Scorsese and “New Hollywood” Part 2

Martin Scorsese's longing for the auteur-driven Hollywood culture which birthed his career is, as I wrote yesterday, naïve and anachronistic. But it isn't wrong. Because the conditions which assassinated New Hollywood around 1982, currently exist again. Only this time, it'll be much, much harder to dislodge them, for two reasons. And Scorsese's abhorred Marvel Comics movies, which caused the current controversy, are only part of one reason.

I stand behind my statement that franchise spectaculars like Star Wars provided a necessary countervailing force to New Hollywood's somber introspection, while also bankrolling more esoteric fare. Initially. But it didn't take long for the economic weight of these movies to change the companies that owned them. George Lucas hadn't finished his first trilogy before abandoning his planned story and turning Return of the Jedi into a toy commercial.

However, this rapid descent of the blockbuster ethos into silliness corresponded with the first reason it’ll be hard to fix. Under the Reagan Administration, the deregulation of Hollywood meant studios were merging, while also buying controlling interests in the distribution networks and cinema chains which got their products in front of eyeballs. Dying of ennui in 1974, by 1984 the studios were flush with cash, and began using it to consolidate their market angle.

Today the big-screen market has few controls: studios own each other, their distributors, the cinemas, and now streaming services. Disney, which Michael Eisner famously saved from extinction in the early 1980s, has become a monolith, controlling Lucasfilm, Marvel, and now Fox. Amazon, once a pinch point in distribution, has become a studio in its own right. A few corporations so thoroughly control the supply end of the curve that, in essence, the entertainment market isn’t free.

This hasn’t been magic for the studios. The apotheosis of vertical integration happened with Roland Emmerich’s 1998 Godzilla remake, which opened on an estimated one-quarter of America’s cinema screens, and still died. The pattern has repeated recently, with Universal Studios’ planned Dark Universe dying in its cradle, and the DC Extended Universe apparently following suit. Though pitching to the middle is supposedly lucrative, audiences are provisionally leery.

But, as Scorsese notes, Marvel movies remain a cash cow. They’ve forestalled the terminal malaise that doomed other series, like Jason Bourne or Pirates of the Caribbean. Audiences still love them, which is the second reason studios have little motivation to abandon the blockbuster model. If, as I stated yesterday, audiences embraced blockbusters because New Hollywood became too repetitive, I can’t explain why this problem dooms some franchises, but not others.

Though the standard model holds that audience preferences drive the industry, that isn’t always so. People are naturally drawn to what’s already familiar, and resist the truly innovative. Movies now regarded as classics, from Citizen Kane and Night of the Hunter to The Big Lebowski and The Shawshank Redemption, initially died at the box office, because audiences found them too different. Risky movies often become successful only in retrospect.

So, between the entertainment industry’s monopoly practices, and audiences’ love for the familiar, there’s little motivation for studio bean-counters to approve anything too innovative. Studios once provided homes to executives like Alan Ladd, Jr., whose gut instinct on unproven properties like Star Wars proved insightful. Today, their decisions are controlled by algorithms which test whether proposed new properties sufficiently resemble what’s been successful in the past.

And because the studios also overwhelmingly own the distributors, they have manifest disincentive to permit smaller, independent producers to get into the business. Occasional upstarts like Blumhouse Productions occasionally break into the distribution business, giving self-financed filmmakers glimmers of false hope; but overall, without a contract with the majors, don’t expect your film to ever particularly go anywhere.

So, combining what I said yesterday with what I’ve written here, where does this leave us? Martin Scorsese’s naïve yearning for New Hollywood is a non-starter, because audiences don’t want that, and the film studios have become too consolidated to do something risky. Industry thinking has become very short-term. But the success of Marvel movies notwithstanding, box office receipts suggest “blockbuster fatigue”; even Star Wars is showing diminishing returns.

Conditions exist for something new to emerge. It probably won’t resemble either New Hollywood, with its self-consciously artsy flavor, or the blockbuster era, dependent on low-risk franchises. Because the five major studios have a stranglehold on the industry, it’ll take some executive willing to defy algorithms and accountants… which is rare currently. Maybe Scorsese can find and cultivate such an executive. Maybe we’re ready.