Hollywood Babble On & On #915: This Is Not A Good Sign...

Zombies, those shuffling, moaning, flesh munching and no doubt malodorous undead are big business these days. AMC's The Walking Dead is a big hit, and just about everyone and his brother is making zombie movies, including movie star Brad Pitt and Paramount Pictures.

Brad Pitt's Plan B Productions and Paramount are currently making a film adaptation of Max Brook's zombie novel World War Z. 

They shouldn't be still making World War Z: The Movie, in fact, they wrapped production months ago. But Paramount has sent everyone back to work for seven weeks of re-shoots and have hired Lost/Prometheus scribe Damon Lindelof to rewrite a good chunk, if not all of the script.

That is never a good sign.

Rewrites happen during production, they're inevitable. Sometimes dialogue, or action just don't work when the cameras are rolling, or the star wants to come across more heroic, or the studio president's nephew needs a credit so he can get WGA membership. There are literally a million reasons for rewrites to happen.

However, when rewrites are called months after the shooting has wrapped can only have one reason.

The movie is coming out like total shit.

World War Z Production still of Brad Pitt in the starring role.

Not only that, but all the people involved in the movie: producers, studio executives, star, director and the half dozen writers who worked on the script before and during the shooting didn't see that, at least not until after spending $125+ million.

Ouch.

How the hell did this happen?  The film is based on a best-selling book and minor pop culture phenom by Max Brooks, that captures current fears about disease, irrationally destructive forces, as well as recent face eating incidents, and should have been an easy home run.

Now for those of you living in caves, World War Z, was a novel spun-off by Max Brooks after the success of his how-to book The Zombie Survival Guide.

It was written in the form of a oral history of a ten year long conflict between the living and the undead, where survivors tell their stories of traumas and triumphs.

Now this is where I think Paramount and Plan B and all the others involved may have screwed the pooch. 

You see the original novel is not one big story that you can center a film around, but a bunch of smaller stories from all over the world. The only character who goes through all these stories is the interviewer, but he's not the "star" per se, just the collector of the various stories. He doesn't solve the zombie problem, or save the world, he's just the guy putting all the stories together.

A studio is not going to spend $125 million on a feature film, hoping to make it a trilogy, with a highly paid star/producer like Brad Pitt.

This puts the studio into a quandary, how do they make what is an ensemble story that's scattered all over the world, and turn it into a one-man heroic-lead star vehicle. I think this quandary is the main reason why they need to rewrite at least 1/3 of the movie when they're supposed to be laying down the last of the soundtrack and putting together the trailers.

Now that quandary should have been settled during the script development process, but this is the age of $100+ million blockbusters going into production without a finished first draft, and I don't really expect much, unless Lindelof & Co. perform a miracle.

Hollywood Babble On & On #914: Let's All Rehash!

A few days ago I wrote a post about movies being rehashed into TV shows, and I got this question....

Nate Winchester asked -   What about you, D? Any movies you can pick out/think of which would actually work great as a TV series?

That got me thinking, and that's actually pretty dangerous, so I'm going to post what I think is a good movie-to-TV adaptation premise and I want you, my readers, to post yours in the comments. That way I can steal your ideas to Hollywood for millions! BWAH-HAH-HAH-HAH!!!

Here's my idea...

THE MOVIE: 

FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF

I know what you're thinking it was tried in 1990 & it stank, but I'm talking about an entirely different concept.

THE TV SHOW: 

THE TRIALS OF FERRIS BUELLER

Instead of trying to make another bad show about Ferris Bueller's high school days, draw some inspiration from the roots of the original story. The character of Bueller was based on a high school friend of John Hughes' who could talk and charm his way out of any situation and drove the authority figures around him nuts. That guy went on to become a successful lawyer representing big name businessmen and politicians.

That's where we start: Matthew Broderick returns as Ferris Bueller, middle aged, a rich and successful Washington D.C. attorney, and bored out of his skull because his work isn't challenging anymore. This ennui, expressed by his wry commentaries to the audience, is broken in the pilot episode when he takes on the case of an unpopular billionaire charged with dozens of counts of fraud. The case seems impossible, but he not only wins, proving his client's innocence, he charms the jury so much, they spent their deliberations writing an apology to his client.

Re-energized, Bueller accepts a challenge by his wealthy client to take on more impossible cases. Each week it's a new client, from big money litigants to no-money defendants, and Bueller has to use his brains and charm to win as the challenge becomes a personal crusade.

A running sub-plot in the series involves his friend Cameron Frye (Alan Ruck), now a freshman congressman from Illinois, and married to Bueller's sister Jeanie (Jennifer Grey), and how Bueller "helps" him navigate the fever swamps of Capitol Hill.  There's even a reunion with his old high school flame Sloane (Mia Sara) who works on a big internet news site.


Surround this cast with a roll call of good supporting players/characters as fellow lawyers, clients, politicians, reporters, and sundry townsfolk, and you could have a funnier version of CBS's award winning hit show The Good Wife.


It's not rocket science it's TV.  The first attempt failed because all they wanted was the title, when they should have figured out how to take the story to the next chapter.


Now, put your own movie-to-TV-series ideas in the comments.

Hollywood Babble On & On #913: Forget Originality!

Just when you think Hollywood has hit bottom creatively, they grab shovels and start digging.

Two stories this week illustrate the entertainment industry's ongoing war against originality.

FEUD, WONDERFUL FEUD

The History Channel took a gamble on originality recently by not only resurrecting the long dormant genre of the miniseries, but by making a miniseries about the oft referenced, but little understood feud between the Hatfields and McCoys.

That gamble paid off big time for the History Channel earning them record ratings.

Now you might think that other channels would look at this and think: "Ah, doing TV miniseries based on history and/or literature can find a healthy audience," but if you did, you'd be wrong.

WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!

NBC saw this and thought: "A-ha! Hatfield & McCoys are the ticket to get us out from under the all cricket channel in the ratings," and they bought a modern dress re-telling of the feud for a TV series.

Let's look at this idea, it's a blatant rip-off of the History Channel mini-series, and if you read up on the details of the premise, it's ripping off Dallas as well. That will turn off audiences, and the inevitable lawsuits by the descendants of the real Hatfields and McCoys over the bastardization of their family's history will turn off audiences even further.

When we boil it all down, it's doubly unoriginal, and doomed to fail, which means it's the perfect project for NBC!

Remember their attempt to rip-off Mad Men & merge it with the "hot" brand of The Playboy Club? Very few do, since nobody watched it.

I thought the new broom was going to change things over their, but it's like that Zucker guy's still running things.

But that's not all....

WARNER BROS. BREAKS WORLD RECORD FOR MOVIE UNORIGINALITY!

Warner Bros. pictures took a break from dumping yet another Justice League movie into development hell to announce that they're developing a movie based on the Guinness Book Of World Records.

Apparently this is not a joke.

What is it with Hollywood's mind-set that having a familiar name is all you need? The practice has dropped more bombs than Curtis LeMay, but they won't quit, because it seems safer to them than trying to do something original.

Well, it's only a matter of time before we get to this...

See how long it takes folks....

Cinemaniacal: Men On Film

Today we're talking about men in the movies. Chiefly the classic archetypes of manhood found in starring roles in the movies since the dawn of cinema and how they work together and how they've changed over time.

HEROIC LEAD

This archetype is the two fisted, hard-charging, guy who will do whatever it takes to save the day and has the skills, the courage, and the strength to do it, regardless of the odds. They are usually hard characters, who feel they don't need anyone else in their lives because they are dedicated to their heroic cause of punching bad guys in the face. However they can have the flint chipped off their hearts by the love of a good woman, or the camaraderie of his squad-mates.

The Heroic Lead is the guy men want to be.

ROMANTIC LEAD

Now this part is the guy that women (and some men) want to be with. At best they have the good looks, the chiseled physique, to be on the cover of a romance novel.

But they have to be more than just physically attractive. They have to be willing to fulfill the mental and emotional facets of female fantasy. That requires charisma, and sensitivity to female needs. Now they don't have to start off that way in the film, the story may center on their transformation, but if the actor cast in the role can't project those qualities then you're out of luck.

JUVENILE LEAD

When they weren't starring in films directed at the youth market the Juvenile Lead's traditionally has filled two roles...

1. Protege - The classic structure of war/action adventure pictures usually featured the Heroic Lead as the experienced veteran and the Juvenile Lead as the young newbie. As the story goes along the newbie goes from being the rebel, the virgin, or the comic relief to become a veteran in their own right and ready to take over the position of leadership in the righteous cause if or when the the Heroic Lead falls.

2. Love Interest - In films where the lead character is too old or too unlikable to be romantic, the tradition has been to add a romantic subplot usually involving the Juvenile Lead and a young lady, usually related to the old/unlikable lead. 

Now these definitions and who played them were not carved in stone. While some actors were pigeonholed as either Heroic or Romantic leads, many more could alternate between or combine the roles if the script called for it. It was also common in the Golden Age for budding male stars to start out as Juvenile Leads, and graduate to become Romantic and/or Heroic Leads.

But things have changed over time.

Hollywood's obsession with youth, which I call "juvenile dementia" has pretty much eliminated the process of graduating from a juvenile lead to the more mature heroic and romantic leads. Even though movies starring more rugged looking actors perform well at the box office with smaller initial investments, the studios continue to push boyish actors onto the audience as action heroes. Who really wants an action movie starring someone who would scream "not the face" and run away in a fist fight.

And it's not just heroic roles. In romantic roles characters that were once charming, and often sophisticated, now come across as oafish who look like they use the word "dude" like it's punctuation. All that matters to Hollywood are the physical attributes like having 6 pack abs.

Do I see an end to this confusion?

Probably not.

RIP Ray Bradbury

Writer, screenwriter, and all around inspiration Ray Bradbury passed away at the age of 91.

While he had a long and full life his passing is still sad because he's been an active author for so long it was easy to assume that he was somehow eternal. A never-ending fantasy factory who was constantly working on something new.

He was a prolific author of short stories and novels in the genres of science-fiction, fantasy, horror, and mystery. To generations he was the gateway drug to the endless possibilities of genre fiction.

He was for me. I can remember picking up a copy of The Martian Chronicles when I was ten years old, and I was hooked. Soon I was picking up every bit of Bradbury I could find at my local library, combing through the collections of his short stories like R Is For Rocket, The Illustrated Man, and I Sing The Body Electric, and other novels like his dystopian classic Fahrenheit 451.

He never really considered himself as belonging to any one specific genre, preferring to view himself as an "idea writer." He was probably the best "idea writer" in history. If you think you have a brilliant idea for a story, the odds are Bradbury probably did some form of it first. He could turn those ideas into words, and those words into dreams as they went on to inspire other writers and readers.

His passing leaves a tremendous hole in the literary landscape.

Goodbye Ray Bradbury, you will be deeply missed.

Hollywood Babble On & On #912: Rehash Big Rehash Little Rehash Into Infinity...

I'm seeing a disturbing trend coming out of Hollywood lately. This trend is to take movie franchises and remake them as TV series.

It's not a new trend, in fact it goes back to the earliest days of the medium. A good example is the 1955 prequel series to the classic movie Casablanca that lasted 10 episodes and a second attempt in 1983 that lasted a whopping 5 episodes. 

Now I'm not saying that all projects translated from the big screen to the small screen are failures or complete creative abominations. 

But for every M*A*S*H* and Buffy The Vampire Slayer style long running classic that comes along there's about ten Dirty Dancing: The Series, and Delta Houses crashing and burning.

However, what strikes me about this latest crop is a certain air of desperation as networks and studios scramble to come up with content while avoiding any new ideas. The latest report I saw is that MTV is trying to find a way to convert the Scream franchise, which fizzled out in part four into a TV series.

Now I'm not going to talk about animated spin-offs of movies, I'm just going to talk about the live-action movies turned TV shows, why the studios and the networks do it, and what can make or break the project.

WHY DO THEY DO IT?

Short Answer: Fear.

Long answer, studios and networks are run by people who are terrified of risk. New ideas are risky in two ways. There's the risk of failure and the risk of success.

If the show with the new idea fails, either as an unsold pilot, or a canceled series the studio and/or the network will lose a lot of money.

If the show with the new idea succeeds, then they have to share more of those profits with the show's creators.

Much like movie remakes these executives will try to cushion themselves from those risk by sticking to properties they already own with familiar titles or premises.

With most of the major studios merged or in some sort of relationship with TV networks, the temptation to do this is increased exponentially.

It doesn't matter that 90% of such projects last less than a single season, the security these executives see in these sorts of projects outweigh the pitfalls.

NOW, WHAT ABOUT THE PITFALLS?

They are many, and what works in one adaptation can damn another. Among them are....

AUDIENCE EXPECTATIONS: The audience has certain expectations when it comes to a TV adaptation of a beloved movie franchise. The more they love the original the more critical they will be of the TV show's cast, look, and story-lines.

Exceed those expectations, and you can succeed, but fall one inch short, and you're doomed.

LIMITED PREMISE:  A lot of movies have premises that do not translate well to episodic storytelling. They're built around one specific event, place, and actions, and trying to make it into a TV series would lead to a much cheaper repeat of the movie on a weekly basis.

REINVENTION: Sometimes a movie can be completely reinvented right down to its foundation when its adapted to a TV series. This can save a series, or it can sink it.

Good examples are the TV versions of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and Ferris Bueller.

Where the movie Buffy was a broad farce, the TV Buffy was much darker, more violent, and the humor was cleverer and the characters were developed into being more than just excuses for jokes or silly scenes.

The TV Ferris Bueller was an adaptation of John Hughes' 80s teen classic Ferris Bueller's Day Off. 

Where the movie was about a smart, smooth, and popular charmer getting away with thumbing his nose at dimwitted authority the TV Ferris was about a smart, but unpopular nerd getting into trouble without neither charm or flair.

Where Buffy seemed to fans like it was getting to the heart of creator's Joss Whedon's original vision, Ferris had no input from the film's creator, John Hughes, and struck everyone who saw as a weak attempt to take a show premise created by someone else, and try to sell it by slapping a previously successful name to it.

That struck the audience as phony, and the show was gone before the end of the season.

I don't see this trend ending anytime soon, in fact, I fully expect it to get a lot worse before it gets any better.

Hollywood Babble On & On #911: We Have A Question!

I got an e-mail that asked a very pertinent question that I'll answer here for all the world to see...

Vincent asked...

Reader and big fan of your blog. I have two questions for you -

First: I hear a lot about power in Hollywood. There are all the random (probably BS) lists about the most powerful people in Hollywood, but what I am interested in is who, among producers and directors, really has true power? Obviously, big names and moneymakers such as Spielberg, Peter Jackson, Scorcese, Chris Nolan, etc have a lot of power and influence, but how far does that really extend? How much control do they *really* have over the films they make? I was reading a very interesting article recently about The Dark Knight Rises and how Warner Bros. wanted it to be released in 3D but Nolan refused. Is Nolan a powerful enough guy to have that say, or are Warner Bros. execs just afraid of making him mad? I'd love to see a post on this with your thoughts, about both Nolan and other big name directors or producers.

Second, you seem pretty knowledgeable about the inner workings of Hollywood. Where do you get this knowledge and experience?

Great to hear that I have some big fans out there, especially fans with intelligent questions.

There are two types of power in Hollywood.

There's Social Power, and then there's Money Power. Often these types overlap, but I'll explain that in just a second.

Social Power comes from a person's status and influence within the Hollywood community. These are the folks that can get you an invite to the "best" parties and fundraisers with the "best" people that you need to network to grow or expand your career.

Not paying the people with Social Power the proper obeisance can actually harm your career, unless you have tons of...

Money Power, which comes from having a track record of making money and lots of it. If you use this power wisely you can make those who seek to interfere with your work back off, for fear that you'll move someplace else, and take the money you make with you.

Now we come to my prime examples of Social Power and Money Power, George Clooney, and Christopher Nolan.

George Clooney is the embodiment of the smart use of Social Power. He hasn't carried a movie anywhere near the $100 million sales mark without a an all-star ensemble for a very long time, if ever. His influence with the audience is minimal, and he can often be a negative when it comes to selling tickets.

But if you go by Hollywood's publicity machine he's the BIGGEST MOVIE STAR ON THE PLANET in big bold capital letters. He gets magazine covers, glowing media coverage, and is constantly touted as the one and only true movie star in the world, and gets A-List paychecks to go with it.

Why does he get this treatment, even though he can't earn it at the box office? Because he is at the epicenter of Hollywood's social elite. He's at the forefront of all the right causes, associates with all the right people, and hosts fundraisers for all the right politicians.

If he feels mistreated, those who mistreat him may find themselves cut out from the Hollywood social swirl. Once cast out, it's extremely hard to get back in, and you might find it hard to get work without the approval of Hollywood's social elite.

Christopher Nolan is the perfect example of smartly managed Money Power. Money Power is all based on trust, which is extremely rare in Hollywood and must be earned.

How do you earn it?

Make shit-loads of money.

And that's what Christopher Nolan does. Not only are his film's commercial successes, but they're pretty good at racking up critical kudos as well, even when he does normally critically reviled "comic book" movies. That's gravy, that increases a filmmaker's status exponentially. Another key part of having money power comes from being aligned with a studio that appreciates money power. 

Warner Bros. has traditionally had a "don't rock the boat" policy as long as the films are profitable and of a high quality.  The last thing they want Nolan to do is to move to another studio, so they give him a lot of sway. However Nolan understands that his power within Warner Bros. is on the "what have you done for me lately" plan, so he must make sure that his films will not only fulfill his artistic vision, but also entertain a mass audience. 

You see Money Power only really lasts as long as the fickle finger of fiduciary fate is pointing at you. The moment it moves onto someone else, you're out on your ass.

That's why it's also smart to build a Social Power base, making sure that you're seen doing the right things with the right people. Because the social power that comes with being in the inner circle is harder to lose than money.

As for your second question: Where do I get my knowledge and experience?

Well, I'm not an elite insider, despite what some may think. I'm as far outside as you can get and still be on the same planet.

What I do have is a little common sense, and a knack to know where to look for publicly available information. It's not like I have legions of secret informants sending me the inside dirt.... or do I?

BWAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH!!!

*cough*

Hollywood Babble On & On #910: The Bext Exotic Moneymaking Movie

If Botox allowed the people in Hollywood to form expressions they'd all be reshaping their faces into a vague approximation of surprise because the movie The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, has passed the $100 million mark in theaters worldwide.

By Hollywood's logic the film should not have made this much money for these reasons:

1. It starred a bunch of British people who are over 60.

2. It was set in India, a country that the Hollywood experts will assure you is a place that Americans have no interest in.

3. They only released it into a handful of theaters in North America, and only expanded into less than 1/4 of the theaters used by normal big studio blockbusters.

4. That release was up against the unstoppable Avengers.

5. The marketing of the movie was minimal compared to most of the other late spring/early summer releases, with most of the TV exposure being ads at the beginning of Masterpiece Theater, while mostly letting critical reviews and word of mouth carry most of the weight for them.

Yet despite this conventional wisdom, the film, which was made for the cost of the perks on Will Smith's contract, has passed the $100 million mark and shows no signs of slowing down.

Meanwhile, all around this little film movies that the conventional wisdom declared were sure-fire blockbusters, like The Dictator, Dark Shadows, and other films have either flopped outright, or at best disappointed their studios with their tepid box office performances in the face of the unstoppable Avengers.

The so-called experts in Hollywood shouldn't be surprised at all, because Hollywood's conventional wisdom really has no wisdom to it all. It's pretty much all convention.

The film's success lies directly with Fox Searchlight who released the film, and, to be more specific the mission behind the company.

Fox Searchlight was founded in 1994 as part of the "faux indie" explosion. You see, the 1990s was experiencing a boom in independent movies winning awards and making money, and the 6 major studios screamed "ME TOO!"

They all started "independent" film divisions with the mandate to buy up and release the next big Sundance Festival darling. 

Now if you were to go around looking for these divisions, like Warner Independent, Fine Line / Picturehouse, Paramount Vantage, Miramax and others you'd be hard pressed to find them, since most were folded or sold off by their parent companies. I think the only real survivors of the big "faux indie" implosion of the 2000s were Focus Features* (at Universal) and Fox Searchlight.

What saved those two companies was that they had a different mission than their rivals. Whereas their rivals were assigned the mission of mission of winning awards and helping their executives get into the ski-suits of young starlets at the Sundance Festival they took on the task of making independent film a viable business.

Since Fox Searchlight is part of News Corp, I'm assuming Rupert Murdoch's instructions to be a viable business were liberally peppered with the words "crikey" and "arse."

Over time both companies learned the fine art of releasing and marketing non-blockbusters. By keeping costs under control, and using years of experience to manage their releases they're still around, making and releasing movies like Marigold Hotel, and bucking conventional wisdom, while all their competitors are long gone.

----------

*Focus is actually more of a creation of the implosion, having been created by the reorganization of USA Pictures, (formerly Gramercy Pictures, a partnership with Polygram Filmed Entertainment), Universal Focus, Good Machine, and October Films.

Hollywood Babble On & On #909: Can Minis Be Mega Again?

The feud between the Hatfield and McCoy families has been turned into a TV miniseries by the History Channel starring Kevin Costner and Bill Paxton and it's a smash, setting a new record for basic cable viewing. In fact, the mainstream broadcast networks would like numbers that like, and now some are talking about the return of the miniseries, which was a staple of TV for a long time before being forgotten.

Now a miniseries, or "serial" as the Brits like to call it, is a show that has a predetermined number of episodes with a definite beginning, middle and end. This has advantages when it comes to narrative, because unlike a regular TV series, you not only can drastically change the nature of the story, and the characters as the story progresses, it's actually better if you do that. A regular TV series can't have changes in premise and characters that are too dramatic, because it's supposed to have an open ended run. You can't have a character go on a self-destructive death spiral without having to pull some sort of a miraculous rescue out of your ass to milk another season out of it.  You can do that in a mini-series, because it actually has an ending coming.

The miniseries evolved from the TV movie which had become incredibly successful for the then "Big 3" networks in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Adaptations of popular novels was seen as the next big step, but there was a problem, too many of the most popular novels were really thick tomes, with large casts of characters with plots spanning several generations. Cramming them into a 90 minute TV movie or a 2 hour theatrical feature film was seen as an impossibility without taking an axe to the story that readers seemed to love.

Enter the miniseries.

The first miniseries in North America were the CBC's documentary/drama hybrid about the founding of Canada The National Dream, and the American ABC Network's adaptation of Leon Uris' QB-VII both in 1974. The format became a phenomenon with the success of Rich Man, Poor Man in 1976, and a mega-phenomenon with the blockbuster success of the adaptation of Alex Haley's epic family saga Roots.

By the 1980s all three of the big networks were making and airing miniseries, and most of them seemed to star Richard Chamberlain. Even when he wasn't hired, he'd just appear as an extra.

But by the 1990s the bloom had gone off the miniseries rose. There were two causes for this, creative and commercial.

The creative cause occurred as the networks began to abandon the expensive historical epics like James Clavell's Shogun, and make more modern, more soap opera-like adaptations of the works of authors like Jackie Collins. The problem with this tactic is that while the works were popular, there wasn't much to differentiate them from other prime time soap operas like Dallas, or Dynasty. So the popularity of the miniseries began to wane.

The commercial cause came from the fact that the networks had changed their business model and it looked like miniseries didn't have a place on network TV anymore. Most of the networks had either merged with movie studios, or formed their own production companies. The plan was to produce their own shows, via their sister studios and production companies, and get a piece of that sweet, sweet syndication money. 

An 8-12 hour miniseries wasn't going to sell to syndication which required a minimum of 66-100 hours to create a viable rerun cycle.

So bit by bit the miniseries just faded away from the big broadcast networks and, for the most part, took TV movies with them.

However, things have changed.

First, cable television has changed the playing field. Serialized dramas, especially costume dramas and literary/historical adaptations, are particularly hot right now with audiences.

The syndication market has also changed, with time slots once held by syndicated reruns are now dominated by talk shows, game shows, and infomercials. Even Cable TV, which was once a prime market for reruns is slowly drying up in favor of new original programming.

 

Why?

Well, it's one of the reasons why miniseries might make a comeback.

Home video.

People aren't watching reruns the way they used to because now they can just order them up from Netflix or some similar streaming service, or buy them in a box set from their local big box store.

This means that miniseries can have a life beyond their initial airing via these new outlets, and hence continue to generate revenue.

I for one would welcome the return of the miniseries to mainstream television. It's a good way to adapt big projects that wouldn't fit well into a two hour feature film, or stretch out into an open ended TV series, and allows writers and actors to create and play characters with definite narrative arcs.

Plus it would mean more work for Richard Chamberlain who I haven't seen on TV in a long time.

Hollywood Babble On & On #908: Will Marvel Be A Marvelous Deal?

Last week a chap named Todd Juenger at Bernstein Research said that Disney's $4.3 billion dollar purchase of comics publisher Marvel in 2009 was a "good deal" but not really a "great deal." Now others are pointing at the $1.3+ billion raked in so far by the box office juggernaut Avengers as proof that it is, in fact, a wonderful deal for Disney.

Well, maybe, and maybe not.

Yes, Marvel was having some success as a movie company, thanks to the massive loans they took out, making it a very tempting property for Disney, and delivering them the young boy demographic they had been ignoring during their "Disney Princess" era,  but there were fundamental problems with Marvel's core business.

Comic books.

Remember them?

They provide the source material for the movies, the TV shows, and all the related merchandise. That segment of the industry is dying slowly. The folks in the industry are touting recent upticks in sales thanks to heavily hyped events as a sign that the good times are here to stay, but that doesn't really hold up compared to the facts on the ground.

First, the sales figures being touted as tremendous victories are mere fractions of the regular sales that comic book publishers used to have every single month. Comics used to be a mass media read by tens of millions, now it's a niche media read by hundreds of thousands and shrinking. That's not healthy.

I read someone comment that it's easier for a ten year old to buy marijuana than comic books in most communities because they are increasingly only available in a decreasing number of specialty retailers, mostly in the bigger population centers. 

Comic publishers are saying that availability is no longer a problem, because now they can beam the comics directly into their iPads or similar tablet computers.

Well, that's all well and good, but it's not the cure all they claim it is.

First, is that the two major players, Marvel and DC don't quite understand that they and their characters are the 'gateway drug' for the medium as a whole, but they're doing it wrong.

Even if you download the latest issue of your favorite movie superhero, unless you're already a long-standing fan of that character the odds are that you're not going to stick with it.  That's because it's more likely than not that the latest issue is Part 3 of a 6 part "event" story arc that requires that you not only go and buy the back issues for parts 1 & 2 then 4,5 and 6 when they come out over the next few months, but also go buy issues of other titles, and have a working knowledge of 5-7 decades of back-story to make any sense of it all.

Casual readers are not welcome.

Now DC is claiming to be doing something about it with their "New 52" reboot of their mainstream universe, but it's not hard to find elements of the previous universe's convolutions finding their way into the "new" story-lines. 

Of course, comics nowadays seem only to exist to keep the rights to characters away from their creators.

Now you might say that Marvel doesn't really need comics as their core business and was doing just fine thanks to the success they had producing their own movies.

Yes, they were pretty damn good producing their own movies. However, they were also in a precarious position.

Unless you're a major media conglomerate with absolute control of the distribution and sales of your movies, you are just one or two box office turkeys from total collapse. Superhero movies are expensive to make and release, and while the rewards are great if you succeed, the damage done by failure is exaggerated exponentially if you're an independent.

So Marvel is definitely better off with Disney. It has the cushion it needs, and Disney has the characters it needs to keep pumping out movies and merchandise. 

So, for now, it's definitely good for Marvel, and good for Disney.

But there's still a way Disney can screw it up.

The one constant of movie studios is that things change. The people running the place can change, either being replaced, or by losing the mojo that once made them successful. Suddenly, studios that were having major box office smashes, can find themselves stuck in the middle of creative logjams where good projects are mangled into horrible abominations, or wither and die in development, tens of millions of dollars are wasted, long dead fads are pointlessly pursued, and only one or two characters can even make it onto the big screen.

Just ask DC and Warner Brothers about that.

So let's split the difference and say that the jury's still out on this one.