron Eagle III.

Neither film was any great success, the second film less so than the first.1 Iron Eagle III, coming out in June 1992 the week after the adaptation of Tom Clancy's Patriot Games, grossed about $1.4 million on its opening weekend. Not a typo, it was about a twelfth of what Patriot Games made in its second weekend of play ($16.1 million), which put Aces at #11 on the list of the highest-grossing films of the week. The next week Batman Returns went into wide release and broke records for an opening weekend take, while Aces did . . . even less well than it had the previous week, so that the $10 million+-budgeted movie ultimately finished up with $2.5 million grossed, which even then did not let it place among the top hundred highest-grossing movies of the year. (Among "in-year" releases it was actually #142 on the list.) Moreover, time has not been kind to it in respect of the public's attention. While the original Iron Eagle has lingered in the pop cultural consciousness (getting, for example, significant mention in Ready Player One author Ernest Cline's "sophomore effort" Armada), Aces was pretty much forgotten by all except the writers of Family Guy.2 Indeed, I myself only caught the film during a few airings on cable a couple of decades ago, since which time I have not noticed it there or on streaming (the straight-to-video follow-up, Iron Eagle IV, actually seeming easier to catch there).

Still, the film has its points of interest, not least a number of details of the premise making for at least some novelty. In an era before senior citizen action heroes became routine, that is what we got in the collection of older pilots who head off to face the enemy, with a little further interest derived from the group's diversity--with General Charles "Chappy" Sinclair joined by a Briton, a German and a Japanese pilot whose teaming together at once evokes and transcends the Second World War conflict of Allies and Axis (indeed, the choice to bring Anglosphere pilots together with a German and especially a Japanese aviator seems the more interesting given its implicit break with the Germanophobia, and especially Japanaphobia, in which so much pop culture was trafficking at the time). This is all the more the case in as they all fly into action in their countries' iconic World War II fighters. Chappy goes into battle in a P-38 Lightning, the Briton in a Spitfire, the German in a Messerschmitt-109, and the Japanese in a Zero--while the villain has vintage aircraft in his own collection, notably a rocket-powered Messerschmitt-263.

There is likewise interest in the unlikely-seeming cast and crew. Here Louis Gossett Jr. is joined by Horst Buckholz of The Magnificent Seven as the German pilot, and the late martial arts legend Sonny Chiba as the Japanese, while Christopher Cazenove (who played an RAF pilot cut out of the Battle of Britain by a car accident in The Eye of the Needle) gets his chance to fly a Spitfire into action, all of which together lends the team a bit of a proto-Expendables quality. Meanwhile Paul Freeman plays the villain (Renee Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark, this time he is an actual Nazi rather than just working for and with Nazis); while also appearing are Watergate figure, then-techno-thriller movie staple and later U.S. Senator and candidate for President of the United States Fred Thompson; the same Phill Lewis today known principally as the Mr. Moseby in the Disney Channel's sitcoms has his part in the events; and bodybuilding superstar Rachel McLish in her first major acting role.3 And helming the production was John Glen--Aces one of just three feature films he made after directing all five of the '80s-era Everything Or Nothing-produced James Bond films.4

None of this makes Iron Eagle III a masterpiece, of course. But my admittedly remote and hazy memory is that taken as the silly B-movie that it unashamedly is it works well enough, while its more novel features are quite adequate to make it at the very least interesting as a curiosity--and so give the film a place, however minor, in the history of the genre.

1. All box office data from Box Office Mojo.
2. Brian was writing a screenplay--and Lois informed him that the Iron Eagle movies had already used his premise, mentioning number three specifically.
3. Fred Thompson had previously appeared in The Hunt for Red October, and The Flight of the Intruder (in the latter, replacing Married . . . With Children's Ed O'Neill in a crucial scene). Bodybuilders, and athletes of McLish's stature, seem to have had more prominence pop culturally and more chances at acting careers then, even if their careers often happened to be short. McLish's principal other film (apart, of course, from the documentary Pumping Iron II) was the straight-to-video thriller Raven Hawk (1996).
4. The other two were Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, one of two much-hyped big-budget flops which aimed to capitalize on the 500th anniversary of the voyage in 1992 (the one with Marlon Brando as Torquemada, which came out just a couple of months after Aces); and, barring Glen's coming out of retirement, his last, 2001's Christopher Lambert thriller The Point Men.

Yogurt's Cave in Spaceballs--and Marvel's Profits

Considering Mel Brooks' more successful works one is likely to see most highly praised the two movies of his annus mirabilis of 1974, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, while 1968's The Producers is highly regarded.

Still, other films of his, if not enjoying that level of acclaim, still seem to have at least a decent-sized cult following. History of the World, Part I seems to fall into this category (enough so that the "Part II" promised at the movie's end seems to have finally materialized).*

So did it go with Spaceballs, which was popular with, at least, us Star Wars-loving '80s kids.

Interestingly, this was even though some of the jokes could not have had much significance to us. I do not mean by this anything particularly subtle or "adult," but rather the Yogurt's Cave parody satirizing the crassness of post-Star Wars filmmaking with its sequels and its merchandising. This generation--my generation--had never known any other type of cinematic world, and could not, did not, appreciate the revolution that Star Wars wrought in this way, something I only came to properly understand reading about film history in books.

Still, even if we take it for granted I think we often underestimate just how much it matters--certainly to a company like Disney. The Disney-Pixar film Cars was not the most celebrated such production--but the billions in merchandise it sold insured the sequels kept on coming.

Marvel has been at least as big that way--and anyone considering the Marvel Cinematic Universe's (MCU) likely longevity should remember that, not only do the MCU films remain big profit-makers even as far down as they have descended from their Phase Three peak, but that revenue stream is plenty of incentive to keep the movies coming even should their profits not look as great as they did before. That by no means guarantees the MCU another fifteen years of high-volume output of the kind we have been seeing since 2008--but it is a reminder that, if the trend has been downward it has a long way to go before reaching the kind of state that drove Warner Bros. to even reboot the DCEU, never mind shut up the shop.

* In line with the tendency in the exploitation of those yesteryear hits not likely to make for big sci-fi action spectacles the sequel has taken the form of a streaming TV series on Hulu, rather than a movie.

Why the Wonder Woman Movie Hasn't Happened

Originally Posted on March 18, 2013.

After the more than decade-long boom of comic book superhero-based films, during which the release of several such movies a year has been routine; most of the best known superheroes have reached the big screen in one form or another (Superman, Batman, the Green Lantern, Spiderman, the Hulk, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Captain America, etc.); some of these have already been rebooted (like the Hulk and Spiderman); and many much less recognized characters have received similar treatment (like the Ghost Rider and Jonah Hex); it has become routine for genre-watchers to wonder aloud about why those "household name" characters that have not yet had films of their own have not received them. And it seems that Wonder Woman is the subject of more of this kind of talk than any of the others.

On the face of it, the fact that not only has a Wonder Woman movie not been made, but that a green light for one remains a distant prospect, seems quite surprising. Nonetheless, it takes only a little consideration of the issue to come up with three not insignificant obstacles in the way of such a film.

DC Comics' Big Screen Track Record
It is a common observation that where film is concerned, Marvel's properties have gone from strength to strength, culminating in the recent success of The Avengers, while DC has typically disappointed. In fairness, Marvel too has had its letdowns (like 2003's Hulk), and DC its successes (Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy arguably the biggest all-around success story of the past decade among superhero films). However, there is no disputing that overall Marvel has done far better, several of its better-known characters turned into successful, long-running franchises (the X-Men, Spiderman, Iron Man), with many others doing well enough to get at least one sequel (Fantastic Four, Ghost Rider)--a track record which has made the studios bullish enough about Marvel properties to be relatively aggressive about rebooting the disappointments (like the Hulk and Punisher), as well as successes which appeared to have run their course (as with the X-Men and Spiderman). By contrast, the disappointments make up a much larger portion of DC's smaller total number of efforts, and include not just some of the most notorious flops of the past decade (like 2004's Catwoman), but many of its highest-profile figures (Superman, the Green Lantern). Unsurprisingly, most members of the Justice League (including core members like the Flash and Aquaman) have yet to appear in even a single feature film. In this regard, Wonder Woman has been the norm, not the exception.

The Artistic Challenges of Adaptation: Plausibility, Relatability, Quality
The superhero films that have done best in recent years have tended to be relatively grounded efforts rather than over-the-top in tone, let alone broad and jokey--Nolan's Batman films rather than Green Lantern or The Fantastic Four, for instance.1 A related aspect of this is that superheroes with a basis in even the most dubious of pseudo-science have had an easier time at the box office than their magic- and myth-based counterparts. All of this works to the disadvantage of a character like Wonder Woman, with her Themysciran roots and the involvement of Olympian deities and other figures out of Classical myth in the stories; her invisible plane and bracelets of victory and truth-extracting rope; and of course, her famous costume.2

The difficulty of "selling" a Wonder Woman movie, big enough given the aforementioned basics of the concept, may be compounded by the fact that the character is "above us and different from us" and so difficult to make relatable to audiences. Of course, one could say the same of Superman, but the difficulty may be greater in her case: even if Superman is from Krypton, he was raised in Smallville, Kansas, and has made a home for himself in the quasi-New York of Metropolis, connecting him to the everyday world in a way which has no counterpart in Wonder Woman's backstory.

On top of all this, many a critic of the franchise notes that the material is simply weak in crucial respects, a post at Topless Robot, for instance, pointing to such things as its cast of its supporting characters. The series has no iconic villains, which have typically been a key ingredient in successful superhero franchises. (Superman has Lex Luthor, Batman the Joker, and Wonder Woman--the Cheetah?3) Wonder Woman's friends have similarly failed to capture the public's imagination. (Superman has Lois Lane--while Wonder Woman has Steve Tyler, who seems to have about as many fans as the Cheetah does.)

All of this leaves would-be screenwriters that much more torn between using the material furnished by the comics (as those actually looking forward to a Wonder Woman film would wish, at least in theory), and being forced to create new material from scratch to make the concept more credible to a general audience, enlarging the distance between page and screen and rendering the project that much more risky.

Gender Politics--and Economics
Substantial as the aforementioned obstacles are, the aspect of such a project that has drawn the most attention has, all too predictably, been gender politics, and it seems pointless to deny that this is an issue here (even if it is equally erroneous to discuss it to the exclusion of all else, as many in the blogosphere seem prone to do). During the last decade Hollywood put an unprecedented number of female action heroes on screen, but it is worth remembering that after the failure of the sequels to Lara Croft and Charlie's Angels in the summer of 2003, studios have been much more inhibited about centering first-string blockbusters on female protagonists.4 When not part of a larger ensemble of characters, they more typically play the lead in somewhat lower-budgeted, less commercially ambitious films (like those of the Resident Evil or Underworld series', or even The Hunger Games).5 The tendency has naturally been reflected in the films of the especially costly superhero genre. The last big summer release centered on a major female comic book character was 2004's Catwoman, a notorious flop which cast a pall over other such attempts, with Elektra (2005) and Sucker Punch (2011) not much more encouraging.

The barest overview of the debate over why this is the case (the demographics of the audience for this type of film, the conflicts between the stuff of popular entertainment and "political correctness," etc.) would require a piece much longer than the format of this post can accommodate, but that this is the case seems nearly indisputable, and that does make the prospect of a $150 million-plus movie about a comic book superheroine a long shot. The problem is in this case compounded by the heroine's iconic status among quite different groups for quite different reasons, and the character's well-known idiosyncrasies (the famous outfit, the implications of her coming from an Amazon culture, the questions about her sexuality), all of which may seem to guarantee that the results of any plausible effort will alienate groups the studio cares about, and perhaps please no one who does matter to it. (The poor reaction to what people have seen of the unaired David E. Kelley pilot for a new Wonder Woman TV series has only proven the point.)

Any one of these factors might have been problematic in themselves, but the combination of them--which confronts a would-be producer with the decision to shoot a really big-budget film about the over-the-top adventures of a DC Comics-based superheroine carrying heavy artistic and political baggage00actually makes it seem little wonder that Wonder Woman has yet to grace the big screen. Indeed, it actually seems to me that a Wonder Woman film may not actually be the best way to launch such a franchise, but rather that long-beleaguered Justice League film, which would naturally include Wonder Woman (who, being one member of the group, would not make or break the film herself). If the portrayal ends up being well-received, it could be a logical springboard for a Wonder Woman film (and for that matter, films about other neglected members of DC's pantheon). This is, of course, the opposite of the approach Marvel took successfully with The Avengers, to which it built by establishing multiple franchises first, but given the way these efforts have gone for DC so far this approach looks to me a lot safer and more plausible--at least, assuming that we have not all had our fill of superhero-based films by the time a film like that can be put together.

1. The Avengers may seem an exception, but it remains to be seen that this will actually mean a new trend in superhero-themed films. Indeed, director Joss Whedon already seems intent on going in a different direction with this very franchise.
2. Megan Fox, as usual too frank for the health of her career, dismissed the character as "lame" when the rumors of her being considered for this role came up in an interview. Much as her remarks have been criticized, this does seem rather a common sentiment.
3. Of course, the first two Iron Man films were resounding successes despite their lack of such villains, but again this seems an exception.
4. Those failures were, for instance, a factor in the decision to terminate the project to spin off a Jinx film series from the Bond film Die Another Day.
5. The Hunger Games did go on to become a $400 million hit at the U.S. box office, but as an $80 million budgeted March release it did represent a comparatively limited investment.