When people were giving their predictions for how the Summer 2023 box office race would go, I don’t think that many had this scenario playing out on their radar.  Warner Brothers’ Barbie and Universal Studios’ Oppenheimer not only beat expectations, they together combined to produce the one of the biggest theatrical weekends ever upon their openings in mid July.  And not only did they both start strong, they have shown strong legs at the box office week after week.  As of this writing, Barbie should have grossed by now over $600 million domestically and $1.3 billion worldwide, while Oppenheimer stands at a not to shabby $300 million domestic and $800 million worldwide.  That’s exceptional for both films, but it is confounding the whole industry, because these were not the kinds of movies that should be putting up these kinds of numbers.  For the last decade, brands like Marvel, Star Wars, Fast and the Furious and Transformers have been the ones that have populated the billion dollar club.  But, in a year where those same franchise have submitted their own entries into this year’s box office race, it’s these two unlikely films that have managed to dominate.  It’s just such an unexpected outcome, and it’s making executives and analysts re-consider if all of their box office data from the last decade is all wrong.  You’ve got a meta feminist satirical comedy centered around a toy doll and a three hour long, talky biopic about the inventor of the atomic bomb, and they are performing better at the box office than Indiana Jones, Mission: Impossible and Fast and the Furious; and not just by a little, by a lot.  There are so many factors that went into the phenomenon that is “Barbenheimer,” but the whole outcome is also revelatory of all of the continuing problems that are plaguing Hollywood today, and that the success of the two movies are shining a spotlight on what needs fixing to help bring the box office back to where it should be.

It helps to know how the whole “Barbenheimer” thing got started in the first place.  Both Barbie and Oppenheimer were set for Summer 2023 releases, but people took notice when the individual studios behind the movies planted their flag on the same exact date; July 21, 2023.  The disparity between the titles couldn’t be more night and day.  Barbie was awash in bright colors and it’s sense of humor was broad and cartoonish.  Oppenheimer by contrast was muted and heavy and very serious in tone.  People on social media began to poke fun at the yin and yang differences between the two films, making bets on which one will give up their post on the release date first.  To a lot of people’s surprise, neither film budged, which led a lot of box office analysts to believe that this kind of counter-programming would end up canceling both films out.  That’s why advance box office predictions for both films remained on the low end for much of the summer.  But social media wasn’t overlooking the two films.  If anything, there was anticipation rising.  Suddenly, there were two rival camps rising up in internet circles representing Team Barbie or Team Oppenheimer.  The speculation about who was going to be the champion of this opening weekend began to grow into something viral.  Memes were shared, slogans were prepared.  And then the viral movement evolved into something different entirely.  The different factions decided that they were going to join forces and turn the opening of both films into an event of it’s own.  No longer were people rooting for one film over the other, but instead they were going to support both films together.  There was a healthy chunk of people who were even committed to watching both movies back to back in one night.  Once opening weekend approached, the studios were shocked to see that their modest predictions for these two movies were going to be completely blown up.

What became known as Barbenheimer was a completely grass-roots effort that blossomed at just the right moment.  Neither Warner Brothers nor Universal had a hand in creating this phenomenon in their marketing.  Their best decision was to not get involved at all; allowing the grass roots movement of Barbenheimer to flourish on it’s own.  They of course were the big beneficiaries of all of this, achieving record breaking box office as a result, which was especially needed for Warner Brothers who have otherwise had a terrible year at the box office.  But, the fact that the grass roots effort culminated in such a success for the two films is something that absolutely should challenge the common wisdom that the industry has relied upon for quite a long while now.  Coming out of the pandemic, Hollywood has been struggling to figure out how to bring audiences back to the theaters in the same kind of numbers that they did before the outbreak.  Unfortunately, a lot of the executives believed that business would return to normal like it had been before and that the same kind of movies released in the past decade would be the ones to save the box office.  This was true with a handful of cases (Spider-Man: No Way Home, Avatar: The Way of Water), but the overall box office performances for many films were just not reaching the levels they had in the past.  What seems to have lit the fire of “Barbenheimer” was a feeling amongst audiences that they wanted something that was worth rushing out to the theater for; something that couldn’t be replicated in home viewing.  So, in the absence of such an event at the box office, audiences instead created one itself.  The peculiarity of the Barbie and Oppenheimer counter-programming made it something that audiences had to see for themselves, and that’s why the opening weekend of those movies ended up being so huge.  Hollywood had been denying audiences a worthwhile experience, so something had to fill that void and that’s why the phenomenon happened.  This makes “Barbenheimer” such a game changer because it’s the clearest example yet of an audience driven statement for the rest of the industry.

To the individual films’ credit, they managed to hold onto those audiences beyond the opening weekend.  The two films are both critically acclaimed and beloved by fans, so even though a meme generated online movement worked to inflate opening weekend  numbers, it was thankfully for two films that were strong enough to maintain those captured audiences.  I’ve already talked about Oppenheimer in my review here but it’s still pretty incredible to see it have the box office stamina that it has.  It’s been a while since a three hour film that was not part of a franchise and is a historical drama has made this kind of money at the box office.  You’d have to go back decades to find any movie that had the kind of box office performance that it has had.  It is a Christopher Nolan film to be sure, but Oppenheimer is the least action packed movie that the director has ever made.  It’s a film that builds tension to be sure, but it still sticks to the kind of genre trappings that historical biopics usually have, which is a lot of talking in small rooms.  And yet, it’s performing even better than Nolan’s more bombastic films.  It helps that it’s clutched to the coattails of Barbie by virtue of it being counter-programming.  There was little doubt that PG-13 rated Barbie would have the bigger box office, but given the resulting numbers that came in, it seemed like Barbie also was boosted by Oppenheimer’s presence and vice versa.  Barbie itself is definitely not the kind of movie that should have this result at the box office either.  Director Greta Gerwig is not a filmmaker you would associate with billion dollar movies.  Her first two films, Lady Bird (2017) and Little Women (2019) did pretty well at the box office, with Little Women getting an awards season boost to a $108 million gross.  Even still, Warner Brothers was gambling giving this possible franchise builder to a filmmaker with just indie cred.  But, Gerwig’s outsider sensibilities gave Barbie exactly what it needed to stand out.  By tackling some meaty issues like feminism and social hierarchies within this film centered around an iconic brand, Greta made a movie that transcended it’s name brand and appealed to audiences through it’s unique voice.  For both Barbie and Oppenheimer to succeed like they are, it’s making a huge statement for films that are distinctly filmmaker driven.

Which gets to how the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon is exposing some of the problems that have plagued the movie studios recently.  The fact that two filmmaker driven films are dominating the box office puts the pressure on the studios who are currently at odds with their talent as both the writers and actors continue their ongoing strike.  Sure, the box office numbers are good now, but with the strike continuing to put a halt on all productions, there’s not much the studios can do to capitalize on the success of these movies.  Both Christopher Nolan and Greta Gerwig, who are members of the Writer’s Guild of America, are on those picket lines too, refusing work in solidarity with their fellow creatives.  As a result, neither them nor the studios can strike while the iron is hot with this “Barbenheimer” moment.  Certainly Christopher Nolan and Greta Gerwig can survive on the strength of their names alone and they’ll be highly coveted creatives once the strike is over.  But they know that it’s more important to stand with the rest of their communities and not put any work yet into their next projects, which puts all the pressure on their studios.  They are collecting the strong box office now, but it’s the long term success that they are jeopardizing by refusing to give the unions what they want.  And “Barbenheimer” marks a strong transition point in the industry, where audiences are making it known that they’d like more movies like these two instead of the movies that Hollywood thought that audiences wanted.  So, with the inability to pivot because all of their talent is on strike, the studios are slowly realizing that they are letting a prime opportunity slip away, and that it is something that they can’t get back unless they swallow their pride and meet the demands of the writers and directors.  Barbie and Oppenheimer are showing the industry the powerful box office effect of movies succeeding because of the clear sighted visions of their filmmakers, and that audiences want films that are unique within their own voice.

One of the other things that “Barbenheimer” has shined a light on is the growing sense of franchise fatigue that is setting in amongst audiences.  People for a long time have been complaining that Hollywood is out of ideas and that they are over reliant on franchise power to drive box office.  That feeling of fatigue is now starting to set in for the vast majority of film goers now, as the Summer of 2023 has been littered with one disappointment after another.  Mainstays like Indiana Jones, Mission: Impossible, Fast and the Furious, and even mighty Marvel all saw diminished box office despite a huge amount of hype leading into this Summer season.  In the the last decade, these franchises were all sure fire winners, and for a lot of people it looked they were going to perform on par with their averages.  With Covid now in the rear-view mirror, and no restrictions in place to affect ticket sales, this should have been a record-setting Summer.  But it never materialized; at least not as predicted.  Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 did about as well as expected, but didn’t over perform.  Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Fast X, and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One would have had decent box office numbers if their astronomical budgets weren’t so high.  And the less said about The Flash, the better.  Audiences made their voices clear; they just weren’t interested in these old franchises anymore.  That’s why Barbie and Oppenheimer stood out so much; they were refreshingly new; not bound by deep lore or multi-year cinematic universes, just easy to digest singular stories told very well.  This is another reason why the ongoing stalemate with the studios and the unions is going to make things difficult for the future of Hollywood.  What has been working in the past no longer applies.  There is an appetite now for new things and the ability to coast on franchise power is waning.

At the same time, it should be understood by everyone in Hollywood; you can’t manufacture a phenomenon like “Barbenheimer.”  This thing grew up in spite of the goings on within the industry, built completely by the fans themselves.  There certainly have been attempts to campaign for a film with viral marketing, but “Barbenheimer” wasn’t manufactured out of some publicity department.  It started as a joke, and the fact that it grew into the movement that it became was more of an organic reaction to all of the things I discussed above.  These movies became a success because audiences chose to make them a success.  They wanted an event to get them excited, and to everyone’s delight what started off as a silly internet game became a moment where we actually appreciated the theatrical experience again.  That’s probably what is at the heart of Hollywood’s troubles; they’ve lost the ability to make movies feel special.  The over abundance of franchises diluted what had made the original movies special in the first place.  The diversity of films has also diminished, as the market is now flooded with super hero films and explosive action movies (the ones that produce a big opening weekend) while other genres like romance and comedy have been exiled to streaming.   Gone are the days when something unbound to a known franchise name like Forrest Gump (1994) or There’s Something About Mary (1998) could open strong and then just stick around week after week for a full season.  Barbie and Oppenheimer are anomalies to be sure in this landscape, but they are not unusual in the whole history of Hollywood.  In the Golden Days of the industry, movies were events that people used to line up around the corner for.  The early days of Star Wars saw people dressing up as their favorite characters as a way of participating in magic of the event itself.  Is that any different from all the people wearing pink to the multiplex when they are seeing Barbie?  “Barbenheimer” is filling a void, and Hollywood needs to reconcile with why that void exists in the first place.

I knew this thing was going to be something big the moment that I saw someone wear a custom made Barbie and Oppenheimer T-Shirt to the screening of Barbie that I was attending; featuring both movie posters cut right down the middle like one of those custom divided loyalty jerseys you see at sports games.  That’s a level of commitment to a movement that I realized was much more powerful than the silly internet game that it started as.  “Barbenheimer” was a real deal moment that people just had to be there for.  And remarkably, it continued on through the rest of the summer and has not dissipated yet.  This is the magical element that the movie theater experience has lost not just through the Covid years, but over the last decade as well.  The ability to make the movies feel like a communal experience worth having again.  I felt like I was missing out on opening night being one of only a handful in the theater not wearing pink for Barbie.  Sure, there was going to be a flash in the pan outcome once both films made it to theaters because of all the viral excitement that was built up, but the fact that the movies turned out to both be very good and re-watchable shows that it is important for the theatrical ecosystem to have unique, creative movies with their own voice be integral to the future plans of Hollywood.  Which means, Hollywood needs to treat their talent with respect, because filmmakers and actors who are fairly compensated will be better able to repeat this kind of success in the future.  And it shows that nothing beats the movie going experience when it’s something worthwhile to see.  Even with this strike still lagging on, it’s important to support your local theater, as they are also affected by the on-going strike and they need us the audience to continue returning.  “Barbenheimer” was a godsend for theaters everywhere, and it’s up to us to convince Hollywood that we want them to make movies special again, and not just an endless stream of product.  Barbie and Oppenheimer showed that one film didn’t have to stand out as special amongst the rest, but in fact any film big and small could flourish together and lift up the theatrical experience as a whole.  These two were an odd pair, but audiences found that opposites do attract and that by giving both of them our love it helped change the movies for the better.

As a society, we the audience have been overwhelmed with an abundance of entertainment over the last few years.  The streaming revolution of the 2010’s began a flurry of investment in new tv shows and movies on a scale unseen before.  While it was fortuitous for us the consumers, who were witnessing what we saw as a Golden Age of Television and a mega-blockbuster period at the box office, all of this unfortunately came at a cost.  The talent behind these shows were working doubly hard to meet the high demand of the new order of things in Hollywood, with streaming becoming the newest platform for distribution, but they were doing so under an outdated compensation standard.  Contracts for all the actors, writers and directors over the last decade have been made under the standard that was set after the 2007-08 Writers’ Strike, which had an ill-defined definition of what streaming content would be.  Back in 2007, YouTube was still in it’s infancy and Netflix was still sending out disc rentals in the mail.  What we know now as streaming wasn’t even on Hollywood’s radar at the time, so the deal made to end the writers strike in 2008 was based on the idea that internet based entertainment was experimental and work done on the platform by Guild talent needed to be compensated differently from the model of residuals for television and home video.  Since then, the streaming platforms, which have grown to become a major part of the Hollywood ecosystem in the 15 years since, have exploited this outdated system of compensation, paying their talent a fraction of what they normally would get through the old residual model for television and yet they were expecting the same talent to work double time to meet the high demand for new content on their platforms.  Of course, the Guild recognize this is a problem and they are now exercising their right to demand a new deal.

The Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) made the first move at the start of this summer, initiating a strike for the first time since the monumental 2007-08 strike.  While the original strike 15 years ago was rough on the industry and ultimately fruitless, this strike has been much differently received, not just within the Hollywood community but on the national stage as well.  The vote to authorize this strike was approved by near unanimous consent in a vote by both wings of the Guild, and without an eleventh hour deal struck by May 1st of this year, the strike would proceed with all members stopping work.  Now, the immediate effect may not have been felt too far and wide in the industry, at least to the outside consumer.  Movie deals made before the strike would continue.  Movie premieres would go on as scheduled.  The only noticeable immediate effect was the abrupt halt on production of daily and weekly talk shows on television (your Jimmy Kimmels, your Steven Colberts, you Drew Barrymores, your Saturday Night Live’s, etc.)  But, the longer the strike runs, the more projects in the pipeline for the studios dries up, and at this point, it becomes a waiting game to see who feels the pinch first; the writers or the studios.  Thankfully for the WGA, the widespread support from across the industry has been tremendous.  One thing that the WGA has this time around that they didn’t in the last strike was the backing of not just the other Hollywood Guilds, but also the Teamsters and IATSE unions that provide the crews for so many productions in the industry.  These incredibly powerful unions have pledged to not cross any picket lines on productions that have not received a waiver from any of the Hollywood guilds, which helps the WGA union out greatly with putting the pressure on the studios.

The WGA also received another boost this last month as they were joined on the picket lines by The Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA).  The 160,000 member strong guild has comparatively much bigger pull over the industry than the 25,000 in the DGA, and having them marching alongside the writers for the same cause at this crucial time is a big deal.  Hollywood hasn’t seen a double strike like this since 1960, when SAG and the WGA fought to get residual compensation from the then burgeoning industry of television.  Ironically, the SAG strike at that time was led by their then president Ronald Reagan, who in later years would become a notoriously anti-union President of the United States.  This time around, actress Fran Drescher of The Nanny fame is leading the charge against the studios, and her resolve to get a fair deal for her union thus far seems to be genuine and passionate.  One thing that the two unions have done well so far is taking control of the narrative of the strike.  Utilizing social media to spread the message (something that they didn’t quite have to their benefit during the last strike), both the actors and writers have made their case very well to the public at large.  One of the smartest moves has been for the individual members of the guilds to post on their social media pages an image of their most recent residual checks that they receive for their work on some of the biggest shows and movies on streaming, and spotlight just how little they are actually getting paid for their hard work.  This is to counter the typical argument made by the arbiters of the studio side of the negotiations, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), that the Guild members are rich ungrateful prima donnas; essentially millionaires fighting against billionaires.  The idea that this fight is to make the already wealthy even wealthier is absurd, as the vast majority of Guild members would be considered working class, and these social media posts of the residual checks are a great way of showing that they are indeed paid much lower than you would expect.

The AMPTP has tried in vain to paint this strike as a ploy for publicity for the elites, and as a result they have foolishly shown their hand in the game.  Disney CEO Bob Iger made a huge mistake early on in the strike by publicly calling the guild demands unreasonable; a statement that resulted in the Guild becoming even more emboldened.  Another anonymous member of the AMPTP also was exposed by a statement where he or she said that the aim was to see the Writers and Actors loose their homes and Apartments before they would be willing to negotiate.  This rather ruthless statement was probably put out there to strike fear in the other Guilds to prevent them from striking out of concern that it would ruin their careers, but the opposite effect actually occurred; solidarity is stronger than ever.  There is concern about how long each side can endure, however, because the longer that the two side refuse to negotiate, the more it puts pressure on the rest of the movie industry as well as all of the other industries that rely upon them.  Movie theaters, which have been on shaky ground since the end of Covid, were hoping a return to normal business would’ve occurred by now, and instead they are anticipating another round of movie release delays and fewer films to fill their screens.  And there are of course the local economies that depend on having their populations of guild members receiving steady income to help boost their local businesses.  With the two sides at a standstill, it may come down to the state and local governments to intercede to help mediate a fair deal.  The 2007-08 Writers Strike cost the California economy billions of dollars, and that’s something that the government and tax payers across the southland don’t need right now.

So, what is the thing that has caused the stalemate in this season of striking.  The primary sticking point would seem to be the residual part.  Residuals are an extended payments to people who worked on a film or television series based on the re-airings of those programs after their initial release.  If a show like Friends gets to play multiple times in re-runs on a variety of different stations, the cast and crew of that show will get a piece of the profits made from that re-airings, based on the frequency of airings and the percentage that was agreed upon in their contracts.  This was a revolutionary deal made after the 1960, which insured that no actor or writer would lose out on the extra money that was being made off of their work long after it was complete.  This helped to make both acting and writing a lucrative profession that could help support a robust work force in Hollywood with strong living wages.  Then, alone came streaming.  Streaming for the most part has been exempt from the residual standards made after the last deal in the pre-streaming era.  Because the income for streamers is subscription based, the money made is not based on things that had become industry standards before like total viewership and ad revenue.  Instead, the total viewership on streaming has been kept a closely guarded secret, which some believe has been the streamers way of exploiting a residual loophole.  The disparity of what the actors and writers make in residuals versus how the shows are performing is becoming very apparent.  Actress Kimiko Glenn spoke about her experience of overhearing Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos gloating about the high viewership of a show she was on called Orange is the New Black (which according to Sarandos was being watched more than Game of Thrones on HBO) and yet she was not seeing any of that success reflected in her residuals for the show.  From what we are hearing from the Actors and Writers on strike, it is much more the streaming side of the AMPTP that has refused to budge when it comes to the residual side of the contracts, because to meet the Guilds’ demands would be opening themselves up to more transparency on the actual viewership numbers of their programs, which I don’t think they are keen on exposing.

One other troubling aspect is how the studios are abusing the hard work that has been put into these movie and shows in the streaming era.  As stated before, the industry has been operating under contracts made with the Guilds that pre-date the standards of streaming.  As a result, the different studios have been able to undermine Guild guidelines under the definition of this being “new media,” therefore able to be more flexible when it comes to staffing and compensation.  When streaming was more experimental and something of a start-up, this was more acceptable under the standards set by the Guilds, but now that streaming has grown to encompass nearly half of all the theatrical and television markets, upending the previously recognized network and cable package standards, it can no longer be acceptable to call streaming a start-up.  Almost every studio has jumped on board the streaming craze, with Disney, Warner Brothers, Universal, and Paramount all launching their own platforms in the last five years, competing with mega-corporate competitors like Amazon, Netflix and Apple.  Sure, this has led to an insane amount of new movies and shows to watch in that time, but at the same time, the studios are also exploiting the work of their creative talent in order to meet that high demand.  This includes the elimination of extensive writers rooms that helped to deliver quality scripts in a timely manner.  Now, the streamers are favoring what is called “mini-rooms” which is the practice of having big shows made with fewer writers.  If you’ve noticed a lower standard of writing on many streaming shows in recent years, this is a direct result of these small teams of writers being stretched too thin.  In some cases, entire seasons are now being written by a mere handful or even just one writer, which is not helpful in creating a well-balanced show.  But even more troubling for creatives in the industry is that because of streaming being a digital based distribution model, the studios have more control over the lifespan of a film or show put on their platform.  If the movie or show doesn’t perform well, the studio can choose to pull it off the platform completely and collect a tax write off for the loss.  If the media didn’t get a physical copy release to coincide along with their streaming premiere, then that program is just gone, because in order to get that tax write off, the studio cannot profit off of it ever again.  We are now seeing a disturbing rise in what is called “lost media” and it should anger the creatives in the business that the studios are cashing in by eliminating their hard work from existence.

And then of course there is the increasing existential threat that is hanging over the heads of creatives on all sides of Hollywood; the rise of AI technology in filmmaking.  While AI hasn’t quite reached the level of creating a whole movie or show whole cloth out of nothing, the emergence of AI platforms like ChatGPT which can replicate informative text based on user prompts has rightfully raised concerns amongst many creatives in Hollywood.  Like most unionized industries, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA are concerned that Hollywood will someday replace man power with robots and computers, and that that day is coming sooner rather than later.  If “mini-rooms” was a concerning result of the streaming era, than the threat of AI eliminating writers rooms altogether is even more alarming.  One argument that the writers do have in their arsenal against this is that while platforms like ChatGPT can produce a lot of text very quickly, it can’t create something new.  It is basically advanced plagiarism; scouring the vast amount of information on the internet to form something resembling a new script, but is really just a jigsaw puzzle of things that have already been written.  One of the best picket line signs that went viral on the internet at the start of the strike read “ChatGPT does not have childhood trauma,” which is a good way of stating that AI cannot replicate the lived in experience that writers put into their own work.  Sure, Hollywood can just keep repeating old and tired gimmicks ad nauseum and AI would help churn those projects out quickly, but what really keeps the industry going are new and surprising things.  Could AI create something like the Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)?  I doubt it.  The threat of AI also extends to the concerns of SAG-AFTRA too.  It’s been discovered that some background actors in the Guild had been offered a fee to have their likeness scanned into a database and then the studios that own those scans could use them in perpetuity in whatever they want without the consent of the actor to decide what it’s used for.  This is a disturbing abuse of technology to move more creatives out of the process of filmmaking, and making it more possible for studios to have their entire creative output become more automated.  The Guilds are rightfully using this opportunity while this technology is still in it’s infancy to put up guard rails and ensure that the studios do not misuse this technology, and more importantly, ensure that ordinary actors and writers have the power to consent to how this technology based on their input is used.

Much more than perhaps any other strike to hit Hollywood, this one represents an inflection point that will determine the future of what the movie industry will be for generations to come.  This is much more important than pay raises; this is about preserving the ability to make filmmaking a career pursuit worth striving for.  People want to be in the movie-making business because they are story tellers and have been inspired by the films and television shows that ignited their creative flames.  But, the way that the streaming era has upended the previously agreed upon standards of the industry, we see a Hollywood that seems less concerned about pleasing their creatives and their audience, and more concerned about pleasing their shareholders.  The streaming wars have grown into this unsustainable arms race to have the most robust subscriber base in the market, while at the same time undercutting the compensation for the creatives that worked hard to deliver this glut of new content for the streamers in order to keep costs down.  The Guilds are rightly raising the alarm and showing that they are increasingly being pushed out of the creative process as studios are driving the creative decisions more and more, and even looking to AI technology to eliminate the human factor altogether.  It’s become less about what stream has the best shows and movies and more about who has the most.  The studios have felt the strain as well, as the Big Five studios are all seeing their investments into streaming turning into a money pit, while the mega-corporate giants like Apple and Amazon can endure the strain of this increased competition longer.  Those streamers as we learned are the big holdouts and it’s likely that the executive who was cheering on the financial woes of the striking writers and actors probably came from from one of them.  What matters now is that the WGA and SAG-AFTRA continue to stay strong in solidarity.  The WGA strike is now over 100 days old and the SAG-AFTRA is over 20, and the studios are no closer to getting the unions to their breaking point.  In fact, support has only increased.  The picketers are braving a heat wave here in California, and their spirits have not been deterred.  Hopefully, for everyone’s sake, a fair deal is reached soon and that it will hopefully lead to a brighter future for the industry.  SAG-AFTRA and WGA Strong!!!

So  a peculiar thing has been happening over the last month.  2023, by all accounts, was supposed to be a great big comeback year for the Summer box office season.  With the Covid-19 pandemic now thankfully in the rear view mirror and all restrictions having been lifted across the market, we could now finally get the movie going experience back to the roaring engine that it once was.  And up to this point in the year, things were actually looking good for the theatrical market.  We had a strong spring season, buoyed by films like John Wick Chapter 4 (2023), Creed III (2023), and also the surprise juggernaut that was The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023); the year’s first and only entry into the billion dollar club.  But, there were also some warning signs in the Spring box office.  The normally potent Marvel brand suffered an underwhelming box office run for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023), but that was nothing compared to the historically low box office for rival DC’s Shazam: Fury of the Gods (2023).  Hopes were still high, however, for the movies coming out in the summer.  The summer 2023 outlook looked especially promising given that many of the titles being lined up were from tried and true franchises that had served the studios well in the last couple decades.  Disney didn’t just have another Marvel film up their sleeve; they were also calling up a remake of one of their most beloved classics as well as a return of Indiana Jones.  Paramount had their Transformers; Universal their Fast & Furious crew; and Warner Brothers was about to give one of their key Justice League members the spotlight with The Flash (2023).  But, despite a bit of a promising start with Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023) opening the summer season, the Summer 2023 theatrical market has been less defined by it’s successes and more by it’s failures.  A big box office bomb in the Summer movie season is not very uncommon to see, but for a string of them to happen all in quick succession is enough to startle the industry and make them wonder where things have gone awry.

Now of course it’s easy for a lot of us armchair media experts to pinpoint exactly what went wrong, and in many cases we sometimes make excuses that merely just fit into the narratives that we want to put into place about the state of Hollywood.  For instance, there’s a segment of the online chatter that tries to put a political spin on why Hollywood is not seeing the success it would like to have; with one misinformed refrain being pushed that says, “Get Woke, Go Broke.”  Of course scrutinizing the actual data of the Summer box offices grosses shows that being “woke” doesn’t in fact affect box office.  Quite contrary, the movies with the highest grosses this Summer (Guardians 3, Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse, and The Little Mermaid) are the most “woke” ones in theaters right now.  And that’s just a subjective reading of these movies, because “woke” is such an ill-defined term that most people just use to slander something rather than critically analyze it.  Seriously, can someone please explain what makes Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny “woke”?  The main hero is an 80 white man who reads maps and punches Nazis.  Politics aside, there is another reasoning as to why Summer box office is decidedly off this year compared to before, and it has a lot more to do with economics than ideology.  We are at a point where movies are underperforming because they are costing too much to make.  It’s hard to believe that we’ve gotten to the point where a movie now has to gross a billion dollars worldwide just to break even, and that a movie that takes in $300 million domestic is considered a disappointment.  But, that’s the reality we are in right now, and it’s starting to make the film industry reconsider it’s priorities.

A lot of what we are seeing right now is residual fallout from the economic shock wave that was the pandemic.  With movie theaters shuttered for significant amounts of time (including the key markets of Los Angeles and New York being closed for over a year), a lot of investment suddenly shifted to streaming, because it was the only avenue of distribution.  Much of that shift ran under the assumption that when the movie theaters were going to finally re-open fully, that it would be a significantly diminished market, and that streaming will have supplanted it as the foremost mode of distribution.  But, something happened that many in the industry didn’t quite expect; theatrical made a miraculous comeback, thanks to strong, record breaking box office performances from the like of Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), Top Gun: Maverick (2022) and Avatar: The Way of Water (2022).  These movies not only brought in big audience numbers in their opening weekend, but they maintained those audiences over the months that followed.  Suddenly, the the studios which had put themselves into a streaming mindset had to readjust to capitalize on a renewed interest in theatrical exhibition.  But, as evidenced by this year, not all movies are the same and as Hollywood is finding out the hard way, it really all depends on the kind of movie that’ll drive up box office numbers.  Sadly, it would appear that Hollywood saw the successes of these previous movies and misinterpreted it as business returning to what it was before the pandemic.  There is very much a fundamental difference today to how a movie will perform at the box offce compared to how it did in the past.

One big difference is the increased presence of streaming within the market.  In the last summer season before the pandemic, 2019, there were only a small handful of streaming platforms (Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu).  Since that summer, the market has been flooded with new competitors, most of them coming from the big studios (Disney+, Max, Peacock, and Paramount+).  This really fundamentally changed not just the kinds of movies that were being made, but also what audiences would be paying extra to go out to the theaters for.  With the pandemic complicating things further, we saw what is likely the biggest shift in audience viewing habits since the invention of television.  But, there were those movies that indeed break through and were undeniably must see films in a theater.  Top Gun: Maverick drew in audiences with it’s incredible stunt work on screen, while Avatar: The Way of Water dazzled with it’s fully immersive environments.  These were not cheap films to make, but they still managed to capture their audience in a way that many others in the industry seem to fail to grasp.  So, what made these films soar while others are failing so miserably.  The primary reason is that the films being made are not justifying the exorbitant costs that are attached to them.  Relating back to the big push made during the streaming wars, a lot of the studios wanted to flex their muscles by delivering movies and programs that would outshine their rivals and put greater value into the library of projects that were going to be found on their streaming platforms.  This meant a greater investment on the most popular brands that are a part of each studios portfolio.  If people were excited about the ability to stream all the Tranformers movies on Paramount+, or all the Marvel movies on Disney+, or all the DC movies on Max, then it made sense to the executives to continue to invest a bunch more money into expanding those library titles; no matter the cost.  But, as we’ve found out, not everyone is as thrilled about these franchises as we thought.

In some cases, the cost associated with some of these movies seem excessively frivolous.  To have an Indiana Jones movie cost nearly $300 million in just production alone is particularly hard to justify, especially considering that it’s more than the past 4 movies in the franchise combined.  Whatever accounting made this acceptable for Disney has got to be based on pretty suspect or outdated consumer research.  Sure, Indiana Jones is a valuable brand that has produced some of the greatest action films that have ever been made, but it’s heyday was over 30 years ago.  A more accurate reading of audiences today will tell you that Indiana Jones as a franchise will not perform like a Star Wars or a Marvel project would.  And yet Disney still poured a fortune into this movie.  Disney would be in a much precarious position if this wasn’t a problem affecting all the major studios.  Pretty much every studio has seen slumping box office returns from this Summer.  Fast X (2023) and The Flash (2023) are just as big of disappointments as Dial of Destiny for their respective studios because of their out of control costs, though Fast X has saved face a bit from better international numbers.  The studios are having to come to the realization that not only have they miscalculated the value of their franchises at the box office, but they have also inadvertently undermined their ability to convince audiences that these movies are worth seeing in theaters at all thanks to their years of aggressively pushing their presence in the streaming market.  There are a lot of audiences now who would rather stay home and wait for these movies to release on streaming, which is knee-capping these films upon their initial releases and making it appear like the brands themselves are failing.  One of the most illogical choices made during the streaming wars was taking so many movies that were clearly made for theatrical exhibition and pushing them straight to streaming instead of waiting for theaters to recover.  This made sense when the pandemic was at it’s peak, but when Hollywood was still doing it a year out, it just undermined their brand because now you had made an audience more used to seeing these movies appear on streaming.  No more brand suffered from this more than Pixar, which saw three of their films go straight to streaming; Soul (2020), Luca (2021), and Turning Red (2022).  The necessity could be made for the first two, but Turning Red should have absolutely been given a full theatrical release based on it’s critical acclaim and broad appeal.  Because Pixar’s brand has been associated more with streaming as of late, it has shackled the releases of their films that have made it to theaters like Lightyear (2022) and Elemental (2023) because their audience is more inclined to wait for them to be on Disney+.

It should be understood that while the box office slump looks bad now, it doesn’t mean that this is somehow a sign of Hollywood’s downfall.  Hollywood has gone through these boom and bust cycles before, and they have often involved big adjustments that the market had to undergo in the past.  In the 1950’s, America had a booming post-war economy that helped to grow the middle class, who were keen on spending their disposable income on entertainment.  And yet, movie theaters initially struggled in these post-War years, because there was a new challenger to their business model; television.  To bring people back to the movies, a lot of experimentation in the presentation of movies began to occur, which included 3D, smell-o-vision, and the one that took hold the most, Widescreen.  With the advent of widescreen technologies, movies began to feel bigger than ever and that helped to make the theatrical experience more of a draw for audiences, because it was something that television couldn’t replicate.  However, to take advantage of the widescreen process, the movie industry invested more into movies that would be bigger than life and spectacles worthy of the more massive size of the image.  In the late 50’s and early 60’s, the film industry was deeply invested in the business of biblical and historic epics as well as over-the-top musicals, and while in retrospect all of these movies are wonders to behold for their scale and artistry, they were also drains on their studios bank accounts.  The catastrophic production of Cleopatra (1963) in particular became a wake-up call for Hollywood.  While the 4 hour epic was extravagant and later became one of the highest grossing films of that year, it’s enormous cost could not be overcome, and it nearly sank it’s studio (20th Century Fox) into financial ruin.  The excesses of the spectacle driven era of Hollywood eventually gave way to the more modest budgeted films of the radical 70’s, though even this era came to a head later on when maverick filmmakers from that era also saw budget overruns occur on their own vanity projects; most notoriously with Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980).  As history has shown, these cycles occur all the time, and are often a teaching moment for Hollywood.  The same is likely happening now as the industry is learning to adjust to a post-pandemic and streaming wars world.

It should also be understood that a movie bombing at the box office in it’s initial release isn’t necessarily a sign that the movie is bad.  None of the movies this year that have underperformed are doing so because people hated them.  At worst, people just find these movies to be okay or mildly disappointing.  Unlike what a lot of naysyaers out there are trying to project upon the performances at the box office, these movies are not losing money because of outright rejection; that nobody wanted these movies and that Hollywood is forcing them down our throats.  The disappointments are more to do with the ratio of box office compared to cost, and Hollywood’s inability to properly sell these films on an audience who’s viewing patterns have changed.  Hollywood needs to find a way to make opening weekends of $60 million seem impressive again, and that means that the movie costs really need to be brought under control.  The worry is that making things more cheaply also means loss in quality and artistry.  But, one thing that Hollywood should observe is what is actually working in the industry right now and how that can be applied industry wide.  A big change certainly should be made to the marketing of movies.  Emphasize why movies should be seen in a theater.  Perhaps the industry should reconsider it’s shortened theatrical window push that occurred during the pandemic, because theatrical gives movies a stronger up front boost.  And I hope both audiences and the studios realize that initial box office returns are not the end of the story for most movies.  In fact, for most films they find new lives beyond the big screen.  There was one animated movie in the Summer of 1999 that performed so poorly that it actually shut down the animation studio that made it.  That box office failure was called The Iron Giant (1999), which is now universally praised as one of the greatest animated films of all times.  Great films always find their audiences eventually, so we shouldn’t be looking solely at box office performance as a barometer of the quality of a movie.

All those spelling doom right now for Hollywood should keep this in mind; the Summer season isn’t over yet, and there is still a chance for the 2023 season to rebound.  Sure it was a bad couple of months, but the upcoming films this next month are actually promising.  Amazingly enough, it may come down to Tom Cruise coming to the rescue again for movie theaters, with his highly anticipated new Mission: Impossible sequel coming next week.  We’ll also see how well that Barbie vs. Oppenheimer social media feud actually translates into strong box office for both films.  And some wild cards could be Disney’s Haunted Mansion and DC’s Blue Beetle, considering that they were more modestly budgeted tentpoles than the films earlier this summer.  And even with the low attendance out of the gate for most of the films this summer, it should be noted what films have legs and what films don’t.  Movies like Transformers: Rise of the Beasts and The Flash have fallen like a rock since their opening weekends, but Pixar’s Elemental, which had the lowest opening weekend in the legendary studio’s history, is still holding strong week after week with small drops; having now grosssed $100 million and quadrupling it’s opening weekend.  It may still be a money loser for parent company Disney, but hopefully they see that Pixar films can still maintain audience growth over time and benefit from strong word of mouth.  For some movies, it’s a marathon and not a sprint,  which may not be ideal for people wanting to see immediate riches, but good in the end for long term strength in a brand.   Hopefully, the lessons learned from this season lead to improved investment in the future that will benefit both Hollywood but also the theatrical business too.  Hollywood has got to learn that it’s muscle flexing when it comes to budgeting their summer tentpoles is not generating the kind of business that it once did, and that they could still do well if they invest more in their marketing capabilities and less on the unnecessary spectacle elements of their films.  Your movies don’t need 20 minute action scenes that needlessly bloat the films to make them feel more epic.  They just need good stories and good characters to get audiences invested.  We are definitely not in the last days of Hollywood like so many who don’t know what they are talking about are trying to express right now as punishment for the industry going “woke.”  Disney in particular is not going away any time soon.  They’ve weathered box office bombs before, and if they can survive Treasure Planet (2002), The Alamo (2004), Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010), John Carter (2012), and The Lone Ranger (2013), they can survive Dial of Destiny too.  The same goes for most of the other studios too.  It’s about recognizing a pattern of success and failure and adjusting to meet the changing market.  We are in the grips of an industry trying to find it’s identity post-pandemic and streaming wars, and a couple box office disappointments will tell them exactly what isn’t working.  For someone like me, theatrical is still ideal, and I hope the best outcome of this era of change is that Hollywood’s presence on the big screen gets better and not worse.

It’s once again Pride Month, where members of the LGBTQ community and their allies take part in celebrating the freedom of expressing ones self the world and honoring the hardship it has taken to bring a better world for those brave enough to show the world who they are.  It’s a relatively new phenomenon, the widespread acceptance of the LGBTQ community, which had long been forced to remain unseen in the public eye.  But, with landmark accomplishments like the overturning of sodomy laws and repealing the ban on same-sex marriage that had long made life dangerous and difficult for the queer community here in America, the stigma of being gay, lesbian, bi or trans has lifted and not only are members of the community now granted rights they should have always had but society at large are now finding ways to show they are more accepting of this once oppressed community.  At least, that what most people want to see.  Most polls show that a majority of Americans today are in favor of rights and protections for the LGBTQ community, but there are those who still are strongly opposed to equality.  A very vocal minority more recently has started a fierce, and sadly in many cases, violent backlash to the gaining representation of the Queer community in all aspects of society; most especially in pop culture.  This backlash is most commonly known as the Culture War, a ridiculous campaign against cultural representations of not just the Queer community, but of people of color too in areas where they had not been represented before.  Before, it was called a fight against “Political Correctness,” now it’s called a fight against “Wokeism,” but it’s still they same disingenuous game of holding back progress as a way of preserving the status quo, which favors a power structure that is decidedly self interested in holding up a hierarchy that places straight white men on the top.  And sadly, it’s a group that despite being fewer in numbers now is still potent in their ability to make their own hateful words heard.

At the moment right now, the trans community is receiving much of harshest backlash.  Any sudden acknowledgment of the rights of the trans community to exist within the pop culture are immediately met with often violent rhetoric, that includes several people making symbolic gestures that includes destroying any product associated with a company that expressed support for the trans community.  It’s often a ridiculous spectacle (destroying a product from a company doesn’t hurt them in the least, because you’ve already bought what they are selling and thereby have already given them your money), but the viral nature of people showing their hatred online adds to the unfortunate effect of amplifying their hateful voices.  And sadly that in the long run can hurt the LGBTQ community, because if companies feel that it is in their best interest to stay out of the conversation, then they are giving these hateful clowns a victory, and the LGBTQ community as a result has less protection in the larger conversation.  And it’s clear what the hateful “anti-woke” forces are aiming at with their relentless attacks on the trans community.  They want to roll the clock back on rights for the whole LGBTQ community, and the tactic is to attack the one part of that community that is still the least understood.  The term “groomer” has been misappropriated by the anti-LGBTQ forces, using it to slander trans people as sexual deviants who are preying on children and trying to convert them over by making them, as they put it, confused about their gender identity.  No proof is ever given how a person going through gender transition publicly is in any way a pedophile predator, nor of transgender representation having a corrupting influence on children, but the same claims are still relentlessly made and amplified.  And the goal in the end is to turn support for the trans community toxic, which will of course spill over into the rest of the Queer community, thereby undoing years of hard won fights to gain fair representation in the culture.  Overall, the most aggressive and potent argument made against the LGBTQ community is that they are “going after the children,” which is a gross mischaracterization of what the fight for Queer rights has been.  And the aim of the “culture warrior’s” attacks particularly has sought to shake the resolve of the part of culture that has the furthest reach with younger audiences; animation.

Queer representation has been a particularly long gestating progression in the pop culture.  Because queer identity has in the past carried this “sexual deviant” stain on it for most of the history of animation, animators have been reluctant to showcase queer identity in their work, even if they themselves are either a part of that community or are supporters of it.  Animation has been a medium primarily for young audiences, and for the longest time, things like homosexuality or gender dysphoria were just too taboo of subjects to take on.  Earlier animation could only go as far as to have a cartoon character dress in drag on occasion, which Bugs Bunny often did in many of his cartoons, but it had to be played off as a joke.  Any express support of anything that went against the heteronormative status quo was strictly forbidden in animation; at least from the mainstream.  That, however, didn’t stop the queer community for declaring icons of their own in their favorite animated films.  You’ll find that animation has a particularly large fanbase across the LGBTQ spectrum, and despite not getting the initial public support from the animation studios in return, the queer community still found some places where they felt represented if not explicitly at least in subtext.  These included characters such as the aforementioned Bugs Bunny, or Velma Dinkley from the Scooby-Doo cartoons, or Peppermint Patty from the Charlie Brown shorts, and of course so many of the Disney Villains.  Though Disney Villains were not exactly ideal role models, the Queer community still adored the flamboyant nature of these characters and valued them for the campiness they represented.  As time progressed, Disney would even throw a little nod to the LGBTQ community in this aspect, as when The Little Mermaid (1989) was made and the film’s Villain, Ursula, had her appearance based on famed drag queen Divine.

Despite the little bits of things that the LGBTQ community had clung onto in all their favorite cartoons growing up, once the fight for equal rights had intensified as they grew older and more open about their identity, the desire grew to have that subtext in so many of their favorite cartoons become text.  Now that things have become more acceptable over time and queer representation is more commonplace in the large society, it was now time for that same progress to be reflected in the culture at large.  Like most other things, cinema takes it’s time to actually catch up with progressive cultural movements, as most mainstream studios are reluctant to antagonize any social group in fear of losing out on certain audiences.  But, as more and more of the LGBTQ community is found represented in most areas of the culture at large, it becomes ridiculous trying to ignore them any longer.  Animation of course is an even harder area to shake the status quo, because of the conception that it’s meant just for kids.  Still, as more and more people see that the queer community is not a threat to young people, that too helps the animated market to change.  One big difference now is that there are a lot of families today that have children raised by two parents of the same sex, and many more children will probably be aware of a family member who is gay or transgender.  Most of these modern day children don’t see the queer community today as an oddity like past generations, but rather as a normal thing that they grow up around, and nothing at all a threat to them.  But, that’s a change that is largely just representative of our own culture.  Animation is still a multi-national artform, and what may be fine here will not be accepted in other parts of the world.  This is an issue that affects animation a bit more compared to live action filmmaking, because of the high costs of producing animation involved.  So, to get animation closer towards fully embracing queer representation is a bit of a harder sell in general.

Like most other big movements in the culture, it takes one first big step forward to get the ball rolling.  Surprisingly, it’s wasn’t one of the big names in animation that made the first step in presenting an openly gay character in the movies.  Laika Animation, the Portland, OR based stop motion animation studio that put themselves on the map with the beloved Coraline (2008) delivered a rather surprising twist in their second film Paranorman (2012).  In the film, the older brother of the main character’s best friend is this goofy, thick-headed jock named Mitch (voiced by Casey Affleck).  Throughout the movie, the main character Norman’s sister has been lusting after Mitch, so in the film’s finale she finally makes her move only for Mitch to reveal that he has had a boyfriend this whole time.  Sure, the moment is meant to be a punchline, but it’s also significant because it’s the first ever acknowledgment in a mainstream animated movie that one of it’s characters is openly gay.  Now Laika is a smaller studio with more progressive social views and far less to lose than the bigger studios, but the example they made showed that a queer character could exist openly in an animated movie and that it wouldn’t be a very big deal in the end.  It was still difficult for a while for the bigger studios to jump on board still, given that international market.  Where you did see more progress made in animation, surprisingly, was in cartoons made for television.  Animated shows, even ones made for young kids, like Adventure Time, Steven Universe, Arthur and many more have gone out of their way to show same sex relationships and gender transition as perfectly normal things that shouldn’t be condemned but rather celebrated.  This is where a lot of the hatred coming from the Culture War is aimed, attacking these shows as attempts to indoctrinate children.  Watching any of these shows shows that they don’t center at all on any of these issues, but rather treat them as common sense lessons on tolerance and understanding; something that children of all kinds can take with them to become more accepting of people who are different from them.  While a lot of attacks have come at the makers of these shows, they nevertheless have shown a lot of backbone in remaining supportive of queer representation in their cartoon worlds.

Strangely enough, a lot of the attacks against queer representation in animation have been leveled at a studio that for the longest time has remained pretty silent when it came to LGBTQ issues.  Disney right now is in a firestorm of attacks from the anti-woke mob, primarily due to their vocal condemnation of the State of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill.  If you listen to the hateful rhetoric from that side, you would think that Disney is Enemy #1 and the biggest propagator of what they consider the “gay agenda.”  In reality, Disney has been reluctant to step into the “culture war.”  To be fair, they have been supportive of LGBTQ staff that work for their company in all departments; granting equal benefits decades ago to same-sex partners long before most of the corporate world did.  But, when it came to queer representation on screen, Disney has often been accused of merely paying lip service.  One thing that they had been consistently mocked for in the past is their habit of making a big deal that an upcoming movie was going to have Disney’s first openly gay character in it, only for that character to be a blink and you’ll miss them background character that doesn’t matter a whole lot.  Eventually Disney did introduce an openly gay main character in their latest animated film, Strange World (2022), but sadly a lackluster ad campaign caused the film to flounder at the box office.  This gave the false impression that the anti-woke mob had gained a victory over the LGBTQ community since the movie was a box office bomb, ignoring all the other factors that led up to the result, and that the movie failed because it leaned into queer representation.  The aim of the Culture War is to deter big corporations from embracing the LGBTQ community by saying that doing so will lose them business.  But, that only happens if the corporations see it as so.  Disney saw the failure of Strange World not as a result of their embrace of the queer community, but rather as mismanagement that occurred under their past regime headed by former CEO Bob Chapek.  Bob Iger, on the other hand, is far more embracing of the queer community as part of the Disney fan base, and this is evidenced with the way he’s handled the fall out from the “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida.  Instead of reversing course, Iger has punched back at the homophobic leaders who passed the bill, mainly because they were attacking Disney’s economic interests in the state.  In response, Iger has cancelled a nearly billion dollar investment in corporate offices in Florida.  In the state of Florida, they are realizing their homophobic backlash is backfiring on them, and that in general it’s a big loss for them instead, because they’ve only emboldened Disney’s commitment to the LGBTQ community.  And when you lose Disney, the largest media giant of all, you lose a major chunk of the cultural collective as a whole.

So, what does that mean for the future of queer representation in animation?  If anything, I think that there will be a lot more representation in the years ahead thanks to the shift made at a big studio like Disney.  The company has gone through bigger losses before than what they went through with Strange World, and they’ve bounced back stronger.  Thankfully, they are not blaming their struggles on the LGBTQ community like the anti-woke crowd wants them to.  One hopes that they try again to bring more upfront queer representation into their upcoming movies.  One thing that would really silence the critics is if that representation came in one of their already successful properties; with Frozen being the most likely place for that to happen.  One of the things that frustrated LGBTQ Disney fans was that there was some strong hints about the sexuality of the character Elsa sprinkled in to the first two Frozen movies, but it was never fully fleshed out.  This was especially frustrating in Frozen II (2019) as the movie gave some strong hints that this is where they were going with the character, only for the plot point to be dropped towards the end with nothing getting resolved.  The recent announcement of a Frozen III gives LGBTQ Disney fans the hope that Elsa will finally get that girlfriend that we’ve been teased with and that the subtext about the character will finally become text, in a franchise that is honestly too big to be ignored.  At the same time, if Disney can prove that they can achieve success with an openly gay primary character in their animated film, then all the other studios like Dreamworks and Illumination will follow suit.  Hey, some may even jump ahead and try to beat Disney to it, like Sony Animation which had a lesbian main character in The Mitchells vs. The Machines (2021) and all of the pro-LGBTQ messaging sprinkled throughout the Spider-Verse movies.  Overall, the signs are encouraging that none of the backlash is deterring the animation studios from embracing the idea of queer representation in cartoons.

It’s just difficult sometimes to see how queer representation can take hold in media when the voices opposed to it are so loud and even worse amplified by powerful people.  Sadly, social media values negativity because it causes the most discourse online and as a result generates more traffic.  You would think with all of the anti-woke think pieces that clutter the internet atmosphere that the backlash towards the LGBTQ community is strong, but in reality, the progress towards representation is still what remains strong.  The thing is, the anti-LGBTQ forces represent an ever shrinking demographic that is growing older and dying out, while younger audiences, the consumers of tomorrow, are far more accepting of the LGBTQ community and that is what the corporations are recognizing more now.  Sure, we would love to see them do more than just post a rainbow flag across their social media pages during pride month (like, I don’t know, stop donating to the campaigns of homophobic politicians), but big business rightly recognizes that antagonizing a generation that is more embracing of diversity and inclusion is not good for their long term success.  So, as fierce as the bullying from the anti-LGBTQ crowd may be, they can not stop the arc of progress.  And one of the most useful places for ensuring that future generations will be open minded about their LGBTQ brothers and sisters is through representation in the cartoons that they view when they are kids.  There is no sexualization of children if they see two members of the same sex either holding hands or giving a small loving kiss in their cartoons.  It’s something that they likely see as normal from their parents or another family member who never is a threat to them at all, and watching it in a cartoon will be both affirming of the reality that they themselves know.  Even better, if that child then grows up realizing that they are part of the LGBTQ community, they’ll have the added benefit of affirmation from the cartoons that helped them to see it as a perfectly normal human condition.  We in the LGBTQ community have always adored the cartoons that we grew up with.  It’s just now heartening to see that those same cartoons are starting to love us back.

Roll back the clock to the 2000’s.  The state of Comic Book movies in the mainstream was in a much different situation than it is now.  The 90’s came to close with the genre in it’s worst state, following the box office and critical failure that was Batman & Robin (1997).  While the  DC Comics properties were firmly in the control of a single studio, that being Warner Brothers, their comic page rival Marvel was not so lucky to have a sole proprietor making decisions over it’s cinematic fortunes, both good and ill.  Marvel was coming out of near bankruptcy in the mid-90’s, and to salvage their financial status, they freely spread out the cinematic rights to their characters and storylines to whomever was interested in them.  As a result, the rights to Marvel properties were spread around to most of the major studios in Hollywood.  Sony took Spider-Man and his associated company of heroes and villains.  Fox won the rights to the X-Men and the Fantastic Four.  Meanwhile, fitting of their history of monster movies, Universal became the home of The Incredible Hulk.  The rest, who many believed at the time were second tier characters like Iron Man, Thor and Captain America, went to Paramount, who for a while did little with their Marvel properties.  In the early part of the 2000’s, the studios that did have Marvel characters in their possession did quite well.  Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002) broke box office records for Sony Pictures, while Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000) was hailed as a refreshingly mature take on the often silly genre.  There were, however, some disappointments as well, with Ang Lee’s Hulk (2002) becoming a convoluted mess, and Tim Story’s Fantastic Four (2005) feeling like an undercooked portrayal of Marvel’s first family.  Sequels to the X-Men and Spider-Man movies also fell off for fans in later years, and many were wondering if Marvel was even capable of competing with the likes of DC in sustaining long lasting franchises.  The ante was upped even more after Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins premiered, a critically acclaimed revival of the Batman franchise that put DC back on firm ground again.  Marvel would answer, but the way they would do would change everything we thought we knew about comic book movies.

The Spider-Man franchise over at Sony Pictures was spear-headed by a powerful Executive Producer named Amy Pascal.  To this day, she still retains exclusive rights to produce Spider-Man movies, but her time in the comic book world left a much different impact than that.  One of her assistants that she mentored during the making of Spider-Man was a up-and-coming producer named Kevin Feige.  Feige was very much a person who lived and breathed comic books, and he was eager to change the way super hero movies were made by pushing them to adhere closer to what was on the page.  There seemed to be a feeling in Hollywood that comic book movies needed to be more like action movies.  Storylines were more grounded and simple.  Gone were the tights and in were the dark leather suits.  It’s almost like the industry was ashamed that these popular characters came from such a colorful and imaginative source such as the comic book page.  Feige didn’t believe any of that.  He wanted to see the characters pop right off the page in all their colorful and sometimes cheesy glory.  He understood that these characters were larger than life, and that the movies needed to embrace this aspect about them in order to do the characters justice.  You can feel that a bit in the Spider-Man films from Sam Raimi, which definitely embraced more of the charming quirkiness of the comic books, and it wouldn’t be surprising if this is what Feige imagined for all the other characters as well.  By the time Spider-Man 3 (2007) came out in theaters, Feige was already working a plan to change the future of Marvel on the big screen.  He convinced the leadership of Marvel Comics to invest in a new in-house production company that would supervise the creation of all future Marvel movies at all the studios, insuring a consistency across all their properties that would define them first and foremost as a Marvel film.  Thus began the existence of Marvel Studios.

Marvel Studios would work with all the different studios on their selectively held properties but all the creative choices, such as casting and which stories to tell, would be run through Marvel Studios offices.  As a result of this change in creative leadership, the decision was to abandon most of the franchises that had been developed up to that point and instead reboot many of the characters.  This, however, was easier said than done, as Fox was insistent on continuing on with their popular X-Men franchise as it was; especially since they had a bankable star like Hugh Jackman still going strong as Wolverine.  The other studios were more inclined to rethink the future, and at this point, Paramount was ready to finally begin using the Marvel properties they had been sitting on.  It was with Paramount that Feige saw a really golden opportunity to try something that hadn’t been done before ever with the super hero genre.  Instead of having each character exist within their own stand alone franchise, Feige and company theorized the possibility of having all their comic book characters share a single connected universe.  Not only would they have their own stand alone movies, but the characters would be able to meet each other and crossover; even forming a super team.  Kevin Feige knew this would be an ideal thing for Marvel to undertake, because it’s exactly what the comic books had been doing for decades before.  It’s not a novel idea; DC had been trying to jumpstart a Justice League film for years before, and both the Superman and Batman franchises featured Easter eggs referencing the different heroes in their films many times; same with early Marvel films too.  But the stars had not aligned until now.  With Marvel Studios now assuming creative control, they were ready to give it a try, and the starting point would be with the trio of heroes that the industry had before believed were second tier.

Paramount announced that they were greenlighting new films based on the Marvel super heroes Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America.  These were untried properties, with only Captain America having one cheaply made for TV movie in the past.  But, Marvel Studios believed that this was the right batch of characters to begin plans for a bigger universe.  But, the all important question was who would be the one taking on the responsibility of starting this new era on the right foot.  The answer came with Iron Man (2008).  There had been attempts to bring Iron Man to the big screen before.  For a while, Tom Cruise was attached to play the role of Iron Man and his alter ego, billionaire playboy Tony Stark.  However, Cruise’s busy schedule conflicted with Marvel Studios’ plans, and the team decided to go in a much different direction than what he was planning to do with the character.  For Iron Man, Marvel Studios needed to not just make the actor look good in the suit, but they also needed to make him interesting outside of it as well.  The task of adapting the character to the big screen fell to actor/filmmaker Jon Favreau, who was coming off of a successful stretch of films such as Elf (2003) and Zathura (2005).  He too was an avid comic book fan who was eager to do justice to the character of Iron Man on the big screen.  But, who other than the unavailable Tom Cruise would be ideal for the role.  Favreau’s first choice was a rather surprising one.  Robert Downey Jr., a long time character actor in Hollywood, was not what many would consider to be a bankable star.  His career was nearly destroyed by his drug addiction and the time he served in prison.  He had recently earned high marks for a comeback performance in Shane Black’s Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang (2004), but many still thought he was too much of risk to headline a major studio film.   But, Favreau saw in Downey’s persona exactly what was needed for the role of Tony Stark, and he convinced Marvel and Paramount to take a chance by giving him the role.  The rest of course is the stuff of legend.  Downey was the perfect Tony Stark and his presence on screen carried the film to remarkable commercial and critical success.  But Iron Man the movie also offered up another surprise for audiences.  A post-credit scene introduced another famous comic character named Nick Fury, played by Samuel L. Jackson, who was there to introduce what ultimately would be the future of Marvel films for the next decade and beyond; the Avenger Initiative.

Marvel Studios had proven itself with the crazy success of the first Iron Man movie, and they were ready to continue with the next phase of their plans, which was to get the other films in the pipeline going.  They got a strong assist that same summer with Universal successfully rebooting The Incredible Hulk with Edward Norton playing Dr. Bruce Banner.  They were even able to tie that film in with Iron Man by giving Robert Downey Jr. a surprise cameo at the end before the credits.  But, a surprising development happened in the wake of Iron Man’s success.  In 2009, Disney, which had up to this point been out of the super hero game entirely, decided they were ready to get in on the action.  Unfortunately for them, the other Hollywood studios had already licensed all of the prime properties that Marvel had to offer.  So, what did they do?  Well they decided to buy up Marvel outright, to the tune of $4 billion.  This purchase included Marvel Studios in the package, so now Kevin Feige and company had a new set of overlords to answer to.  Thankfully for them, Disney CEO Bob Iger was willing to be hands off as long as they could deliver the same way they did with Iron Man.  Surprisingly, Disney was also able to secure back the licenses from Paramount without struggle, which meant that they would be the ones in charge of the upcoming Thor, Captain America, and Avengers releases, as well as an Iron Man sequel.  Universal maintained their Hulk license, but were willing to work with Disney in adding the big green guy to the Avengers team up, which became necessary because Edward Norton left the franchise after one film.  Sony and Fox remained defiant in holding firmly to their exclusive rights and keeping them out of Disney’s hands.  Still, Disney was able to work with what properties they had.  Then unknown Australian actor Chris Hemsworth was given the role of Thor, while actor Chris Evans (who previously played The Human Torch in Fox’s Fantastic Four) was cast as golden boy super soldier Captain America.  Mark Ruffalo replaced the absent Edward Norton in the role of Hulk, and lesser know heroes like Hawkeye and Black Widow were added to the mix, played by Jeremy Renner and Scarlett Johansson respectively.  This was the original team assembled for The Avengers (2012), and again Marvel changed the world of comic book movies forever.

It became clear after The Avengers that Marvel Studios was not just a Hollywood success story, they were a force to be reckoned with.  Now that they finally had a home studio base with deep pockets like Disney to finance all of their future plans, they could indeed create that shared comic book universe that Kevin Feige had long dreamed would be a reality on the big screen.  The first four years of Marvel Studios output was deemed Phase One, and that every collection of films thereafter that would ultimately culminate in another Avengers team up would be another new phase.  Over time they introduced a whole lot more of the Marvel family to the big screen, including long anticipated debuts of fan favorites like Doctor Strange, Black Panther, Scarlet Witch, The Vision, and Captain Marvel.  They even managed to turn a very obscure comic property like Guardians of the Galaxy into a smash hit with audiences and critics alike.  Sony even decided it was in their best interest to play nice, and they granted the use of Spider-Man in their Avengers team ups.  At that point, only Fox remained the lone hold-out; but Disney and Marvel were still able to build their universe without the presence of the Fantastic Four or the X-Men.  The question however was where it was all going to lead.  Audiences had become invested in this cinematic universe to the point where they were following it like it was the biggest serialized TV show ever made.  But in every narrative, there had to be a purpose to it, and for Marvel’s endgame, they turned to the comics for inspiration.  Typically, comic books lead their ongoing storylines to major events, and one of the most famous in Marvel comics history was an arc known as the Infinity War.  In the first three phases of what had become known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) there was this connecting thread of powerful gems known as the Infinity Stones being discovered by the characters.  The stones were coveted by a powerful being known as Thanos (played by Josh Brolin), who ultimately used its’ power to reshape the universe.  Marvel Studios masterfully wove in this storyline across 20+ films, and it resulted in two monumental films Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019), both of which wrapped up the decade long arc in perfect fashion.  The MCU managed to achieve the unthinkable, which was to successfully tie in all of their many franchises into a satisfying conclusion to an epic storyline.  Kevin Feige had achieved his dream of bring the comic book universe completely to life.

But, where do you go after you’ve conquered the world.  By the time Avengers: Endgame had been released, Marvel had become the most valuable entertainment brand in the world.  Not only did Disney make back their $4 billion investment; they were able to use their gains to acquire Fox itself, thereby bringing in the last holdouts of the Marvel properties still out in the wild.  With no more roadblocks in their way, they really could do anything they wanted post-Endgame.  So, what were they ready to do in Phase Four.  This new phase was something of a reboot for Marvel.  The storylines that led up to the Infinity War were now complete, with legacy characters like Iron Man and Captain America getting their farewells.  Now it was time to look towards the next event.  For the new phase of Marvel, Feige and company decided the new direction would focus on what is known as the Multiverse.  And once again, Marvel is finding itself in uncharted territory with this new undertaking.  The multiverse is a concept that’s a bit harder to sell to audiences than easy to identify McGuffins like the Infinity Stones.  The plan has offered up some fun ways to explore the multiverse, like current Spider-Man Tom Holland getting the chance to appear alongside his predecessors in the role, Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, in Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021).  But other uses of the concept feel underdeveloped like with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) which didn’t go far enough into the multiverse.  Plus, you see the struggle Marvel is having with establishing their new big baddie for this long arc saga; the multiversal menace Kang the Conqueror (which isn’t helped by Kang actor Jonathan Major’s on-going, at the time of this writing, legal troubles).  For the first time in it’s 15 year history, Marvel seems to showing some growing pains; like the level of success that they have managed to achieve is now starting to weigh down on them and undermining their focus.  One thing that could be affecting this shaky ground that they now stand on is the fact that Marvel is also devoting part of their master plan to Disney’s aggressive expansion into the streaming market, with Marvel Studios creating long form series and specials for Disney+.  Where in past years there was room to build anticipation between each new Marvel film, now Marvel is releasing new properties throughout the entire year.  And for audiences, it’s proving to be too much of a good thing.  That’s why Marvel’s Phase Four has had the most mixed response to date of any of Marvel’s MCU plans.

Now, looking back in all the fifteen years of existence of the MCU, has Marvel finally lost it’s golden touch?  In many ways it’s still relative.  Compared to it’s own past success, Marvel is underperforming a tad bit in it’s recent offerings.  Earlier this year, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023), the film meant to launch Phase Five of the MCU, became the first film widely accepted by both the fans and the critics as the least successful film from Marvel to date.  It’s not the biggest money loser, which goes to Eternals (2021), but it can’t blame it’s poor box office on lingering effects of the pandemic either.  Even still, most of their movies are still out-performing competitors from other studios.  Sony’s non-MCU Spider-Man character movies have not performed as well, with last year’s Morbius (2022) being a pretty embarrassing flop for them.  And the whole last decade for Marvel’s rival DC Comics has been defined by Warner Brothers desperately trying to play catch-up, with some pretty disastrous results.  The failure of their Justice League (2017) movie is a particular case study in how studio interference can ruin a franchise, and it took a grass roots effort on line to get a better director’s cut released to finally satisfy the fans.  Even the less successful Phase Four projects still perform well when compared to the rest of the market; I’m sure DC wishes they had Quantumania’s over $200 million take in domestic box office.  Honestly, Marvel has been in this boat before.  Phase Two had it’s shaky moments too before things finally revved up in Phase Three leading up to the Infinity War.  For any studio to maintain this kind of level of success this long is pretty miraculous, and Kevin Feige, Disney and everyone who worked on these movies should feel a sense of pride that they are still doing fairly well even as audiences are a bit mixed lately.  You definitely have to credit all the things they have done right to make themselves the juggernaut that they are.  Having the strong foundation of Iron Man was a key part of that.  It was risky trusting the future of comic book movies with someone of Robert Downey Jr.’s reputation, but he persevered and his career resurrection is one of the greatest redemption stories in movie history.  15 year later, Marvel is on top of the world and it still has more stories to share, which will hopefully continue to fulfill the hopeful vision that Kevin Feige and Marvel Studios set out to accomplish.  As the legendary Marvel Comics icon Stan Lee always said: “Excelsior.”

Hollywood has been dubbed the “dream factory,” because of it’s ability to craft an imagined reality for audiences to consume, but behind those dreams put on the big screen, there very much is a “factory.”  Despite the artistic pursuits that inspire many people to become filmmakers, one has to go into the business knowing that it’s just that; a business.  Movies, especially today, require a massive amount of money to make, and those who are financing these movies are adamant about seeing a return on their investment.  Most of what we know as the “business” of Hollywood is entirely unseen by the casual audience member, and the only indication of the massive amount of labor that goes into the making any movie is found at the long scroll of names during the credits that most people in the theaters often leave before seeing.  But each of those names are important, and even more crucially, their recognition at the end of the movie is something that had to be fought for by past generations of technicians throughout Hollywood history.  In the early days of cinema, screen credit was reserved exclusively for the top tier talent involved, like the director, the actors, and the writer.  Now, every aspect of the production is credited on screen, but this is a minor achievement for the technicians that work in the industry.  For them, it’s far less important that their name is listed on screen than it is that they earn the fair amount of what their labor is worth and that they will be continually protected while on the job.  Like all industries, the labor force in Hollywood has been represented by unions, which have been responsible for pushing Hollywood in the direction of fair treatment of their workforce many times, which has been a difficult task given the way that film industry changes so rapidly each new generation.  Though a lot of good things have come out of union representation within the film industry, it hasn’t been without struggles along the way.

Each branch of the film industry here in America has a union (or Guild) representing it.  Movie actors have the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) which is partnered with AFTRA (American Federation of Television and Radio Artists), and it is the single largest union within the film industry, which makes it the most powerful.  All it takes is a few credits in a film or TV production with SAG-AFTRA certification, and anyone can earn their Guild card and be an active member of the union if they so choose.  The other major guilds of the film industry would be the Director’s Guild (DGA), the Producer’s Guild (PGA) and the Writer’s Guild (WGA), which itself is broken into two East and West branches.  Though not as substantial, there are unions for most of the other positions in the film industry like Editing, Cinematography and Art Direction, as well as the powerful IATSE union which represents all the technicians responsible for putting together an maintaining the film sets.  These separate unions all operate independently of each other, but their goals are often intertwined, which is fighting for fair wages and safe work spaces for their members.  Because Hollywood, like most other industries, is profit driven, there are times when film productions will end up exploiting their work force in order to maximize their income.  This means cutting corners, breaking contracts, or deceiving the work force in order to get them to work harder for less reward.  Unions are necessary for keeping the studios and their cost-cutting shenanigans in check.  Thus far, the industry has managed to find ways to work in cooperation with the unions in Hollywood, but every now and then, the unions will push back when they see violations of their deals made with the studios.

Such a time is currently hanging over the industry right now.  The Writer’s Guild voted overwhelmingly, by a 97% margin, to authorize a strike.  The demands are fairly standard with what most labor disputes are about; fair wages and appropriate work hours, but what is behind the dispute is interesting.  The issue that the Writer’s Guild is disputing about today is with regards to residuals form streaming.  Because streaming has become a major part of the film and television market in recent years, the previously agreed to contracts with the guilds don’t quite apply to the revenue made from streaming subscriptions, so the film industry has been in some cases exploiting that loophole.  That’s why some projects intended for theaters or television have been moved to streaming instead, because it means the studios can save money on the back end without the profits that would’ve been applied based on receipts from the box office.  The same applies on the other end two.  Stuff that was made for streaming have in the last year or so been disappearing off of platforms, solely because the studios would’ve had to pay up more residuals from airing and re-airing those same programs into another contract year.  The end of the year purge on the HBO Max platform is a prime example of this, with shows like Westworld disappearing forever just so the Warner Bros. Discovery merger could take advantage of tax credits in their restructuring.  For the writers of these shows and movies, these kinds of extreme measures have been made without their input on the matter, and this has led many of them to rightly believe that they are getting shut out of their fair share of compensation by the exploitation of these streaming loopholes.  Right now, the focus of the Writer’s Guild is to form a new contract with the studios in which this loophole is addressed and make sure that all union writers are not being denied the wages that they owed, even if the studios change their minds about distribution.  This follows a long history of the Guilds in Hollywood having to shift gears whenever something changes in the business as a whole.

The Writer’s Guild of America, along with the other Hollywood unions, was formed in the 1920’s, during the rise of the studio system.  The aim of the union, like with most other industry guilds, was to ensure that the rights of the workers were protected.  As the studios were amassing power, they were also taking advantage of laborers that often had to work long hours for very little money in order to meet the high demand for new films.  There are several stories about people who died on film sets in the early days, mainly due to lack of oversight on set safety and inadequate services meant to cater to large crews of people, like first aid or craft services.  The unions were helpful in getting the studios to agree to these improvements, but it wasn’t without struggle.  And by struggle, I mean strikes, which often brought the industry to a stand still.  The good thing about all the unions in Hollywood is their strong commitment to solidarity.  When one union goes on strike, the others will stop work as well, making a statement of their own, even if they don’t actively strike themselves.  There have been a number of times that the industry has indeed reached this point, and it often comes at a cost.  The Writer’s Guild themselves have gone on strike five times, the longest of which lasted 22 weeks in 1988, a move that in many ways crippled the broadcast television market to the point that they still haven’t recovered 35 years later.  And why were the strikes necessary?  Because, in the 1988 case, the studios were unfairly singling the guild out of distribution deals that had been newly formed since the agreements on the last contract; in this case re-runs and foreign distribution.  When the Guild went on strike again in 2007, it was because of internet downloads, due to new video sharing websites like YouTube.  It’s always a constant battle between the studios and the guilds and that creates conflicts that extend far beyond the picket lines.

From an outsider perspective, it looks like a battle between elites.  Since most of the Guilds are made up of entertainers and storytellers, the most famous names and faces often become the voices we hear the most with regards to the strikes that happen.  And for many people, they have a hard time believing a person who makes $20 million a movie complain about unfair compensation.  But, what outsiders need to understand is that when these strikes happen, it’s not to protect the exorbitant salaries of the big celebrities, but rather to help out the professionals who don’t have the same means but still are affected by the cost-cutting measures made by the studios.  These include writers, actors, and technicians who work on small productions, outside of the Hollywood mainstream, who are very susceptible to exploitation.  If the studios can cut back the big salaries of the most famous people in the industry, the same can happen with producers of small budget films and shows too.  Only the small time workers on these projects will feel the burn of exploitation even more.  The goal of the Guilds is to make sure that everyone is held to the same standard, no matter the size of the production.  That’s why, with the solidarity of all the guilds involved, they can put the pressure on the studios by going on strike as a united front.  Any film or show that then uses non-union labor will as a result be scrutinized as a result, which can damage it’s reputation.  Sure, the celebrities won’t feel the sting, but they are valuable in the fight because they are the voices that ultimately get listened too, and thus, they become the face of the movements.  The studios can complain about any perceived “hypocrisy” they want, but the struggle for fair wages is far more universal than they think.  One recent example of the studios misjudging the public perception of labor rights came when actress Scarlett Johansson’s dispute over the residuals from the release of Black Widow (2021) pitted her against the top brass at Disney.  She rightly pointed out that doing a hybrid release of the movie on streaming diminished the potential box office of the movie, which would’ve determined her back end payday depending on the gross.  She sued Disney to demand compensation for what she felt owed due to the terms of the original contract, which has box office gross as a major part of her eventual payday.  Disney’s then CEO Bob Chapek tried to paint her as selfish, but audiences and outsiders mostly sided with Scarlett, because they rightly recognized a major employer was trying to back out of a deal they had made, which could happen in the same way to someone with less influence as Scarlett Johansson and would’ve been extremely unjust in that scenario.  She is a big name not just fighting for herself, but for all those who likewise could’ve been cheated out of a better payday.

Despite having achieved plenty of good things for workers across the industry, the track record of Hollywood’s unions have their bad history too.  One such moment was the House Un-American Activities committee in the 1950’s which eventually led to the blacklist.  While the Writer’s Guild’s leaders were more defiant than the other guild’s during this Red Scare witch-hunt, with then SAG president Ronald Reagan being a “friendly witness” to the committee who named names, they still nevertheless upheld the blacklist that followed thereafter, denying hundreds of their members screen credit and compensation for their work.  It was a dark time in the film industry, which saw many writers lose confidence in their guild.  Another point where the Writer’s Guild failed to deliver for their members was during the 2007 strike.  The Guild authorized the strike, which lasted 100 days, but did so without an exit strategy.  Basically, they were playing a game of chicken with the studios, with no clear definition over what the “new media” they were fighting over was supposed to be.  Some of the issues arising now that the Guild is yet again threatening to strike on is due to the unfinished business left over from the 2007 strike.  The deal, which was brokered through a similar contract made between the studios and the DGA, did grant the Writer’s Guild jurisdiction over residuals made over internet based distribution.  However, it was determined to be related to online media purchases, such as from iTunes.  YouTube, which was still in it’s infancy at the time, was not seen as a viable marketplace of content at the time, so the WGA missed a prime opportunity to protect their members with streaming declared as “new media,” and that’s an oversight that the studios have been exploiting ever since.  Sure, it’s hard for the guilds to have foresight over every market trend, but the vagueness of the 2007 settlement was a missed opportunity for the Writer’s Guild that made the 100 day strike a mostly wasted effort.

But, despite the problems that the Guilds in Hollywood have had, they have been an essential and needed part of the film industry.  The fight for much needed health coverage for many of the members has been especially beneficial for people within the industry.  Apart from medical insurance plans, the Guilds have also helped many technicians and performers gain beneficial retirement plans.  But, even these can fall prey to cut backs from the industry unless the Guilds remain strong and committed to their members.  Recent Oscar-winner Ke Huy Quan mentioned in his acceptance speeches that he was dropped by his insurance providers during the pandemic, due to his absence from acting in front of the camera for decades and the fact that the movies he was making, like Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) were considered too small to justify him retaining the benefits of his union membership.  A lot of people haven’t been as lucky as him where the success of the movie has helped him to regain a foothold in the industry again.  Many more fall by the wayside, and life-altering events like the pandemic can indeed lead to layoffs that affect the livelihood of people dependent on union work.  Hollywood is competitive to be sure, and just being able to gain a single credit to be eligible for union membership is a privilage that itself is hard to achieve.  But, unions are important for balancing the power structure in Hollywood, and giving the laborers themselves a say in the business, so as to not be exploited by the studios who are most concerned about their bottom line.  Membership is not mandatory, and there are some noteworthy filmmakers who have left their cards behind, like George Lucas, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriquez, and South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone.  But it should be known that they are in a different position where they can survive without the Guilds.  They’re departure is mostly because of creative autonomy, because Guild members must abide by rules when it comes to credits, and working with other Guild members as well.  It’s a better thing overall to be working on a Guild certified film, because independent non-union work comes with too many risks.

With another strike possibly looming on the horizon, what kinds of outcomes are we likely to see.  A prolonged shut down  could have a devastating effect on the industry, especially since it’s still in recovery from the pandemic.  Keep in mind, any project with a finished script can still move forward on schedule without violating the Guild’s rules.  Any project still in the development stage will be the ones that suffer the most, with many likely to get cancelled because the studios cannot keep paying writers and filmmakers for something that can’t be produced.  Scripted television that is produced on a daily basis, like talk shows, will also likely suffer, with hosts having to either write their own material or put their show on a costly hiatus until the strike is resolved.  As the 2007 strike showed us, things can be disrupted quite a bit the longer a strike goes on, and shows and movies that had a lot of promise beforehand will end up struggling or be cancelled outright.  Are we going to see a repeat in the days ahead?  We will know on May 1, which is when the current Writer’s Guild contract expires.  If nothing is brokered before then, you can bet the WGA will bring the industry to a standstill, given the overwhelming support for a strike amongst their membership.  It’s a tough pill to swallow, especially if you are a struggling writer just starting out in the industry.  A work stoppage can lead to a full stop in the progression in one’s career.  At the same time, too many people will find themselves disadvantaged by ill defined contracts that the studios can exploit, and it’s up to union solidarity to counterbalance that position of power.  Perhaps the Writer’s Guild may have an advantage this time around in the negotiations as the pandemic stricken industry is resistant to the idea of another costly shut down.  It might mean a quicker resolution to this labor dispute that hopefully avoids a strike, while at the same time granting the Writer’s Guild with a new contract that meets most of their demands.  We’ll see what happens, and one can hope for the best outcome.  Make no mistake, the main reason why Hollywood is still the “dream factory” today is because the workers who make it all happen have ensured that the movie industry is one that respects it’s labor force and doesn’t take it for granted.

Since the rise of the independent cinema over the last 30 or so years, there have been a number of labels that rise up from obscurity to become major players in the market of films, especially when it comes to awards and acclaim.  These independent movie houses often start out as distributors for films that make a lot of noise coming out of the film festival circuit, and over time they have established themselves well enough to become a mini-major studio in their own right, capable of producing films in house.  Each decade sees a significant rise in brands that suddenly become staples in awards season, though their rise often is followed up by a steep fall.  In the 80’s, Orion Pictures became the most successful distributor of award winning films, including Best Picture winners Amadeus (1984), Platoon (1986), and Dances With Wolves (1990), only to go bankrupt while their fourth Oscar winner The Silence of the Lambs (1991) debuted in theaters.  Emerging in the 90’s was the Weinstein Brothers backed Miramax, with their awards favorites like Pulp Fiction (1994), The English Patient (1996) and Shakespeare in Love (1998).  At the turn of the millennium emerged Dreamworks, a new studio formed by industry heavyweights Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen, with movies like American Beauty (1999) and A Beautiful Mind (2001).  And though it was bankrolled by a mega corporation, Netflix as a film producer also emerged in the 2010’s to change the game within the industry.  And that’s what unites all of these independent producers together; they were the ones changing the direction of the industry by their curating of rising talent and fresh ideas.  These studios also built their brands to be synonymous within the industry with a certain level of quality, and this was often what led to the choices of films they sought to either make or distribute.  Other independent studios have followed in the same steps as those of the past, but as we go further into 2020’s, one independent studio has remarkably emerged in a way that few industry insiders may have expected, and it’s leading Hollywood into a very peculiar new path.

A24 stands out amongst all of the independent studios both past and present mainly due to the kinds of films they have chosen to attach their name to.  The “A” in their name could easily stand for atypical because that’s often the best way to describe their catalog of movies.  They are not producers of gritty realist dramas like Orion, or a mixture of auteur driven statements like Miramax, or socially conscious historical epics like Dreamworks, or expensive passion projects like Netflix.  A24’s brand is about finding the most unique films out there and getting them seen, no matter how outside of the box they are.  When you see that A24 logo pop up on the big screen, which often appears in clever movie specific variations during the trailers, you just know you’re going to see something new and different, and even a little strange.  That has been the brand they have developed for themselves over their last decade of existence and it has worked out pretty well so far.  So much so, they are now finding themselves not only awards contenders, but the overall leaders in the race this year, with more nominations for this year’s Oscars than any other producer.  Though the decade is still young, it can be safe to say that they are the most valuable brand in the industry right now, and the ones that are beginning to shape the direction of the industry.  This is evident by the dominance of their top awards contender this year, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022); a movie that likely would’ve flown under Hollywood’s radar if it came out 10 years ago or more, but now is garnering unparalleled attention for a movie that is quite frankly outside of the Hollywood norm.  But, how did A24 manage to achieve this while still maintaining their mission to seek out the strange and genre-bending in both their in house productions and in their acquisitions.  In many ways, it all comes down to the awareness of what an audience is looking for.

A24 was founded in 2012 by the trio of Daniel Katz, David Fenkel, and John Hodges.  The industry professionals had all worked in various other positions within the industry, but they joined together with the goal of finding movies that fell outside of the norm and give them a spotlight with their collective expertise in marketing and distribution.  Initially, they were just a distribution label, collecting films from festival circuits, often the ones that other independent distributors found too strange to spend their money on.  For A24, these outsiders were the movies that they were confident they could find an audience for, and all it took was connecting the right audiences to the right movie.  In their first year, they managed to find surprising success with the Harmony Korine film Spring Breakers (2013).  Korine’s movies have often been too controversial for Hollywood or mainstream audiences, like Kids (1995) and Ken Park (2002), but Spring Breakers ended up finding a mainstream audience thanks to A24, because they successfully marketed the movie to the right audience; namely college kids.  Korine’s art house film suddenly became a must see movie for college audiences who, as you would guess, identified with the culture that was depicted in the film, even if it was showing the darker side of Spring Break festivities gone awry.  Though modest, it still showed that the A24 model of seeking the weirdest movies and targeting them to the right audience could be a profitable model to base their studio’s mission on.  And it was something that helped them to quickly rise in esteem within Hollywood.

Perhaps the year that marked A24’s arrival as an important player in Hollywood would be 2017, because that was the year that they pulled off one of the biggest upsets in Academy Awards history.  Only two years into the game, A24 did manage to gain Oscars attention right away.  In 2015,they had a nominee for Best Picture with their Toronto International Film Festival champion Room (2015).  The movie would go on to win a Best Actress award for Brie Larson, but it lost out to Spotlight (2015) for the top award.  The story would be different a year later.  A24 would again be in the Best Picture race with their critically acclaimed queer themed drama Moonlight (2016), but that film was up against a juggernaut called La La Land (2016).  As the latter kept sweeping up awards throughout the night, the inevitable seemed certain.  But, when the final award of the night was announced, even a mix-up passed by without raising an alarm.  Of course what ensued was one of the craziest moments in Oscar history as the wrong card was read for Best Picture, and Moonlight had indeed pulled the biggest upset in Oscar history.  In a way, A24’s first Best Picture win seemed destined to be as chaotic as it was, because it is on brand for them.  But indeed, Moonlight put A24 on the map in Hollywood, and they have been a fixture at the Oscars almost every year since, with movies like Lady Bird (2017) and Minari (2020) being some of the standouts.  But now they have gone from Oscar spoilers to Oscar front-runners with their latest Everything, Everywhere, All at Once leading all other contenders.  Whether or not it can translate into an Best Picture win is still yet to be seen, but it’s definitely another sign of how far A24 has advanced over the year.

So what has turned A24 into this success story.  One thing that has worked in their favor is having the right kinds of movies and getting them to the right audiences.  Their awards bait fare certainly has the right ingredients to grab the attention of voters, but their other movies that fall outside of Awards season also do their part to connect with the ideal kinds of audiences.  Where A24 has really built their brand the most successfully is with horror movie audiences.  They emerged at the right time when horror fans were growing tired of the slasher flicks and gore fests that were flooding the market over the last few decades.  Most horror films during that time were pandering and often regurgitating old franchises that had long worn out their relevance.  Horror fans wanted to see movies that were challenging and unique again.  A24 found this as a perfect avenue to seek out strange and unsettling horror flicks that could fill that need for new ideas into the genre.  One thing that really distinguished A24 horror flicks was their often more tempered pace.  Their movies didn’t rely on jump scares or buckets of blood, but instead built their horror around atmosphere and unsettling themes.  One of their most famous horror flicks to date is also one for their first in-house productions; the Ari Aster directed Hereditary (2018).  Hereditary showed that a horror movie could be terrifying without cheap tricks like jump scares, and instead have building tension, disturbing imagery, and unforgiving atmosphere be the driving force behind the horror; not to mention incredible performances helping make all that believable as well, including the criminally overlooked Toni Colette.  Aster continued that atmosphere driven horror with his follow-up, Midsommar (2019), another A24 production, and you can see a lot of the studio’s other horror movie output following the same pattern.  Other unconventional horror movies like Gasper Noe’s Climax (2019), Robert Eggers The Lighthouse (2019), and Ti West’s Pearl (2022) have all shown many different faces of horror that has greatly helped to diversify the meaning of horror in recent years, and similar to their like minded horror competitors Blumhouse, they have shown you don’t have to throw a ton of money towards horror movies in order to make them more horrific.  Like with all of A24’s movies, it’s about making movies that are unique, and that drive for uniqueness has helped to make A24 one of the drivers of contemporary horror.

One of the keys to their success has also been in their dedicated working relationship with some of the most unique filmmakers in the business today.  Here is also where their rise in the horror genre has been valuable to their overall brand.  People like Ari Aster and Robert Eggers continue to return to A24 because they know that the studio will gladly put their money behind their oddball ideas for movies.  I’m sure that Robert Egger’s The Lighthouse would’ve been a very hard sell to any other production company in Hollywood; a black and white character study set on a remote island with two loners growing increasingly insane as they tend to a secluded lighthouse.  And yet, it’s a movie that is on brand for A24.  It’s not just among horror filmmakers that they have found committed creative partnerships.  Another auteur filmmaker that has collaborated frequently with A24 is David Lowery.  Lowrey’s filmography is interesting because of how frequently he changes up genres.  His two films with A24 are A Ghost Story (2017) and The Green Knight (2021) and they couldn’t be more different in genre and story, and yet fit very much in the director’s own style.  It’s also interesting that Lowery’s time with A24 coincides with another unexpected creative relationship he has with Disney, as he’s directed Pete’s Dragon (2016) and the upcoming Peter Pan & Wendy (2023) there, again while still maintaining his own unique voice.  A24 is a film company where a little bit of risk is welcomed on the creative end, and that’s what’s helped to attract filmmakers who want to work outside of the Hollywood norms to their label.  They are definitely finding out that curating talent with outside the box ideas is a good strategy for them right now, as The Daniels (Kwan and Scheinert) have presented them with their biggest hit ever in Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.  And it was a wise choice to keep them involved with A24 after their first film, which was also unusual; Swiss Army Man (2016), which featured Daniel Radcliffe playing a farting corpse throughout the whole movie.  A24 managed to miraculously connect that film with an audience, and they reaped the reward of that investment as they secured The Daniels as an exclusive partner in what may now be an awards season juggernaut.

So, can A24 manage to continue staying on top like they are now, or will they inevitably decline like Orion, Miramax, and Dreamworks behind them.  For the first year ever, their output of in-house productions exceeded their distributed titles that they acquired in the festival market.  They are now not just a seeker of unique movies, they are the makers of them from the ground up.  But, growth is difficult to maintain long term.  It’s going to really depend on how much bigger A24 plans to get.  What kinds of movies do they plan on making in the years ahead.  Thus far, their movies have remained relatively modest in terms of their budgets.  Even movies like Everything, Everywhere, All at Once that are ambitious in concept have been made on relatively small budgets.  Is A24 ready to make bigger films; some in the range of $100 million per budget?  No plans for those kinds of movies are in the pipeline now, but A24 is planning on broadening their reach into a variety of different genres, each reaching a different kind of audience.  Last year, they put out their first ever G-Rated movie with Marcel, The Shell With Shoes On, and while it may be too weird of a movie for young audiences, it nevertheless shows that they are willing to make a movie appropriate enough for all audiences.  They are also starting to develop more documentary films as well, lending their brand to a selection of non-fiction filmmaking that likewise also fits outside of the norm.  One thing that has also benefitted them over the years is their forward thinking distribution deals with big streaming platforms.  They started off with DirectTV and Amazon as their go to streamers, but an exclusive deal with Apple in 2018 marked a new phase that has helped them secure funding for a number of projects, including co-productions with Apple just for the Apple TV+ platform.  Things could certainly change, and A24 may lose out their status as a driver of the industry, but there is no doubt that they know what they are doing in this moment, and that’s building an expectation when you see the name A24 on a new film or television show.  They have curated a brand, one that is an indicator of quality built the atypical, and it’s something that they are hopefully going to try to live up to in the years ahead.

What is really interesting about A24 in the grand scheme of things with independent filmmaking is that they’ve managed to build a brand for themselves with the kinds of movies that normally wouldn’t survive elsewhere in the market.  There are some movies out there that are just hard to sell to executives and even more difficult to market to a wide audience.  And yet, A24 has managed to make these types of movies work for them over and over again.  Sure, they’ve wisely avoided movies that are way too big for their modest budgets, but the movies that they have put forward are still no less ambitious in their own way.  The A24 marketing team seems to be especially skilled in knowing exactly how to market the unmarketable, and get people excited for things as strange and challenging as Swiss Army Man, The Lighthouse, or The Safdie Brothers’ Uncut Gems (2019).  There are up and coming filmmakers out there that are crafting what they see as an A24 style film in the hopes that the open-minded studio will consider their project.  Perhaps the fact that there is a concept of an A24 film buzzing around the industry that may help to keep the studio relevant for some time.  A24 doesn’t need to grow beyond their means like Miramax and Dreamworks have in the past.  Their brand is being atypical to the Hollywood machine, and that enables them to remain defined by modest films as long as they still exhibit a sometimes unusual quality.  To A24’s benefit, the rest of the film industry is taking notice of this, and rewarding the studio with a whole lot of accolades and awards.  It’s also making studios reconsider what an Oscar-worthy movie is now; it’s no longer the star-studded serious minded drama, but rather the movie that demands recognition for defying the standard conventions.  It might just be A24’s time right now, and their style is clicking with both the industry and audiences, but if they continue a commitment towards curating new and fresh voices for years to come, it might be the key to their longevity.  We’ll see how well that plays out at this year’s Oscars, but for now we know that when that A24 logo shows up on the big screen, something bold and unusual is about to follow, and that’s helping to set an example that hopefully changes Hollywood for the better.

In case you didn’t know, the Golden Globes were handed out last week.  It wouldn’t be your fault if this event had passed you by without notice.  The Golden Globes, to put it bluntly, has been going through an existential crisis lately; one in which may eventually lead to it’s complete and total demise.  At one point, the Golden Globes was seen as second to only the Oscars in importance within Hollywood.  It bridged both the theatrical and television side of the industry, and for a time gained a reputation for being the looser, more hip awards show in comparison to the stately Oscars.  But, that shine has diminished in the last decade.  Combined with a general decline overall with televised awards ceremonies and internal politics that have spilled over into public view, the Golden Globes are now seen by many to be irrelevant as a part of the Awards season.  Other awards, such as the Guild honors as well as the Critics Choice have become more reliable bellwethers for the Oscars in recent years, and the Globes track record for picking winners has grown ever more shoddy, mainly due to the untrustworthy way that winners and even nominees are selected.  And with the society of publishers and journalists that make up the voting body called the Hollywood Foreign Press becoming ever more scrutinized for their poor judgement and lack of reform, does Hollywood even need to acknowledge the Globes anymore.  In many ways, the Golden Globes are both an incredible Hollywood success story (managing to stay around for 80 years) and also a cautionary tale of the industry at it’s worst.  And the decline that it has seen recently begs another question as to what value should we culturally put into Awards ceremonies that are increasingly insular and out of step with the industry as a whole.

It helps to understand what the Golden Globes are and how they evolved over time in the history of Hollywood.  Founded in 1943, the Hollywood Foreign Press was a collection of Los Angeles based foreign journalists that were looking to bridge the gap between Hollywood and non-U.S. markets.  As a sign of their desire to court favor within Hollywood circles, they created the Globes as a special honor recognizing the yearly achievements within the industry.  It was risky, adding another Awards ceremony in the shadow of the firmly established Academy Awards, but the Golden Globes managed to succeed, with the first ceremony taking place in 1944.  One of the traditions that helped to distinguish the Globes apart from the Oscars was that it retained the banquet style of the presentation; something that the Oscars had once had, but eventually abandoned as they moved into bigger LA venues like the Shrine Auditorium and the Pantages Theater.  The Globes, on the other hand, has continually maintained their commitment to smaller ballroom settings, moving around to venues like the Beverly Hills Hotel, the Hollywood Roosevelt, and then eventually to the Beverly Hilton where it has remained a fixture since 1961.  In the 1950’s, the Globes expanded to include honors for achievements in television, and the ceremony has remained more or less unchanged since then.  Because of the banquet aspect of the ceremony, guests have indulged themselves with the offerings of alcoholic refreshments available, which has led to the Globes feeling much more like a free-wheeling party than most other Awards.  It wasn’t uncommon for winners to come up on stage after having a few and saying stuff in their acceptance speeches that they normally wouldn’t at any other awards show.  The sometimes bawdy nature and unpredictability of the Globes for a time helped them to look like the cooler Awards in comparison to the Oscars, although it could never quite break free from the latter’s shadow.  And as the years rolled along, the Globes began to experience it’s own internal drama that unfortunately turned ugly as the years rolled along.

One of the main problems people have with the Hollywood Foreign Press itself is that it is an increasingly insular voting body that up until recently hadn’t faced any accountability for it’s sometimes questionable practices.  As of today, the Hollywood Foreign Press is made up of only 105 members, and they are the sole voting block that picks the nominees and winners for the Globes.  Compare this with the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, the voting block behind the Oscars, which has a membership that numbers in the thousands.  With a small group of people voting on these awards, you can see how there can be the danger of manipulation from studio influence.  For many years, The Hollywood Foreign Press has been accused of taking bribes as a favor for awards recognition, whether or not the movies themselves were any good.  And there are plenty of instances in the past that have given fuel to those accusations.  One was the award given to Pia Zadora as “New Star of the Year,” in 1982.  It was revealed that Zadora’s multimillionaire husband had flown members of the HFPA to Vegas on an all expenses paid trip, and had set up private screenings at his mansion with lavish dinners, which made it appear that the members were being purposely wooed towards giving the award as a favor.  Similar accusations arose in 2011 when a Johnny Depp film called The Tourist received numerous nominations despite being a box office flop and was panned by critics.  It turns out that a movie studio this time (Sony) had also been wooing HFPA members with trips, and it was speculated that the movie only got nominated so that the stars Depp and Angelina Jolie would attend the awards that year.  Studio influence, to be honest, is nothing unusual in Awards season, as the Oscars themselves have seen incidents of questionable campaigning practices that cloud the eventual awards given.  But, the instances at the Globes have been so brazenly obvious, that it has given the HFPA the unfortunate reputation of being suck-ups to the stars and one of the least trustworthy in deciding the best achievements in entertainment in the course of a year just based on merit.

But there have been even far greater problems with the Golden Globes that have recently come to a head with a reckoning within the last couple of years.  The number of members in the Hollywood Foreign Press used to be even smaller than the 105 that make up it today.  And as many pointed out a year or two ago, that small voting body was noticeably lacking in diversity.  The foreign body that makes up the HFPA is mostly journalist from Europe, along with a couple from Latin America and Asia.  Until recently, not one black journalist was within the ranks of the organization.  In the wake of Black Lives Matter and the racial discussion that arose out of the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and many other incidents like his, the attention to the racial make-up of the HFPA began to gain focus and scrutiny.  People were rightly concerned that the lack of a black voice within the organization creates an unfair blind spot when it comes to movie and shows from black creatives.  It’s something that all the awards ceremonies have had issues with, but it seemed especially egregious that up until now, no one in the HFPA had been a person of color.  The recent growth of membership has thankfully added more diversity to the HFPA ranks, but for some it’s a remedy that still falls short of addressing racial attitudes within the HFPA as a whole.  The slow change at the HFPA came to a head in 2022, as major studios bowed out of the ceremony altogether, and celebrities joined the boycott as well, saying they would not attend the ceremony unless significant change was demonstrated.  This resulted in the ceremony being untelevised for only the second time in it’s history; the first being in 2008 because of the months long Writers Strike.  Strangely, the ceremony had managed to survive the Covid-19 pandemic, with a virtual presentation keeping it alive as presenters and winners remained at home, but only a year later the Golden Globes were facing the reality of annihilation if they did not make serious change quickly.

It’s hard to say if the Golden Globes has righted the ship in the year since the boycott.  They managed to get back on the air this year, with NBC carrying the broadcast (which normally gets passed along to each of the networks except ABC, which hosts the Oscars exclusively).  But this year’s Globes seemed oddly desperate on the part of the HFPA.  It seems like they are fully aware of their issues and that they need to appear contrite.  But, with this year’s host Jarrod Carmichael calling the HFPA out on their hypocrisy on the Globes stage itself in front of the Hollywood elite, it seems that the HFPA is trying to present the image of contrition while at the same time desperately trying to get things back to the way that it used to be.  But, the issues with the Hollywood Foreign Press and the Globes themselves extend far beyond just the reforms made within the past year.  There is a general lack of trust that exists now between the industry (particularly with talent) and the HFPA.  One of the biggest problems that the Globes has right now is that fewer people within the industry see any value in winning one now than they did years ago.  Case in point, to protest the lack of reform with the HFPA, actor Tom Cruise gave back the 3 Golden Globes that he has won over the years.  It’s not a good sign when one of the biggest names in Hollywood no longer values the award you gave to him and seems so willing to depart with all of them.  Obviously it’s a statement on Crusie’s part towards his disgust with the HFPA, but it’s also a reflection of the Globes diminished value.  It’s also not surprising that even with the Globes back on TV this year, there were quite a few no shows who were still boycotting the awards, and with good reason.  Oscar hopeful Brendan Fraser has an especially justifiable good reason to never attend the Globes ever again, as he has accused past HFPA president Philip Berk had sexually assaulted him at an awards luncheon in 2018.  It was an incident that led to Fraser’s years long exile from Hollywood which he has only just now returned from with his Awards contender The Whale (2022).  Fraser, despite a nomination, didn’t attend this year’s Globes, stating in an interview, “my mother didn’t raise me to be a hypocrite.”

Despite making a return to live broadcast, the Golden Globes still has to contend with another existential factor, in that all awards ceremonies are on the decline; even the prestigious Oscars.  People just aren’t that interested in the glitz and glamour of the Awards season like they have been in the past.  Awards shows have always been a bit of indulgent self congratulation on the part of Hollywood.  It’s a bunch of rich celebrities all dressing up fancy and handing each other gold statues; something that seems very much detached from the actual issues that society deals with today.  Overall, Hollywood rewarding itself is taking on a more trivial place in the minds of audiences around the world.  But, it’s actually always been trivial.  The Golden Globes and even the Oscars for that matter have never exactly reflected what ends up being considered the greatest movies and shows of all time.  Some of the best films recognized today never even got anywhere close to recognition from awards like the Globes.  So, why should we as an audience put any value into Awards shows?  Well, for many decades, apart from the movies themselves, the Awards ceremonies have managed to distinguish themselves as entertainment in their own right.  There was a time when the Oscars, and even the Golden Globes were appointment television, even in the same company as events like the Super Bowl.  And this was due to the fact that these shows knew back then how to grab the attention of the audience.  They were spontaneous and grandiose spectacles.  What unfortunately has happened is that the Awards ceremonies have tried to play it safe and conventional, which has made awards shows feel more like manufactured chores to get through rather than major events to be astounded by.

What the Awards shows need to do is to make the ceremonies feel as rewarding for those watching at home as it does for those watching live in room itself.  The shows have increasingly felt like ceremonies for elites rather than shows worth tuning in for, and it needs to strike that right balance between glitz and spectacle.  In this case, the Golden Globes has historically had an advantage.  It’s more spontaneous moments have been the highlights of Awards season throughout the years, with slightly intoxicated celebrities breaking loose a bit more than they would elsewhere.  But, there are cases when then anything goes approach can back fire.  You want your awards ceremony to be remembered for the people who won, and not for one celebrity smacking a presenter across the face on live TV like what the Oscars experienced last year.  In the end, the thing that people want to see is their favorite celebrities be rewarded for their achievements and given the chance to speak from the heart on stage.  The moment the names inside the envelopes are read to the acceptance speeches that are given are always the highlights of any awards show, especially if it’s a surprise.  Unfortunately, the producers of these awards try to micro-manage these moments too, by playing the person off with music to cut their speech short.  And when audiences recognize they are watching something that is trying way to hard to be pleasing to everyone, they begin to grow less interested, because of the artificiality of it all.  For the Golden Globes, they are facing these kinds of headwinds within the industry as well as renewed competition.  When the Globes were off the air last year, the Critics Choice awards took it’s time slot and increased it’s own televised audience, helping to make it’s own case for being the number 2 awards show of the season.

A lot of the woes facing the Golden Globes are certainly self-inflicted.  Years of shady practices and unlawful activity on the Hollywood Foreign Press’ part has justifiably made Hollywood lose trust in it.  And the unusual way it chooses it’s nominees and winners still leads to questionable choices as well.  The ceremony has split awards between Drama and Musical/Comedy for years in several categories, but when a film like Ridley Scott’s The Martian (2015) is nominated in the Musical/Comedy category, it definitely becomes a head scratcher.  But the problems it faces are also problems systemic with the industry as a whole.  Awards only have value if there is an understanding across the industry and among the general audience that the certain award is worth winning, and the Globes are beginning to falter in justifying it’s value these days.  It’s always played second fiddle to the Oscars, but the gap between them seems even more pronounced now.  The Oscars has the benefit of being the original industry award, and the one that stands as the gold standard nearly a century later.  We aren’t at the point where even the most passionate industry insider will give back their Academy Award in protest.  Some have refused Oscars (George C. Scott and Marlon Brando) but no one has actually picked up their statue and then returned it after a dispute with the Academy.  And yet now, we are at the point where celebrities have no qualms about returning their Golden Globe.  The Globes may have meant something in the past, and the ceremonies at one point were must see events on television, but those days may be coming to an end faster than the HFPA would like.  Can they turn things around, or is the end inevitable?  Somehow they have survived for 80 years, despite all the scandals, two cancelled ceremonies due to a strike and a boycott, and a pandemic.  They have been under-estimated before, but with an industry becoming far less trusting in a historically corrupt organization like the HFPA, it might be time to let the Globes sunset and fall out of the orbit of Hollywood’s increasingly competitive Awards season.

There seems to be a clash in entertainment when it comes to classifying what an animated film is.  Many people consider animation a genre onto it’s own, which when you look at all the animated films that have been made, seems like a very reductive classification.  Like film director Guillermo Del Toro, who himself has made an animated feature this last year, has recently said, “animation is a medium; not a genre.”  And that’s true, because there are so many examples of other genres like science fiction, fantasy, and horror that have been represented in the form of animation.  Animation is no more different than any other tool of storylelling that has been used in cinema, and yet the animation medium has long had to shake off the unfair distinction that it is just “kids stuff.”  True, the biggest names in animation (namely Disney, Warner Brothers, Dreamworks) have made movies that can be watched by the youngest of audiences, but the same studios will tell you that they don’t make their movies solely for kids.  Walt Disney himself scoffed at the idea that he made cartoons solely for children, saying that his movies were both “for the young, and the young at heart.”  The snobbish attitude towards animation has changed over the years, and you will find that today some of the most ardent fans of animated films are not so much kids but rather adults.  Sure children will still get a lot out of animation, but there is an ever growing market out there for grown up animation fans, who are far more likely to indulge in the lucrative collectible merchandise market.  What has definitely emerged out of this growing fan base of animation aficionados is an awareness from Hollywood that animation is one of the most valuable mediums within the whole industry.  Unfortunately, the industry can also take the wrong lesson from this and fall into bad judgments about how to exploit success without addressing the pre-conceived biases.

One problem that Hollywood still has within it’s perception of animation’s value is that it still places a superiority onto live action filmmaking that unfortunately perpetuates the idea that animation is less than in the business.  This is certainly reflected in the way that Hollywood honors animation in their awards season.  To this day, only 3 animated films have been nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards.  And to make the struggle for the honor even harder, there is a separate category just for Animated Features, which in a way sequesters animated films from ever getting traction in the race over the live action films; much in the same way that Foreign Language films had to struggle to break out of their own category before Parasite (2019) finally broke through the glass ceiling.  But, Hollywood cannot deny that Animated films are among the most lucrative in the industry.  Studios often are helped by their animation wings to bring them within the black thanks to the broad audience support from all ages that consistently show up.  Pixar, Dreamworks, and Illumination for the better part of the last decade have accounted for billions of dollars of profits for their respective studios alone, and that’s just based on the box office.  Merchandise is a whole other industry that can benefit the movie studios that makes these movies.  And yet, there is this belief in the industry that for the stories told in these films to truly be considered worthy in Hollywood, they must be as close to live action as possible in terms of how close they adhere to reality.  There’s this tendency in animation studios to try to reign in their styles in order to be taken more seriously by the industry, or to forego more entertaining characterization in favor of ones that could be more closely connected with a familiar name.  But, Hollywood even goes a step further by taking a hit animated film and reworking it completely so that it can become a live action film.

Now animation to live action remakes is not an impossible venture to undertake.  In some ways it can be done, but more as a demonstration in how different mediums can be used to tell the same story.  Disney for instance has made movies based on fairy tales, mainly because they are public domain so it’s easy to adapt, and secondly because they are already familiar stories that people know going in.  All they have to do is offer their own spin on the story and make it entertaining.  When a movie from the same studio, like Disney, adapts the same story for a different medium, they can have a bit more free reign to adapt the story differently.  This is certainly what Disney did with what can be considered their first live action remake; 101 Dalmatians (1996).  The live action version tells the same story, but does so in a different way that works within the limitations of live action filmmaking.  Unlike the animated film, the dogs and animals never speak, and the focus is shifted more to the human characters and their story; particularly when it comes to the villainess, Cruella De Vil, played memorably by an over-the-top Glen Close.  Sure for many the live action remake doesn’t replace the original animated film, but the “remake” did enough to have it feel like it’s own movie, divorced from it’s animated origins.  And that’s because the filmmakers never intended to replace the original, but to merely offer up a different take on the same story, one that uses it’s medium just as well as the animated medium uses it’s own.  But, one thing that did result from that experiment was big box office for Disney.  The results were so good that the studio began to examine other titles within their library that could potentially be given the live action treatment.  Initially, the plan was to update classic stories with more contemporary approaches, utilizing the kinds of cinematic advancements that could allow live action movies to do things that only animation could pull off before.  As animation itself began to wane in the post Renaissance years at Disney during the 2000’s, live action began to seem like a more worthwhile investment for the studio.  Less time consuming and often easier to alter mid-stream, live action was viewed as a safer bet.  And thus began a decade of ever more pervasive animated remakes.

What was troubling about the glut of animation to live action remakes that pervaded the 2010’s was that they became increasingly meaningless over time.  Unlike the 1996 101 Dalmatians, the more recent Disney remakes seem very reluctant to head off script.  They are sometimes nearly shot for shot reproductions, but the results don’t work as well.  How can that be?  I think what it comes down to is that Disney seems to be under the suspicion that if they stray away too much from their formula, it will turn away audiences, but they don’t understand that by just repeating the same actions also exposes their lack of creativity in the same case.  They work their best when they are aware they are adapting a story rather than repeating a scene.  Of the remake era movies, the best ones are movies like Pete’s Dragon (2016) and Cinderella (2015), and that’s because those movies do enough differently that you don’t even think about the original movies that they are based on, offering up a better comparison.  By contrast, you cannot help but think of the animated versions when watching Beauty and the Beast (2017) and The Lion King (2019), because they are pretty much exactly the same, with only minor changes.  And the comparisons favor the live action versions very poorly.  To call 2019’s The Lion King a live action remake is actually false, because it’s an animated film still, but one that’s trying way to hard to make you think it’s live action.  Sadly, these movies did spectacularly well at the box office despite terrible reviews, and that only led to Disney feeling more emboldened to raiding their own library.  In the process, they look less like a company striving for artistic merit and more like one cashing in for a quick buck.  It’s however increasingly hard for Disney to continue to build off of this.  They only have a finite amount of movies to remake before they scrape the bottom of the barrel, and they aren’t making them any better.  Even classic era Disney is un-spared, as a Tim Burton directed remake of Dumbo (2019) and Robert Zemekis directed remake of Pinocchio (2022) have proved.  The charmlessness of the Pinocchio remake particularly highlights the needless exploiting of these classic titles that has been going on.

But, Disney is not alone in their misguided attempts to adapt animation into a live action medium.  There is another market of animation that has unfortunately succumbed to some terrible adaptations from Hollywood.  That market would be Anime, the animation style originated and popularized in nations like Japan and South Korea.  Japanese anime in particular has found a strong cult following here stateside, with rabid fandoms as strong as those found on the opposite side of the Pacific.  And Hollywood has take notice too.  Unfortunately, like with the success of Disney animation, the industry takes the wrong lessons, and mistakenly believe that what these anime properties need is a live action adaptation.  Thus far, most of the anime remakes fall way short of their original predecessors.  Some change so much that they are unrecognizable in comparison, like the failed Dragonball: Evolution (2009), or are so shot for shot faithful that they look like a cheapened rip off, like Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop series.  Netflix in particular has struck out multiple times in trying to make anime properties work in live action, including their Death Note (2017) remake.  And try as they might, Hollywood can’t seem to let go of making a live action Akira (1988), despite over 20 years of development with names like Leonardo DiCaprio and Taika Waititi attached to it at various times.  Like the Disney remakes, all of these remakes make the same mistake in thinking that the name recognition alone will carry the production through.  It doesn’t matter how glossy you’re film effects are or if you get a big name like Scarlett Johansson to play the lead part.  Nothing can replicate the work that went into crafting the same world by hand.  This is especially true with anime, because of the style of the animation, which utilizes limited frames per action.  The same action just doesn’t look the same when it’s done in the 24 frames per second that live action produces.  There is just something about animation that cannot translate perfectly into another medium, without that other medium also having to bend itself more towards animation.

Strangely enough, the reverse often has the opposite effect.  Animated renditions of live action worlds have sometimes turned out to be really interesting experiments.  This is especially true with anime projects that use big studio IP.  This was the case with The Animatrix (2002), a compilation of anime shorts that were loosely connected to the storyline and world of the Wachowski’s Matrix trilogy.  The result was a beautiful animated collection that some would argue were better as a whole than the live action sequels that they were meant to promote.  Hollywood still hasn’t overlooked the value of using an animated medium to find added avenues to cross promote their live action properties.  After the success of Tim Burton Batman movies, Warner Brothers launched an animated series that took it’s visual style cues from the Burton films, and the result is one of the most beloved animated shows of all time.  That animated series in fact was so popular that a character created just for it, Harley Quinn, has been spun off into many different mediums including comic books and live action movies, where she is played by Margot Robbie.  Star Wars also has managed to build it’s lore equally across both animation and live action, with The Clone Wars series being just as popular with fans as the movies are, and characters created in the Star Wars animated properties are also now finding themselves being worked into hit live action shows like The Mandalorian and Andor.  Essentially, that’s where the happy medium is found between live action and animation; when both are treated as valid entryways into a larger story, and can be connected together without losing connective tissue.

What Hollywood seems to think wrongly is that these are competing modes of storytelling, rather than different tools that can both be effective in carrying a narrative.  In some cases, a first impression is often to difficult to overcome with an adaptation, and that’s something that is true for both mediums.  I think a lot of studios can’t succeed at taking chances on stories like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and The Little Mermaid because Disney’s adaptations are so iconic.  Any studio is within their rights to make their own because of public domain laws, but they hesitate because of the unfair comparison they would face against the beloved classics from Disney.  But, the same also applies with stories that were perfectly captured in live action.  I have yet to see an animated film that succeeds at being as magical as MGM’s original The Wizard of OZ (1939), an example of a classic fairy tale that was definitively captured through live action.  Basically, it comes down to what you are able to bring to a story that gives your movie value, and the best ability to stand on it’s own.  This last year, we saw a perfect example of a live action remake failing to justify it’s existence, while a different re-telling of the same classic story succeeded, all at the same time.  Disney’s Pinocchio (2022) is a textbook example of little effort put into a remake, leaving the movie to feel like a blatant cash grab that’s supposed to capitalize on the good will built around the original film that it’s trying to emulate.  Audiences could see the shallowness of the film with little effort, and the movie was justifiably rejected by both critics and audiences alike.  Meanwhile, Guillermo Del Toro released his own animated Pinocchio.  Made using stop motion, the film distinguishes itself through an art style based around Del Toro’s own designs and with a decidedly darker tone that is closer to the original literary source than either of the Disney version.  While the 1940 Disney version is still arguably the best cinematic version of the story, Del Toro’s Pinocchio is vastly superior to the remake, because it does the crucial job of creating it’s own identity and justifying it’s existence. It’s the story we all know, but done in a way that we haven’t seen.  Ultimately, that’s what audiences want in the end, to have the familiar feel like something new again, and that’s something that both animation and live action can accomplish in their own way, without having to undermine the other.

There are indeed some things that animation can do better than live action, and vice versa.  Animation for instance has been better used to make a person appear like they are flying, like the original Disney Peter Pan (1953).  When you see Christopher Reeve fly as Superman or Robin Williams fly as Peter Pan in Hook (1991), you can still get a sense of the wire work.  On the other hand, animation is a medium that can’t quite convey the subtlety of stillness in a movie.  It’s a medium that is built around continuous movement, so it can’t quite pick up the same subtlety of an actors performance the same way a live action film can with a locked down, in focus camera close-up can.  Imagine if animation tried to replicate the jail cell interrogation scenes from The Silence of the Lambs (1991).  It could try, but the little details of Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Fosters facial expressions would be lost, as animators would try to add more movement to those facial expressions.  It’s just the different natures of how the mediums work, and they both have their strengths and limitations.  There are great subtle acting moments found in animation, as well as great cartoonish found in live action.  Performance is also different across the spectrum, even with the same actors.  A live action movie could not replicate what Robin Williams brought to the Genie in Aladdin (1992), but animation would also have a hard time replicating the physical comedic timing of his work in Mrs. Doubtfire (1993).  So, I find it strange why Hollywood seems so insistent on trying to replicate animation into live action.  The critical failure and rejection from fans to everything from the Disney remakes to the anime adaptations should prove that.  Sure, you can make a quick buck on name recognition alone, but it’s a short term gain that does not have a long life span, and may in fact be doing damage to the brand overall.  Hollywood should recognize that these are both equal mediums and should both be used when it’s best in service of the story.  The current state of Star Wars is a prime example of how best to blend the two, with different mediums being used to tell different sides of a singular story.  For right now, it would be best for Hollywood to see that animation is not inferior to live action, but is in fact a valuable medium perfect for exploring stories of all kinds.  In the end, it’s the story that matters most, and more importantly, it’s got to be something that feels new and fresh.  Don’t try to reinvent the wheel when you have the ability to fly.

On this Christmas Eve many people are no doubt indulging in their favorite Holiday festivities on the night before the big day.  For many, it’s spending the night partying with friends, coworkers, or just family.  Some may go out to the movies, or others may just stay home and watch a holiday standard on television.  There are of course many movies made just for that occasion, from the perennials like Home Alone (1990) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), or for something more recent there is a whole marathon of saccharine rom coms from the Hallmark Channel ready to satisfy that feeling of Christmas spirt.  But, for those not looking for a long sit, there is also the tradition of Holiday specials that have been a part of television since the early days.  More often the Holiday special has been used as a variety show for TV audiences, showcasing musical or comedy acts tied around the Holidays with celebrities getting into the festive spirit for the entertainment of audiences who tuned in.  But, Holiday specials were also used for one off short form programming, meant to draw in audiences looking to be entertained with something more substantial than a glorified concert.  These were often a great opportunity for animation studios, particularly smaller independent ones, to reach a wider audience that they couldn’t otherwise have gotten to on the big screen.  Of those animation studios vying to make a name for themselves, one not only emerged as a strong contender, but they also managed to excel so much as a producer of Christmas specials that their name is to this day synonymous with the Christmas season in the world of entertainment.  That studio is of course Rankin Bass.  For a whole generation, Rankin Bass became the authors of many childhood Christmas memories with their colorful and quirky holiday specials that even to this day enjoy a yearly revival on broadcast television.  So how did a pair of New York based ad men manage to conquer the airwaves as the masters of the Holiday special.

Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass grew up on opposite sides of the country, but during the late 1950’s, both fresh out of college upstarts had their chance meeting while working in marketing at ABC.  Rankin was a junior art director and Bass a copywriter, and after a couple years of collaborating on numerous television commercials (which included their first forays into animation) the pair parted ways with ABC in 1960 to form their own independent studio.  Their company was called Videocraft International and like many start-up production companies, they were focused on creating programming for television.  The company started off with cel-based animated series for Saturday morning cartoon blocks, including shows like The New Adventures of Pinocchio and Tales of the Wizard of Oz.  Thus far, these animated series gave them plenty of work, but not much notoriety.  This was until they had a chance meeting with a Japanese based stop-motion animator named Tadahito Mochinaga.  Mochinaga had for years been developing his own animation studio utilizing puppets made from wood rather than the usual clay that most other stop motion had utilized.  Mochinaga’s puppets were doll like and highly expressive, and this immediately caught the attention of Rankin Bass who believed that Mochinaga’s style of animation would blend perfectly well with their own unique house style.  They formed a partnership with Mochinaga’s studio to produce television specials, with the characters being designed by Arthur Rankin himself and the animation itself being conducted at the Tokyo based stop-motion studio.  The style that came as a result of the Rankin Bass designs and the Mochinaga animation was dubbed “Animagic.”  This was a fortuitous partnership, but it needed a special kind of story to give these two animation studios a chance to really stand out in the crowd.

There’s no denying that stop motion is a costly and time consuming form of animation, so for Rankin Bass to convince any broadcaster to take on the project and provide the necessary funding for the project, they needed a surefire story that would connect with discerning holiday audiences.  What the studio ultimately landed upon was the story of “Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer.”  The special would be based on the 1949 song written by Johnny Marks, which itself was based on a poem from 1939 written by Robert L. May, commissioned by retailer Montgomery Ward.  The song was popularized by recording artist Gene Autry, and by the time Rankin Bass were about to approach it, the song had become a holiday standard.  With many people already familiar with the lyrics to the song, all Rankin Bass had to do was fill out a story around it.  Jules Bass collaborated on the script with writer Romeo Mueller, finding a story that could fill the needed hour’s worth or programming that they need.  It seems like the lyric from the song, “They never let poor Rudolph, join in any reindeer games,” provided the driving force in the story.  Their Rudolph would start off as an outcast, shunned by his fellow Reindeer for being different; a “misfit” as it were.  As a result, this lead to Rudolph befriending other Misfits like him, giving the special a fuller cast of original characters; including Hermey, the elf who wants to be a Dentist, and Yukon Cornelius, the very unlucky Klondike explorer.  They even visit a whole Island of Misfit Toys, which gives the movie a surprisingly open minded message of tolerance for those who are different.  Ultimately, Rudolph shows he has value despite the shiny nose than has given him grief most of his life, and ultimately turns that deformity into an asset when Santa needs Rudolph to guide his sleigh through a stormy night.  Rankin Bass’ treatment of the story won over executives at NBC, and they were given a greenlight to produce their special.  It aired for the first time on the network on December 6, 1964, and was an immediate hit with audiences.  It later was picked up by CBS in 1972, and since then has aired on network television every year since.

Rankin Bass suddenly found themselves in demand as an animation studio, with the big networks now looking to them to repeat the success of Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer.  Of course, Rankin Bass continued to look to other well known holiday stories to provide their own twists on the tales.  They continued to work with Mochinaga on their “Animagic” projects, including 1968’s The Little Drummer Boy.  At the same time, they continued to also put out animated specials in their traditional, hand drawn style, with animation services provided by another Japanese based studio, Toei Animation; a studio that would go on to become one of the powerhouse names in Anime.  In the hand drawn animation style, Rankin Bass had another massive hit with the short Frosty, the Snow Man (1969), which like Rudolph was also based on a popular song.  The following decade saw a lot more success for Rankin Bass, as they seemed to have a new special every year lined up.  This included Santa Claus is Coming to Town (1970), ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas (1974), The Year Without a Santa Claus (1974) which famously introduced us to the Miser Brothers, Rudolph’s Shiny New Year (1976) a psudo-sequel, Jack Frost (1979), and many more.  They also produced specials and films for other holidays as well, like Mad Monster Party (1967) which was Mochinaga’s final film collaboration with them.  They also were not just successful in making hit shows for television, but they also helped contribute greatly to the holiday time songbook as well.  Most of the specials featured songs from Maury Laws, as well as new covers of classic standards that were often the story basis for the specials.  It helped that some of the best singers at the time were involved as voice talent in these specials, like Burl Ives, Fred Astaire, Jimmy Durante, Joel Grey and many more.  In fact, the Rankin Bass specials were a great showcase all around for some of the best voice actors around.  Mickey Rooney was always reliable as a go to Santa Claus, and the legendary Paul Frees often was voicing multiple characters all at once in many specials.  In additions to the popular new covers, the Maury Laws songs themselves became popular standards themselves, like Rudolph’s “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas” and ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas’ “Even a Miracle Needs a Hand.”

But, Rankin Bass was not just looking to make their name in holiday specials alone.  They wanted to compete in the same field as the Disney’s and Warner Brothers’ when it came to animation.  Building on the success of their Christmas specials, the studio was looking to expand into feature animation.  They had managed to make simple family friendly animated features in the wake of their Rudolph success, including Willy McBean and His Magic Machine (1965), The Daydreamer (1966) and The Wacky World of Mother Goose (1967).  But, in the latter part of the 1970’s, they wanted to go in a direction that ran contrary to where the bigger studios were going with animation, which were stories with a darker theme to them.  And they managed to secure the enviable task of taking audiences for the first time into a mythical place called Middle Earth.  Somehow, Rankin Bass managed to secure the coveted rights to the writings of J.R.R. Tolkein, and they were very much interested in bringing the famed Fantasy writer’s first novel, The Hobbit, to animated life.  The Hobbit (1977) became a made for television animated feature that was decidedly more mature in style and theme than what we had seen from Rankin Bass up to that point.  With a voice cast including Orson Bean as Bilbo Baggins, Hans Conreid as Thorin Oakenshield, and legendary film director John Huston as Gandalf the Wizard, The Hobbit may have divided Tolkein purists with it’s condensation of the author’s expansive mythology, but it enchanted young viewer who were getting their first introduction to the world of Middle Earth.  A couple years later, Rankin Bass followed up the success of their Hobbit adaptation with a film version of the third book in Tolkein’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, The Return of the King (1980).  A few years after that they created a cult hit with the dark animated feature The Last Unicorn (1982).  Though they enjoyed a long and varied career in animation, changing times eventually caught up to Rankin Bass.  The specials of the 80’s were nowhere near as popular as their earlier work, with their last stop-motion special The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (1985) and their last hand drawn special The Wind in the Willows (1987) both performing very poorly in the ratings.  Even though they still had some success with their Saturday Morning Cartoon Thundercats, the studio ultimately couldn’t right the decline and in 1987, the studio dissolved.  Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass would collaborate one more time in 2001, on appropriately enough a Christmas special called Santa, Baby, but apart from that it was the end of an era for one of the greatest teams in animation history.

So, looking back on the body of work that Rankin Bass left behind, what do we understand about their legacy as animators as well as contributors to the holiday season.  For one thing, the ubiquitous-ness of the Rankin Bass brand with the holidays is undeniable, particularly for GenX’ers out there.  For many, who were raised during the 1970’s and 80’s, the holidays were not complete without seeing that Rankin Bass logo at the end of the credits on each special.  When you sat in front of the TV during the holiday season and saw one of the Rankin Bass specials, it gave you that special feeling of the holiday season being in full swing.  Drawing from my own family experience, my Mom recorded a few holiday specials from TV airings onto a VHS tape, and it included a couple of Rankin Bass programs on it, including Rudolph, Frosty, and The Night Before Christmas, as well as a couple other holiday classics like  the Grinch and Charlie Brown specials.  I probably wore that tape out through years of re-watches, but it did it’s job because it put me very much in the holiday spirit every year.  The same I’m sure is true for many others in my generation of late Gen X and early Millennial kids.  One other thing that the Rankin Bass holiday specials did to help make Christmas time even better is that it moved other like minded studios to elevate their game as well.  The success of Rudolph helped to launch a who new generation of holiday classics, including How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966) from animation legend Chuck Jones, as well as A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) from former Disney artist Bill Melendez and written for television by Charles Schultz himself.  Even Disney stepped up to offer their own holiday short, Mickey’s Christmas Carol (1983), based on the Charles Dickens classic.  Holiday specials were standard before on television, but Rankin Bass carved out a special place for the art of animation into that block of programming every year.  The reason that there is so many cartoons to this day as a part of the holiday playlist for many households each year is because Rankin Bass was always a present player in the television that we watched during this time of year.

You can still see the influence of Rankin Bass in many new holiday films and specials made today.  Anytime a TV show does a holiday episode that features an animated segment, it almost always is stop motion in tribute to the Rankin Bass specials.  This includes sitcoms as varied as Home Improvement and Community, all with clear nods to the Rankin Bass style.  The style has also been spoofed on shows like Saturday Night Live and South Park, more often affectionately.  Though perhaps the biggest nods to Rankin Bass have been on the big screen.  The 2003 comedy Elf starring Will Farrell features stop-motion animation mixed in with live action to represent a vey Rankin Bass like vision of the North Pole.  The movie even goes as far to have Farrell’s character, Buddy the Elf, having a heart to heart talk with the Burl Ives’ Snowman from Rudolph The Red Nose Reindeer.  It’s an affectionate nod to Rankin Bass that clearly knows just how indelible those specials were to the holiday season.  A less obvious nod to the Rankin Bass legacy is found in another film that has become a holiday classic.  I honestly believe that if it weren’t for the proven success of Rankin Bass use of stop motion, director Tim Burton might not have pursued it as the ideal animation style to bring his story of The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) to life.  Stylistically, there is little to compare Nightmare Before Christmas with the films of Rankin Bass, but you can see the influence is still there.  The fact that stop motion animation has such a connection to the holiday season is purely the result of Rankin Bass’ influence.  That’s why so many holiday commercials still use the animation style, banking on people’s familiarity with the holiday specials.  It seems reasonable that Tim Burton saw this connection too, and wanted to invoke the familiarity of the Rankin Bass holiday special style while at the same time subverting it in his own way.  You’ll also find references to characters from the Rankin Bass specials in unlikely places, including an appearance of Snowmiser from The Year Without a Santa Claus in the lair for Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Freeze in Batman and Robin (1997).  Despite their studio being out of the game in the last 30-plus years, Rankin Bass’ place as an iconic part of the holiday season still remains as strong as ever.

Of course, Rankin Bass is not just an iconic part of the holiday season, but also a  highly celebrated name in the field of animation in general as well.  They helped to carve out a special place in the market and elevate independent animation studios at a time when the medium really needed it.  Their “Amimagic” stop motion puppets have this toy like quality to them that makes them appealing to audiences both young and old, and the specials they made continue to resonate across generations.  And Rankin Bass helped to elevate other parts of the animation field as well.  Toei Animation, which through it’s subsidiary Topcraft animated many of the hand drawn specials for Rankin Bass, would go on to make a name for themselves as producers of major anime hits like DragonBall Z and One Piece.  And before Peter Jackson embarked on his own groundbreaking cinematic trilogy, Rankin Bass’ The Hobbit would stand as the preeminent adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkein’s classic adventure.  For many of my generation, Rankin Bass was our entry point into Middle Earth.  But, it’s unmistakable that the thing that Rankin Bass will be most remembered for are their holiday specials, and for good reason.  The short programs may be simple and quaint, but they are as cozy as warm sit by the fireplace with a warm cup of hot chocolate on a Christmas night.  The holidays are just not the same without them on TV every year.  While Rudolph still gets it’s annual airing on network TV, many of the lesser seen holiday specials have made their way to other avenues of broadcast.  Freeform, formally the Family Channel, has been the home to the Rankin Bass collection for many years now as part of their 25 Days of Christmas block of programming, and you can still find many of the standards like Frosty the Snowman and Santa Claus is Coming to Town there.  There are also DVD and Blu-ray compilations out there, though it’s hard to find complete collections as the rights to the Rankin Bass library is scattered between NBC Universal and Warner Media.  But, regardless of where you find the specials, just know that they feel just as festive today as they did when they first aired.  Both Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass left behind a marvelous legacy to be proud of, and even into long retirement, they managed to see that legacy grow after they long called it quits.  Arthur Rankin passed away in 2014 and Jules Bass passed just this last October, at the ripe old ages of 89 and 87.  They were valuable pioneers in the field of animation and I hope in their last few years they were able to understand how much they made the holidays for a whole generation of children, including myself, that much more merry and bright.  And with that, may all of you have a holly, jolly Christmas this year.