Back in early May I got in my two cents on Transformers: Rise of the Beasts' box office prospects. My guess, based on the performance of prior films in the once mighty but long declining franchise, and the reported tracking, was a range of $300-$450 million for the global take.
Of course, expectations regarding the film turned upward, and its opening weekend saw the movie overperform a bit--take in $61 million (where the predictions had figured mid-50s, tops). It was a win--but only a small one, as the somewhat stronger-than-expected opening was not followed by commensurately good holds, the decline afterward pretty typical for a front-loaded sequel. The drop from the first weekend to the second was 67 percent--and as of its fourth weekend had only $136 million grossed domestically.
Meanwhile the movie's overseas run was less sensational than for previous Transformers films. Where Transformers 4 and 5, and Bumblebee, tripled and quadrupled their domestic take internationally, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts has not quite doubled it, such that the global total stands at well under $400 million at last check ($381 million), with not much further to go (Japan the last major market in which it as yet to open). As things stand I still expect it to finish well within the range I predicted, which seems to me a significant problem for a reported $200 million production--enough of one to possibly mean a major loss for its studio as, reportedly, it plans to proceed with the sequel.
Sunday, July 2, 2023
The First Six Months of 2023 at the Box Office: Hollywood's Post-Pandemic Recovery Going into Reverse?
The first four months of 2023 showed a healthy increase in the domestic box office's total gross over the preceding year--$2.6 billion to $1.9 billion going by the Box Office Mojo data, which works out to a 30 percent boost even after adjustment of the component monthly figures for May 2023 prices. However, even just in current dollars the North American box office took in only marginally more in May and June 2023 ($1.777 billion according to the current, likely to be revised slightly upward figure) than it did in May-June 2022 ($1.755 billion), and, even on a generous adjustment of the figure (assuming zero inflation in June 2023), down at least two percent in real terms from the year.
In other words, recovery was quite evident in the first third of the year, with the first four months of 2023 seeing the box office take in 59 percent of the average for 2015-2019 in the same part of the year, and 64 percent of what was seen in the last "normal," pre-pandemic year of 2019 (as against 46 and 49 percent for the year before, respectively). However, so far this summer it has gone backward. Where the May-June box office in 2022 managed 68 percent of the 2015-2019 average for the same months, and 69 percent of the figure for 2019, in 2023 it has managed just 67 percent of the average for the five-year period, and of the 2019 level.*
I am sure that few expected the box office's recovery, after (if perhaps not going as fast as many would like) still proceeding strongly in the year's first third, going into reverse in the summer season. I certainly did not. Looking at last year's recovering-but-not-all-the-way-there box office my thought was that the summer's revenues reflected the relatively limited slate of films (just four big action movies rather than the usual eight, a fact which seemed to me critical in helping Top Gun 2 rack up its spectacular gross), and my guess was that this year's comparatively would-be-blockbuster-packed summer would complete the normalization, or near-normalization, of the market. But as the flops pile up it appears that this was overoptimistic--and evidence that the road back to profitability for Hollywood is longer and harder than widely appreciated.
It also raises two possibilities.
One is the pandemic's blow to Hollywood being harder than realized--as people continue to avoid theaters because they do not feel safe in them (perhaps to a greater degree than we realize; the media has much more interest in opposition to measures to contain the pandemic than the opposite), or moviegoing suffers for the permanent shutdown of so many theaters, or so many just falling out of the habit of going so they only come out for something really, really, really big.
The other is the extent to which Hollywood has problems besides the pandemic, and which preceded it (even if the pandemic accelerated them)--like its decreasing ability to entice people to the theater with anything but mega-budgeted brand name tentpoles, and the fact that the franchises on which it relies for those tentpoles are ever-more weary. (Putting it bluntly, the sequels and remakes that no one asked for keep coming, even as the audience's willingness to see them declines.) Meanwhile the fact that the consumer is now so hard-pressed--that, as strikes, strikes, strikes everywhere against a backdrop of skyrocketing prices for essentials (you know, like food and housing)--may make them the more hesitant to indulge in a night out at the movies rather than just watching streaming, or anything else, at home. (This, too, is likely a greater factor than appreciated--the media no more interested in consumers' responses to tough times than it is in those still concerned about the virus, least of all the claqueurs of the entertainment press.)
As we consider Hollywood's domestic woes we should also remember that this is a moment in which the international markets are not providing relief--in which, frankly, that biggest and most important piece of that market, China, is ever less lucrative for Hollywood, with a glance a one underperformer after another showing lackluster or worse Chinese ticket sales as a factor. (Ant-Man 3, which may have faded fast in North America but saw its biggest troubles in the international market, took a particularly big hit in China, without which its "flop" status would be a lot more disputed--and this has proven merely the beginning of a long train of disappointments this year, from Fast X to Transformers: Rise of the Beasts as the latest installments in franchises that normally do quite well there bring in disappointingly small amounts of cash.)
The result is that just as the weak grosses of the summer of 2023 (so far) ought not to be trivialized, one should also not trivialize what the summer means for the badly-battered American film industry.
* Even in current dollars Hollywood broke the $3 billion barrier in the year's first four months in every single year of the 2015-2019 period (and blew past $3.8 billion in 2018)--while breaking $4 billion when the figures are adjusted for May 2023 prices.
In other words, recovery was quite evident in the first third of the year, with the first four months of 2023 seeing the box office take in 59 percent of the average for 2015-2019 in the same part of the year, and 64 percent of what was seen in the last "normal," pre-pandemic year of 2019 (as against 46 and 49 percent for the year before, respectively). However, so far this summer it has gone backward. Where the May-June box office in 2022 managed 68 percent of the 2015-2019 average for the same months, and 69 percent of the figure for 2019, in 2023 it has managed just 67 percent of the average for the five-year period, and of the 2019 level.*
I am sure that few expected the box office's recovery, after (if perhaps not going as fast as many would like) still proceeding strongly in the year's first third, going into reverse in the summer season. I certainly did not. Looking at last year's recovering-but-not-all-the-way-there box office my thought was that the summer's revenues reflected the relatively limited slate of films (just four big action movies rather than the usual eight, a fact which seemed to me critical in helping Top Gun 2 rack up its spectacular gross), and my guess was that this year's comparatively would-be-blockbuster-packed summer would complete the normalization, or near-normalization, of the market. But as the flops pile up it appears that this was overoptimistic--and evidence that the road back to profitability for Hollywood is longer and harder than widely appreciated.
It also raises two possibilities.
One is the pandemic's blow to Hollywood being harder than realized--as people continue to avoid theaters because they do not feel safe in them (perhaps to a greater degree than we realize; the media has much more interest in opposition to measures to contain the pandemic than the opposite), or moviegoing suffers for the permanent shutdown of so many theaters, or so many just falling out of the habit of going so they only come out for something really, really, really big.
The other is the extent to which Hollywood has problems besides the pandemic, and which preceded it (even if the pandemic accelerated them)--like its decreasing ability to entice people to the theater with anything but mega-budgeted brand name tentpoles, and the fact that the franchises on which it relies for those tentpoles are ever-more weary. (Putting it bluntly, the sequels and remakes that no one asked for keep coming, even as the audience's willingness to see them declines.) Meanwhile the fact that the consumer is now so hard-pressed--that, as strikes, strikes, strikes everywhere against a backdrop of skyrocketing prices for essentials (you know, like food and housing)--may make them the more hesitant to indulge in a night out at the movies rather than just watching streaming, or anything else, at home. (This, too, is likely a greater factor than appreciated--the media no more interested in consumers' responses to tough times than it is in those still concerned about the virus, least of all the claqueurs of the entertainment press.)
As we consider Hollywood's domestic woes we should also remember that this is a moment in which the international markets are not providing relief--in which, frankly, that biggest and most important piece of that market, China, is ever less lucrative for Hollywood, with a glance a one underperformer after another showing lackluster or worse Chinese ticket sales as a factor. (Ant-Man 3, which may have faded fast in North America but saw its biggest troubles in the international market, took a particularly big hit in China, without which its "flop" status would be a lot more disputed--and this has proven merely the beginning of a long train of disappointments this year, from Fast X to Transformers: Rise of the Beasts as the latest installments in franchises that normally do quite well there bring in disappointingly small amounts of cash.)
The result is that just as the weak grosses of the summer of 2023 (so far) ought not to be trivialized, one should also not trivialize what the summer means for the badly-battered American film industry.
* Even in current dollars Hollywood broke the $3 billion barrier in the year's first four months in every single year of the 2015-2019 period (and blew past $3.8 billion in 2018)--while breaking $4 billion when the figures are adjusted for May 2023 prices.
Is Fast X a Flop?
A little over two months after its world debut (it came out in Italy at the end of April), and over six weeks after its wider launch (in the U.S., China and other key markets), without much further to go, the Fast and Furious sequel Fast X is still short of the $700 million mark. (At last report it in fact had only $691 million grossed.)
The figure is notably lower than what the preceding F9 made during the pandemic-depressed year of 2021 in current dollars ($726 million), never mind inflation-adjusted real dollars ($820 million in May 2023 dollars)--by which measure it is 16 percent down. Compared with the series' last "normal" release, the eighth film The Fate of the Furious it is down by over half in real terms (that movie made $1.24 billion in 2017, equal to $1.54 billion today), and scarcely better than a third of what the franchise made at its peak with Fast Seven in 2015 (over $1.5 billion in real terms, and about $1.95 billion in May 2023 dollars).
The result is that, however much one tries to grade the film's performance on a curve ("Not every movie has to make a billion dollars!" goes the retort), the gross of Fast X has to be recognized as a significant comedown from past films in the franchise--and a problem given that it cost enough to make a $700 million gross a serious problem. With the film's budget reported as $340 million, my guess according to the formula I previously discussed is that even on the most optimistic calculation it needed $800 million+ before getting near the break-even point even after the home entertainment and other revenue streams are counted in, with a billion dollar gross likely a necessity.* (No, not every movie needs to make a billion dollars. But when they cost north of $300 million they don't make much sense as a financial proposition otherwise, and the studio bosses don't make these things for their or anyone else's health.)
Naturally I think the film has a shot at next year's Deadline list of "biggest box office bombs," except that competition is very, very intense here, with the even less well-performing Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, The Flash and other such films also in contention for spots.
Considering that I think Deadline should make the list longer--give us the list out to ten or even more places this year rather than the usual five, just as they do with the most profitable films. (Really, 2023, and especially the summer of 2023, is shaping up to be that bad.)
* Counting in, besides production, promotion and distribution all the way through home entertainment, TV, streaming, etc., a big-budget movie tends to cost its producers at least twice, and often three times, its production budget, giving us a figure in the range of $700 million to $1 billion in the case of a $340 million film. A movie making $700 million or so at the box office might see the equivalent of half that in theatrical rentals (48 percent seems typical these days, so call it $335 million), and perhaps the equivalent of 80-90 percent of that in the post-theatrical outlets, coming to another $240-$280 million or so. This works out to somewhere around $600 million, which can easily leave a nine-figure gap between what was spent and what came in in the form of revenue.
The figure is notably lower than what the preceding F9 made during the pandemic-depressed year of 2021 in current dollars ($726 million), never mind inflation-adjusted real dollars ($820 million in May 2023 dollars)--by which measure it is 16 percent down. Compared with the series' last "normal" release, the eighth film The Fate of the Furious it is down by over half in real terms (that movie made $1.24 billion in 2017, equal to $1.54 billion today), and scarcely better than a third of what the franchise made at its peak with Fast Seven in 2015 (over $1.5 billion in real terms, and about $1.95 billion in May 2023 dollars).
The result is that, however much one tries to grade the film's performance on a curve ("Not every movie has to make a billion dollars!" goes the retort), the gross of Fast X has to be recognized as a significant comedown from past films in the franchise--and a problem given that it cost enough to make a $700 million gross a serious problem. With the film's budget reported as $340 million, my guess according to the formula I previously discussed is that even on the most optimistic calculation it needed $800 million+ before getting near the break-even point even after the home entertainment and other revenue streams are counted in, with a billion dollar gross likely a necessity.* (No, not every movie needs to make a billion dollars. But when they cost north of $300 million they don't make much sense as a financial proposition otherwise, and the studio bosses don't make these things for their or anyone else's health.)
Naturally I think the film has a shot at next year's Deadline list of "biggest box office bombs," except that competition is very, very intense here, with the even less well-performing Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, The Flash and other such films also in contention for spots.
Considering that I think Deadline should make the list longer--give us the list out to ten or even more places this year rather than the usual five, just as they do with the most profitable films. (Really, 2023, and especially the summer of 2023, is shaping up to be that bad.)
* Counting in, besides production, promotion and distribution all the way through home entertainment, TV, streaming, etc., a big-budget movie tends to cost its producers at least twice, and often three times, its production budget, giving us a figure in the range of $700 million to $1 billion in the case of a $340 million film. A movie making $700 million or so at the box office might see the equivalent of half that in theatrical rentals (48 percent seems typical these days, so call it $335 million), and perhaps the equivalent of 80-90 percent of that in the post-theatrical outlets, coming to another $240-$280 million or so. This works out to somewhere around $600 million, which can easily leave a nine-figure gap between what was spent and what came in in the form of revenue.
Thursday, June 29, 2023
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: Just One Day to Go Before it Hits Theaters (A Note on the Latest Opening Weekend Projection)
Boxoffice Pro has just put out its projection for this coming weekend--and along with the usual projection for three-day Friday-to-Sunday period, also one for the five-day Friday-to Tuesday period created by the long holiday weekend we will get as a result of Independence Day falling on a Tuesday this year.
Of course, the big story here is what Indiana Jones 5 will make. As it happens the range for the weekend now stands at $60-$77 million--which means that the ceiling for the film is now below the floor in Boxoffice Pro's first tracking-based projection four weeks ago ($81-$111 million), which itself had reflected expectations none too high to begin with.*
Their best guess seems to be that the movie will take in something in the middle of that range--$70 million, with all that implies for the Solo-caliber or worse catastrophe scenario I have been discussing here for quite some time.* (And of course, should the prediction of a $70 million gross prove overoptimistic as it just did for The Flash, well, the consequences of that need no enlargement here.)
Is there any hope at all for Indiana Jones 5 avoiding that outcome? I see little--but not nothing. One possible glimmer of hope is that as more critics have seen the film the overall response has become a bit more favorable--the Rotten Tomatoes score risen from 50 to 66 percent. Admittedly that is still not very impressive, with the more favorable later reviews possibly just a matter of people saying "Well, it's not that bad." But it is something a little more positive than what we heard before, especially should it betoken audiences proving a little more generous, and maybe good word-of-mouth bringing more viewers in subsequent weeks--and the film having sufficiently decent legs to make the film's final take merely a disappointment rather than a disaster. Still, I have to admit that, especially given what is known about the content of the movie itself (The Super Mario Bros. Movie defied the critics to become a mega-hit, but this just does not look like that kind of crowd-pleaser), and the way in which the summer has been going, I would not expect too much.
* In real terms even $70 million is half of what Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull pulled in back in 2008 (about $140 million in May 2023 dollars).
Of course, the big story here is what Indiana Jones 5 will make. As it happens the range for the weekend now stands at $60-$77 million--which means that the ceiling for the film is now below the floor in Boxoffice Pro's first tracking-based projection four weeks ago ($81-$111 million), which itself had reflected expectations none too high to begin with.*
Their best guess seems to be that the movie will take in something in the middle of that range--$70 million, with all that implies for the Solo-caliber or worse catastrophe scenario I have been discussing here for quite some time.* (And of course, should the prediction of a $70 million gross prove overoptimistic as it just did for The Flash, well, the consequences of that need no enlargement here.)
Is there any hope at all for Indiana Jones 5 avoiding that outcome? I see little--but not nothing. One possible glimmer of hope is that as more critics have seen the film the overall response has become a bit more favorable--the Rotten Tomatoes score risen from 50 to 66 percent. Admittedly that is still not very impressive, with the more favorable later reviews possibly just a matter of people saying "Well, it's not that bad." But it is something a little more positive than what we heard before, especially should it betoken audiences proving a little more generous, and maybe good word-of-mouth bringing more viewers in subsequent weeks--and the film having sufficiently decent legs to make the film's final take merely a disappointment rather than a disaster. Still, I have to admit that, especially given what is known about the content of the movie itself (The Super Mario Bros. Movie defied the critics to become a mega-hit, but this just does not look like that kind of crowd-pleaser), and the way in which the summer has been going, I would not expect too much.
* In real terms even $70 million is half of what Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull pulled in back in 2008 (about $140 million in May 2023 dollars).
The Little Mermaid: Box Office Gross: The Fifth Weekend--and the Upcoming Sixth
During the run of The Little Mermaid some analysts found it useful to compare the film's domestic run to that of 2019's Aladdin--the next-to-last of Disney's animated-classic-to-live-action adaptations, which likewise came out Memorial Day, and I have tended to use the comparison (in current, not real, dollars) as part of my basis for making calculations about the film's likely gross.
As it happened The Little Mermaid opened a little stronger--with $95.6 million taken in in its first three days, and $118.8 million in its first four, as against $91.5 million and $116.8 million in the case of Aladdin. The result was the hope that, if the movie was already falling short of expectations domestically (to say nothing of internationally) it could overtop, or at least match, Aladdin's $356 million gross--which, even with the dollar worth a fifth less than it had been in 2019, would not look too shabby.
Alas, the gap between the two movies (again, without bothering with inflation) has steadily widened--and not in the new film's favor. Where The Little Mermaid was running almost 4.5 percent ahead of Aladdin at the end of the first three days, my extrapolations from the data have its lead down to 0.8 percent by the second weekend and turning increasingly negative afterward--1.5 percent lower by the third weekend, 4.2 percent by the fourth, and 6.4 percent by the fifth, when it had $270 million grossed, as against Aladdin's nearly $289 million.
In short, the film's opening a little bigger (even if it was just in current dollars) has been more than offset by its faster fade at the box office, which seems likely to continue this weekend. Boxoffice Pro anticipates the movie making a mere $4.4 million over the Friday-to-Sunday period, which would leave it with just under $280 million banked--as against the almost $307 million Aladdin had, widening the gap from 6.4 to 8.7 percent.
Previously considering the film my guess had been that its final gross would be in the range of $300-$350 million. At the current rate I still expect it to break past $300 million, but the faster fade makes its getting anywhere near $350 million a long shot now. Instead I think even $325 million out of reach, the lower half of the $300-$350 million range where it will end up.*
Meanwhile the international markets continue to offer little succor--the $230 million taken there to date amounting to just 46 percent of the global gross. Getting it past the half billion dollar mark (and thus into the $500-$700 million range I earlier anticipated), I would guess that if this does not improve the film's final take will be in the $550-$600 million range. Even by the lowered standard of a month ago it is not the happiest outcome that could have been anticipated for the film.
* Aladdin made 86 percent of its money by the sixth weekend. Should The Little Mermaid be at the same point in its trajectory after taking in $280 million as of Sunday one could expect $325 million when it finishes up--but the faster fade means one should assume it to have pulled in more than Aladdin had at the same point.
As it happened The Little Mermaid opened a little stronger--with $95.6 million taken in in its first three days, and $118.8 million in its first four, as against $91.5 million and $116.8 million in the case of Aladdin. The result was the hope that, if the movie was already falling short of expectations domestically (to say nothing of internationally) it could overtop, or at least match, Aladdin's $356 million gross--which, even with the dollar worth a fifth less than it had been in 2019, would not look too shabby.
Alas, the gap between the two movies (again, without bothering with inflation) has steadily widened--and not in the new film's favor. Where The Little Mermaid was running almost 4.5 percent ahead of Aladdin at the end of the first three days, my extrapolations from the data have its lead down to 0.8 percent by the second weekend and turning increasingly negative afterward--1.5 percent lower by the third weekend, 4.2 percent by the fourth, and 6.4 percent by the fifth, when it had $270 million grossed, as against Aladdin's nearly $289 million.
In short, the film's opening a little bigger (even if it was just in current dollars) has been more than offset by its faster fade at the box office, which seems likely to continue this weekend. Boxoffice Pro anticipates the movie making a mere $4.4 million over the Friday-to-Sunday period, which would leave it with just under $280 million banked--as against the almost $307 million Aladdin had, widening the gap from 6.4 to 8.7 percent.
Previously considering the film my guess had been that its final gross would be in the range of $300-$350 million. At the current rate I still expect it to break past $300 million, but the faster fade makes its getting anywhere near $350 million a long shot now. Instead I think even $325 million out of reach, the lower half of the $300-$350 million range where it will end up.*
Meanwhile the international markets continue to offer little succor--the $230 million taken there to date amounting to just 46 percent of the global gross. Getting it past the half billion dollar mark (and thus into the $500-$700 million range I earlier anticipated), I would guess that if this does not improve the film's final take will be in the $550-$600 million range. Even by the lowered standard of a month ago it is not the happiest outcome that could have been anticipated for the film.
* Aladdin made 86 percent of its money by the sixth weekend. Should The Little Mermaid be at the same point in its trajectory after taking in $280 million as of Sunday one could expect $325 million when it finishes up--but the faster fade means one should assume it to have pulled in more than Aladdin had at the same point.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse vs. Guardians of the Galaxy 3: After the Fourth Weekend, and Into the Fifth
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is proving a rare instance these days of a sequel significantly outdoing its predecessor--performing, as one observer had it, more like a regular, live-action superhero movie with a comparison of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 making the point. Spider-Man opened a little bigger--with a gross of almost $121 million to Guardians of the Galaxy 3's $118 million--and afterward actually widened its lead, such that it has in the subsequent three weekends generally stayed 5 percent ahead of where the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel was at the same point in its trajectory. (Thus as of last weekend Spider-Man had $317 million grossed, against the $300 million that Guardians of the Galaxy had managed as of its own fourth weekend.)
Moreover, going by Boxoffice Pro's projection--the movie's taking in $340 million by Sunday--would mean this continuing, the movie still about 5 percent ahead of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 in its fifth weekend (by which it had grossed just $323 million). The fact that the weekend is another holiday weekend would seem likely to add to its edge, boosting its gross to $346.5 million by its 34th day in release (as against Guardians' $326 million at the same point), working out to a 6 percent margin of difference.
All that being the case, even with Guardians of the Galaxy 3 benefiting from surprisingly strong holds late in its run (which will see it triple its opening weekend gross this weekend, and finish up in the vicinity of $360 million) it still seems easy to picture Spider-Man edging it out at the end. Given that Guardians of the Galaxy 3 seems likely to be the highest-grossing live-action superhero movie of the year (especially given the debacle The Flash proved to be, and the questionable prospects of Captain Marvel 2 and Aquaman) I still expect the animated Spider-Man film to be the highest-grossing superhero movie of 2023 domestically. (The global winner in the stakes is another matter, given that Spider-Man, if doing better than its predecessor internationally, has just not caught on abroad the same way--though I will be revisiting that matter in an upcoming post.)
Moreover, going by Boxoffice Pro's projection--the movie's taking in $340 million by Sunday--would mean this continuing, the movie still about 5 percent ahead of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 in its fifth weekend (by which it had grossed just $323 million). The fact that the weekend is another holiday weekend would seem likely to add to its edge, boosting its gross to $346.5 million by its 34th day in release (as against Guardians' $326 million at the same point), working out to a 6 percent margin of difference.
All that being the case, even with Guardians of the Galaxy 3 benefiting from surprisingly strong holds late in its run (which will see it triple its opening weekend gross this weekend, and finish up in the vicinity of $360 million) it still seems easy to picture Spider-Man edging it out at the end. Given that Guardians of the Galaxy 3 seems likely to be the highest-grossing live-action superhero movie of the year (especially given the debacle The Flash proved to be, and the questionable prospects of Captain Marvel 2 and Aquaman) I still expect the animated Spider-Man film to be the highest-grossing superhero movie of 2023 domestically. (The global winner in the stakes is another matter, given that Spider-Man, if doing better than its predecessor internationally, has just not caught on abroad the same way--though I will be revisiting that matter in an upcoming post.)
Wednesday, June 28, 2023
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: Opening Weekend Expectations, Domestic and Global
Last week did not see Boxoffice Pro's already low and falling expectations for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny's domestic opening change much. All that happened was a slight shift of the ceiling downward, as the floor remained constant, the projected range now $68-$95 million (while Boxoffice Pro's long-range projections were unchanged from $211-$325 million, which would only make sense on the basis of the optimistic expectation of the movie having legs at least as good as those of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and better than tripling the opening weekend take). However, we now have a projection for the global opening--of some $140 million. That is to say that the film is expected to make globally on its debut more or less what it made in North America alone--back when the dollar was worth forty percent more than it is now (and the $100 million debut of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull back in May 2008 was equal to about $140 million today).
This is not a great vote of confidence in the movie's foreign performance--which matters greatly. The last two Indiana Jones movies took in about one-and-a-half times their domestic income internationally, which would, on the basis of Boxoffice Pro's (admittedly optimistic) figures, work out to between $300 and $500 million above its domestic take, and a global total in the $530-$810 million range--the high end of which, if still a disappointment, would not necessarily be disastrous. (Indeed, there would be some hope of the movie not just breaking even but turning a profit by the time the income from home entertainment, etc., is in.) However, should, as seems possible if one sticks with the $140 million opening weekend (in which the movie at best matches its domestic gross, and maybe does less well than that) as a basis for the longer run projection, we would be looking at a lot less money taken in, and certainly the "Solo or worse" scenarios I have been discussing here since April that, especially since the colossal misfire of the Cannes premiere, have moved from being the outlier to the baseline.
Simply consider the math. With an opening weekend take of $140+ million, and the film doing well to triple that (the way Guardians of the Galaxy 3 has been doing), the movie would still end up in the range of $420-$450 million--which is markedly lower than the $475 million that Solo's gross would be when adjusting the figure ($393 million) for today's prices. Meanwhile, should the movie really fall flat (should its opening weekend be followed by collapse domestically, and its overseas gross be no better than its domestic) it could do a lot worse than Solo even in current dollar terms. (Doubling a $68 million take domestically, matching that overseas, works out to a gross of not much more than $270 million--so that there would be plenty of room to do better than this and still fail to match Solo's gross in current, never mind real, terms.)
Still, grim as the prospects looks, a possibility of the movie's at least triumphing over the worst-case scenarios cannot be completed ruled out. And this Friday moviegoers all across America, and around the world, will get their say, and we will once more see speculation give way to historical fact as the theaters and the studios total up the cold hard cash paid by the ticket-buyers--and Lucasfilm weighs it against the outlays that led up to this moment.
This is not a great vote of confidence in the movie's foreign performance--which matters greatly. The last two Indiana Jones movies took in about one-and-a-half times their domestic income internationally, which would, on the basis of Boxoffice Pro's (admittedly optimistic) figures, work out to between $300 and $500 million above its domestic take, and a global total in the $530-$810 million range--the high end of which, if still a disappointment, would not necessarily be disastrous. (Indeed, there would be some hope of the movie not just breaking even but turning a profit by the time the income from home entertainment, etc., is in.) However, should, as seems possible if one sticks with the $140 million opening weekend (in which the movie at best matches its domestic gross, and maybe does less well than that) as a basis for the longer run projection, we would be looking at a lot less money taken in, and certainly the "Solo or worse" scenarios I have been discussing here since April that, especially since the colossal misfire of the Cannes premiere, have moved from being the outlier to the baseline.
Simply consider the math. With an opening weekend take of $140+ million, and the film doing well to triple that (the way Guardians of the Galaxy 3 has been doing), the movie would still end up in the range of $420-$450 million--which is markedly lower than the $475 million that Solo's gross would be when adjusting the figure ($393 million) for today's prices. Meanwhile, should the movie really fall flat (should its opening weekend be followed by collapse domestically, and its overseas gross be no better than its domestic) it could do a lot worse than Solo even in current dollar terms. (Doubling a $68 million take domestically, matching that overseas, works out to a gross of not much more than $270 million--so that there would be plenty of room to do better than this and still fail to match Solo's gross in current, never mind real, terms.)
Still, grim as the prospects looks, a possibility of the movie's at least triumphing over the worst-case scenarios cannot be completed ruled out. And this Friday moviegoers all across America, and around the world, will get their say, and we will once more see speculation give way to historical fact as the theaters and the studios total up the cold hard cash paid by the ticket-buyers--and Lucasfilm weighs it against the outlays that led up to this moment.
Tuesday, June 27, 2023
The James Bond Continuation Novels: In Lieu of a Guide
Listed below are the James Bond continuation novels--specifically the twenty-seven authorized, non-novelization James Bond continuation novels by Kingsley Amis, John Gardner, Raymond Benson, Sebastian Faulks, Jeffrey Deaver, William Boyd and Anthony Horowitz.
At this point reviews of nearly every one of them have been posted on this web site. Those for which such reviews have been posted may be accessed via the hyperlinks in the titles which take you to the relevant page.
Kingsley Amis
Colonel Sun (1968)
John Gardner
Licence Renewed (1981)
For Special Services (1982)
Icebreaker (1983)
Role of Honor (1984)
Nobody Lives Forever (1986)
No Deals, Mr. Bond (1987)
Scorpius (1988)
Win, Lose or Die (1989)
Brokenclaw (1990)
The Man From Barbarossa (1991)
Death is Forever (1992)
Never Send Flowers (1993)
SeaFire (1994)
Cold Fall (Alternatively, COLD) (1996)
Raymond Benson
Zero Minus Ten (1996)
The Facts of Death (1997)
High Time to Kill (1998)
DoubleShot (2000)
Never Dream of Dying (2001)
The Man With the Red Tattoo (2002)
Sebastian Faulks
Devil May Care (2008)
Jeffrey Deaver
Carte Blanche (2011)
William Boyd
Solo (2013)
Anthony Horowitz
Trigger Mortis (2015)
Forever and a Day (2018)
With a Mind to Kill (2022)
At this point reviews of nearly every one of them have been posted on this web site. Those for which such reviews have been posted may be accessed via the hyperlinks in the titles which take you to the relevant page.
Kingsley Amis
Colonel Sun (1968)
John Gardner
Licence Renewed (1981)
For Special Services (1982)
Icebreaker (1983)
Role of Honor (1984)
Nobody Lives Forever (1986)
No Deals, Mr. Bond (1987)
Scorpius (1988)
Win, Lose or Die (1989)
Brokenclaw (1990)
The Man From Barbarossa (1991)
Death is Forever (1992)
Never Send Flowers (1993)
SeaFire (1994)
Cold Fall (Alternatively, COLD) (1996)
Raymond Benson
Zero Minus Ten (1996)
The Facts of Death (1997)
High Time to Kill (1998)
DoubleShot (2000)
Never Dream of Dying (2001)
The Man With the Red Tattoo (2002)
Sebastian Faulks
Devil May Care (2008)
Jeffrey Deaver
Carte Blanche (2011)
William Boyd
Solo (2013)
Anthony Horowitz
Trigger Mortis (2015)
Forever and a Day (2018)
With a Mind to Kill (2022)
Monday, June 26, 2023
Review: Never Send Flowers, by John Gardner
While there was always an important element of continuity between James Bond's adventures in Ian Fleming's novels (the Soviets' desire for revenge for prior battles in From Russia, with Love, the aftermath of those events in Dr. No, etc.), Fleming got more ambitious in his later books. His last five novels--Thunderball, The Spy Who Loved Me, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, You Only Live Twice and The Man with the Golden Gun--can be read as a single saga of a run-down 007 struggling against previously accumulated damage, and a succession of personal disasters, through and after his battle with his most famous enemy, Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
Likewise John Gardner's last books--specifically his final three novels, Never Send Flowers, SeaFire and Cold Fall--form a more thoroughly interconnected story. This time around Bond's real or alleged decay is not an issue, and the novels do not have him fighting a single great villain. Instead it is M's aging that is more prominent, the Old Man on his way out, amid a larger reorganization of the Service for the post-Cold War--changes which see Bond, whose administrative role had previously been vague at best, become entangled with government committees in SeaFire, and Cold Fall closing with Bond on his way to meet Sir Miles Messervy's replacement for the first time.
However, as in Fleming's later novels Bond again copes with love and loss, albeit in a different fashion. One can even see hints of a political theme--just hints, less fully realized or worked out than Fleming's, but worth mentioning all the same. Those last five books, and especially You Only Live Twice and The Man With the Golden Gun, saw a declining, weary Bond sorely tested (not least, by his assignment to assassinate Dr. Shatterhand in Japan), and, after hitting what seems like rock bottom (Bond captured by the Soviets in an amnesiac state, brainwashed into an assassination attempt against M himself), redeeming himself (by taking down Francisco Scaramanga). Through him, Britain and its traditional elite were symbolically tested and redeemed as well (Tiger Tanaka making this quite explicit in Twice).
What happens here in the way of this is hinted at in the preceding book, Death is Forever. There the CIA that in the Bond novels conventionally provided the cash and technology and sheer muscle while the Brits provided the skills, was looking a good deal less flush than it used to do, while Bond comes to the rescue not of those less helpful Americans but the EU, such that it could seem as if Bond's future, and Britain's, lay in partnership not with the Cousins, but the Continentals. And certainly that is how it comes to look in Never Send Flowers. Fittingly Bond is, more than ever before (even in Scorpius), more local cop than international man of mystery in a story more than usually attentive to bureaucratic gamesmanship. Bond's story proper actually begins with a visit to the Secret Service by a pair of senior functionaries from the "Security Service" responsible for domestic intelligence (MI 5)--specifically the Terrorist Intelligence section chief who informs M and Bond that the chief's deputy, one Laura March, has turned up dead in Switzerland. And so they want Bond to go talk to the Swiss police, find out what they have learned in their investigation, and bring the body home. Bond does just that, and learns that Laura had skeletons in her closet, not least an unknown elder brother who just so happened to be a serial killer. It seemed he was dead--but of course "seemed" and "was" are two different things, and in fact big brother March was still very much alive, and still very much going about his gruesome business.
Of course, serial killers had in the past been henchmen within the Bond novels (Red Grant, certainly, was such), but hardly the stuff of the series' primary villains, and it would seem that just as Win, Lose or Die was about capitalizing on the fashion for Top Gun and Tom Clancyesque military techno-thrillers, Never Send Flowers was about doing the same with the popularity of serial killers as villains after the commercial and critical success of The Silence of the Lambs, as so many others did in those years.
To his credit Gardner displays some originality (and some care to not simply give us a cookie-cutter cop-hunts-serial killer-story) as he tries riding the wave. Thus he blends together the figures of the serial killer and the political assassin in his image of an assassination-obsessed thrill-killer (who just so happens to be a celebrated actor much admired for having both a "thousand faces" and a "glass head" that lets the audience see right into the mind behind each and every one of those faces) who gets his high not from preying on society's most vulnerable, but pursuing the most difficult of targets in some of the highest profile figures in the world--a celebrated treader of the boards giving his greatest performance on the world stage. In doing so Gardner blends the antiseptic world of the criminal profiler and the modern mental institution with Gothic horror, with its monstrous children and evil twins and madmen in the attic and incest and religious fanatacisms and even a Rhineland castle standing as a monument to its murderous owner's insanity.
Still, clever as this all sounds the actual effect is disappointingly flat. Dragonpol is a far cry from even Gardner's more memorable Bond villains (an Anton Murik, a Brokenclaw), never mind the villains he created outside this franchise (like his hugely entertaining take on that other James of thriller fiction, James Moriarty). All this is the more problematic given the scenario's ruling out the usual Bondian mechanics (the large organizations and their grandiose agendas, the legions of heavily armed cannon fodder they put into the field, the big finale in the enemy fortress out of the question when the enemy is not a SPECTRE-type organization, but just a single thrill-killer).
It seems to me the execution (no pun intended) was to blame, with a sign of this the triteness toward which Gardner too often tended here. Considering this I find myself coming back to an early passage where he describes an Italian Air Force General who is one of Dragonpol's first targets. Gardner refers to the man as, following his aerial heroics in the Gulf War, having become a household name by writing an international nonfiction bestseller about "the dust-dry stuff of strategy" as "a subtle cross between Tom Clancy and John le Carrè." As one who has read, with very close attention, a very great deal of strategy, and of both Clancy and le Carrè, I find the description confusing rather than illuminating as I have literally no idea what such a piece of writing would look like; how all these prose forms would mix, subtly or in any other way. (Simply concerning ourselves with Clancy and le Carrè, the former is inclined to plain, straightforward, information-heavy writing oriented to the big picture, le Carrè toward a far more Literary, oblique, "Show-don't-tell" approach centered on the characters--and for all its merits from the standpoint of storytelling, utterly unsuited toward a "strategic treatise.") I suspect Gardner had no idea how all this could mix either, that in this instance he was simply stringing together words to produce something that would sound impressive to a reader who had heard of these things without actually knowing about them, or at least did not make a habit of actually thinking about what they actually read on the page.
Alas, it seemed such failings were not solely on the surface here, Gardner generally showing less concern for consistency than usual in his handling of his material. If Bond's Gardner suddenly became an expert on the theater mainly for the reason that Gardner was, and was interested in bringing the element into the books, here he becomes a veritable encyclopedia on the subject--indeed, a "drama geek," in the middle of a briefing at headquarters suddenly expounding tangentially on the satirical intent of a Cole Porter lyric and being reprimanded by M for it; and relying on minute recollection of a prior Dragonpol stage performance to advance the investigation. Similarly out of character is Bond's relationship with the Swiss operative with whom he works, Fredericka "Flicka" Von Grusse, a far cry from Bond's prior taste in women, physically and other ways. (Gardner tells us that her face is "long . . . nose slightly crooked . . . jaw a shade square. Not beautiful by any standard," but "full of character," while career-wise and in other ways, down to her Anglo-Swiss heritage, she seems to have been conceived as a female 007--hardly the sort of thing that usually endeared women to Bond's sense of romantic fantasy, even after Gardner's long eliding of Bond's once well-known attitudes in these matters.)
One might add that their time together was, unlike the sort of dramatic experience that made Bond decide to marry in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (or even his thoughts of a deeper involvement with Tiffany Case in Diamonds Are Forever), far from life-changing. Yet Bond falls for her so hard that he becomes a one-woman man. Meanwhile M is happy to have a foreign operative no longer in good standing with her own agency come to work for him, while even nudging Bond toward marrying her. (I cannot but contrast it with M back in Diamonds Are Forever telling Bond that making it official with Tiffany Case would mean the kind of "mixed marriage" that the old Victorian was sure could never work--scarcely removed from Anthony Trollope's Roger Carbury, likewise probably imagining "all American women as . . . loud, masculine and atheistical" in The Way We Live Now. To Gardner's credit Bond himself is surprised, while less to Gardner's credit M suggests that he is "really just a sentimental old matchmaker.") Meanwhile Bond-the-man-who-couldn't-stand-the-office became a player in the Service's post-Cold War reorganization. (I might add that tonally the Security Service's spying on Bond in Britain, and the final confrontation in EuroDisnyeland--a choice of setting for the climax that recalled the decision to make Markus Bismaquer an ice cream tycoon--also felt out of place, even by Gardner's standards.)
Altogether the result means that the deviation from the usual Bondian expectations is uncompensated by what Gardner does differently. Still, the book has a particular relevance nonetheless as an apparent foundation for the series' post-Cold War shape, with the changes in Bond's personal life, and his professional life, very much at the heart of the next book, SeaFire.
For a full listing of the James Bond continuation novels (and the reviews of them available on this blog) click here.
Likewise John Gardner's last books--specifically his final three novels, Never Send Flowers, SeaFire and Cold Fall--form a more thoroughly interconnected story. This time around Bond's real or alleged decay is not an issue, and the novels do not have him fighting a single great villain. Instead it is M's aging that is more prominent, the Old Man on his way out, amid a larger reorganization of the Service for the post-Cold War--changes which see Bond, whose administrative role had previously been vague at best, become entangled with government committees in SeaFire, and Cold Fall closing with Bond on his way to meet Sir Miles Messervy's replacement for the first time.
However, as in Fleming's later novels Bond again copes with love and loss, albeit in a different fashion. One can even see hints of a political theme--just hints, less fully realized or worked out than Fleming's, but worth mentioning all the same. Those last five books, and especially You Only Live Twice and The Man With the Golden Gun, saw a declining, weary Bond sorely tested (not least, by his assignment to assassinate Dr. Shatterhand in Japan), and, after hitting what seems like rock bottom (Bond captured by the Soviets in an amnesiac state, brainwashed into an assassination attempt against M himself), redeeming himself (by taking down Francisco Scaramanga). Through him, Britain and its traditional elite were symbolically tested and redeemed as well (Tiger Tanaka making this quite explicit in Twice).
What happens here in the way of this is hinted at in the preceding book, Death is Forever. There the CIA that in the Bond novels conventionally provided the cash and technology and sheer muscle while the Brits provided the skills, was looking a good deal less flush than it used to do, while Bond comes to the rescue not of those less helpful Americans but the EU, such that it could seem as if Bond's future, and Britain's, lay in partnership not with the Cousins, but the Continentals. And certainly that is how it comes to look in Never Send Flowers. Fittingly Bond is, more than ever before (even in Scorpius), more local cop than international man of mystery in a story more than usually attentive to bureaucratic gamesmanship. Bond's story proper actually begins with a visit to the Secret Service by a pair of senior functionaries from the "Security Service" responsible for domestic intelligence (MI 5)--specifically the Terrorist Intelligence section chief who informs M and Bond that the chief's deputy, one Laura March, has turned up dead in Switzerland. And so they want Bond to go talk to the Swiss police, find out what they have learned in their investigation, and bring the body home. Bond does just that, and learns that Laura had skeletons in her closet, not least an unknown elder brother who just so happened to be a serial killer. It seemed he was dead--but of course "seemed" and "was" are two different things, and in fact big brother March was still very much alive, and still very much going about his gruesome business.
Of course, serial killers had in the past been henchmen within the Bond novels (Red Grant, certainly, was such), but hardly the stuff of the series' primary villains, and it would seem that just as Win, Lose or Die was about capitalizing on the fashion for Top Gun and Tom Clancyesque military techno-thrillers, Never Send Flowers was about doing the same with the popularity of serial killers as villains after the commercial and critical success of The Silence of the Lambs, as so many others did in those years.
To his credit Gardner displays some originality (and some care to not simply give us a cookie-cutter cop-hunts-serial killer-story) as he tries riding the wave. Thus he blends together the figures of the serial killer and the political assassin in his image of an assassination-obsessed thrill-killer (who just so happens to be a celebrated actor much admired for having both a "thousand faces" and a "glass head" that lets the audience see right into the mind behind each and every one of those faces) who gets his high not from preying on society's most vulnerable, but pursuing the most difficult of targets in some of the highest profile figures in the world--a celebrated treader of the boards giving his greatest performance on the world stage. In doing so Gardner blends the antiseptic world of the criminal profiler and the modern mental institution with Gothic horror, with its monstrous children and evil twins and madmen in the attic and incest and religious fanatacisms and even a Rhineland castle standing as a monument to its murderous owner's insanity.
Still, clever as this all sounds the actual effect is disappointingly flat. Dragonpol is a far cry from even Gardner's more memorable Bond villains (an Anton Murik, a Brokenclaw), never mind the villains he created outside this franchise (like his hugely entertaining take on that other James of thriller fiction, James Moriarty). All this is the more problematic given the scenario's ruling out the usual Bondian mechanics (the large organizations and their grandiose agendas, the legions of heavily armed cannon fodder they put into the field, the big finale in the enemy fortress out of the question when the enemy is not a SPECTRE-type organization, but just a single thrill-killer).
It seems to me the execution (no pun intended) was to blame, with a sign of this the triteness toward which Gardner too often tended here. Considering this I find myself coming back to an early passage where he describes an Italian Air Force General who is one of Dragonpol's first targets. Gardner refers to the man as, following his aerial heroics in the Gulf War, having become a household name by writing an international nonfiction bestseller about "the dust-dry stuff of strategy" as "a subtle cross between Tom Clancy and John le Carrè." As one who has read, with very close attention, a very great deal of strategy, and of both Clancy and le Carrè, I find the description confusing rather than illuminating as I have literally no idea what such a piece of writing would look like; how all these prose forms would mix, subtly or in any other way. (Simply concerning ourselves with Clancy and le Carrè, the former is inclined to plain, straightforward, information-heavy writing oriented to the big picture, le Carrè toward a far more Literary, oblique, "Show-don't-tell" approach centered on the characters--and for all its merits from the standpoint of storytelling, utterly unsuited toward a "strategic treatise.") I suspect Gardner had no idea how all this could mix either, that in this instance he was simply stringing together words to produce something that would sound impressive to a reader who had heard of these things without actually knowing about them, or at least did not make a habit of actually thinking about what they actually read on the page.
Alas, it seemed such failings were not solely on the surface here, Gardner generally showing less concern for consistency than usual in his handling of his material. If Bond's Gardner suddenly became an expert on the theater mainly for the reason that Gardner was, and was interested in bringing the element into the books, here he becomes a veritable encyclopedia on the subject--indeed, a "drama geek," in the middle of a briefing at headquarters suddenly expounding tangentially on the satirical intent of a Cole Porter lyric and being reprimanded by M for it; and relying on minute recollection of a prior Dragonpol stage performance to advance the investigation. Similarly out of character is Bond's relationship with the Swiss operative with whom he works, Fredericka "Flicka" Von Grusse, a far cry from Bond's prior taste in women, physically and other ways. (Gardner tells us that her face is "long . . . nose slightly crooked . . . jaw a shade square. Not beautiful by any standard," but "full of character," while career-wise and in other ways, down to her Anglo-Swiss heritage, she seems to have been conceived as a female 007--hardly the sort of thing that usually endeared women to Bond's sense of romantic fantasy, even after Gardner's long eliding of Bond's once well-known attitudes in these matters.)
One might add that their time together was, unlike the sort of dramatic experience that made Bond decide to marry in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (or even his thoughts of a deeper involvement with Tiffany Case in Diamonds Are Forever), far from life-changing. Yet Bond falls for her so hard that he becomes a one-woman man. Meanwhile M is happy to have a foreign operative no longer in good standing with her own agency come to work for him, while even nudging Bond toward marrying her. (I cannot but contrast it with M back in Diamonds Are Forever telling Bond that making it official with Tiffany Case would mean the kind of "mixed marriage" that the old Victorian was sure could never work--scarcely removed from Anthony Trollope's Roger Carbury, likewise probably imagining "all American women as . . . loud, masculine and atheistical" in The Way We Live Now. To Gardner's credit Bond himself is surprised, while less to Gardner's credit M suggests that he is "really just a sentimental old matchmaker.") Meanwhile Bond-the-man-who-couldn't-stand-the-office became a player in the Service's post-Cold War reorganization. (I might add that tonally the Security Service's spying on Bond in Britain, and the final confrontation in EuroDisnyeland--a choice of setting for the climax that recalled the decision to make Markus Bismaquer an ice cream tycoon--also felt out of place, even by Gardner's standards.)
Altogether the result means that the deviation from the usual Bondian expectations is uncompensated by what Gardner does differently. Still, the book has a particular relevance nonetheless as an apparent foundation for the series' post-Cold War shape, with the changes in Bond's personal life, and his professional life, very much at the heart of the next book, SeaFire.
For a full listing of the James Bond continuation novels (and the reviews of them available on this blog) click here.
Sunday, June 25, 2023
Why No Wildstorm Cinematic Universe?
We have reports of a movie about the Authority possibly in the making, apparently as part of the bigger DC reboot being overseen by James Gunn.
The Authority, of course, was not originally a DC creation in the manner of the Justice League, but part of the Wildstorm Press comics "universe" that DC later bought up--which included, besides the Authority, such titles as WildCATs, Stormwatch and DV8.
In this age in which Hollywood seems obsessed with superheroes, and shared universes, Wildstorm's universe could seem a natural--with it perhaps appearing a surprise that with all the "Marvel envy" out there no one seized on the Wildstorm universe to make a screen universe out of it before. However, a moment's thought past that makes it seem all too predictable given how much "brand name" means these days when only the easiest high concept "sells" will do, the more in as the budgets regarded as required (even a $100 million is too puny for a tentpole these days) make the investments so large. Wildstorm's heyday was a long time ago, and even then its properties far less well-known to the general audience than the first-stringers, or even third-stringers, of DC and Marvel. Indeed, even younger comics fans probably have never heard of many of the associated series'. (Name recognition-wise, John Lynch is a long way from Nick Fury or Charles Xavier.)
I might add that the work I remember from the brand's '90s heyday may not have much to commend it to the audience. Much of it was derivative, if often in a knowing way (with the aforementioned John Lynch we see a man become father figure to a team of super-powered young mutants who all live together while having adventures--wait, I've seen this somewhere before); and where it was not derivative, as with a lot of Warren Ellis' or Alan Moore's work, it was more oriented to grown-up, hardcore readers (as with Ellis' deeply metafictional Planetary saga, or Moore's America's Best Comics work); while in innumerable ways, even the lighter stuff, from the ironies of the stories to the style of the art work, were very, very much of the '90s.
Speaking for myself I have enjoyed a great deal of Wildstorm's stuff over the years. But I know that this stuff is a tough sell to the general audience next to the kinds of things put out by Marvel Studios--while much simply would not survive contemporary handling given the current cultural moment. The result is that even if an Authority movie does come to pass the odds of a bigger on-screen Wildstormverse seem to me slight indeed.
The Authority, of course, was not originally a DC creation in the manner of the Justice League, but part of the Wildstorm Press comics "universe" that DC later bought up--which included, besides the Authority, such titles as WildCATs, Stormwatch and DV8.
In this age in which Hollywood seems obsessed with superheroes, and shared universes, Wildstorm's universe could seem a natural--with it perhaps appearing a surprise that with all the "Marvel envy" out there no one seized on the Wildstorm universe to make a screen universe out of it before. However, a moment's thought past that makes it seem all too predictable given how much "brand name" means these days when only the easiest high concept "sells" will do, the more in as the budgets regarded as required (even a $100 million is too puny for a tentpole these days) make the investments so large. Wildstorm's heyday was a long time ago, and even then its properties far less well-known to the general audience than the first-stringers, or even third-stringers, of DC and Marvel. Indeed, even younger comics fans probably have never heard of many of the associated series'. (Name recognition-wise, John Lynch is a long way from Nick Fury or Charles Xavier.)
I might add that the work I remember from the brand's '90s heyday may not have much to commend it to the audience. Much of it was derivative, if often in a knowing way (with the aforementioned John Lynch we see a man become father figure to a team of super-powered young mutants who all live together while having adventures--wait, I've seen this somewhere before); and where it was not derivative, as with a lot of Warren Ellis' or Alan Moore's work, it was more oriented to grown-up, hardcore readers (as with Ellis' deeply metafictional Planetary saga, or Moore's America's Best Comics work); while in innumerable ways, even the lighter stuff, from the ironies of the stories to the style of the art work, were very, very much of the '90s.
Speaking for myself I have enjoyed a great deal of Wildstorm's stuff over the years. But I know that this stuff is a tough sell to the general audience next to the kinds of things put out by Marvel Studios--while much simply would not survive contemporary handling given the current cultural moment. The result is that even if an Authority movie does come to pass the odds of a bigger on-screen Wildstormverse seem to me slight indeed.
Married . . . With Children . . . In Animated Form?
I was recently surprised to hear of plans for a revival of Married . . . With Children in animated form.
Even by today's remake-mad Hollywood's standards the idea is questionable. The show was very much of its time, and practically impossible to present today because of how the sensitivities of the public (or at least its opinion-leaders) have changed. The air of crudity, the toilet humor in this answer to the upper middle class gentility of the sitcoms of the era of The Cosby Show and Growing Pains that caused a moral panic back in the '80s seem tame in the era of Shameless--while other aspects are today regarded as completely unforgivable. (In the era of the alt-right Al's leading an avowedly anti-feminist organization is apt to be taken very differently indeed.) Indeed, not one of the four members of the Bundy family would be allowed on screen today as they were then--and the degree of adaptation likely required to make them acceptable sure to leave the Bundy family unrecognizable, with the neighbors not much more likely to survive handling.
My expectation is that the altered version will produce an Internet tempest in a teacup, be promptly canceled, and then, as is usually the case with such tempests and their causes, be quickly (and deservedly) forgotten--a risible little footnote in the history of Married . . . With Children and its pop cultural legacy.
Even by today's remake-mad Hollywood's standards the idea is questionable. The show was very much of its time, and practically impossible to present today because of how the sensitivities of the public (or at least its opinion-leaders) have changed. The air of crudity, the toilet humor in this answer to the upper middle class gentility of the sitcoms of the era of The Cosby Show and Growing Pains that caused a moral panic back in the '80s seem tame in the era of Shameless--while other aspects are today regarded as completely unforgivable. (In the era of the alt-right Al's leading an avowedly anti-feminist organization is apt to be taken very differently indeed.) Indeed, not one of the four members of the Bundy family would be allowed on screen today as they were then--and the degree of adaptation likely required to make them acceptable sure to leave the Bundy family unrecognizable, with the neighbors not much more likely to survive handling.
My expectation is that the altered version will produce an Internet tempest in a teacup, be promptly canceled, and then, as is usually the case with such tempests and their causes, be quickly (and deservedly) forgotten--a risible little footnote in the history of Married . . . With Children and its pop cultural legacy.
Clive Cussler's 1993 in Dragon
From quite early on Clive Cussler got in the habit of setting his Dirk Pitt novels a few years ahead into the future, so as to offer some latitude for the political and technological changes without which his scenarios would not be as plausible, especially in the case of novels like Night Probe! (1981)--or Dragon (1990). Part I of the latter novel incorporates in Cussler's version of 1993 undersea mining stations 16,000 feet down with all their apparatus and vehicles, and satellites with sensors which can render the oceans effectively transparent to investigators, with these things not merely interesting gimmicks but indispensable to the unfolding of the plot--while the technology gets only more exotic from there, not least where the robotics are concerned.
Of course, not only did we not have that stuff in 1993, we do not have it in 2023, and at this much later date are unsure that we ever will. (This applies even to another technology critical to the unfolding of the plot of Dragon, autonomous cars.)
Considering the fact it seems to me reflective of the line between "techno-thriller" and "science fiction" having been thinner for '70s-era techno-thriller writers like himself, or his contemporary Martin Caidin (who like Cussler, was fond of writing in not just imaginary technology but cryptohistory and cryptoarchaeology, as seen in The Messiah Stone, or the third of his Steve Austin novels, High Crystal).
The differentiation of the two genres also seems to have gone with the techno-thriller writers becoming more intent on persuading the reader that their fiction was in fact well-grounded. A Tom Clancy, for example, who did read Clive Cussler, and in some cases seemed to follow his footsteps (I suspect Cussler's influence when I look at Debt of Honor), never expected his readers to take seriously anything like Dragon's undersea mining station, or presented his spy satellites as able to peer through the sea that way--and while some of what he envisioned has since come to seem science fiction-al (as with his conception of anti-missile defenses in The Cardinal of the Kremlin), these were lapses, in this case a product of the wildly overblown '80s-era hype about them by which Clancy was taken in, even as he generally strove to "get the details right" to a much greater degree than Cussler did. (Clancy generally purported to write about real technologies, while Cussler, especially in his earlier books, did not hesitate to make things up even when he did not have to do so. Thus in Deep Six an "F/A-21" fighter plane launched "laser-guided" anti-ship missiles at a key part of the narrative. The U.S. did not have, even on the drawing board, F/A-21 fighter planes or laser-guided anti-ship missiles that would have been launched from such, and such would never have appeared in a Clancy novel.)
However, it seems to me there may be more than the care to "keep things grounded" and "get the details right" differentiating them--especially from the standpoint of a reader looking back. They might scoff at Cussler's seaQuest-like undersea mining station, or the advanced robotics of the tale, but such stations were supposed to be a near-term possibility when Cussler began writing his books, while there was a lot of hype about robotics, and the artificial intelligence controlling them, back in the '80s, and especially what Japan was supposed to be accomplishing in that field. (Remember, fifth-generation computing was going to change the world!) Expectations in both these areas (like the expectations in regard to anti-missile defense) have become more modest as we became habituated to the generally lowered expectations of an era of technological stagnation in which the "techno" became less thrilling than it seemed just a short time earlier.
Of course, not only did we not have that stuff in 1993, we do not have it in 2023, and at this much later date are unsure that we ever will. (This applies even to another technology critical to the unfolding of the plot of Dragon, autonomous cars.)
Considering the fact it seems to me reflective of the line between "techno-thriller" and "science fiction" having been thinner for '70s-era techno-thriller writers like himself, or his contemporary Martin Caidin (who like Cussler, was fond of writing in not just imaginary technology but cryptohistory and cryptoarchaeology, as seen in The Messiah Stone, or the third of his Steve Austin novels, High Crystal).
The differentiation of the two genres also seems to have gone with the techno-thriller writers becoming more intent on persuading the reader that their fiction was in fact well-grounded. A Tom Clancy, for example, who did read Clive Cussler, and in some cases seemed to follow his footsteps (I suspect Cussler's influence when I look at Debt of Honor), never expected his readers to take seriously anything like Dragon's undersea mining station, or presented his spy satellites as able to peer through the sea that way--and while some of what he envisioned has since come to seem science fiction-al (as with his conception of anti-missile defenses in The Cardinal of the Kremlin), these were lapses, in this case a product of the wildly overblown '80s-era hype about them by which Clancy was taken in, even as he generally strove to "get the details right" to a much greater degree than Cussler did. (Clancy generally purported to write about real technologies, while Cussler, especially in his earlier books, did not hesitate to make things up even when he did not have to do so. Thus in Deep Six an "F/A-21" fighter plane launched "laser-guided" anti-ship missiles at a key part of the narrative. The U.S. did not have, even on the drawing board, F/A-21 fighter planes or laser-guided anti-ship missiles that would have been launched from such, and such would never have appeared in a Clancy novel.)
However, it seems to me there may be more than the care to "keep things grounded" and "get the details right" differentiating them--especially from the standpoint of a reader looking back. They might scoff at Cussler's seaQuest-like undersea mining station, or the advanced robotics of the tale, but such stations were supposed to be a near-term possibility when Cussler began writing his books, while there was a lot of hype about robotics, and the artificial intelligence controlling them, back in the '80s, and especially what Japan was supposed to be accomplishing in that field. (Remember, fifth-generation computing was going to change the world!) Expectations in both these areas (like the expectations in regard to anti-missile defense) have become more modest as we became habituated to the generally lowered expectations of an era of technological stagnation in which the "techno" became less thrilling than it seemed just a short time earlier.
Characterizations and Prose in the Popular Thriller: Clive Cussler's Dragon
Recently reviewing Clive Cussler's Dragon I considered the book as a Clive Cussler Dirk Pitt novel from the period I associate with his best. Thus I had much to say of the book's structure and incidents, pacing and action, focus and flow (which had me concluding that even if other entries in the series were stronger in various ways, the book as a whole works, in cases quite impressively).
I did not raise the matter of literary qualities such as characterization and prose--which were pretty much as expected for Cussler novels, and for popular thrillers generally.
That is to say--they were, are, pretty bad in certain specific ways that were outside my concerns as a reviewer at that time, but of which something may be worth saying.
One may as well start with the most conventional of expectations, as laid out by that most conventional of critics, James Wood. Far from the author's "maintain[ing] an unsentimental composure and know[ing] how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary" as Wood says, such that the "author's fingerprints on all this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible," in the Dirk Pitt novels Cussler's voice erupts into the narrative so often and blatantly and melodramatically (for instance, to hint at some doom the characters did not yet expect) one could be forgiven for thinking that they were reading a Victorian-era book for a not particularly sophisticated audience. Thus it is not enough that almost everyone is a superhuman Gary Stu, but we are beaten over the head with the fact by the chunky character sketch he presents at each introduction of one of his principal dramatis personae. The artlessness of the presentation annoys me less than the triteness and falsity of what was being presented, affirming innumerable, quite stupid social prejudices. Still, the artlessness reflects a broader and very frequent tendency to overdescribe that constantly undercuts what Cussler is actually achieving by pouring out more words past the point at which he ought to have stopped. (Pursuing villains Pitt believes have kidnapped his longtime girlfriend Cussler tells us that "if they harmed her, they would die, [Pitt] vowed ruthlessly." Was there an un-ruthless way to vow that?) Quite naturally, this is the kind of novel where characters "shake their heads" every time they utter a negative (perhaps not so much as in Larry Bond's books, but not much less either, this quirk popping up scores of times in Dragon). The narration is also replete with comparisons that use up a good many words in distracting and confusing rather than enlightening. (We are told that the villain's dining hall recalled those of "the most palatial castles of Europe" and then almost immediately told that almost everything in the chamber was "distinctly Japanese," from the paper lantern lighting, to the bamboo carpet, to the paintings by Japanese masters on the walls. So, basically, it bore no resemblance whatsoever to its counterparts in European castles.)
I find myself more sensitive to such failings all the time, which do not improve the reading experience. Nevertheless, grating as they could be the story did more than survive them--much more. It is a reminder that those aspects of literary craftsmanship that middlebrow critics tend to emphasize are only part of writing, not the whole of it, and that like all writers and works which excel according to one measure or another they do so not because they get everything right, but because what they got right mattered more than what they got wrong.
I did not raise the matter of literary qualities such as characterization and prose--which were pretty much as expected for Cussler novels, and for popular thrillers generally.
That is to say--they were, are, pretty bad in certain specific ways that were outside my concerns as a reviewer at that time, but of which something may be worth saying.
One may as well start with the most conventional of expectations, as laid out by that most conventional of critics, James Wood. Far from the author's "maintain[ing] an unsentimental composure and know[ing] how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary" as Wood says, such that the "author's fingerprints on all this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible," in the Dirk Pitt novels Cussler's voice erupts into the narrative so often and blatantly and melodramatically (for instance, to hint at some doom the characters did not yet expect) one could be forgiven for thinking that they were reading a Victorian-era book for a not particularly sophisticated audience. Thus it is not enough that almost everyone is a superhuman Gary Stu, but we are beaten over the head with the fact by the chunky character sketch he presents at each introduction of one of his principal dramatis personae. The artlessness of the presentation annoys me less than the triteness and falsity of what was being presented, affirming innumerable, quite stupid social prejudices. Still, the artlessness reflects a broader and very frequent tendency to overdescribe that constantly undercuts what Cussler is actually achieving by pouring out more words past the point at which he ought to have stopped. (Pursuing villains Pitt believes have kidnapped his longtime girlfriend Cussler tells us that "if they harmed her, they would die, [Pitt] vowed ruthlessly." Was there an un-ruthless way to vow that?) Quite naturally, this is the kind of novel where characters "shake their heads" every time they utter a negative (perhaps not so much as in Larry Bond's books, but not much less either, this quirk popping up scores of times in Dragon). The narration is also replete with comparisons that use up a good many words in distracting and confusing rather than enlightening. (We are told that the villain's dining hall recalled those of "the most palatial castles of Europe" and then almost immediately told that almost everything in the chamber was "distinctly Japanese," from the paper lantern lighting, to the bamboo carpet, to the paintings by Japanese masters on the walls. So, basically, it bore no resemblance whatsoever to its counterparts in European castles.)
I find myself more sensitive to such failings all the time, which do not improve the reading experience. Nevertheless, grating as they could be the story did more than survive them--much more. It is a reminder that those aspects of literary craftsmanship that middlebrow critics tend to emphasize are only part of writing, not the whole of it, and that like all writers and works which excel according to one measure or another they do so not because they get everything right, but because what they got right mattered more than what they got wrong.
Clive Cussler's Dragon as a Novel of the '90s
From the standpoint of politics Clive Cussler's contributions to the thriller form tend to be of the "orthodox" kind, where all is pretty much well in and with his country and its system save for the nasties, usually foreigners, trying to muck it up. For many years these were usually KGB types (as in Raise the Titanic!, Deep Six and Cyclops), but, with the Cold War drawing to a close, and with Japanaphobia booming, it was for a Japanese plot that Cussler opted--with this the more conspicuous as, while militant anti-Communism and anti-Soviet sentiment can appear so much the background noise to American life as to be easily overlooked, simply accepted as the inevitable even by those not eager to hear more of it, the issue at hand was more novel and controversial for the mainstream.
Rather than merely choosing enemies for his hero according to those politics and then getting on with the story, Cussler is quite emphatic about the view that the economic challenge from Japan, and the Japanese, characterizing Japan as engaged in economic warfare against a United States whose leaders and people consistently failed to see that they were in fact in a war and act accordingly. Indeed, in a piece of particularly striking symbolism (not a word one uses often when discussing Dirk Pitt novels) the villains use as a critical component of their scheme for blackmailing the United States into political and economic submission Japanese-made cars imported into the U.S.--American commentators at the time regarding such vehicles as key symbols of Japanese industrial success and American decline.1 Similarly pointed is the reference Cussler makes to Japanese theft of American aerospace secrets, another then-significant but long since forgotten fear, as the furor over the FSX fighter program demonstrated--which program, incidentally, Cussler references more than once (on one occasion, informing them that a squadron of FSX fighters escort the villain's aircraft back to his home country). Meanwhile all these acts lead up to the villains' proceeding beyond economic warfare to the other kind, with their superiority in robotics becoming a key basis for their subjecting the U.S. to a latterday equivalent of the "Twenty-One Demands" the Japanese government attempted to impose on China during World War I.2 However, long before that point Cussler repeatedly made his view explicit in the remarks of the good guys, be it Pitt's longtime girlfriend Senator Loren Smith grilling a Japanese financier in committee, or the normally cool Pitt's own uncharacteristic political rant when they are alone together that prompts from her the joking suggestion that he follow his father, and her, into the U.S. Senate.
In the process, as was customary in Japan-themed thrillers of the early ‘90s like this one, Cussler retailed the stereotypical and simplistic cultural comment about Japanese society of the approved, "Establishment," experts to whom the mainstream media loves giving a vast platform, and then never calls out when they prove disastrously wrong. Thus we read here plenty about how the Japanese have always been and always will be a closed, culturally homogeneous, individuality-stifling society of ultra-conformists who "know their place"; follow harder, more ruthless leaders who brook no nonsense about rights, egalitarianism and democracy; and cheerfully sacrifice themselves on demand at their leaders' behest; in contrast with open, free-wheeling, diverse, tolerant, liberal, democratic America--such that many an American conservative, if deeming the Japanese irreconcilably Other and threatening, still seems to deep down envy them their model. (Thus does Pitt's rant at one point accuse Americans of "overconsuming" and preferring the "fast buck" over the foundations of prosperity and sovereignty as against the Japanese opposite--with the implication that some fault of the American culture evident in its people as a whole is the cause of the matter, and elite interests had nothing to do with the "fast buck" mentality and the supposed overconsumption. Thus does a different character, surveying a fully robotized Japanese workplace, think to himself of the "workers" operating "twenty-four hours a day without coffee breaks, lunch, or sick leave," and gratuitously add the cheap shot that such a setup would be "inconceivable to an American union leader"--implicitly endorsing the right-wing scapegoating of the '80s that held the "coddling" of the American workers whose unions were at that time being squashed to be what was holding the country back.)
It was a less than one-dimensional view of Japan that (a few token remarks about the villains not representing their country's people aside) overlooked the reality that all societies are complex, divided, conflicted, with Japan's no exception--as the "experts" should have better appreciated at the time, and would have appreciated at the time, had they bothered even to pay attention to the (Japanese) cartoons and (Japanese) video games their own children and grandchildren were growing up on. Now it all looks still more foolish. (After all, what a far cry this image of a hyper-dynamic but overcrowded superpower intent on acquiring Pacific Rim Lebensraum is from our contemporary image of a stagnating country in danger of being unable to keep itself peopled, as its supposedly ultra-conformist young people are now derided as NEETs, hikikomori, "parasite singles" in what the more prominent social commentators belatedly realized was not a purely Japanese trend!)
Cussler's espousal of these ideas to the point of building a thriller around them can seem the more significant in that, if Japanaphobia had been a theme of American popular culture for years (with Black Rain a hit and a grown-up Marty McFly being fired by his caricature of a Japanese boss the year before Dragon hit bookshelves), Cussler was still probably ahead of the curve, his book preceding by years other bestsellers emergent from that mood such as Michael Crichton's Rising Sun or Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor, and so not just a sign of the times, but a likely influence on them. Indeed, I got the feeling that Clancy (whose applause for Cussler's novels I see in the front matter of my paperback copy of this book) not only read this one, but was considerably influenced by it as he wrote Debt of Honor--in the care he took to dissociate the villains from the Japanese government and the people, behind whose backs they for the most part operate; the attempt at nuclear blackmail in defense of the country's economic position; the Japanese-American intelligence agent key to exposing the villains' plans; and even the assault by vengeful Japanese villains on American legislators (the kidnap of Congressman Mike Diaz and Senator Loren Smith, perhaps, the germ of the idea for Debt's finale).
These days any attempt to make a movie of Dragon seems unlikely in the extreme--given how Hollywood has twice attempted to launch a Pitt franchise, and each time seen it end in very costly failure, while I suspect that, addicted as the studios are to sequels and prequels, reboots and remakes, Hollywood these days is less prone than before to adapt material that has appeared in book than in other forms (for the simple reason that fewer and fewer people read books these days, the interest of yesteryear's bestselling thrillers have a short half-life, and the Pitt franchise being rather a less hot "property" than it was in the early 2000s).3 Still, we are hearing reports of plans for a Debt of Honor movie.
I suspect that if such reports have any substance to them, and the movie actually gets made, it will bear no resemblance to that book in this respect, not least given the present attitude toward Japan in the U.S. press. Cussler's book is heavy on evocations of Japan's wartime aggression and atrocities; of the fact that that Japanese Establishment responsible for them never lost power (war criminals' remaining in power, and seeing their descendants follow them to the same high places) or ceased to defend its crimes; and of the equally factual reality that that Establishment hypocritically attacks Western racism and colonialism while denying its own racism and insisting on the "uplifting" character of its colonialism. By contrast today the American press can seem more eager to see Japan rearm than the Japanese people themselves, with that people's anti-militarism leaving American commentators scratching their heads--ever obtuse toward how people actually feel in Japan, and the neighboring countries, where memories of the war do not line up neatly with what seems convenient to American neoconservatives.
1. One might add that Cussler and his characters repeatedly compare the brown paint job of the cars in question to the color of "fertilizer," and at at least one point, more directly compare it to the substance “fertilizer” is intended to evoke.
2. As it did of China, Japan demands of the U.S. concessions of strategic territory it regards as particularly significant to its interests and ambitions (outright cession of not just Hawaii but California, just as Japan had demanded the cession of the Fukien province on the opposite side of the Strait of Formosa); and cession of control over government finances and the direction of its economy, not least by demanding accept Japanese administrators in key government positions. As Cussler makes no reference to the 1915 demands I have no idea whether they were a model for him here or not. (Cussler displays little interest in Japan's imperialism prior to World War II, and is all too reflective of the kind of comment available to most Americans at the time in that the experts tended in general to have no knowledge or interest in Japanese history, about which little was available in English--as many an anime fan learns when their interest is stoked in, say, the Shinsengumi and tries to read up on them.)
3. Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels had been around for three decades in the early 2000s, but this particular action-adventure series, like Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan novels, weathered the end of the Cold War and the broader collapse of the action-adventure fiction market rather better than most of the competition. Moreover, the coincidence of its release with one of the twenty-first century's most catastrophic events would seem to have helped make 2001's Pitt novel, Valhalla Rising, a stronger than usual seller; while the success of Doug Liman's adaptation of The Bourne Identity seems to have strengthened the interest of Hollywood in the rights to comparable thriller series (like Stephen Hunter's Bob Lee Swagger series, which got a movie version in 2007, and the Pitt novels, which got their second crack at the big screen in 2005's Sahara). No such inducements to Hollywood's giving Pitt another chance have been seen since.
Rather than merely choosing enemies for his hero according to those politics and then getting on with the story, Cussler is quite emphatic about the view that the economic challenge from Japan, and the Japanese, characterizing Japan as engaged in economic warfare against a United States whose leaders and people consistently failed to see that they were in fact in a war and act accordingly. Indeed, in a piece of particularly striking symbolism (not a word one uses often when discussing Dirk Pitt novels) the villains use as a critical component of their scheme for blackmailing the United States into political and economic submission Japanese-made cars imported into the U.S.--American commentators at the time regarding such vehicles as key symbols of Japanese industrial success and American decline.1 Similarly pointed is the reference Cussler makes to Japanese theft of American aerospace secrets, another then-significant but long since forgotten fear, as the furor over the FSX fighter program demonstrated--which program, incidentally, Cussler references more than once (on one occasion, informing them that a squadron of FSX fighters escort the villain's aircraft back to his home country). Meanwhile all these acts lead up to the villains' proceeding beyond economic warfare to the other kind, with their superiority in robotics becoming a key basis for their subjecting the U.S. to a latterday equivalent of the "Twenty-One Demands" the Japanese government attempted to impose on China during World War I.2 However, long before that point Cussler repeatedly made his view explicit in the remarks of the good guys, be it Pitt's longtime girlfriend Senator Loren Smith grilling a Japanese financier in committee, or the normally cool Pitt's own uncharacteristic political rant when they are alone together that prompts from her the joking suggestion that he follow his father, and her, into the U.S. Senate.
In the process, as was customary in Japan-themed thrillers of the early ‘90s like this one, Cussler retailed the stereotypical and simplistic cultural comment about Japanese society of the approved, "Establishment," experts to whom the mainstream media loves giving a vast platform, and then never calls out when they prove disastrously wrong. Thus we read here plenty about how the Japanese have always been and always will be a closed, culturally homogeneous, individuality-stifling society of ultra-conformists who "know their place"; follow harder, more ruthless leaders who brook no nonsense about rights, egalitarianism and democracy; and cheerfully sacrifice themselves on demand at their leaders' behest; in contrast with open, free-wheeling, diverse, tolerant, liberal, democratic America--such that many an American conservative, if deeming the Japanese irreconcilably Other and threatening, still seems to deep down envy them their model. (Thus does Pitt's rant at one point accuse Americans of "overconsuming" and preferring the "fast buck" over the foundations of prosperity and sovereignty as against the Japanese opposite--with the implication that some fault of the American culture evident in its people as a whole is the cause of the matter, and elite interests had nothing to do with the "fast buck" mentality and the supposed overconsumption. Thus does a different character, surveying a fully robotized Japanese workplace, think to himself of the "workers" operating "twenty-four hours a day without coffee breaks, lunch, or sick leave," and gratuitously add the cheap shot that such a setup would be "inconceivable to an American union leader"--implicitly endorsing the right-wing scapegoating of the '80s that held the "coddling" of the American workers whose unions were at that time being squashed to be what was holding the country back.)
It was a less than one-dimensional view of Japan that (a few token remarks about the villains not representing their country's people aside) overlooked the reality that all societies are complex, divided, conflicted, with Japan's no exception--as the "experts" should have better appreciated at the time, and would have appreciated at the time, had they bothered even to pay attention to the (Japanese) cartoons and (Japanese) video games their own children and grandchildren were growing up on. Now it all looks still more foolish. (After all, what a far cry this image of a hyper-dynamic but overcrowded superpower intent on acquiring Pacific Rim Lebensraum is from our contemporary image of a stagnating country in danger of being unable to keep itself peopled, as its supposedly ultra-conformist young people are now derided as NEETs, hikikomori, "parasite singles" in what the more prominent social commentators belatedly realized was not a purely Japanese trend!)
Cussler's espousal of these ideas to the point of building a thriller around them can seem the more significant in that, if Japanaphobia had been a theme of American popular culture for years (with Black Rain a hit and a grown-up Marty McFly being fired by his caricature of a Japanese boss the year before Dragon hit bookshelves), Cussler was still probably ahead of the curve, his book preceding by years other bestsellers emergent from that mood such as Michael Crichton's Rising Sun or Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor, and so not just a sign of the times, but a likely influence on them. Indeed, I got the feeling that Clancy (whose applause for Cussler's novels I see in the front matter of my paperback copy of this book) not only read this one, but was considerably influenced by it as he wrote Debt of Honor--in the care he took to dissociate the villains from the Japanese government and the people, behind whose backs they for the most part operate; the attempt at nuclear blackmail in defense of the country's economic position; the Japanese-American intelligence agent key to exposing the villains' plans; and even the assault by vengeful Japanese villains on American legislators (the kidnap of Congressman Mike Diaz and Senator Loren Smith, perhaps, the germ of the idea for Debt's finale).
These days any attempt to make a movie of Dragon seems unlikely in the extreme--given how Hollywood has twice attempted to launch a Pitt franchise, and each time seen it end in very costly failure, while I suspect that, addicted as the studios are to sequels and prequels, reboots and remakes, Hollywood these days is less prone than before to adapt material that has appeared in book than in other forms (for the simple reason that fewer and fewer people read books these days, the interest of yesteryear's bestselling thrillers have a short half-life, and the Pitt franchise being rather a less hot "property" than it was in the early 2000s).3 Still, we are hearing reports of plans for a Debt of Honor movie.
I suspect that if such reports have any substance to them, and the movie actually gets made, it will bear no resemblance to that book in this respect, not least given the present attitude toward Japan in the U.S. press. Cussler's book is heavy on evocations of Japan's wartime aggression and atrocities; of the fact that that Japanese Establishment responsible for them never lost power (war criminals' remaining in power, and seeing their descendants follow them to the same high places) or ceased to defend its crimes; and of the equally factual reality that that Establishment hypocritically attacks Western racism and colonialism while denying its own racism and insisting on the "uplifting" character of its colonialism. By contrast today the American press can seem more eager to see Japan rearm than the Japanese people themselves, with that people's anti-militarism leaving American commentators scratching their heads--ever obtuse toward how people actually feel in Japan, and the neighboring countries, where memories of the war do not line up neatly with what seems convenient to American neoconservatives.
1. One might add that Cussler and his characters repeatedly compare the brown paint job of the cars in question to the color of "fertilizer," and at at least one point, more directly compare it to the substance “fertilizer” is intended to evoke.
2. As it did of China, Japan demands of the U.S. concessions of strategic territory it regards as particularly significant to its interests and ambitions (outright cession of not just Hawaii but California, just as Japan had demanded the cession of the Fukien province on the opposite side of the Strait of Formosa); and cession of control over government finances and the direction of its economy, not least by demanding accept Japanese administrators in key government positions. As Cussler makes no reference to the 1915 demands I have no idea whether they were a model for him here or not. (Cussler displays little interest in Japan's imperialism prior to World War II, and is all too reflective of the kind of comment available to most Americans at the time in that the experts tended in general to have no knowledge or interest in Japanese history, about which little was available in English--as many an anime fan learns when their interest is stoked in, say, the Shinsengumi and tries to read up on them.)
3. Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels had been around for three decades in the early 2000s, but this particular action-adventure series, like Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan novels, weathered the end of the Cold War and the broader collapse of the action-adventure fiction market rather better than most of the competition. Moreover, the coincidence of its release with one of the twenty-first century's most catastrophic events would seem to have helped make 2001's Pitt novel, Valhalla Rising, a stronger than usual seller; while the success of Doug Liman's adaptation of The Bourne Identity seems to have strengthened the interest of Hollywood in the rights to comparable thriller series (like Stephen Hunter's Bob Lee Swagger series, which got a movie version in 2007, and the Pitt novels, which got their second crack at the big screen in 2005's Sahara). No such inducements to Hollywood's giving Pitt another chance have been seen since.
Review: Dragon, by Clive Cussler
MILD SPOILERS AHEAD
As a reader of Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels I have long felt that Cussler hit his peak with his early 500-pagers--his first cracks at what book critics in the '70s were, in the wake of bestsellers like those of Frederick Forsyth and Robert Ludlum and Jack Higgins' The Eagle Has Landed, calling "super-thrillers." Those books were specifically 1986's Cyclops, 1988's Treasure, 1990's Dragon, and 1992's Sahara.
Of the four I have tended to think Dragon the weakest. In fact, where I read the other three straight through, cover to cover, on first picking them up, I remember skimming long stretches of Dragon--and only recently picked it up again.
I think I still like the other three better. But my impression of this one is more favorable than before--even if looking at the book again I am reminded of what I did not like about it so much. If there is vigor, briskness and ingenuity here, Cussler had also been very productive for two decades at the time he wrote this one and, like most writers at that stage of things, was reusing significant elements of his older work. The derelict ship in the book's opening sequence, the associated marine disaster, the involvement of Asian shipping in it, very obviously recall the plot of Deep Six. So does the structure of what follows--not least in its failings. The opening incident has a very great deal to commend it--a robust combination of suspense, action and gadgetry that includes the book's finest "set piece," with the manner of Pitt's involvement in the disaster giving a stronger than usual dramatic edge to his desire to get the culprits (it isn't just "Someone killed my favorite second cousin" this time), while also laying key groundwork for the finale. Still, at bottom the kind of thing that in a Bond film would probably be packed into the few minutes of the pre-credits scene, here it takes up almost a quarter of the book before the investigation and associated adventure properly begins. Moreover that adventure has a comparatively disjointed feel. An early display of self-assertion on Pitt's part apart, the book consists of a weary Pitt time and again being told to take a long flight out to some scene to perform some incredibly unlikely and hazardous task by government officials previously unknown to us who are the ones actually managing the crisis and solving the mystery as they send Pitt off after this clue or to perform that task. (Indeed, I could not think of any prior Pitt adventure which was not only so scattershot--a quality epitomized for me by the junket to Germany--but in which Pitt was so passive.)
Moreover, where such disjointedness in thrillers of this type is so often a matter of a writer trying to cram in more action than the frame of the narrative can hold, the book, while offering plenty of adventure, danger and violence, is relatively light on "action," if one thinks of this as physical confrontation, and especially interpersonal combat, between hero and villain. The good guys have their first proper brushes with the enemy only a third of the way in, and Pitt his first contact with enemy agents after page 200 of my 542 page paperback edition, after which there is still less than we tend to get in the bigger Pitt books. The principal car chase has Pitt pursuing a vehicle with no human inside it, while there is just one proper shootout, and that shoehorned in that action-cramming way (the villains electing to send what feels like a platoon of ninjas to take Pitt out, just because he seems "a threat," resulting in a set piece that could have been easily excised without doing the slightest damage to the narrative). Indeed, if Pitt's personal motive for "getting to the bottom of things" are stronger than usual, the way in which things play out mean that there is no final face-to-face confrontation with any of the villains, these in the end destroyed impersonally or left to others with which to deal. (The final fate of the figure set up as "the big bad" is very anticlimactic, particularly given that Cussler gives us a suitably Bond movie-like capture-the-hero-and-then-chat-with-him-over-a-luxurious-dinner scene before that.)
From the standpoint of flow and of focus the result is a far cry from what we got in, for example, Sahara, once the Calliope gets upriver. Still, if it does not work in every way on the whole it tends to work very well indeed. Disjointed as the narrative was, I still kept turning the pages, in part because Cussler keeps the pace brisk (helped in this by the frequent changes of scene the structure allows), while if feeling like a collection of bits the bits, even the shoehorned bits, tend to be very good (as with that shootout with the ninjas), such that the reuse of old elements is often to superior results (Dragon never dragging the way Deep Six often did). If that still does not quite put it on a level with favorites like Sahara, Treasure or Cyclops, it pleasantly surprised me again and again by reminding me just how good these adventures were at their very best, and still beats just about anything else in the Dirk Pitt series for sheer entertainment.
As a reader of Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels I have long felt that Cussler hit his peak with his early 500-pagers--his first cracks at what book critics in the '70s were, in the wake of bestsellers like those of Frederick Forsyth and Robert Ludlum and Jack Higgins' The Eagle Has Landed, calling "super-thrillers." Those books were specifically 1986's Cyclops, 1988's Treasure, 1990's Dragon, and 1992's Sahara.
Of the four I have tended to think Dragon the weakest. In fact, where I read the other three straight through, cover to cover, on first picking them up, I remember skimming long stretches of Dragon--and only recently picked it up again.
I think I still like the other three better. But my impression of this one is more favorable than before--even if looking at the book again I am reminded of what I did not like about it so much. If there is vigor, briskness and ingenuity here, Cussler had also been very productive for two decades at the time he wrote this one and, like most writers at that stage of things, was reusing significant elements of his older work. The derelict ship in the book's opening sequence, the associated marine disaster, the involvement of Asian shipping in it, very obviously recall the plot of Deep Six. So does the structure of what follows--not least in its failings. The opening incident has a very great deal to commend it--a robust combination of suspense, action and gadgetry that includes the book's finest "set piece," with the manner of Pitt's involvement in the disaster giving a stronger than usual dramatic edge to his desire to get the culprits (it isn't just "Someone killed my favorite second cousin" this time), while also laying key groundwork for the finale. Still, at bottom the kind of thing that in a Bond film would probably be packed into the few minutes of the pre-credits scene, here it takes up almost a quarter of the book before the investigation and associated adventure properly begins. Moreover that adventure has a comparatively disjointed feel. An early display of self-assertion on Pitt's part apart, the book consists of a weary Pitt time and again being told to take a long flight out to some scene to perform some incredibly unlikely and hazardous task by government officials previously unknown to us who are the ones actually managing the crisis and solving the mystery as they send Pitt off after this clue or to perform that task. (Indeed, I could not think of any prior Pitt adventure which was not only so scattershot--a quality epitomized for me by the junket to Germany--but in which Pitt was so passive.)
Moreover, where such disjointedness in thrillers of this type is so often a matter of a writer trying to cram in more action than the frame of the narrative can hold, the book, while offering plenty of adventure, danger and violence, is relatively light on "action," if one thinks of this as physical confrontation, and especially interpersonal combat, between hero and villain. The good guys have their first proper brushes with the enemy only a third of the way in, and Pitt his first contact with enemy agents after page 200 of my 542 page paperback edition, after which there is still less than we tend to get in the bigger Pitt books. The principal car chase has Pitt pursuing a vehicle with no human inside it, while there is just one proper shootout, and that shoehorned in that action-cramming way (the villains electing to send what feels like a platoon of ninjas to take Pitt out, just because he seems "a threat," resulting in a set piece that could have been easily excised without doing the slightest damage to the narrative). Indeed, if Pitt's personal motive for "getting to the bottom of things" are stronger than usual, the way in which things play out mean that there is no final face-to-face confrontation with any of the villains, these in the end destroyed impersonally or left to others with which to deal. (The final fate of the figure set up as "the big bad" is very anticlimactic, particularly given that Cussler gives us a suitably Bond movie-like capture-the-hero-and-then-chat-with-him-over-a-luxurious-dinner scene before that.)
From the standpoint of flow and of focus the result is a far cry from what we got in, for example, Sahara, once the Calliope gets upriver. Still, if it does not work in every way on the whole it tends to work very well indeed. Disjointed as the narrative was, I still kept turning the pages, in part because Cussler keeps the pace brisk (helped in this by the frequent changes of scene the structure allows), while if feeling like a collection of bits the bits, even the shoehorned bits, tend to be very good (as with that shootout with the ninjas), such that the reuse of old elements is often to superior results (Dragon never dragging the way Deep Six often did). If that still does not quite put it on a level with favorites like Sahara, Treasure or Cyclops, it pleasantly surprised me again and again by reminding me just how good these adventures were at their very best, and still beats just about anything else in the Dirk Pitt series for sheer entertainment.
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