Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies

Warren Buckland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135895730
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Film theory no longer gets top billing or plays a starring role in film studies today, as critics proclaim that theory is dead and we are living in a post-theory moment. While theory may be out of the limelight, it remains an essential key to understanding the full complexity of cinema, one that should not be so easily discounted or discarded.

In this volume, contributors explore recent popular movies through the lens of film theory, beginning with industrial-economic analysis before moving into a predominately aesthetic and interpretive framework. The Hollywood films discussed cover a wide range from 300 to Fifty First Dates, from Brokeback Mountain to Lord of the Rings, from Spider-Man 3 to Fahrenheit 9/11, from Saw to Raiders of the Lost Ark, and much more. Individual essays consider such topics as the rules that govern new blockbuster franchises, the 'posthumanist realism' of digital cinema, video game adaptations, increasingly restricted stylistic norms, the spatial stories of social networks like YouTube, the mainstreaming of queer culture, and the cognitive paradox behind enjoyable viewing of traumatic events onscreen.

With its cast of international film scholars, Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies demonstrates the remarkable contributions theory can offer to film studies and moviegoers alike.

part one
new practices, new aesthetics

one
new hollywood, new millennium

thomas schatz

This essay is a sequel of sorts to “The New Hollywood,” which first appeared in Film Theory Goes to the Movies, a lively collection published in 1993 that was intended, as the title exhorts, to bring film scholarship within shouting distance of contemporary Hollywood films and filmmaking. That volume was well received and helped fuel the growing interest in media industry studies, which gauges the complex interplay between media production (and media products) and the myriad forces that both shape and, in rare cases, are shaped by that production. My own work has continued along these lines, focusing mainly on the film industry in the late 1980s and 1990s as the New Hollywood steadily morphed into Conglomerate Hollywood. The focus here is on the film industry in the early 2000s, a period that in my view has proved to be quite distinctive, due particularly to the combined impact of conglomeration, globalization, and digitization—a veritable triumvirate of macro-industrial forces whose effects seem to intensify with each passing year.

It remains to be seen whether the early 2000s qualify as a distinct historical period—“millennial Hollywood,” if you will—but even without the benefit of greater historical distance we can distinguish significant changes in the contours and overall configuration of the industry. Consider this brief inventory of industry developments during the past decade that mark either key advances over or distinct departures from the New Hollywood of the 1990s:

• the culmination of an epochal merger-and-acquisition wave and the consolidation of U.S. media industry control in the hands of a half-dozen global media superpowers;
• the related integration of the U.S. film,TV, and home entertainment industries into a far more coherent system than had ever existed before;
• the enormous success of DVD, both as a source of revenues for the studios (and their parent conglomerates) and also as a transformative technology for the home entertainment industry generally;
• the surging global film and TV markets, which have proved to be as susceptible to Hollywood-produced entertainment as the domestic media markets;
• the emergence of a new breed of blockbuster-driven franchises specifically geared to the global, digital, conglomerate-controlled marketplace, which spawn billion-dollar film series installments while also serving the interests of the parent conglomerate’s other media-and-entertainment divisions;
• the annexation of the “indie film movement” by the media conglomerates, providing a safe haven for a privileged cadre of filmmakers while leaving the truly independent film business in increasingly desperate financial straits;
• the rapid development of three distinct film industry sectors dominated by three different classes of producers—the traditional major studios, the conglomerate-owned indie divisions, and the genuine independents—which generate three very different classes of movie product.

The transformative effects of these and other industry forces have grown steadily more acute, reaching an apparent culmination in 2007—or so it seems from the vantage point of this writing in mid 2008. Here again, only time and a broader perspective will tell us whether the past year was indeed a pinnacle of sorts, perhaps even a watershed, or simply another step in the industry’s inexorable post-millennial transformation. In any event, Hollywood saw a remarkable number of singular developments and definitive events in 2007. These included record box-office revenues in both the U.S. and the worldwide marketplace, propelled by a run of franchise blockbusters like Spider-Man 3, Shrek the Third, and Transformers that cleared a billion dollars within a year of release, setting a new benchmark for the major studios commercially.¹ Their affiliated “indie divisions” garnered all the critical praise with hits like No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, resulting in an unprecedented drubbing of the majors in the post-season Oscar ceremony. Meanwhile the scores of genuinely independent producer-distributors, which released well over half of all theatrical films in the U.S., suffered their worst year ever both commercially and critically, as the independent sector threatened to implode. Thus 2007 was positively Dickensian in its best-of-times/worst-of-times polarity, underscoring the fact that the story of modern Hollywood is a tale of two industries, and that conglomerate ownership has become the deciding factor in a studio’s prospect for survival, let alone success. Indeed, while conglomeration has been the structural imperative of the movie industry for the past two decades, not until the early 2000s did it fully coalesce—with enormous consequences not only Hollywood but for the U.S. media industry at large.

conglomerate hollywood in the new millennium

The most salient development in contemporary Hollywood has been the formation of the so-called Big Six media conglomerates and their hegemony over the American film (and TV) industry (Epstein; Schatz, “Conglomerate Hollywood”). This modern conglomerate era crystallized in the mid-1980s when News Corp purchased 20^th Century Fox and launched Fox-TV, and it culminated with the 2003 buyout of Universal Pictures by General Electric (GE) and subsequent creation of NBC Universal. At that point a cartel of global media giants—Time Warner, Disney, News Corp, Sony, Viacom, and GE—owned all six of the major film studios, all four of the U.S. broadcast TV networks, and the vast majority of the top cable networks, along with myriad other media and entertainment holdings including print publishing, music, computer games, consumer electronics, theme parks, and resorts. Conglomerate control of Hollywood is exercised primarily via ownership of the traditional major studios—i.e., Warner Bros., Disney, Universal, 20^th Century Fox, Columbia (Sony), and Paramount (Viacom)—and in fact the term Big Six is used in the trade press to refer to both the major studios and their parent companies. The studios are situated within the conglomerates’ “filmed entertainment” divisions, which produce content for both the movie and TV industries, and operate in close cooperation with the “home entertainment” divisions, which play a vital role in film industry fortunes due to the impact of DVD on the home-video industry.

Key to the conglomerates’ hegemony and their financial welfare in the early 2000s has been the strategic integration of their film and TV operations in the U.S., by far the world’s richest and most robust media market, as well as their collective domination of the global movie marketplace. In terms of their U.S. film and TV holdings, consider the figures in Table 1.1 from Advertising Age’s annual report on the 100 leading media companies in 2006.

Table 1.1 2006 Net U.S. media revenue (all figures in $ billions)

While movie-related revenues represent a relatively modest portion of the conglomerates’ overall U.S. media income, it’s important to note that the studios’ worldwide movie-related income in 2006 (according to the Motion Picture Association) was $42.6 billion (Hollinger). This indicates well the significance of overseas markets for Hollywood films, as well as the explosive growth of the foreign and home-video markets in the early 2000s. While domestic box-office revenues remained fairly steady from 2002 to 2007 at $9 billion to $10 billion per year (roughly twice the 1990 total), foreign box office steadily climbed from $9 billion to $18 billion. That growth is expected to continue due to the economic development of foreign markets as well as the studios’ coordination of domestic and international release—an effort that has been greatly facilitated by the fact that both the U.S. and overseas markets are fundamentally hit-driven, and are driven by the same studio-produced blockbusters. From 2002 to 2007, Hollywood’s top ten releases averaged an astounding 25.6 percent market share domestically and a 25.5 percent market share worldwide. During the same period, the top 25 box-office hits captured 45 percent of the domestic market and 41.2 percent of the market worldwide, grossing $9 billion to $10 billion per year.

Meanwhile the home-video sector grew at an even faster pace due to the impact of DVD, which was introduced as a movie-delivery system in 1997 and enjoyed the most rapid “diffusion of innovation” in the history of technology (Taylor; Sebok). The main reasons for the success of this new digital format were, first, the unprecedented alliance between the Hollywood film industry and two adjacent industries, personal computers and consumer electronics; and second, the decision to abandon the VHS-era rental model in favor of a conglomerate-controlled “sell-through” strategy that returned a far greater portion of home-video revenues to the studios. In 2002, home-video revenues reached a record $20.3 billion, with DVD surpassing VHS for the first time ever and sell-through surpassing rental (Hettrick). The surging home-video industry reached $24 billion in 2004 and since then has leveled off in the $23–24 billion range, with the major studio-distributors consistently capturing the lion’s share of that market in sell-through DVDs. In 2006, fully 45 percent of the studios’ $42.6 billion in worldwide revenues mentioned above came from home video, and even top hits were routinely generating more revenue in DVD than in the domestic or foreign theatrical markets (Hollinger). This was most pronounced with CG effects-laden blockbusters like Transformers and 300, huge box-office hits that saw even greater returns on DVD than in either the domestic or foreign theatrical market. Another interesting trend involves idiomatic hit comedies like Wild Hogs, Knocked Up, Superbad, and Hairspray that do not “travel well” in terms of foreign box office but did extremely well on DVD.

Most of the studios’ DVD income is generated by current releases, although another crucial (and largely unanticipated) revenue source involved classic films and popular TV series, compelling the studios to make their entire libraries available on DVD. During the earlier VHS era, Disney was the only studio to exploit the extended shelf-life of its classic films. Indeed, Disney’s climb from struggling mini-major to industry power in the 1980s was based primarily on the savvy repackaging of its library for home-video sale. The other studios followed suit in the DVD era, although Disney remains far ahead of the pack in the home entertainment market generally, including its revamped “straight-to-video” strategy. In 2007, the top 100 DVD releases included reissues of Peter Pan (1954) and The Jungle Book (1967), along with new direct-to-DVD films extending its classic Cinderella franchise and its recently launched High School Musical franchise, which has been a huge hit on both the Disney Channel and on DVD. The DVD revenues for these four Disney releases alone totaled $312 million.

The substantial returns from their TV and DVD pipelines have induced the studios to treat theatrical release as a “loss leader” in the commercial life span of their movies. In other words, Hollywood’s major producer-distributors have developed a deficit-financing strategy whereby movies are expected to operate at a loss during theatrical release, ultimately recovering their production and marketing costs and turning a profit in the subsequent TV and home-video markets—and via the parent company’s other media divisions as well, from books and records to videogames and theme park rides. The reasons for this deficit-financing strategy are altogether obvious. First, a movie’s theatrical release and massive ad campaign establish its value in all other media markets. Second, TV licensing and DVD are far more profitable because the production and marketing costs—which ranged from $75 million to a quarter-billion dollars per film (more on this below)—are largely if not completely absorbed via theatrical revenues. Third, on a more abstract level, this strategy discourages competition, since film producers outside the conglomerate realm lack the financial leverage and ensured access to the marketplace enjoyed by the studios.

This deficit-financing strategy was facilitated by the conglomerates’ broadcast and cable TV “pipelines”—for all but Sony, that is, which has been an outlier among the Big Six in its lack of significant TV holdings. This is not to say that the other five are structurally alike, and in fact each conglomerate’s media-and-entertainment holdings outside the film and TV arena differ significantly. But the other five conglomerates do have similar profiles within the film-TV sector—including Time Warner, whose lack of a U.S. broadcast TV network is offset by its massive Turner Broadcasting division (whose acquisition was announced in 1995 within weeks of Disney’s purchase of ABC), and also its development of HBO into the leading pay-cable network. TW has also kept pace with the other conglomerates in TV series production and distribution, another area in which Sony has lagged behind.

While the other conglomerates were acquiring media outlets, Sony has developed a very different strategy of media integration focusing on hardware-software synergy—i.e., on the coordination of its massive consumer electronics operation with U.S.-based content suppliers like CBS Records and Columbia Pictures. Sony has pursued this strategy not only in its filmed entertainment and consumer electronics divisions, but in its “computer entertainment” division as well. Sony is light years ahead of the other media conglomerates in the manufacture and sale of interactive games and game consoles, and it involves its three major divisions—Sony Pictures Entertainment, Sony Electronics, and Sony Computer Entertainment—in the development of entertainment franchises. Sony has tentatively pursued pipeline opportunities in recent years, most notably in a 2004 partnership with Comcast to acquire MGM/UA (Sorkin). This allied Sony with the top U.S. cable TV company (and a leading Internet service provider as well), while augmenting its film library and providing access to several dormant franchises—including James Bond, resulting in one of Columbia’s top hits in 2006, Casino Royale. But Sony’s overriding strategy continues to be the pursuit of hardware-software synergies, best evidenced by its 2007 introduction of Blu-ray, a high-definition (HD) DVD technology that Sony owns and controls, and that it hopes to establish as the worldwide standard for the “next generation” home video system (Hall; Fritz). In bucking the cooperative spirit of DVD’s initial launch in 1997, Sony was willing to risk the kind of format war (with arch-rival Toshiba) that plagued the VCR’s introduction in the late 1970s—a war that Sony lost. Sony seems to have prevailed, although it remains to be seen whether hi-def DVD displaces the current system. If and when that occurs, Sony’s control of home video technology—and the license fees it collects for all discs and players sold—will help offset its lack of TV pipelines and will bring this perennial outlier into a closer rapport with the other media conglomerates.

hollywood filmmaking in the new millennium

Despite its outlier status and singular integration strategy, Sony’s operations within the feature filmmaking realm have been quite consistent with the rest of the Big Six. Indeed, a key development in the new millennium has been the increasing uniformity of the conglomerates’ filmmaking operations, particularly in terms of the major studios’ intensified blockbuster efforts and the annexation of the independent film sector by the conglomerate’s so-called indie divisions. The former is in many ways more important due to the sheer commercial success of the movie-driven global entertainment franchises. With each passing year since the late 1990s the studios’ compulsive pursuit of franchise-spawning blockbusters has become more acute—and more successful—as the film industry at large has become more blatantly hit-driven on a global scale, and more intently focused on the coordination of the domestic, foreign, and home-entertainment markets. Meanwhile, the industry powers responded to the surging independent film movement of the 1990s by strategically expanding their own filmmaking operations in that arena, either by acquiring successful independents or launching subsidiaries geared to art films, imports, and other “specialty” productions.

Consequently Hollywood filmmaking by the early 2000s was increasingly geared to three distinct industry sectors wherein three different classes of film producer were creating three very different classes of product. The top tier, so to speak, comprises Hollywood’s six traditional major studios—Warner Bros., Disney, Paramount, 20^th Century Fox, Universal, and Columbia—whose filmmaking operations are closely tied to (and determined by) the structure and strategies of the parent conglomerate. The prime objective of these studios is the production of franchise-spawning blockbusters budgeted in the $100–$250 million range that are targeted at the global entertainment marketplace and are designed to operate synergistically with the parent company’s other entertainment-related divisions. The next tier includes the conglomerate-owned film subsidiaries—the indie and specialty divisions like Fox Searchlight, Focus Features, and Sony Pictures Classics that produce more modestly budgeted films in the $30 million to $50 million range for more specialized and discriminating audiences. The bottom tier includes the truly independent producer-distributors, literally hundreds of companies that supply over half of all theatrical releases, usually budgeted in the $5 million to $10 million range (often far less), and that compete for a pitifully small share of the motion picture marketplace, due largely to the proliferation of the conglomerate-owned film subsidiaries.

To get a sense of the impact of these indie subsidiaries on contemporary independent American film, consider the transformation—and fundamental segregation—of that industry sector over the past decade (as gleaned from data provided by the MPA and Nash Information Services). In 1995, the six major...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• illustrations
• acknowledgments
• introduction
• part one: new practices, new aesthetics
• part two: feminism, philosophy, and queer theory
• part three: rethinking affects, narration, fantasy, and realism
• contributors