Is the Fantasy Bubble About to Burst?

I've recently come across two pieces about the state of Hollywood studio movies. Neither one is very optimistic but both are worth a read.

David Denby has written a piece for The New Republic about the emphasis on superhero and fantasy entertainment in Hollywood and how the single-minded focus on popcorn cinema is pushing all other films out of the studios' slate of releases. It is a lengthy piece but an important one. Here is a relevant excerpt:

Yes, of course, the studios, with greater or lesser degrees of enthusiasm, make other things besides spectacles—thrillers and horror movies; chick flicks and teen romances; comedies with Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Jennifer Aniston, Katherine Heigl, and Cameron Diaz; burlesque-hangover debauches and their female equivalents; animated pictures for families. All these movies have an assured audience (or one at least mostly assured), and a few of them, especially the Pixar animated movies, may be very good. The studios will also distribute an interesting movie if their financing partners pay for most of it. And at the end of the year, as the Oscars loom, they distribute unadventurous but shrewdly written and played movies, such as The Fighter, which are made entirely by someone else. Again and again these serioso films win honors, but for the most part, the studios, except as distributors, don’t want to get involved in them. Why not? Because they are “execution dependent”—that is, in order to succeed, they have to be good. It has come to this: a movie studio can no longer risk making good movies. Their business model depends on the assured audience and the blockbuster. It has done so for years and will continue to do so for years more. Nothing is going to stop the success of The Avengers from laying waste to the movies as an art form. The big revenues from such pictures rarely get siphoned into more adventurous projects; they get poured into the next sequel or a new franchise. Pretending otherwise is sheer denial.

I don't entirely agree with Denby's argument, as movies about fantasy and myth are not inherently without meaning. Films like the original Planet of the Apes, the Harry Potter series, and Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy offer storytellers and their audiences a metaphor through which to deal with valuable or challenging ideas like race and class issues, growing up, and urban blight. But Denby is right that most fantasy films aren't trying to be more than just acceptably entertaining (see: The Avengers) and most studio films evade anything in the text, subtext, or filmmaking that is potentially innovative or challenging. He is also right on the broader point: blockbuster entertainment has crowded everything else out of the way and filmmakers interested in producing smaller, smarter, or more challenging films often have to struggle against the Hollywood machine to get their projects made and onto the radar of viewers.

A similar argument was made by Tom Tykwer and Andy and Lana Wachowski in an interview at The Huffington Post. Tykwer and The Wachowski's, whose film Cloud Atlas opened recently, explained that the emphasis on superheroes and spectacle might come to a forced end:

Do you think Hollywood doesn't give the audience enough credit to keep up with layered, ambitious storytelling?

Tom Tykwer: In particular they don't when it comes to movies that are being made for the big screen. If you want to raise a certain budget for a more spectacular experience on a large canvas, it seems it has to be connected to PG-spectacle. A superhero film. What really started missing a while ago was large-canvas filmmaking with substance. Something to discuss and revisit. Films that stay with you -- that become friends in your life. Films that you want to find other things out about. Something else to discover on your second and third viewing. That has moved to television or a certain type of art house movie. It is really struggling to survive on the big scale on the one we attempted to do.

Andy Wachowski: There's a supply-and-demand thing working there in Hollywood. The studios are making these big spectacles, but the audiences are going to see them.

Lana Wachowski: It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Andy Wachowski: Soon the audiences will stop going to see them -- and they will. We think it's hysterical that the studios are basing all of their films nowadays on superhero sequels, when just 20 years ago you saw the collapse of the comic book industry because they did the exact same thing. So, at some point, people are going to stop going to see [these movies] and the whole system will reinvent itself as something else.

The predictions of Debny, Tykwer and the Wachowski's may already be coming to fruition. In 2012 we saw the box office failures of John Carter and Battleship as well as the under performance of The Amazing Spider-Man, Dark Shadows, and Men in Black 3. The success of movies like The Dark Knight Rises and The Avengers may be enough to sustain interest in making these films for the same reason that the occasional lottery winner keeps the public buying tickets. But the fantasy bubble may burst and soon and when it does the studios will scramble to find a new source of revenue. When that happens it could bring about a resurgence of American film as it did in the 1970s or it could decimate the Hollywood studio system.