San Diego Comic-Con is over for another year, and as usual, the name was something of a misnomer — this convention is all about the movies, and the major studios certainly came out swinging.
Now that the smoke from the weekend has cleared, a disturbing trend has emerged — or perhaps reached its nadir. 2015 is going to be the year of franchise; with all of these sequels and big-budget adaptations due to arrive in that 12 month period:
Alvin And The Chipmunks 4
Ant Man
Assassin's Creed
Avengers: Age Of Ultron
Fantastic Four
Finding Dory
Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2
Independence Day 2
Inferno (Da Vinci Code sequel)
James Bond 24
Jurassic Park IV
Kung Fu Panda 3
Pirates Of The Caribbean 5
Smurfs 3
Star Wars Episode VII
Superman/Batman
Terminator
Warcraft
That's 18 films based on existing properties — almost one a fortnight, if spread out over a full year, although many of them will be released in the same season. 18 films based on stuff you've seen before.
So what does this mean? Well, first off, it means you're going to want to see these films within the first couple weekends of their release. There simply won't be enough screens going around for films like Star Wars Episode VII, Jurassic Park IV, James Bond 24 and Superman/Batman to screen for the length of time you'd expect from 'tentpole' flicks of their ilk. (This is fine with the studios, of course, who have long directed their promotional efforts towards opening weekend and would prefer to recoup their money sooner rather than later.)
This is especially true when you consider that every film on the above list — with the possible exception of Inferno — will be released in 3D, and fighting for space on a limited number of 3D screens.
You can already see this trend taking effect with a film like Man Of Steel, a box office smash that's already winding down its theatrical run despite being released less than a month ago in Australia — now imagine it trying to compete with four or five other films in its weight class, instead of, say, Pacific Rim.
On that note, Pacific Rim is exactly the sort of movie there won't be any room for in 2015 — an 'original' idea unrelated to an established property. You can make Neon Genesis Evangelion and Transformers comparisons all you want, but the crucial thing is that the film didn't have the branding of either of those franchises behind it, and therefore didn't have a built-in audience (a fact its relatively disappointing box office take has made plain).
You don't need to look far to find other examples — two big-budget Ryan Reynolds films (RIPD and Turbo), neither of them based on established properties, bombed at the US box office last weekend. Lone Ranger, based on a property that no moviegoer under 50 could be expected to have any memory of, was another high-profile dud.
If that's happening now, when films like Grown Ups 2 and Despicable Me 2 are topping the box office, why would any sane studio even bother to take a chance with an unknown property in 2015? That's not necessarily a bad thing if it discourages studios from filing off the serial numbers and making big-budget rip-offs of successful franchises (looking at you again here, Pacific Rim and RIPD), but it absolutely is a bad thing if it discourages genuine creativity.
Steven Spielberg, the man largely responsible for the prevelance of the modern blockbuster, recently predicted that Hollywood's addiction to franchises would lead to a change in the paradigm. "There's going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen mega-budgeted movies go crashing into the ground," he said in June, "and that's going to change the paradigm again."
If that paradigm change is going to happen, it's clear from the above release schedule that it's not going to happen for at least three years. Even then, it's unlikely to lead to a resurgence of smaller dramas and comedies in cinemas — both Spielberg and George Lucas believe consumers will watch more content at home (Spielberg's Lincoln, for instance, was almost relegated to HBO), limiting the films that actually get theatrical releases to big-budget, surefire hits.
"You're going to end up with fewer theatres, bigger theatres with a lot of nice things," Lucas said. "Going to the movies will cost 50 bucks or 100 or 150 bucks — like what Broadway costs today, or a football game."
A few days after Lucas' prediction, a $50 World War Z mega ticket was announced, making him look downright prophetic — although Warner Bros president of domestic distribution Dan Fellman wasn't convinced. "You have so many movies that are sleepers that open to huge numbers," he said. "What [are theatres] going to do, change the price in the middle of the day?"
The obvious counter to Fellman's point is that there will be fewer and fewer sleeper hits in the post-2015 landscape. That audiences and studios have made their bed with the blockbusters, and now they need to sleep in it.
Or maybe this is a lot of handwringing over nothing. Good films, great films, will always find an audience — it's just going to be tougher than ever to do it in theatres.
