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The Reason Why Hollywood Makes So Many Boring Superhero Movies - The Atlantic

Hollywood has become adept at producing blockbuster films like superhero movies that are highly predictable and appeal to broad audiences. Studios mitigate financial risk by relying on established franchises and testing films extensively with audiences. As a result, blockbusters have become homogenized and "average" in an effort to appeal to everyone but take few creative risks. While critics decry the lack of originality, audiences continue to turn out for these safe, recognizable films.

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95 views5 pages

The Reason Why Hollywood Makes So Many Boring Superhero Movies - The Atlantic

Hollywood has become adept at producing blockbuster films like superhero movies that are highly predictable and appeal to broad audiences. Studios mitigate financial risk by relying on established franchises and testing films extensively with audiences. As a result, blockbusters have become homogenized and "average" in an effort to appeal to everyone but take few creative risks. While critics decry the lack of originality, audiences continue to turn out for these safe, recognizable films.

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The Reason Why

Hollywood Makes
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Studios were better at making great movies when they were worse at
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DEREK THOMPSON

MAY 13, 2014

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Hollywood has a fever, and the only prescription is more superheroes.
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The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man 2 (sequel to reboot) opened last weekend,
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partnersDays
andof
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while Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (reboot), X-Men:
Future Past
(sequel/prequel blend), and Transformers: Age of Extinction (third sequel) are all
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opening this summer. A second Avengers and a Superman vs. Batman lm are
both slated to open next year.
Matt Zoller Seitz, a critic for New York magazine and

ELATED STORY

RogerEbert.com, isn't mad, just disappointed in the


relentless sameness of the superhero genre, but Tim
Wainwright, writing in The Atlantic, instructs him to be
patient. Superhero cinema is still in its larvae stage, he
says, and the classics will come, as they did for westerns
in the 1950s. But the causes of blockbuster sameness,
which are rooted in the economic history of the movie

he Amazingly Bloated Spider-Man 2

industry, don't really predict an artsy future for


blockbusters. Hollywood has become sensational at
predicting what its audiences want to see. And,

ironically, for that very reason, it's become better at making relentlessly average
movies.
First, a quick history lesson: Let's go back to the golden age of westerns in the
1950s, where High Noon, Shane, and The Searchers were all made within ve
years of each other. It's hard to imagine just how impregnable the movie industry
was back then. In 1950, movies were the third-largest retail business in the
America, after grocery stores and cars, as Edward Jay Epstein explains in his
book The Big Picture. Watching lms approached the ubiquity of a bodily
function: Every week, 90 million Americans60 percent of the countrywent to
the cinema, creating an audience share that's bigger than today's Super Bowl.
The six major studios (MGM, Warner Bros., Paramount, Twentieth Century
Fox, and RKO) could basically do whatever they wanted and be sure to make
money. Owning their own theater chains (which accounted for half their

total revenue), they controlled the means and distribution of a product that was
as essential to mid-century life as grilled chicken. Surprise, surprise: Virtually all
their lms made money.

In 1950, movies were the third-largest


retail business in the America, after
grocery stores and cars. The major
studios could basically do whatever
they wanted and be sure to make
money.
But in the next 20 years, two TsTelevision and Trust-bustingbroke up the
studios and scattered audience attention. The typical American used to buy 2030 tickets a year. Today, she buys about four. Fittingly, studios make fewer
movies today, and they have to spend more money marketing them (about $35
million per lm), since they've lost their guaranteed weekly audience. At the
same time, the box oce has globalized. U.S. and Canadian box oce grosses
are large but at. The future of ticket growth is overseas.
What does all that mean? Fewer movies, bigger movies, louder movies, and safer
movies.
Now that the studios are making fewer, more expensive lms, there is much
more risk riding on each project. Hollywood mitigates that risk in two ways: safer
subjects and more testing. First, it relies on sequels and adaptations that it knows
have a built-in audience, not only at home, but also abroad, where explosions
translate easier than wit. The formula works, too. Thirteen of the 14 biggest

movies of 2013 were adaptations and sequels. Zoller Seitz nails it:

The marketplace rewards each new superhero movie with a reexive


paroxysm of spending, guaranteeing each $200 million tentpole a
boo US opening that follows a boo international opening (the new
release pattern ips the old one). It's an entertainment factory in
which the audience is both consumer and product. Its purpose is not
just to please consumers but to condition and create them.

For critics, the problem with Hollywood's superhero movies (and, perhaps, with
its blockbusters in general) is that they are just ne. They are average. But they are
average on purpose. They are the product of Hollywood's exquisitely designed
factory of average-ness, which has evolved as the industry has transitioned from a
monopoly to a competitive industry that can no longer aord to consistently
value art over commerce. Hollywood needs to know what its fragile audience
wants, and when it asks us, we tell them: Make something like the last average thing
I saw!
Hollywood, like other entertainment industries in the era of big data, is better
than ever at guring out how to give audiences exactly what we say we want.
Scripts are revised by teams of editors and are studied by analytics companies to
tell studios if the plot lines t with audiences' expectations of horror movies or
superhero dramas. When enough scenes have been aligned to approximate a rst
draft of a movie, screening companies arrange private viewings for Orange
County moms and dads to watch undeveloped versions of the lms and give their
feedback. (No oense to California's test-audiences, but folks who happen to be
free on a Wednesday afternoon aren't going to guide you to Godfather: Part II;
they want Iron Man II.)

If you're a critic, you might call this


Hollywood's "superhero
problem." But whose problem is it,
really?
Hollywood's assembly line of double- and triple-checking the viability of its
$200-million products isn't debased. As one industry vet told me, the exhaustive
process of smoothing and refurbishing makes many bad movies better. But
studios are so worried about what audiences thinkand so skilled at soliciting
their feedbackthat they ensure that the next blockbuster always reminds
audiences of the last blockbuster. The bad stu gets less bad, and the brave stu gets
less brave, the same guy told me. So much gets pulled to the middle. So much
becomes just ne.
Sixty years ago, audiences went to the movies reexively. Now we go to the
movies mostly to see things we recognizeactors, stories, and crusaders wearing
costumes. If you're a critic, you might call this Hollywood's "superhero
problem." But whose problem is it, really? The Amazing Spider-Man 2 got a
Rotten Tomatoes score of 54 percent, meaning about half its critics thought it
was good and half thought it was bad. But out of 155,000 user reviewers on the
site, 73 percentmore than 113,000 peoplehave rated the movie "fresh."
Even with a lukewarm domestic opening, it's the biggest movie in the world.
Critics will keep calling average stu average, but it turns out there are a lot of
people who are ne with ne.

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