Why JAG Was an Older Person's Show: Reflections

Donald Bellisario's JAG had a ten season run and provided the platform for the launch of one of the twenty-first century's biggest ratings' successes, the NCIS franchise (the fourth show in which, NCIS: Hawaii, has just hit the air). All this may seem surprising given that it was hardly one of the past generation's more talked-about shows, with what little comment I remember about it jokes about the advanced age of its audience. (Notably I recall a fantasy sequence in one episode of Scrubs where J.D. is in the implausible situation of sharing an apartment with a large number of old men and yells for "whoever's been filling up my Tivo with JAG reruns to cut it out!") And if this seems like just a matter of cheap laughs Bellisario personally confirmed that the jokes, at least, were not baseless. When the show was canceled he acknowledged publicly that the age of the audience was a factor for advertising-minded executives, and even joked that the decent ratings with the 18-49 crowd it had in the earlier days were a matter of it being just 49 year olds who were 59 year olds a decade later.

Recently I have found myself giving some thought to the reasons for that. Certainly part of it would seem to be that JAG simply happened to run on a channel that, even before TV generally became an old-person thing, had a reputation for drawing an older crowd. (After all, in those years CBS was identified with Murder, She Wrote, and Diagnosis: Murder, and so forth in the very years when FOX and WB and UPN and others were going very hard after younger audiences, and getting them.)

Still, JAG was hardly the show to change that image. It was, after all, hardly Beverly Hills 90210 or Dawson's Creek or even Friends. Rather the show was a legal drama about the armed forces, with grown-up characters dealing with grown-up problems and any distinct youth interest lacking. Moreover, if the show's mash-up of A Few Good Men with Top Gun promised some action-adventure that was only part of the package--and those who came for the action did not necessarily stick around when it cut back to legal procedural. This seems all the more the case given what Bellisario and his team made the stuff of the episodes. The writers attempted to be contemporary with "ripped from the headlines" plots, like that other NBC hit Law & Order, and by making the gender politics of the armed forces (an ultra-fashionable topic at the time) a major theme.1 Yet the show's backward glance, a little more recognizable when one remembers that Bellisario was the creator of Airwolf (1984-1987) and Magnum P.I. (1980-1988) before he created JAG, and before that had worked on Black Sheep Squadron (1976-1978), was unmistakable.

Simply put, the pop cultural craze for things military in the '80s that helped make Airwolf a hit was well on the way from crest to trough circa 1995 when JAG came along. This went especially for a major factor in that craze, the "ghosts of Vietnam" with which Airwolf and Magnum P.I. were saturated (the protagonists of both shows were veterans of the conflict whose service in that conflict was background to many a store, while the issue of American MIAs from the conflict was central to Airwolf and prominent again in Magnum), and with which JAG was also saturated (not least through its protagonist Harmon Rabb's hunt for his MIA father, a running story through the first three seasons, which tied up with much else).2 And where in the '70s the old-fashioned feel of Black Sheep Squadron (at the time Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales called it a "war-is-swell series" for people who recalled "World War II as a rousing, blowzy, fraternity turkey-shoot") found an audience amid a period of nostalgia for World War II-themed entertainment, JAG's reverence and earnestness and what an earlier generation would have called its "squareness" were out of step with the irony-saturated '90s, a throwback to the '40s when the show did not recall the post-Vietnam '80s. All this limited the audience, with this going above all for the young, for whom G.I. Joe was just one more thing they enjoyed as children from which they had moved on to other crazes (to the Turtles, to the X-Men), for whom Vietnam was remote, for whom much in the ever-growing range of choice they had was more appealing--while it was a segment of the older population with which the theme and the baggage and the tone were likely to strike a chord, and apparently did.

Still, the game has changed a great deal since, and it says something that as reruns of old shows seem to be resurgent across the basic (and even premium) cable line-up, helped by the arrival of a growing number of channels devoted to classic TV. Indeed, after the show being off the air for a long time, this year I have spotted reruns on no fewer than three channels (H & I, WGN/NewsNation, even Sundance!) in what seems just one reflection of the way that older groups once shunned by advertisers have become a highly coveted demographic.

1. Apart from the pilot, where the theme of women in combat and the relations between men and women aboard ship were central to the murder investigation and the larger situation of which it was a part, and the consistent pairing of Harmon Rabb with a female partner (with all the opportunities to raise such issues such a pairing meant), the show devoted numerous episodes to such matters as gender discrimination, sexual harassment and the frictions and other complexities of male-female relations within the armed forces ("Chains of Command," "The Court-Martial of Sandra Gilbert," "Offensive Action," etc.). Indeed, Representative "Bobbi" Latham, presented as a standard-bearer for the cause of women's participation in the military on equal terms with men, appeared in no fewer than 18 episodes during the series' run (from "The Court-Martial of Sandra Gilbert" on).
2. The protagonist Harmon Rabb's father (played by David James Elliott, just like the son), we are told at the outset, was a Vietnam War "MIA," believed by his son to be still alive in Communist captivity, a fact that drove Harm to sneak into Southeast Asia as a teenager in search of him, and has since remained an obsession. Indeed, the fact is significantly referenced at the very start of the series, with Harm's assignment in the two hour pilot which launched the series taking him to the very carrier from which his father flew in the war ("A New Life"), and where the ship's current Carrier Air Wing commander ("CAG") is one of the war buddies with whom he did it--Rear Admiral Thomas Boone--a connection that proves significant over the show, with, after his saving Boone's life in the pilot, Harm time and again coming to Boone's legal defense during the ten later episodes in which Boone appears. Meanwhile no fewer than six of the show's first sixty-two episodes ("The Prisoner," "Ghost Ship," "King of the Fleas," "People vs. Rabb," "To Russia with Love" and "Gypsy Eyes") had Harm's search for his father at the center of their plot, with the narrative arc concluding only with Harm's discovery of his father's fate--his transfer to the Soviet Union, his escape, his taking up with a woman with whom he had a child and whom he died defending from Soviet soldiers, though that is of course not the end of the theme. It resurfaced a number of times, not least in a Christmas-themed episode set during his father's service during the Vietnam War about a USO visit to his ship ("Ghosts of Christmas Past"), while afterward the half-brother he discovers his father sired in Russia, who happens to be a helicopter pilot (like some Russian counterpart to Airwolf's Stringfellow Hawke!) appeared in another dozen episodes (over seasons 6-8). And still other episodes evoked the conflict, sometimes in quite similar fashion, with Harm's boss Admiral Chegwidden, who has plenty of "ghosts of Vietnam" of his own, in one episode going overseas on a private mission to rescue a man who saved his life during that conflict ("Soul Searching").

On the Reputation of CBS as the Older Viewers' Network

I have recently had occasion to think about CBS' reputation as, well, an older person's TV channel.

One explanation for that reputation I have come across is that CBS was the king of the ratings back in the '70s and early '80s, thanks in large part to Norman Lear (All in the Family was the #1 show on TV for five straight years, and he had Maude, and Good Times, and The Jeffersons), and Dallas, and MASH, and Hawaii Five-O and Kojak, and 60 Minutes, and The Dukes of Hazzard, and Magnum P.I. and . . . well, you get the picture. In the 1973-1974 season it had nine of the top ten shows, eight the next season, and if there were ups and downs after that, between the 1979-1980 and 1984-1985 seasons on average seven of the top ten and eleven of the top twenty rated shows were running on that one channel, a truly extraordinary proportion of the market. Of course, CBS' hit machine virtually sputtered out later in the decade (during which one was more likely to see NBC at the top, with the likes of Cheers and Family Ties and The A-Team and The Cosby Show). The result was, presumably, that anyone who was still watching CBS was someone the channel won over in earlier, better days, who were sticking with their declining hits down to the end after most others jumped ship, were simply in the habit of watching the channel when they sat down in the front of the TV, and so because they were on the channel and see a promotion and maybe get interested, or just happened to have the channel on when the show started, wound up following shows that the rest of the public never noticed or never got interested in because their attention was directed elsewhere. And because the hits that made CBS viewers of people were from years earlier, and because it seems to have been the case that compared with younger viewers those older viewers were in their TV viewing habits more prone to follow channels than shows, that audience was on the whole older than the average.

I find this explanation plausible. But it also seems to me a matter of such hits as the channel managed to have when it faltered. Consider the biggest hit CBS generated between Magnum and the end of the century--Murder, She Wrote. Indeed, for the decade or so from 1986-1987 on, by which point most of the older hits were either gone from the air (like the Norman Lear sitcoms or MASH), or in decline (like Dallas), 60 Minutes and Murder, She Wrote were the CBS shows far and away most likely to make the Nielsen ratings' top ten--a weekly TV newsmagazine then late into its second decade (which had the curmudgeonly Andy Rooney for a mascot), and a "cozy" mystery series about a sixtysomething mystery writer solving murders--which were hardly the thing to bring in that younger crowd. And even if other CBS shows also made appearances in the top ten, like Touched by an Angel and Everybody Loves Raymond (a show about watching grouchy middle-aged people fighting each other when they were not fighting with even grouchier old people), they, along with more modest but still important successes like Diagnosis: Murder and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, affirmed the impression of a channel catering to an older audience. Then, as a result of holding on to viewers won in past days while finding it tougher to get new viewers the channel's viewers were on the whole older; the channel's management responded disproportionately to material aimed at an older audience; and so CBS kept the "old people's shows" on the air, and picked up new ones; while younger viewers passed on its offerings.

Still, when considering why this went so far it may be helpful to remember that, contrary to the solipsistic view prevailing, the outcome of a competition is never a matter of just what one party does, but what the competitors do as well--and it was the case that in these years the competition was getting a lot tougher, with there being that much more to draw away the attention of those younger viewers. After all, between the mid-'80s and mid-'90s the country saw the arrival of three new broadcast networks, all of which were very aggressively chasing younger viewers, and in at least some degree catching them. FOX had 21 Jump Street and Beverly Hills 90210 and Party of Five, while the newer and even more youth-oriented WB had Dawson's Creek and Felicity and 7th Heaven (and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed and Smallville for sci-fi fans), and UPN had Veronica Mars. Cable was scoring, too, with MTV, for instance, airing shows like Beavis and Butthead and The Real World. Meanwhile, if NBC had Matlock, The Golden Girls and Empty Nest it also had its family sitcoms, and much more youth-oriented shows like the college-set A Different World, and not long after, Friends, and Seinfeld (which if not being about teens or twentysomethings was not exactly about "adults" either, and still commanded quite the youth audience at the time), while ABC had its own youth-friendly TGIF block.

Not unrelated was that matter of "edginess." Where CBS had once been more daring and provocative than its rivals (as with the Norman Lear sitcoms, the politics of which ABC refused to touch--as one sees in its completely-missed-the-point attempt at All in the Family-minus-the-politics, the short-lived The Paul Lynde Show), it was now the channel known for offering safe, cozy stuff as the others pushed the envelope, with CBS offering Touched by an Angel as ABC contributed to broadcast TV's last truly great bout of moral panic over sex-and-violence-on-TV with NYPD Blue. (Indeed, it may say a lot that CBS' line-up from those days now makes up such a large part of the weekday lineup of the Hallmark channels.)

Certainly CBS did make some effort to vary its offerings that way, scoring cult successes with quirkier and sometimes more daring material (like The Flash, or Picket Fences), and even a measure of real commercial success (as with Northern Exposure), but when it broke with its pattern it seems to have more often been a matter of trying to make something out of its rivals' declining properties and outright cast-offs, and often not succeeding (as with its picking up longtime TGIF staple Family Matters well past its peak, only to see the onetime top twenty hit fail to make the top hundred in its one season on the channel, finishing out its run at a dismal #108). The result was that even when the channel started having top ten-caliber hits with a broader appeal--indeed, began setting trends with shows like the reality TV-pioneering Survivor and forensics show boom-launching CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (I didn't say they were good trends, just that CBS launched them)--the old person's image stuck and the channel never quite shook it. But then TV was becoming an old person's scene anyway, the young inclining toward the Internet, especially after streaming took off, and indeed a glance at the Nielsen ratings these past few years, dominated by the NCIS franchise, and The Big Bang Theory franchise, and Blue Bloods, make it look like it's the '70s all over again, with 2020-2021 seeing it ratings champion for thirteen straight years.

How Has Robert Ludlum's Readership Held Up Over the Years?

When I was researching The James Bond We Forget I found myself looking for empirically useful indications of the readership of the James Bond novels in recent years--originals and continuation novels alike. In the process I hit on the idea that the number of Goodreads ratings a book got might be an indicator. Going by these it seemed that, as I had suspected, there were not many of them. Casino Royale, greatly boosted by the hit movie, still had some 70,000 ratings when I looked--and the figure fell by more than three-fifths between there and the next book, Live and Let Die. The numbers continued trending downward from there, to about 10,000 for The Man with the Golden Gun, while the continuation novels did even less well--some of them having under a thousand such ratings.

Just for the sake of comparison, Fifty Shades of Grey, Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train each have over 2 million ratings, and Me Before You over 1 million ratings. Of course, the books in question were older and the platform less favorable to them--but compare Casino Royale even with Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October--which had well over 300,000 ratings.

Recently I wondered where Robert Ludlum fits into the picture. As it happens his novel The Bourne Identity has an impressive 420,000 ratings--doubtless also helped by having been the basis for an identically titled hit movie. But, even with the boost provided by hit adaptations of the sequels, these did far, far less well. The Bourne Supremacy has about 181,000 ratings, The Bourne Ultimatum a mere 63,000. And while Bourne got his continuation novels the way Bond has the ratings for these dwindled fast--the more recent of these scoring about a couple of thousand. Meanwhile Ludlum's non-Bourne novels have not held up all that well readership-wise, if one goes by this measure. The most-rated non-Bourne novel is The Matarese Circle, with a mere 42,000 ratings, The Icarus Agenda having about 30,000 (not sure why it ended up next in line), and The Aquitaine Progression a little under 19,000, with his The Road to Omaha (one of his two comedies) at the bottom of the list with just 4,000.

I think I was more surprised by the limited evidences of a readership for Ludlum than for Fleming. After all, Fleming's storytelling style (telling the doings of James Bond as though he were writing Madame Bovary, while every so often subjecting us to a thirty-page account of a card game) is not what readers of popular fiction these days expect from a thriller, such that Bond fans--especially fans who think of a Bond movie as properly a light, fun, gimmick-packed action-adventure secret agent procedural--quickly drop the books in disinterest. Meanwhile they never acquired the level of cachet a John le Carrè has had, leaving those who might otherwise bear with them unwilling to struggle with an old, difficult book--while many regard the social attitudes of that Edwardian Etonian as unforgivable. (Race and gender get all the press, but there is much, much more there to be offended by.)

By contrast Ludlum was a more recent writer (not 2020, but still, not a writer already being lambasted as a reactionary in the '50s), offering more straightforward, brisker, more action-packed novels. (Indeed, I think that more than anyone else he can be credited with having brought the paperback shoot 'em-up-style just arriving on the scene in the '70s into the high-end, big-press hardcover spy thriller.) There is, too, the cachet that the Ludlum media franchise has had--which I expected to do more for the readership of his books than the Bond movies manage to do for Fleming's books (let alone Gardner's), as well as the buzz that a number of his works make from development hell (as with those versions of The Matarese Circle and The Chancellor Manuscript that we heard about). But it has been far from being enough to save him--and at least to go by what I see on the Goodreads pages, a reminder that where popular fiction is concerned blockbusters very quickly lose their appeal for most readers. Indeed, I suspect that had Doug Liman's film The Bourne Identity not become a hit back in 2002 the Ludlum name (which through the '90s went from topping the bestseller lists to falling right off of them) would be all but forgotten today save by a few older fans and hardcore students of the form--a latterday William Le Queux or E. Phillips Oppenheim.

New and Noteworthy (Collected)

Back in the '00s, with social media rather less developed and utilized, it was not uncommon for bloggers to post little announcements or referrals to other material such as we would now convey to the world through a service like Twitter instead. I certainly did this with various items that caught my eye under such headings as "New and Noteworthy," "Links Round-Up" and "Items of Interest" (up until 2013, by which point the practice made less sense).

Many of these items have since lost their interest simply because they became dated, while in cases th items in question have disappeared altogether, such that it makes little sense to keep them here. Still, it seemed to me that a few were worth preserving and this post fulfills that purpose, providing a round-up of the lot in one place for anyone who might be interested in them, organized by date.

May 10, 2009
* As usual, io9's providing a lot of interesting items, with two of the more noteworthy its list of "Dumbest Space Operas of All Time!" and a "rant" asking the question "Have War Movies Become Superhero Flicks?" (My answer to that question is absolutely yes-and as it happens, I actually discussed some of the reasons for that in a January article in the Internet Review of Science Fiction, "Science Fiction and the Post-Cold War.")

* Also worth a look is Ken MacLeod's recent posting on the handling of the theme of the "surveillance society" in science fiction, and Geoff Ryman's thoughts on the conclusion of Battlestar Galactica.

As you might guess, Ryman is no exception to the disappointment felt by so many other viewers, feeling himself to have been proved right in a dismaying way.

I was left feeling proved right in a dismaying way myself, though the things that really bugged me weren't the same ones. In my May 2008 IROSF article, "The Golden Age of Science Fiction Television" I referred to the writing on the show as often being

silly, sensationalist, muddled and inconsistent (especially in its running post-Nine-Eleven commentary), its gimmicks more derivative than casual viewers of science fiction generally appreciated, and the theory of "naturalistic" science fiction touted by the writers really much ado about nothing.

In that regard the finale lived down to my lowest expectations, reminding me what utterly mediocre SF the show was, espousing an astonishing number of terrible genre cliches at its core, not the least of them a lame pseudo-religiosity (all the things that didn't make sense before still didn't make sense, thereby proving it was all God's plan!) and a "Frankenstein complex" Luddism that was already tired when Isaac Asimov coined that term seventy years or so ago.

So why was there all that hype about what a great, ground-breaking show BSG was? My guess is that the response was due to its catering to the skewed standards of TV critics, who overvalue pointless head games, "crisp" filler dialogue, unlikable characters (provided, of course, that they're unlikable in the "right" ways), homage to the political pieties of the moment, and the tendency to take oneself far, far too seriously, something this show always did.

August 27, 2009
* Charles Stross offers an impassioned and incisive analysis of the dark side of mainstream American political culture (more deeply frightening and disturbing than any of his Lovecraft homages) at his always worthwhile blog, Charlie's Diary.

* io9 recently published an interview with Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden which promises to be on the future of science fiction books (focusing mainly on the impact of e-books and the Internet, rather than on the content itself).

* Strange Horizons recently made the news-the regular news read by people who don't follow the genre (in this case, the Los Angeles Times)-after Hugo-winner John Scalzi offered to match up to $500 in donations for the non-profit magazine.

* Jonathan McCalmont, over at his Ruthless Culture blog, offers a compelling commentary on the whole issue of public support of the arts, which devotes some attention to the case of Strange Horizons specifically-and the ultimately structural nature of the problem of the respective places of amateur and pro.

September 21, 2009
* Plenty from the always worthwhile Charlie's Diary, including Stross and his readers' tracking of the saga of the Arctic Sea (the last entry on which was "More News From the Tom Clancy Dimension"); his thoughts on the joys of customer service call centers in the New Economy (said disregard for service I chalk up to the combination of "short-termism"-now an accepted term, appearing routinely in academic papers on economics and business-and the view that cutting wage expenditures is the way to business success); and an extended discourse on the "political threats of the 21st century" with an eye to the totalitarian potential latent within transhumanism and extropianism, and the prospect of Singularitarians in "chrome-plated jackboots."

* The return of the English-language edition of the Polish steampunk-themed compendium Steampunkopedia (as Steampunkopedia2) on September 3.

October 8, 2009
* A fairly lively discussion over at Lou Anders's Bowing to the Future about the old issue of the mainstream's literary elite's attitude toward speculative fiction (one which recaps recent high points in the debate-not least, the comments from Kim Stanley Robinson and recent genre coverage in The Guardian-and also includes participants unafraid of raising issues of cold hard cash, and possible hypocrisy).

* From io9's Lauren Davis, a graph offering a comprehensive track of the popularity of genre themes over time, one which suggests some interesting conclusions. Interestingly Davis notes that

the graph's most striking feature is the boom all the themes apparently experienced in the 1990s . . . [which] now seems to be on the decline . . . suggest[ing] a huge investment in genre television shows (and perhaps in television in general) that we simply aren't seeing any more . . . Interestingly, space travel shows were the first to go as circumstances changed, and although shows about managed to hang on longer, they, too are on their way out. Does this indicate that science fiction and fantasy shows are on the decline? Or does it represent a shift to less expensive, near-future science fiction with different speculative priorities, shows like Dollhouse, Chuck, and Fringe?

My methodology in setting forth my assessment of the situation in the June 2008 and June 2009 editions of the Internet Review of Science Fiction was less scientific, but similar in some of its conclusions (particularly about the shift in tropes, away from space, toward the close-at-hand, the subtly different, and the low budget). Chuck, of course, is all but finished, Dollhouse hung on by the skin of its teeth, and Fringe could be in trouble, so it may well be that the turn to "less expensive, near-future science fiction with different speculative priorities" may be a transition to even bleaker times ahead for the genre.

October 16, 2009
* Jonathan McCalmont's latest "Blasphemous Geometries" column over at Futurismic, in which he discusses the value system embedded in many of the best-known games in the first-person shooter, an additional comment about which he has posted on his personal blog, Ruthless Culture.

The heart of his argument is that in video games (as other observers, including Thomas Frank-who is cited in the piece-have pointed out about a great deal of other contemporary culture), we get an outrageous, even rebellious-seeming surface, underlain by the acceptance or even promotion of conservative or conformist values (from consumerism-as-the-essence-of-individualism to a Hobbesian world-view). As McCalmont rather elegantly puts it, these games present

man as little more than a beast: a blend of Hobbesian savage and PCP-fuelled homo economicus who can unleash unspeakable and unrepentant violence in service of his own desires, but who would never seek to question either the system he is a part of or his ultimate involvement in it.

* Over at Tor.com (for which October 2009 is steampunk month), Vernian Process founder and Gilded Age Records cofounder Joshua Pfeiffer discusses differing treatments of the sociopolitical side of steampunk (which I think deserves as much attention as the sociopolitical side, and have devoted some time to myself).

* By way of M.C. de marco, Paul Graham's essay on "Post-Medium Publishing," which wrestles with a problem raised by, among others, Cory Doctorow-namely that (as he put it in "Happy Meal Toys Versus Copyright," downloadable as part of the Content collection available on his web site) an

"information economy" can't be based on selling information. Information technology makes copying information easier and easier. The more IT you have, the less control you have over the bits you send out into the world. It will never, ever, EVER get any harder to copy information from here on in. The information economy is about selling everything except information.

Which of course leaves us wondering-where do we go from here? As you might expect, Graham doesn't have any answers, but he does have some ideas about what an answer might look like.

January 7, 2010
* CNN's list of the "nine worst tech movies of all time." There's a bit of hyperbole in the title, of course, but there are plenty of "bad" movies here all right, and certainly bad in the ludicrousness of their depictions of the technologies concerned. (Incidentally, it's no surprise to me that most of the films are from the '90s, with the most recent given as coming from 2002-for reasons I discussed at length in my February 2009 article for the Internet Review of Science Fiction, "Racing Down the Information Superhighway: Computers in 1990s Film," in which I not only discussed the subject, but critiqued many of the same movies.)

* By way of the prolific video game blog Kotaku, one Karachi resident's observation that the street signs in Modern Warfare 2's recreation of the city are written in the wrong language-Arabic, instead of Urdu (Pakistan not being an Arabic-speaking country).

Naturally, this started a debate regarding the broader unrealism of the game (which is, of course, considerable at every point, even by techno-thriller standards), and even the real-life political situation it draws on for its inspiration.

My take on this particular error: a sad reminder of our collective geographic illiteracy (did no one at the company realize this very basic point?), and the tendency to simplistically view whole parts of the world as monolithic blocks-as when someone refers to "Africa," "Asia" or "Latin America" as though any one of these were all one thing. (In spite of U.S. foreign policy's preoccupation with the Middle East since the '70s, which went into overdrive in the last decade, the North Africa/Southwest Asia/South Asia/Central Asia region seems especially susceptible to such misconceptions, with especially unfortunate consequences, because of the political charge involved.)

* For those who haven't seen it before, Mark Rosenfelder's humorous piece "If all stories were written like science fiction stories," in which a perfectly ordinary trip to San Fransisco is given the genre treatment. (Of course, this particular prose style has long since ceased to be fashionable, with "lived-in" futures in which the characters take all the trappings in stride as part of daily life enjoying more favor, but the point is valid all the same.)

March 26, 2010
* Charles Stross on Blindsight author Peter Watts's conviction-with a focus on what this whole situation tells us about the directions in which both civil liberties and globalized capitalism are moving. (As usual when an issue like this comes up, there's plenty of interest in the comments thread as well.)

September 7, 2010
* By way of io9, Connal at A Dangerous Business on his visit to the Museum of Soviet Arcade Games. (Yes, they had video games there too.)

* Also from io9: this list of science fiction films Hollywood is currently remaking (twenty-one of them!), accompanied by alternative suggestions of successful but as-yet unfilmed science fiction works.

I don't know all of the alternatives they mention, and I'm not sure that all the ones I do know really would be worth filming, even when I happen to like the source material. (I don't think there's a two hour movie in John Kessel's "Pride and Prometheus," for instance. And while there's no arguing the place of E.E. Smith's Lensman in the history of space opera, it may be too sprawling and too old-fashioned to be viable as a Hollywood movie.)

All the same, I'm sympathetic to the idea behind the post. An unwillingness to let go of (or let rest) a salable brand name or profitable intellectual property--an obsession with the sequel, the series, the remake--has always been part of Hollywood's way of doing things, and if it seems more pronounced now, it is worth remembering that this is also a response to the ever-bigger gamble involved in gigantic and still-growing budgets, shortening theatrical runs, ever-more fickle attendance at theaters, and the ever-louder pop cultural cacophony which a project needs to get above to be seen or heard, something easier to do with an already-established IP.

But all that's really no excuse. The budgets are as big as they are because the studios are so preposterously wasteful, the audiences fickle in large part because so much of the product is so bad and the ticket (and concession) prices so high, while the larger cacophony of pop culture is a reflection of their own hype-creating machines. And it's well worth remembering that much of the mess is due to the contempt of Big Media for the new and the creative that has made reality television (ugh!) what it is today, another, crucial reason for this desperate clinging to the same old IPs.

Ultimately, the biggest threat of all to their profit margins is their small-minded insistence on trying to hold back change rather than adapt to it.

And so here we have the studios determined to produce mega-budget movies no one ever asked for while ignoring vast, fertile fields of possibility. Going down the list, it seems to me that not one of the listed remakes is a genuinely exciting prospect, with some of these movies redoing what hadn't even been worth doing the first time around, and others bound to be inferior to what was accomplished with their concepts on the first go.

* SfSignal's recent "MindMeld" on "the next big thing" in science fiction and fantasy literature. Predictably, none of the authors interviewed had a particularly good answer--at least, not as straight answers go. None of them convincingly points to a new scientific development or area of technology opening up explored new territory, to an orthodoxy that will be challenged, or a vein of untapped potential that can be mined, or a new work or talent changing the game. If anything, they put me in mind of the argument I've made time and again that nothing to compare with, for instance, the splash cyberpunk made in the '80s, seems to be on the horizon.

Still, Jeff Vandermeer in particular has fun brushing off the question with facetious answers.

* Jonathan McCalmont's review of Adam Roberts' New Model Army for The Zone. You may remember I reviewed the same book for Strange Horizons back in June, but his take is quite different, McCalmont declaring it "one of those rare works that seems to provide a cultural blueprint for the entire genre," and indeed, inviting comparison with the birth of the novel. (I think that's a bit much, but as might be expected from McCalmont, the case is certainly an interesting one.)

* Victoria Strauss dissects the implications of statistics on self-published books recently published by Publisher's Weekly at the blog of the Science Fiction Writers of America. That there are more books appearing through this avenue doesn't mean more people are actually buying them, a reminder that, as Andrew Orlowski put it, the hope that "things would get fairer on the Interwebs" for those whose path to authorship has been blocked by Big Media has not been realized, and perhaps will not be.

* Last but not least, the winners of this year's Hugo Awards have just been announced. China Mieville's The City & The City and Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl tied for best novel. Best novella went to Charles Stross's "Palimpsest" (first published in the collection Wireless, which I reviewed for Strange Horizons last year). Best novelette went to Peter Watts for his highly praised "The Island" (which appeared in the New Space Opera 2 anthology). You can click on the link to read the full list.

September 19, 2010
* Charles Stross, drawing on Alvin and Heidi Toffler's 1970 book Future Shock, recently looked back at the place of religious tolerance inside a world that is looking worrisomely authoritarian; and offered his thoughts on authorial fact-checking of minor details, with Carrie Vaughn's Discord's Apple held up as an object lesson.

* Airlock Alpha's Michael Hinman on HBO's recent loss of subscribers, itself part of the unprecedented, broader slippage of cable, this year seeing a drop in paying customers for the very first time. This has often been taken as a reflection of the broader economic crunch, but some also wonder if cable isn't suffering from competition with Netflix and the Internet.

There's surprisingly little comment so far, though, about how cable has tried to cope with that competition. Far from trying to fight by offering a better product or better prices as market enthusiasts would have us believe is the response to such a situation, the industry has dedicated itself to simply making it as difficult as possible for consumers to get the Internet on their TV screens, while offering less product and higher prices--yanking channels out of their analog line-ups without cutting their rates, but clearly pushing them to pick up more expensive digital packages (with John Luciew earlier this year offering an interesting take on one particularly affected group, those who rely on TV to help get them through their exercise routine).

I leave you to draw the obvious conclusions about this situation.

* Publetariat: People Who Publish, "an online community and news hub built specifically for indie authors and small, independent imprints." There is a fair amount of standard how-to stuff here, admittedly, but there is also quite a bit of news and commentary about the business itself, oriented to this marginal but heavily populated side of the publishing business (mentioned here in my blog post of the 7th this month).

November 29, 2010
• Ken MacLeod's posting on his blog of his 2006 speech on science fiction as "the first human literature," an analysis well worth the read.

• Michael Hinman of Airlock Alpha offers an incisive analysis of the "boneheaded scheduling moves" that have characterized the Syfy Channel's line-ups in recent years, with the demise of Caprica offered as an object lesson for the mismanagement of heavily serialized shows. He also offers a plausible alternative model, though my guess is that Syfy (which now airs some form of reality TV every weeknight, including Smackdown in the Friday night slot) has already written off science fiction-just as science fiction fans should be writing the channel off.

• Spy novelist Jeremy Duns' interview of J.P. Trevor on his blog, The Debrief. Trevor is an artist and production designer best known for cinematic special effects work on Star Wars and the Tim Burton Batman, but he is also the son of novelist Adam Hall, the author of the "Quiller" spy series. The Quiller novels have been translated to the big screen in a 1966 movie and the small one by the BBC in a 1975 series, and in the past decade MGM bought up the film rights in order to take another crack at the series-which has yet to materialize-and it is on this that the interview focuses.

November 30, 2010
* Airlock Alpha's Dennis Rayburn, revisiting the question of reboots, remakes and re-everything else, asks "Is Hollywood Creatively Bankrupt?"

This seems like a rhetorical question, of course. After all, can anyone but a Beverly Hills Babbitt possibly say "No" to that with a straight face? However, it's not just that I'm sympathetic to the sentiment that led me to note it here; Rayburn does show how it fits in with the industry's broader situation.

All the same, I think he's overoptimistic about the reality "craze" fading away. It's already gone strong for a decade now, with no sign of letting up, and the creative bankruptcy of which he's spoken, and the attractions of reality TV for media executives, especially those trapped between the shrinking resources of beleaguered networks, and the smaller ones of the network's cable subsidiaries (low production costs, non-unionized writers, none of that messy "creative process" Suits can't stand) make it exceptionally resistant to a backlash from an audience that frankly isn't discerning enough to teach Hollywood a lesson by refusing to have anything to do with the format.

* An abbreviated version of the roundtable discussion about the history of pulp science fiction magazines between Robert Silverberg, Richard A. Lupoff and Frank M. Robinson, up at the Locus web site. (Those intrigued by the subject may also want to check out this 2006 article by Brian Curtis for Slate Magazine regarding pulp fiction generally, across genre boundaries-and in knowing that since its redesign in October, Tangent Online has devoted a section to those same pulps, as well as one to classic science fiction in all formats.)

* Charles Stross on the possibility that a virus is responsible for the obesity epidemic, as well as the tiresome tendency to view physical illness as a matter of moral failure rather than biological disease. (Also of interest on Charlie's Diary: his commentary on the recent announcement of Prince William's marriage, which those similarly inclined may find a welcome respite from the tedious, fawning hoopla surrounding the event.)

December 7, 2011
* A trio of recent pieces from Jonathan McCalmont's Ruthless Culture on our "culture of passive-aggressive friendliness," Occupy Wall Street, and personal ambition (or to be precise, the lack of it).

* An amusing bit from Cracked about "8 Scenes That Prove Hollywood Doesn't Get Technology." (Five of the eight are actually from crime dramas on CBS – with NCIS accounting for two all by itself, the original and New York spin-offs of CSI for another two, and NUMB3RS rounding out the group. However, the 1995 film Hackers, well-known for its unique attempt to convey the experience of computer hacking on the big screen, also appears here.)

February 25, 2012
* Cory Doctorow on "The Coming War on General-Purpose Computing" and a response from Joe Brockmeier – agreeing about the import of the "copyright war," but raising some other, perhaps even trickier issues. Of related interest: Joe Karaganis on public opinion and heavy-handed online piracy crackdowns.

* Two recent pieces by Jonathan McCalmont, the first on Tim Maughan's indie short fiction collection Paintwork, which includes an interesting overview of the cyberpunk genre since the 1980s; and the second on the formulaic nature of American independent cinema. (Incidentally, McCalmont's discussion focuses on films of the 2000s like About Schmidt, Sideways and Young Adult, more than the angsty slackers, frustrated Hollywood-creative types and quirky lowlifes I personally associate the category with, but nonetheless does a good job describing a substantial amount of the recent territory.)

* At Strange Horizons: Susan Marie Groppi on her departure from the fiction department; reviews of two particularly intriguing books – Adam Roberts' new novel By Light Alone (the clever central gimmick in which is genetic engineering which endows human hair with photosynthetic properties, with huge consequences) and Ernest Cline's Ready Player One (which combines a bleak post-greenhouse future with the '80s geek nostalgia hinted at in the title); and Genevieve Valentine take on the new film version of John le Carré's classic Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy as science fiction.

September 5, 2012
* At Forbes, a lengthy article by David Vinjamuri on indie publishing. It seems to me especially notable for its critical take on the contempt to which these authors have been subjected by bestselling authors who came up the traditional way, like Sue Grafton (who has been especially nasty), and Vinjamuri's thoughts on the economics of book pricing.

* From io9, "Ten Rules of Blockbuster Movies that Hollywood Forgot." Given that the number of blockbusters made is so small, and reliant on such a small, closely connected club of people for their creation (the handful of producers, directors, stars and executives capable of getting them green-lit, and their advisers), it seems astonishing that the product does not reflect a more robust institutional memory in these respects - but as the article makes quite clear, this has often been absent.

November 19, 2012
* Charles Stross presents his predictions about the year 2512, which, again, are a far cry from what his more extravagant fiction would lead one to expect (with rather less in the way of transhumanism and outer space adventures, and rather more in the way of climate change's consequences).

* Ken MacLeod's essay "The Soul of Man After Socialism," in which he argues that socialism, or something like it, will be more rather than less necessary in a transhuman future, on the grounds that nothing has quite matched the socialist project's assertion of a common humanity - a position which will be all the more challenged by technological change. As MacLeod notes in his mention of the essay on his blog, he touched on these ideas earlier in a September post, "Mapping the Posthuman," which also provides some useful context.

January 24, 2013
* Ian Sales on taking Amazon's bestseller lists as a guide to larger trends in book publishing.

February 26, 2013
* Tom Shone of the Guardians' film blog on the end of what he called the "Oscar film," described here as "mid-range, mid-budget humanitarian epics like Dances With Wolves, Gandhi and Driving Missy Daisy, about the moral efficacy of the individual – one person making a difference, in costume" - and of course, how that led to Argo (a controversial win in quite a few quarters) beating Lincoln.

* David Walsh with quite another perspective on how the ceremony played out. As one might expect given his particularly pointed criticism of some of the year's nominees (like Django Unchained and Zero Dark Thirty, but also Argo), he criticizes the product on the grounds of politics as well as art, which he sees as broadly representative of problematic tendencies within the film industry, like the superficiality of its "liberalism" (limited to culture and lifestyle, while thoroughly conservative in its attitudes toward economics and international politics), and its refusal to "mention . . . a single problem of contemporary life" ("one had the distinct sense that some powerful anti-reality filtration system was at work in the hall"), with the implications of Michelle Obama's presenting the Best Picture award, and Syriana producer and star George Clooney's being among the recipients, naturally remarked upon.

March 18, 2013
* Kent Anderson on the cheapening of the word "innovation." That the post is itself a comment on an earlier post by Scott Berkun from more than five years ago only highlights how thoroughly this term has been abused by a certain kind of technology and business-hyping nit-wit, ruining it for everyone else, so that we are all far, far, far past the point at which we should, if not totally cease and desist using the term, at least use it only very, very carefully.

We can think of it this way: if you're saying it, you probably aren't doing it.

* Tor.com on the prospect of a rise in the cost of video games with the next generation of consoles (Playstation 4, XBox 720 and the rest) now on the horizon.

I should say, though, that the $70 video game does not seem all that new to me. I remember such retail prices for 8-bit games way back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Admittedly, such prices were a rarity, but given the inflation we have since then, which has almost halved the purchasing power of a dollar ($1 today is like 53 cents in 1989, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics), a $70 game today is about equal to $37 then, a bit below what was average at the time - which suggests a slight drop in prices.

How many things can one say that about? Certainly not food. Or energy. Or education. Or health care. Or any of the other things that really do put pressure on people's budgets. And in contrast with all these other areas, it does seem pretty clearly the case that gamers are getting more product for their money.

* Charles Stross, considering the possible implications of a British exit from the EU (which he thinks will not be pretty for the British economy).

May 2, 2013
* John Winters on being a (self-described) self-publishing failure, a much needed corrective to the kinds of success stories our rags-to-riches-quick-fantasy-obsessed culture trumpets.

* By way of the Ukiah Blog, a piece by Victoria Beale in the New Republic which offers a critical take on Paul Coelho, as both artist and thinker, with her assessment of the author's Message tidily summed up in its last sentences:

[U]nder the platitudes Coelho’s philosophy has always been a harsh worldview: unhappiness or lack of fulfilment is only for the weak and unfocused. And increasingly in his books, success can only be measured against the author and the obstacles he has overcome. The gospel of self-reliance has never been so trite or unforgiving.

Make what you will of Coelho's star status at Davos.

* In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Alec Ash's interview with writer Fei Dao about science fiction in China touching on the genre's history and influences in China (interestingly he identifies Soviet science fiction as one of the "big three" influences, alongside Western and Japanese science fiction), its current concerns (reflecting the country's modernization), as well as the audience for this type of work and the prejudices it is up against (which are not all that dissimilar from what it has seen in the West).

May 21, 2013
* At Fanpop, a well-constructed response to the enmity so many apparently feel toward Game of Thrones' Sansa Stark. (I would have to number myself among those who see her character as one of the series' more sympathetic - and a reminder that much as we complain about the prevalence of Mary Sue/Gary Stu characters, a large segment of the audience all but demands them, and becomes quite unreasonable when their demand is not met.)

* A provocative piece from Airlock Alpha's Amber Hollingsworth which takes on the issue of "Why Horror Isn't Scary, But Thrillers Are."

* A number of Charles Stross's recent posts, including his response to Margaret Thatcher's passing, and its aftermath; his "Public Service Announcement" about why it is best to ignore the news; his announcement of the release of The Traders' War (an omnibus edition of the first three Trade of Queens novels, "revised and reassembled as the single book it was meant to be"); and his piece on British nuclear disarmament, which offers a succinct critical history of the country's strategic deterrent.

May 25, 2013
* Three pieces by David Walsh. The first is a follow-up to his earlier consideration of Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty which responds to later revelations about the film's production. The other two discuss Baz Luhrmann's hit remake of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, with the first a review of the movie which considers a side of Fitzgerald and his book that you very likely did not encounter in high school; and the second an examination of some recent misadventures of the tiresome Prince Harry and company through the lens of the novel, and the film, in turn, through Luhrmann's associations with British royals.

* An amusing piece from SFX's Nick Setchfield on what Star Trek might have looked like had it first appeared in the 1890s, 1930s, 1950s or 1970s.

June 10, 2013
* Patrick Nielsen Hayden's obituary for British novelist Iain Banks, perhaps best known to science fiction fans for Consider Phlebas, the first of his "Culture" novels, and a founding work of the new space opera. He will genuinely be missed.

* Ian Sales reviews James Lovegrove's The Age of Zeus. (You may remember my review of Lovegrove's previous mix of mythology and contemporary military adventure, The Age of Ra, which I reviewed here.)

* Charles Stross's latest crib sheet on writing The Jennifer Morgue - in which he wrote the Laundry's Bob Howard into a James Bondian adventure.

June 17, 2013
* Gawker's Max Read on the accents in Game of Thrones (which has recently concluded its third season).

* As Jonathan McCalmont notes over at Ruthless Culture, Speculative Fiction 2012, a round-up of the best online nonfiction writing about the genre, is out. As might be guessed by those who followed the portion of the blogosphere devoted to science fiction, the debate kick-started by Paul Kincaid's September 2012 review essay about three year's best anthologies for the L.A. Review of Books has a place in it, with Kincaid's piece included, as well as Jonathan McCalmont's response "Cowardice, Laziness and Irony: How Science Fiction Lost the Future."

* Ken MacLeod's remembrance of Iain Banks in The Guardian.

* Also in The Guardian, Cory Doctorow on the recent revelations about the NSA's Prism program.

June 22, 2013
* David Walsh looks back on the career of the late James Gandolfini. (Naturally, he has plenty to say about The Sopranos, and what the reception of that show says about its cultural moment.)

* Shoshanna Kesock considers Syfy's Defiance.
* From io9, Charlie Jane Anders on the possibility of a Zack Snyder-helmed Wonder Woman movie. (I, for one, don't think this project is any more likely than the others, and certainly had a much more favorable view of Watchmen, which is probably the superhero movie I've enjoyed most in recent years, but the piece does touch on a lot of the relevant issues.)

July 9, 2013
* Last month io9's Rob Bricken asked "Does DC Have a Chris Nolan Problem?" after watching Man of Steel. I think DC certainly has a problem--but that it's the same problem everyone else has, and that the tendency he attributes to Christopher Nolan goes far, far beyond the role of any one individual. It reflects where the whole industry has gone in this postmodern era of "dark-and-gritty" everything with a side of still more dark-and-gritty.

* Jonathan McCalmont's review of Nikita Mikhailov's Burnt by the Sun 2, the sequel to the Palme d'Or and Oscar-winning 1994 film--which, surprisingly, seems to have wound up a Stalinist-Orthodox version of a Michael Bay movie according to McCalmont. (How many sequels to Cannes Grand Prize winners can you say that about?)

* Charles Stross, with a provocative piece on the troubles besetting British democracy, and what he thinks it says about the future of politics.

The Release and Box Office Run of No Time to Die: A Summary View

(I have been posting on No Time to Die's box office run these past couple of months and decided to replace all those little posts with this single post consolidating the contents of the lot. Here goes.)

The 25th EON James Bond film, No Time to Die, which had already suffered a more than usually long and troubled production (with one director's walking out and having to be replaced, with Daniel Craig's interrupting shooting, and the rest already translating to two delays) was due out in April 2020. A schedule that had it slightly preceding the big rush of blockbusters coming that summer, while alarms about the pandemic indicated a massive disruption of everyday life, filmmaking included, on the way, its backers were the first to bump a major release due to COVID-19, from April to November. They ended up delaying the release yet again when fall came around to April 2021, and then from April once more to October 2021.

Of course, the pandemic was still very much ongoing that year and a half on, while the box office was, as those in the business had feared, still depressed. In the months immediately preceding No Time to Die's release films that could have been counted on to bring in a cool billion, like Black Widow, fell far, far short of such expectations, with even Hollywood's most successful release in the preceding months, Fast and Furious 9, doing only a bit better than half that franchise's accustomed business as of late, grossing just over $700 million.

Going by the same assumption of fifty percent or so of "normal" business, with the new Bond film following two more or less billion dollar hits (Skyfall blazed past the mark in 2012, while Spectre's $880 million works out to a billion when adjusted for inflation), I figured the movie (with some claim to being an event as the close of the Daniel Craig era and its story arc, but not enjoying Skyfall-like buzz) would do about the same--which worked out to a half billion dollars. And I seem to have been far from alone in thinking so.

Still, the weekend before it came out, in the U.S. at least, Venom 2 had a sensational opening weekend, taking in some $90 million in those first three days, while the international release that very same weekend saw a $119 million take that beat the expectations previously held for it (also about $90 million). Feeding into yet another round of "The pandemic is over!" exuberance to which the media has been addicted no less than governments analysts greatly upped their estimates for the new Bond film's debut in the days right before its release, with even moderate expectations running as high as $70 million and one prediction suggesting a North American opening north of $100 million, which would have been a new record for the series. The actual opening weekend gross was more like $55 million Friday-to-Sunday (and $62 million counting in the Monday, which was Columbus Day).

Far from a new record, it was a low for the Daniel Craig era (lower even than what Casino Royale made back in 2006, fifteen years of ticket-price inflation ago). Confronted with the reality of the lower number some analysts accepted that they had been overoptimistic, but others took a "Wait and see" attitude, suggesting that the Bond film would prove to have exceptional legs. There was not much basis for this thinking. The best argument those espousing this position were able to set forth was that the older moviegoers less set on seeing a movie opening weekend would eventually come out, though the truth was that for the most part they had already done so. (It was the young people who weren't bothering.) Unsurprisingly the drop was the predictable one, the movie taking in a little under $24 million the following weekend (a 57 percent drop, more or less in line with the pattern of the last few Bond films--60 percent for Quantum of Solace, 54 percent for Skyfall, 52 percent for Spectre after its less impressive opening). Going by the premise that ten days into their run the Daniel Craig Bonds had generally made between half and two-thirds of their money, with the more robust earners proving to have the better legs (Skyfall had made only 52 percent of its total ten days in, Quantum of Solace and Spectre about 65 percent) I ventured the guess that No Time to Die, which had made $100 million by that point, would probably make somewhere between $150 million and $200 million in the U.S., with the lower bound at that point seeming to me the more likely given the soft response.

Where the global take was concerned I looked to the British data as well as the U.S. data (precisely because Britain is, of course, an especially strong market for the Bond films). The film's second U.S. weekend coincided with its third British weekend, by which point the movie had made about $93 million--just four-fifths of what Spectre had made by the same point in unadjusted numbers ($118 million). Assuming that the U.S. would, as was seen in the past, account for a quarter of the film's earnings, and that lower bound of $150 million, I saw $600 million as a plausible low end to the range. At the same time working from the possibility of the movie scoring about four-fifths what Spectre did in unadjusted dollars (four-fifths of $880 million) I guessed about $700 million as the upper end of the range.

It turned out that I was right about the North American take. In its eighth weekend in North American release, with the film already out on video On Demand, the movie took in all of $2 million, bringing its total up to $158 million, and leaving anything much above $160 million unlikely. In inflation-adjusted terms that is less than half what Skyfall made, about a third less than what the comparatively disappointing Spectre made, and indeed, less than any Bond movie has made in North America since the famously low-grossing Licence to Kill way back in 1989, as the table below (in which all figures have been adjusted for 2021 prices using the Consumer Price Index) demonstrates.

Spectre (2015)--$229 million

Skyfall (2012)-$360 million

Quantum of Solace (2008)-$208 million

Casino Royale (2006)-$225 million

Die Another Day (2002)-$243 million

The World is Not Enough (1999)-$207 million

Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)-$212 million

Goldeneye (1995)-$189 million

Licence to Kill (1989)-$76 million

However, if I was right about the North American take I was wrong--overly conservative--about the global gross. Rather than $600-$700 million with the low end of the range the more likely I should have guessed $700-$800 million, with the upper range the more likely. (As it is the film has already passed the $750 million mark.)

For any but the absolute top-line blockbusters that would be a solid performance in normal times, never mind pandemic conditions, which I think justify grading on a curve. If one assumes that it made half the money it would have made in normal times that would make it the biggest hit the series has ever had (bigger than Thunderball, bigger than Skyfall, with its $1.5 to $1.6 billion exceeding even the latter film's inflation-adjusted gross of $1.3 billion appreciably). If one less generously assumes the pandemic allowed the movie to make sixty percent of what it would have ordinarily then it is, perhaps, number two, after only Skyfall. And if less generously we assume that the pandemic's cutting into its gross reduced its earnings by just a quarter it would still be on par with Spectre, and very respectable indeed. Testifying to the plausibility of the more generous measures is the fact that, with the end of the year scarcely a month away at the time of this writing No Time to Die is the highest-grossing movie of the year globally (excepting two productions made in China for the country's domestic market, increasingly an outlier these days), a distinction no Bond movie, not even the biggest, ever previously achieved (with Thunderball having the misfortune to be competing with The Sound of Music, Skyfall with the original Marvel's Avengers). In fairness the competition was not what it would have been in a normal year, with movie attendance fluctuating greatly (had No Time to Die come out in April it would have done rather less well), while it has likely helped that other studios split their earnings between the box office and video--and that Marvel got shut out of China's exceptionally large and, by pandemic standards, exceptionally healthy, market. All the same, it has the prize for now, and seems likely to still have it at year's end.

Still, if an observer might grade box office performance on a curve when assessing the reception of a film this does not work where a company bottom line is concerned. Spectacular as a nearly $800 million take is in 2021 the fact remains that, with the already obscene cost of making a Bond film raised by the tortuous path this one followed to the screen even before the pandemic, the marketing costs blown on those releases that never happened, the interest payments on borrowed money and the rest, it seems the movie may have needed to gross $900 million just to break even. The movie is clearly short of that, and indeed we are now hearing that the producers may, in spite of this success, be in the red by as much as a hundred million dollars. But all the same, when all the other non-theatrical income streams are taken into account No Time to Die will likely turn a profit before too much longer, as the producers confidently move on to the next reinvention of a franchise whose salability has (in spite of the disappointing American release, at least, testifying to vulnerabilities, not least in attracting interest among younger viewers) defied the doubters once again.

Considering the franchise's future I personally see it as being on TV (more particularly, streaming) because that is simply how things are going these days, with Star Wars, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Jack Ryan and the rest happily shifting from the box office to Disney Plus, Amazon and the rest. This is all the more the case in that I cannot help recalling the reports about Apple having been prepared to offer $400 million for the film's video rights, and that the producers might have done better bottom line-wise to take that offer. (While the details can make a lot of difference a studio typically ends up with about forty to fifty percent of a film's gross, which coming out of a $750-$800 million gross would work out to be $300-$400 million, which they would have got their hands on a lot earlier, and before they had got deeper into the red.) Still, I can easily imagine that with nearly $800 million banked in pandemic conditions (and the expectation that this thing has to end sometime) they remain ready to take at least one more crack at theaters--especially if they can find someone who knows how to keep to a schedule and manage a budget in charge the next time around.

On American Monolingualism

It is an old stereotype that Americans, especially if they are not immigrants, are less likely to have second language skills than people in other, comparable countries, and especially less likely to be fluent in a second language than they.

Of course, all this is tougher to estimate than it sounds. Statistics based on self-reporting, for example, likely exaggerate capability, especially given the vagueness of concepts like "fluency"--and the demonstrated inability of a great many people to function at a high level in their own native language, even after lengthy formal education. (Perhaps one can carry on a simple conversation in a given language--but cannot speak it, let alone read it, at a very advanced level, such that so simple and mundane a task as understanding a common bus schedule can defeat them. Can that truly be regarded as command of the language?)

Still, there seems to be at least some truth to the image, sufficient that those interested in those subjects point out a couple of factors with some regularity. One is that an English-speaking American (as compared with a citizen of the European Union, for example) generally has to travel a long way before they are in a place where the people predominantly speak, write and read a language that is not their native one (and less often need to do so than, for instance, people in countries where hard circumstances drive their people to go abroad looking for work).

Another factor is that Americans are far more accustomed to exporting pop culture than importing it--the songs they listen to, the movies they watch, much less likely to originally have been created in a language other than their native one. (Indeed, Americans much more often see Hollywood's remakes of foreign movies than the movies they are based on.)

All of this implies a great deal for the pressure to learn, the opportunity to practice--that they are less likely to have just "picked up" other languages in childhood, or acquired something of them in everyday life, instead making this a thing one goes that much more out of their way to do, indeed specifically, consistently commit time to over a long period for the relatively distant payoff of competence in the language, which is often little more than an end in itself.

There is also what all this means for those taking the deliberate, academic path to which they have no recourse--that they get language instruction conceived by linguists for other linguists, rather than for more general users; instruction by teachers inclined to a scholarly perfectionism rather than offering up a package the student can quickly begin using as a basis on which to build that subtler knowledge. Is it quite so important that the student be enjoined to remember every last form of every verb to which they are introduced, the vast majority of which forms they are unlikely to see anytime soon, practically before the student has acquired any vocabulary at all? I doubt it. But that is what the textbook writers insist on, and the implicit enjoinment to perfectionism--which leaves potential learners thinking in terms of a far greater competence in the language than most native speakers of that language are likely to have as the standard of acquisition, and the choice between this or nothing at all. And that would seem to be another problem in itself, for when it is perfection or nothing I imagine many resign themselves to nothing. (I suspect contributing to this further is the pop cultural garbage inundating us in false images of hyperpolyglot geniuses who all speak a dozen languages perfectly, in spite of never actually studying or practicing, making it look easier than it is, setting impossible standards that make the onlooker feel inferior.)

There is, too, the way a purely academic effort can produce a very uneven capability. (One may end up in a situation where they can read the second language at a very high level, within some field of competency they have perhaps far more adroit at reading the relevant material than a native speaker who has not been trained in the field--but at the same time find that coming up with the words with which to carry on an everyday conversation defeats them.)

And of course, that those most likely to make the academic effort are people who probably speak their own native language with exceptional skill and polish is likely to pose obstacles for them as well--by leaving them the more impatient of their difficulties and crudity in that other language, all while they are perhaps juggling other intellectual or cultural interests as well with less than all the time in the world for all of them. (For example, they have only so much time to give to discretionary reading. As a result they find themselves having to choose between reading a book they are interested in their own language for the knowledge it contains--and struggling along with a book in another language just for the sake of practice.)

Of course, all this does not in itself mean that Americans as a whole might not be doing better--but it does at least call into question the tone of accusation and moralizing that American social critics tend to assume (and the sneering of a good many foreign observers) when discussing American monolingualism.

Hollywood Takes the Chinese Market For Granted--to its Cost

As even a glance at the box office data from China indicates the Chinese film industry is a powerful competitor for its vast domestic audience. Consider the following numbers:

* Since 2016, in spite of the difficulties for the market over the past two years, nine Chinese-made movies have broken the half billion dollar barrier.

* In the last "normal" year for moviegoing, 2019, 24 movies broke the $100 million barrier at the Chinese box office, of which 15 were Chinese productions. Of the top 10 earners (all of which broke the $200 million barrier), 7 were Chinese productions, while 5 Chinese-made movies took in over $300 million and two broke the half billion dollar barrier, with the disaster film The Wandering Earth making $690 million and the superhero movie Ne Zha taking an astonishing $703 million.

* Wolf Warrior 2, to date the highest-grossing Chinese film, took in $854 million back in 2017--outdoing the much-crowed about global gross of the first Wonder Woman. Translating to some $945 million in 2021 dollars, this falls just short of the billion dollar mark. Think about that--a billion dollars taken in by one movie in a single country.

As all this shows the Chinese market is big enough to support the making of big budget films just for Chinese audiences, without much concern for foreign viewership--with this extending all the way to first-rank blockbusters like the $200 million The Battle at Lake Changjin, which has made almost four times that figure at the Chinese box office in a mere three weeks. And of course, Chinese filmmakers have even less difficulty making lower-cost comedies and dramas suiting local taste.

Of course, much is made of Chinese censorship, which is real enough, and perhaps getting tighter (with three Marvel movies frozen out of the market this year, perhaps costing them the proceeds from hundreds of millions in ticket sales). Still, contrary to what the entertainment press claims it is far from the whole story. Even without censorship being at issue Hollywood has shown itself consistently clueless about what will or will not be a winner with Chinese audiences, or international audiences generally--perhaps as a result of America's culture these days making it less able to connect with foreign audiences like China's. The slogan "Go woke, go broke" represents the grinding of an ideological axe--but the fact remains that there is no reason for foreign audiences to care about an extremely particularist identity politics, with even the successes showing this. Black Panther, for example, was a strong earner overseas, picking up $600 million (and just $105 million in China). Yet while Black Panther was #1 in the U.S. that year, it was far outdone that year by Avengers: Infinity War, taking in close to $1.4 billion ($360 million of that in China). Simply put, Black Panther was received as another Marvel superhero film, and not the major cultural moment it was made out to be in America at the time of its release (with the result that, in China certainly, Infinity War outgrossed Black Panther by a factor of over three).

And of course what went for even the hits went that much more for the disappointments, with Crazy Rich Asians exemplary. The press for the film was extremely heavy on the identity politics angle--but it was far from clear why such American concerns would make the movie a blockbuster elsewhere, and indeed they did not. (Indeed, in a China still nominally Communist, and where the social divide is enormous and people less prone to pretend obliviousness to it than in class-phobic America, audiences were likely less inclined to see a spectacle of the vulgarity and snobbery of the ultra-rich as somehow uplifting simply because the vulgar snobs happened to be Asians.)

The blind spots were even more astonishing where more action-oriented fare was concerned. In America Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings was celebrated as the first Marvel movie with an Asian lead, as its promoters conveniently overlooked the story's evocation of the vicious Yellow Peril racism that produced Fu-Manchu (an oversight the more appalling at a time of increasing anti-Asian racism, and Sinophobic fearmongering); while if they saw the casting's not conforming to ideals of conventional physical attractiveness as a rejection of "racist" standards of appearance, they were oblivious to how at least some Chinese filmgoers saw it, namely as Western stereotyping of how East Asians look, and so yet another racist insult. Given what has happened with last year's Monster Hunter after the movie's release this could have cost the movie dearly even if it had its crack at the theaters.

Similarly reflecting that self-absorption is the place given to nostalgia in making movies for mass consumption, with again, the attempt to sell Star Wars exemplary. When Disney relaunched Star Wars Americans went to see it because they had seen Star Wars movies before, and remembered their earlier experiences in particular fondly--but this was not the case in China, which was in a very different place in 1977. And unsurprisingly the sales pitch fell flat--just as it was soon to do everywhere else, with Episode IX taking in about half of what Episode VII did, and Disney shelving its once Marvel-like plans for a mega-franchise sending two or three big Star Wars movies our every year. Now Star Wars is something people see on TV--and it remains to be seen when, and even if, Star Wars will be a big screen property again.

Altogether in this moment when Hollywood is ever more reliant on the global market it has become more national, even provincial--a fact on which few seem to care to linger these days. The question, however, is what Hollywood will do about it. Will it stop worrying about Chinese and foreign markets so much and focus on appealing to easier markets--or will it attempt to become more cosmopolitan, the better to secure as big a cut of the tickets bought by the planet's moviegoers as possible? The latter seems to me a far more likely outcome than the former--but first it would have to admit that it is having a problem, and at least to go by the tenor of the press that moment has not yet arrived.