From an early age, l loved going to the movies, and summer was the prime movie season with plenty of films aimed at kids. Where I grew up, air conditioning was a luxury not worth purchasing for six sultry weeks a year. So, the chance to sit in a cool, dark theater on a hot afternoon was an added inducement.
Recently, however, the movie going experience has become increasingly annoying, and living below the Mason-Dixon line means I have an air-conditioned home with pay-per-view and streaming video on a big screen with sound I can control.
In an apparent bid to entice viewers like me from the comforts of home, theaters have begun adding bigger reclining seats. But they are so bulky that the theater can accommodate fewer customers, so the prices have risen to compensate, and concession prices have also skyrocketed. Has Trump imposed a tariff on popcorn and Coke syrup?
It is now perfectly possible for two moviegoers to drop $30 to $40 on a pair of tickets, a bag of popcorn and a drink. That might be tolerable if the stuff on the screen was masterworks of comedy and drama too fabulous to wait for on the home screen, but that’s not the case. The major studios no longer bother to provide original content. Instead, they are in the recycling business
The schedule, especially in the summer, is dominated by one weary franchise or threadbare remake after another. For this I should leave home, sit in discomfort, pay through the nose, and subject myself to half an hour of ads for crummy coming attractions, an equally crummy knock-off of previous films, and a pyrotechnic soundtrack so deafening it drowns out quieter films in the theaters next door? I don’t think so.
Already this year, the kind of franchise kiddie movies based on comic books or YA novels once reserved for July have been in the theaters for months – “Black Panther,” another “Pacific Rim,” “Ready, Player One,” another Avenger epic, “Deadpool 2,” “Solo,” a Star Wars prequel, and now “Incredibles 2” and “Jurassic Park 5 or 6.”
But a tremor or two has shaken Hollywood’s complacency, and the fault in not in the San Andreas but in their business plan. There’s been talk of Star Wars fatigue since the box office receipts flor “Solo” were anemic, as were those for the latest Jurassic iteration. The audiences have apparently decided the fatigue is on the part of the film makers. Too timid to mess with a sure thing, they end up producing an enervating rehash that entertains no one, not even the most addicted fanboys.
Case in point, “Solo,” the origin story of Han Solo, was originally entrusted to a couple of young, daring filmmakers with hopes they’d reenergize the franchise, but halfway through filming, the studio flinched and brought in geriatric Ron Howard to save the film from adventurous departures from familiar tedium.
By all account “Jurassic Park 9” is an even more rote, paint-by-numbers effort, though it is loud. And what do we have to look forward to for the rest of the summer and 2018? The usual suspects, of course. No creativity required. I’m not making this up, except the numbers and subtitles of a few of the sequels.
“Sicario 2,” “Ant Man and the Wasp,” on the theory that two superbugs are better than one.” Hotel Transylvania 3,” “Equalizer 2”, “Mamma Mia: Superfluous,” “Mission Impossible: Retirement Village,” “Creed 2” (which is really “Rocky” 10 or 11), “Fantastic Beasts 2”, “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Post Mortem,” “Halloween 12,” the fourth remake of “A Star is Born,” “Aqua Man,” “Spiderman: Infestation” and “Mary Poppins: Resurrection.”
I’m so excited! I’ll take out a second mortgage, so I don’t miss one. Is it too early to reserve tickets for the Christmas showings? Or should we all just admit our mainstream pop culture is exhausted? Same old genre tropes. Same old ads to sell the same old remakes. Same old chase, crash, explosion, beating, shoot out, robot, superhero, supervillain, alien, hitman.
At least that’s the case from the giant corporations who manufacture “entertainment” as if it was sausage. And incidentally, also true of our political parties with the same pols, lies, ads, panders, scapegoats, enemies, exhausted ideological cant.
It’s true that Hollywood in its prime made a lot of genre pictures — Westerns, Weepies, Noir thrillers, War stories — but except for serials and stuff like the Road pictures, most of their product was bespoke. Would we regard the best of them with such abiding affection if there had been a “Gone with the Wind 2,” “Casablanca 3,” “Lawrence of Arabia 5?” Not bloody likely.
Today, however, almost every big budget film is predicated on a continuing stream of revenue from sequels, spin-offs, merchandise. It is only the oddballs — indie, out of the way moviemakers whose films never play the multiplex, the independent cable channels and streaming services, the small presses, the insurrectionist pols — who show signs of life, who understand that, if you hope to produce something that’s one of a kind, there’s a box you need to think outside of. The rest is reruns from the assembly line, the walking dead.