How Hollywood murdered movie magic

MANILA, Philippines - High up in the summit of Hollywood’s current hierarchy of cool are the It dudes and dudettes: franchises, sequels, reboots, and films based on existing material. As film blogs and other venues online buzz daily with news on these films, there seems to be a dwindling number of films in Hollywood that thrum with the fresh spark of an original idea. While franchise films do turn out to be game-changing ventures, the quality seems to dwindle as the numbers pile up. For every The Dark Knight and Rise of the Planet of the Apes rallying the transformative power of a reboot, films like Bourne Legacy and A Good Day to Die Hard showcase the declining appeal of exhausted tropes. Execs now turn to the strangest places for new possible franchises: board games (Battleship and the forthcoming Ouija), a Twilight fan fiction turned bestseller (50 Shades of Grey) and a gel-filled action figure (Stretch Armstrong).

In 2012 alone, the 10 highest grossing films worldwide are all part of a film franchise. The top four films, The Avengers, Skyfall, The Dark Knight Rises, and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, all crossed the $1-billion mark worldwide, further pushing the “Harry Potter effect” that propelled franchises into the heart of Hollywood. For the next few months, we’ll be seeing more of franchises: a sequel to a reboot (Star Trek: Into Darkness), another attempt at a franchise reboot (Man of Steel), a prequel to an original animated film (Monsters University), and a sequel to a comic book spinoff (The Wolverine).

The wonder years

In this frenzied state, we can almost trace a shared malaise between our country’s mainstream filmmaking state and Hollywood’s franchise-hungry race: films churned out every month follow a tried-and-tested formula to suck viewers into another endless string of stale and regurgitated popcorn flicks. A percentage of Filipinos still look up to Hollywood in terms of quality and execution, but it seems that their precious Hollywood has also lost its way.

“At some point everybody is willing to admit how creatively bankrupt Hollywood movies have become. But I often wonder why we can’t be less beholden to them? Or move on to other things? These kinds of films are being made in abundance all over the world. And they’re often fresher, smarter, and more soulful. But no, it’s Americans or nothing when it comes to our movies, right?” says Filipino film critic Dodo Dayao.

Movie magic now relies on shock-and-awe tactics and Michael Bay-scale of bombast and swagger to survive an industry that’s slowly losing to handheld devices, on-demand media content, and television. Many of these films, bloated by corporate sleaze and marketing hype, only provide fleeting pleasures (that clanging spectacle of watching cities burn, metallic creatures reducing each other to nuts and bolts, and bodies tumbling down surfaces) as opposed to the captivating worlds of classic blockbusters such as Jurassic Park, Back to the Future, and Star Wars.

Digital wizardry has captured our imaginations for quite some time. We can still draw out our memories of seeing the Great Hall of the Hogwarts castle for the first time, or watching the Battle of Helm’s Deep unfold before our eyes, or even as the Autobots first gathered themselves in front of Sam Witwicky to explain their plight. These are moments that leave lasting imprints on our impressionable minds. Unlike the ongoing spate of franchises, we are treated to one mind-numbing digital washout after the other.

The decline of spec scripts

Hollywood may have run out of ideas, but it still carefully treads the line in taking a chance on original ideas. Proof of which is the decline of the “spec script market,” a lucrative bubble that gave screenwriters their big breaks while raking in fat checks and massive credentials. Spec (“speculative”) scripts are screenplays that come with “an original idea not owned or commissioned by a studio.” The spec script market brought films like Lethal Weapon, Rush Hour, Independence Day, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and American Beauty. This “mythical bubble” lasted from 1990 to 2008, killed by technology, high-profile flops, industry change, and economic collapse. Studios now hesitate to take a chance on shaky ideas without tested markets.

Tackling the decline of the spec script market in the March 2013 issue of Vanity Fair (“When the Spec Script Was King”), Margaret Heidenry wrote about the new system that currently keeps Hollywood alive: “The new math isn’t complicated: pay a screenwriter $1 million for an untested, unknown idea or squeeze a movie out of an existing product with built-in branding. As a result, ‘developing from I.P.’ (intellectual property, i.e., books, comics, video games, old movies, TV series, toys) has become de rigueur rather than waiting for a spec to come in,’” says Donna Langley of Universal Pictures.

Now that Hollywood has stopped paying attention to riskier ideas, high-profile directors such as David Fincher and Judd Apatow have turned to the small screen to tell original content. Fincher recently premiered his Netflix original series House of Cards starring Kevin Spacey. Apatow backs Lena Dunham in HBO’s Girls, a chronicling of this generation’s angst and woes. Shows such as Homeland, Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead only strengthen the migration of great storytelling to a smaller medium, especially now that audiences can stream or watch these TV shows wherever and whenever they want.

Every now and then, we are grateful to the Hollywood gods for films like The Cabin in the Woods, which masterfully took on horror film tropes, Bridesmaids or Inception (although some critics might argue about its originality since its plot is seemingly cribbed from Satoshi Kon’s 2006 animated film Paprika) but we’d still have to witness the long assembly line of franchises shuttle in and out of cinemas.

'A terrible crisis'

While things may seem a little grim, critics still see a silver lining in these troubled times. “There is enough talent sloshing around in the troubled vessel of American movies to keep the art form alive. But the trouble is real, and it has been growing for more than 25 years. By now there is a wearying, numbing, infuriating sameness to the cycle of American releases year after year. Much of the time, adults cannot find anything to see. And that reason alone is enough to make us realize that American movies are in a terrible crisis, which is not going to end soon,” David Denby wrote in The New Republic (“Has Hollywood Murdered the Movies?”, Oct. 4, 2012).

Much in the way that film festivals, Oscar films and art house imports pump ideas and original concepts into the film industry, the prodigious power of talent will be the one to counter the vanishing allure of films, especially here in the Philippines. As prospects seem dim with the plethora of on-trend films, trust the encompassing sway of ideas to topple regimes and break barriers to unleash a new age in filmmaking. If only we’d get someone to finance them.

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