Who’s Super Now? – 20 Years of The Incredibles and How Pixar Created the Blueprint for the Rise of Marvel and DC

The early 2000’s were an interesting transitional time for comic book movies.  After the crushing failure of 1997’s Batman and Robin, the genre as a whole went into a bit of a recession as it tried to re-establish what it needed to be.  The Batman franchise had evolved from moody and grim to campy and colorful, and it was not what audiences were looking for.  Heading into the new millennium, a different approach was looked at.  Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000) got the ball rolling by grounding the super hero mythos in something that was more familiar to the world that we live in.  A couple years later, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002) took the genre in a direction that made it’s adventure fun but not overly camp.  In many ways, the genre was heading in a direction that honestly was much closer to the comic books that these movies were based on.  Fidelity to the comic books was the guiding force now rather than the traditional standards of genre that had been present before.  And each comic book movie was able to have it’s own identity rather than follow formula, though there were still common tropes that still stuck around.  By the end of the 2000’s, the comic book genre had gone from being on life support to being the dominant force in Hollywood, and it would only continue to grow into the following decade and beyond.  But while the mighty forces of Marvel and DC were battling for supremacy in Hollywood, it could be argued that both have an entirely different source to thank for setting the tone right for the genre.  The movie that had the most profound influence on the super hero genre over the last 20 years (with impacts on everything from character development to the sense of humor present) didn’t come from Marvel nor DC, but rather from an animation studio called Pixar, which itself saw it’s own meteoric rise during this same period.

Pixar’s The Incredibles (2004) came at a pivotal time for both animation and super heroes.  For Pixar, it was a big leap forward for them in terms of animation.  Up to that point, they had steered away from depicting human characters, often leaving them to the background as they were far more difficult to model in a believable way.  You look at the early character models of characters like Andy and Sid in Toy Story (1995) and you can see why Pixar chose to center their early movies on stylized toy characters like Woody and Buzz Lightyear.  Animals or non-humanoid creatures also gave the studio more creative freedom with the primitive tools they had to work with, which was evidenced in the movies A Bug’s Life (1998), Monsters Inc. (2001) and Finding Nemo (2003).  However, they faced increased competition from Dreamworks Animation, which struck a huge hit with Shrek (2001), which featured more human characters in prominent roles.  For studios like Dreamworks and Pixar, the dilemma was to find the perfect medium in animating humans that would avoid the uncanny valley pitfall that can often occur.  The solution that Pixar ultimately landed on was to treat their human characters less like perfect recreations, and instead look for ways to make them stylized in a way that would make them easier to animate.  And what better example to look for exaggerated forms of human physique than in comic books.  There are plenty of examples of comic book artists doing away with traditional character models and bringing their own unique stylistic twists to the looks of popular characters; in many cases creating body shapes that could only make sense as part of comic book art.  This is likely what inspired the artists at Pixar and drew them into the idea of making a super hero movie that felt very heavily inspired by the freeing graphic inventiveness of comic books.  Instead of characters with perfectly rendered anatomy, Pixar’s Incredibles would have humans with extreme features that not only made them stand out, but would also be perfectly accentuated to their personalities as well.

The interesting thing about how The Incredibles came to be at Pixar is that it marked the first time that the studio went outside of their own inner circle to green-light a new project.  Now, writer and director Brad Bird was no stranger to the Pixar team before he came to work for them.  Bird was part of the same class at Cal Arts that also included Pixar Animation co-founder John Lassater, and both men started out as junior animators at Disney in the early 80’s, so they were already familiar to each other.  Bird, however, left Disney fairly early on to pursue independent work.  He would work on projects such as Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories anthology series, as well as directing a couple episodes of The Simpsons, including creating key supporting characters such as Krusty the Clown and Sideshow Bob that still remain a part of the show to this day.  It was, however, when he made his feature film debut in 1999 with The Iron Giant that Brad Bird began to make a big splash in the animation industry.  Though The Iron Giant is celebrated as a masterpiece today, it did not have a great opening in theaters and ended up prematurely closed the studio that made it, which ended up making Brad Bird a free agent again.  Regardless of box office, the love for Iron Giant was strong across the animation industry so there were a lot of studios that were willing to meet with Bird during this time, and that’s when John Lassater decided to call up his old colleague.  It would prove to be fortuitous because Brad Bird had been developing this idea for a film centered around a family of super heroes that fit perfectly with the desire of Pixar to experiment more with stylized human characters.  Up to this point, the Pixar legacy team had consisted of the people who worked on the original shorts as well as Toy Story.  Lassater had directed the firs three features, while Pete Doctor and Andrew Stanton helmed Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo respectively.  The Incredibles would be the first new film by someone who had not come up through the ranks of Pixar, but as evidenced by the results, Brad Bird fit in very much with the Pixar community.

There are a lot of layers to what makes The Incredibles a perfect super hero movie.  For one thing, the film is not about the characters doing super hero things, but rather it shows us how they try to build a life outside of their super powered identity.  In the world of The Incredibles, super heroic acts have been made illegal due to a string of incidents where people have become collateral damage in the fights between super heroes and super villains and in turn have led to law suits.  As a result, super heroes have live anonymously underground, forced to suppress their abilities.  The Parrs, a family of “supers,” try to blend in with this new normal and this is the focus of the story.  The movie has fun with how the Parrs use their powers in this domestic setting, but it’s ultimately about how they function as a family unit rather than what they must do to save the world, which does come into play in the final act.  The movie brilliantly allows each character to have their own power type too.  Bob Parr, aka Mr. Incredible, has super strength; his wife Helen is super stretchy and goes by the alter ego Elastigirl.  And their children are unique as well; shy Violet can make herself invisible and creates a force field around her, while hyperactive Dash has super speed.  And the baby Jack-Jack, well, that would be spoiling too much.  The Parr family also has a close relationship with Lucius Best, whose freezing powers have earned him the name Frozone.  You can see the parallels with these characters with pre-existing characters from comic books, like Ice Man, Invisible Girl, or The Flash, but putting them together as a family was a unique way of framing their story and examining how being super would function in an average family narrative.  Super hero families aren’t a novel idea; Marvel has tried for years to make a Fantastic Four movie work, with attempt number three coming next summer.  But with The Incredibles, it’s a focal point for the story that works and helps to endear each of these super beings in a way that makes them relatable to the everyday average family.

But what was the thing that set The Incredibles apart as a super hero movie.  What Brad Bird did, in addition to directing an action packed film, was craft a script that in many ways deconstructed the very idea of being a super hero.  The brilliance of the story is that the super heroes are forced to suppress their powers in order to function as a citizen of society, and if a super hero can’t use their powers, what are they left with.  Bob Parr’s crisis in the film is that he has all this power, and yet he has to work a boring day job like everyone else.  What this motivates him to do is to break the rules just a little bit while still trying to balance his home life, with a wife who is more determined to keep him and the family in check.  We see that Bob is a hero to his core and wants to use his powers for good, but is foolhardy to the point where his desires don’t take into account the repercussions of what his actions may do.  By looking into this side of Bob’s character, we see how Brad Bird is examining the duality of being both a god among men and a flawed human being at the same time.  It’s a more introspective examination of the tropes of super herodom that in many ways has found itself worked into the whole genre at large.  When Marvel began their MCU, it was noticeable from the get go that they were taking a much more introspective look at the characters themselves.  The humor of the MCU is definitely more meta than super hero films of the past, and you can’t help but recall how a lot of their deconstruction of super hero tropes fell reminiscent of the ones from The Incredibles.  There’s a through line to be sure of the jokes in Incredibles about villains monologuing leading to 20 years later where Wolverine punches out a villain and says “Not everyone gets a speech,” as seen in Deadpool & Wolverine (2024).

But The Incredibles is far more than just examining the home life of super heroes.  The point wasn’t to just show what Superman does when he is only Clark Kent.  Brad Bird’s film is ultimately about embracing the special part of what makes us who we are; something that is a common theme in his films.  Some have criticized the movie for promoting an Ayn Randian objectivist point of view; where exceptional people should be held up as better than the rest of society.  The Randian elements seem most pronounced in the movie with Bob Parr’s frustrations over being held back by the anti-super laws, but I don’t see the movie as a validation of Randian beliefs either.  If anything, Brad Bird’s point in the film is not objectivism, but rather the way society scapegoats it’s problems on those who are different.  Ultimately, the Parr family realizes that just sitting on the sidelines doesn’t make society better either, and that the need to conform is not just restrictive to them, but it’s also preventing them from having a healthy family life as well.  When they get to be super powered in the open, they grow closer together as a family.  Exceptionalism, according to Brad Bird, is not in being better than everyone else, but in being the best version of oneself.  That’s something that he showed more definitively in his next film, Ratatouille (2007), where the motto “Anyone Can Cook,” reveals itself to be the idea that a great artist can be anyone, even the least expected.  And he also celebrates the idea that people who chose less power can often be the best representation of oneself; such as The Iron Giant choosing not to be a weapon and instead becoming “Superman.”  This is another idea that has helped shape the characterizations of super heroes over the last 20 years.  It’s the motivation that makes Wonder Woman walk into No Man’s Land and act as a human shield, or Spider-Man choosing to let everyone in the world forget who he is, or Thor letting his home world be destroyed in order to save it’s people.  Like the Incredibles family, modern day super heroes don’t just choose to be super to be better; in many ways they have no choice but to do what’s best for those they care about.

It’s the complexity of character that The Incredibles brought that certainly helped create ripples throughout the super hero genre, though there certainly were many cases before of complex characterizations.  One other thing that the movie had a strong influence on was the way it showcased the power sets of it’s characters.  The movie seems to have the most fun with Helen’s Elastigirl power set, as her stretching ability gave the animators a lot to work with.  One of the biggest highlights of the movie though is the sequence dubbed the “One Hundred Mile Dash.”  It’s a chase scene involving Dash as he tries to escape guardsmen trying to hunt him down.  Even to this day I don’t think super speed powers have been as showcased as well on screen as it is here, and we’ve had two Quicksilvers and one Flash in the movies by now.  There are many other great elements of the movie that the movie set a high bar for that I don’t think any other super hero film has been able to match.  One is the presence of the character Edna Mode (voiced by Brad Bird himself).  We see all these amazing super suits in Marvel and DC movies, but are never given an explanation about who makes them, with a few exceptions.  A character like Edna is a great addition here, and it makes sense that a person who designs suits for super heroes would be a type A personality herself.  She is easily one of the highlights of the movie and a character type you wish would be more present in the genre.  One other brilliant part of the movie is the villain, Syndrome; easily one of the greatest in all of Pixar’s canon.  Syndrome’s role is a great deconstruction of toxic fandom, where one’s fascination with super powers often leads to eventual loathing of not having control over it, and a desire to flip the power dynamic in their favor.  Syndrome wishes to create a society where everyone has access to super hero ability (which he will profit off of by selling it to them), so that in his eyes, “when everyone is super, than no one will be.”  He’s a character that has become frighteningly all too real in the last 20 years, as tech bro billionaires have used their wealth to bully their way into politics and culture.  Given Pixar’s close proximity to Silicon Valley, it’s almost like Brad Bird and his team knew what was coming and tried to warn us, but we didn’t listen and are now in a world increasingly run by Syndromes.

Unlike The Iron Giant, Incredibles was an immediate success upon it’s initial release.  The movie grossed a respectable $260 million domestic and Brad Bird won his first Academy Award for Animated Feature that year.  What’s more, it was a major milestone for Pixar Animation, as it helped them improve their style of animation and showed that they could tell a human story without having to be rigid in their animation of the human figures.  You know you’ve got great stylized human characters when each one’s silhouette alone conveys personality.  It also was a great leap forward in staging, pushing the medium of computer animation further into a cinematic mode, with the movie very much reaching epic heights in it’s sense of scale.  But at it’s heart, Brad Bird drove home the idea that this was a family film as well.  The heroes aren’t just defined by their deeds, but in how they act as a family unit as well.  And it contrasts so brilliantly with a villain who only sees the powers as the only thing that makes a hero who they are, completely missing the whole point of what heroism is.  While The Incredibles is working with tropes that were already there present in the genre, it did help us to look at them in a fresh new way, and that in many ways guided the shifting winds that would define the genre through the whole rise of the MCU and the DCEU.  One noteworthy contribution to the genre that definitely has a direct connection to The Incredibles is the contributions of it’s music composer Michael Giacchino.  After writing music for television and video games for years, Giacchino was able to make his studio feature film debut as composer for The Incredibles, with a mid-century jazz score reminiscent of the James Bond films. Cut to a decade later, and Giacchino is credited with writing the fanfare for Marvel Studios.  You now hear his music before every Marvel movie, which is quite a legacy to leave behind, and it all started with writing the score for The Incredibles.  Marvel even gave the longtime comic book fan a chance to make his debut behind the camera as director of the special Werewolf by Night (2022) for Disney+.  Even 20 years later and The Incredibles still remains a high water mark not just for animation, but for super hero films in general.  Even it’s sequel, Incredibles 2 (2018) performed like a MCU film at the box office, grossing over a billion worldwide.  Culturally, it is undeniably Brad Bird’s most influential film, and that’s saying a lot for a man with multiple masterpieces on his resume.  It’s an action packed ride, but also one where the heart is in the right place, showing how heroism in the end is not about personal glory, but instead about discovering the best way to use what you have for good.  It’s old school in that way, and there’s no school like the old school.

Too Big to Stream – How Netflix’s Fight With Movie Theaters May Be Hurting Their Brand

There is no doubt the biggest disruptor in cinema over the last few years has been the company known as Netflix.  The Silicon Valley startup that had the novel idea of renting out movies through the mail from an online platform has since grown into a megalithic player in Hollywood itself, literally re-shaping the way that business is conducted within the movie industry.  It has also been one of the causes for a lot of destruction of the old standards of production and distribution.  The first casualty of Netflix’s rise was the video rental industry.  Blockbuster Video, which had itself leveled the competition to leave themselves in a position where they were the only video rental option in most markets, fell very quickly in response to Netflix’s easier to use service.  By the time Netflix was moving away from it’s mail service model to a streaming model, making on demand entertainment even more convenient, Blockbuster went from being a national brand to a ghost of it’s former self, now only open in a single location in Bend, Oregon.  The shift to streaming has also led to a significant decline in physical media in general, with most big box stores no longer featuring a movie aisle as most physical copies are now sold exclusively online.  Studios that once made a mint on selling their legacy titles on physical media have instead decided to play in the same field as Netflix, and launch their own streaming platforms instead.  There really is no other company that has changed the culture in the movie industry as much as Netflix has, and after leveling past juggernaut industries like that of home entertainment and video rental, they seemed poised to put another prominent column of Hollywood out to pasture as well; the movie theater industry.  However, this next step has taken some unexpected twists and turns that in some ways has put pressure on Netflix to rethink it’s whole business model.  Is it better for them to seek to destroy the theatrical model of distribution, or is there a better option for them in actually working with movie theaters?

One thing that has surprisingly emerged in the last couple of years in the wake of the streaming wars is that movies that released in theaters first actually perform better on streaming than the movies that were put out as streaming exclusives.  This has been the case with the studio run services like Disney+, Max, and Paramount+.  One noteworthy example is Disney’s Moana (2016), a film released in theaters 8 years ago, years before there was a Disney+, and even after all this time it is still ranked high on the all-time watched list for every streaming platform.  More recent films like The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) and Barbie (2023) have also given their streaming platforms a boost after their initial theatrical runs, which by the way both netted over a billion dollars each.  Which is to show that releasing the movies first in theaters does not decrease their viewership numbers once they are released on streaming after.  If anything, it shows that movies have resiliency.  Of course, I’m citing examples of movies that were universally beloved by audiences, and their repeat watching value certainly translated into viewership on streaming.  But, it’s also a sign that a theatrical roll out doesn’t hurt either.  In fact it is more beneficial in the long run for a movie to premiere on the big screen first because of the patterns of viewership that help to spotlight any certain film.  When a movie is in theaters, the choice is limited to the availability of screens, so the customer is making a very active choice in what movie they are going to see.  Whether the experience is good or bad, the movie goer still had a clear idea of what experience they were paying for.  Movies on streaming on the other hand don’t benefit from that factor of audience interest.  They are algorithmically spotlighted on a platform that customers usually spend scrolling through hundreds of titles in order to find something to watch.  At a cost between $10-20 a month, streaming gives it’s customers and abundance of options, but very few quick choices.  And naturally, the movies that people saw on a movie screen will be the ones that they actively seek first, while straight to streaming will tend to be buried.

This has become a contentious thing between Netflix and the movie industry now.  For years, Netflix has been spending billions on expanding their library of movies and TV shows, which was something they had to do out of necessity after studios like Disney and Universal began to remove their films and shows from the platform in order to consolidate for their own platforms.  And as part of this expansion of their in-house production, they also were trying to build their brand as a prestige name in the industry.  They did this by getting big name talent like Martin Scorsese, the Coen Brothers, David Fincher, and Alfonso Cuaron to bring their next projects to their studio.  Netflix developed this reputation for being generous to filmmakers with movie ideas that probably were not going to work in the Hollywood business model as it was.  This attracted a lot of talent to Netflix and away from the other studios, who were starting to fret about the pull that Netflix was having in the industry.  And for a good while, it was working.  Netflix went from being an online streaming platform featuring films from all studios to a major studio within itself.  They were buying up real estate across Hollywood, including the legendary Sunset Bronson studio lot that was once home to both Warner Brothers during it’s early years.  They were beginning to frequently appear at awards ceremonies  including the Oscars and even racked up a fair amount of gold along the way.  But, the streaming market has definitely changed with all the other studios now running their own platforms.  And while Netflix still dominates as the streaming champion, their status as the ideal place for filmmakers to go has somewhat diminished.  Before, Netflix could persuade filmmakers to come to their offices with the appeal of getting their dream projects made, sparing no expense.  But now, the legacy studios of Hollywood are beginning to lure the filmmakers back with a different appeal that seems to be more ideal to them nowadays; that they can get their movie seen on the big screen.

One has to thing that filmmakers are making a calculated risk between these two options now.  One, they go to Netflix and get their strange, unconventional movie made without restrictions but also see it play exclusively on streaming and potentially be buried in the algorithm.  Or, they go to the studios and potentially face numerous obstacles from executive meddling, but eventually they’ll see their work play in front of an audience on the big screen.  But, there are those filmmakers who very much desire to have their movies screened for a wide audience and that’s becoming a more and more desirable option to some.  Box office is a very tangible measure of a film’s success, so it’s a great way to gauge if your movie managed to succeed or not.  On streaming, your movie becomes one of numerous titles listed simply as thumbnails on a smaller screen.  Most streaming platforms don’t even publicly state their internal numbers, so the measure of success is somewhat a mystery.  And there are just a lot of filmmakers out there who are still succeeding without even thinking twice about choosing to go theatrical first.  Christopher Nolan for example clashed with his previous home studio (Warner Brothers) after they were about to push his film Tenet (2020) to streaming during the pandemic against his wishes of waiting for theaters to re-open.  He jumped ship, went to Universal who gave him an assurance of a theatrical first release, and he made Oppenheimer (2023) to resounding box office and awards season success.  Tom Cruise likewise convinced his studio Paramount to sit on Top Gun: Maverick (2022) until the theatrical market recovered, and it payed off extremely well.  So, what filmmakers are seeing is that there is an added benefit to getting the movie seen in theaters to lots of people, because it gives their film an added spotlight that can be tangibly felt.  That’s why a lot more filmmakers are starting to demand a bit more on their distribution front, and ensuring that their film is not just made, but also viewed.

One of the biggest challenges recently to Netflix’s streaming first policy is a recent push by filmmaker Greta Gerwig to get her next film project set up at Netflix released on more screens nationwide.  After her success with Barbie, Greta inked a massive deal with Netflix to launch a brand new take of the Narnia books from C.S. Lewis into a major film franchise.  Clearly, Netflix sees this as a major potential win for them, but Greta Gerwig believes (rightly I’d say) that such a franchise can’t just thrive on streaming alone.  Narnia is a major title to produce, akin to The Lord of the Rings in scale and scope, which is what prompted Disney and Fox’s short lived run with the book series.  They are movies that demand a big screen treatment, and that’s why she’s putting pressure on Netflix to consider a wider release.  It’s not something new for Netflix to go wide with one of their films.  As part of their contract with director Rian Johnson, Netflix did agree to release the first of his two Knives Out sequels, Glass Onion (2022), in a wide theatrical release before it was put on streaming.  However, they limited the amount of time it played in theaters, and the film was gone after only two weeks.  This clearly limited the amount of box office it was going to take, and by all accounts, Glass Onion did pretty well in it’s short run.  Who knows how much money Netflix left on the table by pulling it after such a brief run.  Perhaps the Netflix accountants think that box office is miniscule compared to the $15 a month they currently get from their hundreds of millions of subscribers, but any box office is is helpful to the bottom  line, especially when it can off set production and marketing costs.  For Greta Gerwig, she actually has a powerful ally in her camp; the IMAX Corporation, who are interested in getting Ms. Gerwig’s Narnia films on their screens.  IMAX has a lot of pull in the industry, and have proven to be a big driver of box office for films because of the premium ticket price.  Greta clearly wants to get her movie seen properly on a bigger screen than just having it streamed on a platform; but at the same time, she is working with Netflix’s money, who ultimately have the final say.

Netflix has been defiant, but the other streamers have reconsidering their plans to put a bunch of their movies exclusively on streaming.  Paramount made a last minute choice to take their musical re-make of Mean Girls (2024) and put it into theaters in advance of it’s premiere on Paramount+.  The choice proved fruitful as the movie grossed over $90 million at the box office, making it a hit for the struggling studio that they otherwise wouldn’t have had if it went straight to streaming.  There is also an example of movie studios that were planning on making multi-part mini-series for streaming all of a sudden restructuring them into feature films for theaters.  Disney’s upcoming Moana 2 (2024) was one of those streaming series projects that got re-worked and now it’s being projected to be a box office winner for Disney Animation, which is really in need of one. But perhaps the biggest example of a shift back to the theatrical model that payed off big for a studio was Warner Brothers decision to take Tim Burton’s long anticipated sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024) and put it into theaters after initially greenlighting it as a streaming exclusive.  To date, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has grossed nearly $300 million domestic and over half a billion worldwide.  Had they gone the streaming route, Warner Brothers would have missed out on a net profit of over $100 million on this film, which they definitely need after the box office flops of Furiosa (2024) and Joker: Folie a Deux.  But there are other examples of some studios doing the reverse.  After a string of box office disappointments like Napoleon (2023) and Argylle (2024), Apple Studios has opted to pull back from theatrical and release more of their films straight to streaming, like they did to the recent film Wolfs (2024) starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt.  That film was planned for theaters, with trailers already running in most markets, and in the eleventh hour the movie was shifted to streaming instead.  While there’s this case to prove a bit of the point to Netflix’s argument, the trend of movies going from streaming to theatrical is growing bigger.

In many ways, it comes down to what type of movie gets either the theatrical or streaming treatment.  The movies that seem to get the lowest bit of interest are the ones that studios feel safer putting out in streaming, meanwhile the safer bets and higher profile projects get the theatrical market.  But with Netflix, they seem content on going all in on streaming; at least up to now.  They only used limited theatrical releases to put their movie out for awards contention, since they still have to play by the Academy’s rules in this regard.  But still, that limits the visibility of their in theaters to just a handful of theaters, namely in Los Angeles and New York, where Academy voters mostly live.  Movies play differently on living room entertainment systems compared to the movie theater experience.  If Netflix wants their prestige movies to gain any traction in awards season, make it so that they have the highest profile in the grandest presentation possible.  When Netflix was starting to disrupt the industry in the 2010’s by investing in Oscar caliber campaigns, they certainly had the kinds of movies to back that claim up.  In some cases, their movies were garnering the most nominations in any year, led by movies like Roma (2018), The Irishman (2019) and The Power of the Dog (2021).  This last Oscars, they had only one nominated film, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro (2023), and it went home empty handed.  Couple this with the fact that straight to streaming films have garnered the reputation of being the new direct-to-video moniker of poor quality, and you can see that Netflix’s brand has somewhat diminished.  All of the Oscar worthy stuff they put out is now being drowned out by the deluge of bad films that get dumped onto their platform, whether made by them or licensed by another studio.   It may now be worth it for Netflix to clean up it’s reputation by putting their name out their more in a theatrical arena, showing that they can be competitive with the legacy studios in Hollywood.

Netflix should not be adversarial with the theatrical market.  It’s a resilient mode of distribution that Netflix has been unable to conquer in the same way it has so many other industries.  Even still, movie theaters are not fully recovered yet from the blow dealt to them by the pandemic.  The problem isn’t so much that people prefer to watch movies at home than go out to a theater.  We’ve discovered in the last couple years that there is indeed a reliable base of customers that will definitely make time to watch movies in theaters.  The issue today is that the movie industry is just not making enough movies in order to fill the demand of the theatrical market, and this is where Netflix could be a lot of help.  Not every movie they make is necessarily worthy of the big screen treatment, but there are a few that absolutely would benefit from a wide release in theaters.  Most people forget that Eddie Murphy made a new Beverly Hills Cop sequel this year exclusive for Netflix, because it never got a theatrical release.  Seeing how much a legacy sequel made so many years later ended up lighting up the box office this fall with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, perhaps Murphy and Netflix realized they missed out on a gold opportunity this year to bank on the nostalgia driving their movie.  Will Netflix make the change?  It’s hard to say.  In many ways, the streaming market is changing once again to something that favors a symbiotic relationship with the theatrical model and not one in opposition to it.  There are added pressures now for Netflix to reconsider their position, including more demands from filmmakers and more competition from other streamers that are benefiting from the theatrical to streaming mode of release.  Given that Netflix has more to gain than lose by just doing more in the theatrical market, it should be an easy choice.  There seems to be signs that some at Netflix value the theatrical experience; they did help save the legendary Grauman’s Egyptian Theater in Hollywood after all.  Netflix needs to shake off the reputation they have as just a content mill, and actually show that they mean business as a new major Hollywood studio by showcasing what they can do on the biggest scale possible by getting their movies out on the silver screen.  They’ll still remain a top dog in streaming for years to come if people get interested in all their movies again, and not just the ones that the algorithm pushes to the top.    For many, nothing beats the theater experience, so for Netflix’s sake if you can’t beat it, join it.

Collecting Criterion – Election (1999)

We are mere days away  from that time again, when we must do our duty as citizens and vote for who will lead our country for the next few years.  It’s a day that we are either eagerly awaiting, or more likely dreading.  But, nevertheless it is an essential function of a healthy democracy, where every voice matters.  Much of the political discourse in our nation, for better and worse, is influenced greatly by our culture and Hollywood has contributed it’s fair share of political movies over the years.  A few of those films have become special enough to be recognized by the Criterion Collection, and they span a wide variety of issues.  There are political thrillers from the likes of director Costa-Gavras, namely Z (1969, Spine #491) and Missing (1982, #449).  There’s also Watergate era paranoia thrillers like The Parallax View (1974, #1064).  Political documentaries also are represented in the collection, like Harlan County U.S.A (1976, #334) and Hearts and Minds (1974, #156).  But perhaps the most politically charged film that are found in the Criterion Collection are the political satires.  Some of the most hard hitting ones include Robert Altman’s 11-part mini-series Tanner ’88 (1988, #258), where it skewers the American political machine by running a fake candidate in a real election.  There is also the chillingly prophetic film A Face in the Crowd (1957, #970) from Elia Kazan, where a loud mouth entertainer is propped up to run for office and over the course of time becomes a dangerous demagogue; a savage critique of the toxic relationship between media and politics that feels eerily too close to reality today.  But perhaps the one of the most interesting political satires that has made it into the Criterion Collection is a little film about a high school student body election that over the course of the film reveals itself to be a microcosm of the American way of politics in it’s entirety.  That movie would be Alexander Payne’s breakthrough second feature simply titled Election (1999, #904)

Alexander Payne beforehand was no stranger to tackling politics in his movies before Election.  His first feature, Citizen Ruth (1996), satirized the debate around abortion in America during the 1990’s.  A movie like Election seemed like a logical next step.  But it is interesting that ever since, Payne has largely avoided overt political stories in the rest of his body of work.  Through the following two decades he was more concerned with human stories such as About Schmidt (2002), Sideways (2004), The Descendants (2011), Nebraska (2013) and most recently with The Holdovers (2023).  Really, the only movie in that time where he returned to making a political satire, it was the movie Downsizing (2017) which many people agree is his least successful film.  Election does fit well within his larger body of work mainly because it is a film about characters more than it is about any political agenda.  For his film, Alexander Payne and his frequent writing partner Jim Taylor created characters that reveal themselves to be familiar archetypes of the kind that you see pop up in any contentious political campaign.  By keeping the scope of his setting small, Payne helps to draw more attention to the stakes of this small scale election and how it pertains to the characters in his story.  While the stakes are small, the way these characters deal with their own scheming and manipulation in order to seek victory in this election reveals an interesting concept that has a far more reaching conclusion than you would think from the start.  All of the pettiness and backstabbing we see in politics today really isn’t that far removed from the way we behaved when we were in high school.  Politics has grown increasingly juvenile over the years, with elections becoming more of a clash of personalities than a clash of ideas.  The fact that social media and the ability to meme is a function of campaigns today is just another sign of how spot on Alexander Payne’s satirical look at campaigning was.  It should have been a wake-up call, but instead it was sadly ahead of it’s time.

Set in Alexander Payne’s hometown of Omaha, Nebraska (as most of his films are), the movie follows the student body election of Carver High.  Currently, the overly ambitious and over-achieving Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) is running un-opposed for student body president, but even despite of that, she is aggressively campaigning in a way that even Beltway insiders would find over the top.  Her election seems like a foregone conclusion, until History and Civics teacher Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick) decides to shake the campaign up.  McAllister has grown to dislike Ms. Flick after she got herself involved in a sexual relationship with the geometry teacher who was also Jim’s best friend.  Though he agreed that his friend Dave should have been fired for the inappropriate relationship he had with a student, Jim is also upset that Tracy did not face any consequences herself.  As a way of trying to make her pay for her misdeed, he convinces dim-witted star football player Paul Metzler (Chris Klein) to run for class president as well.  While completely lacking in any of the same knowledge needed to run student government like Tracy has, Paul nevertheless gains support from the student body by virtue of his simple charisma.  Tracy is outraged that the clearly unqualified Paul is just coasting through his campaign while she is working hard and getting nothing in return.  To make things even more complicated, Paul’s lesbian sister Tammy (Jessica Campbell) decides to enter the race herself as a spoiler third party candidate, running on a position of ending student government in general.  When the day of the election comes, McAllister finds that Tracy has won by only a single vote.  Not wanting to see her succeed, he hides the last couple votes she would need for victory, and hands the election to Paul.  However, McAllister’s dirty deed is discovered and he loses his job for the election interference.  Tracy gets the student body president position she always wanted, but it comes at the cost of alienating her from half of the student body.  Despite the victories gained, the movie shows us that the fight itself is not without cost.

It’s hard not to watch the movie today and not see the parallels with American politics today.  Even when it first was released, many people were shocked by how much the film predicted what would happen in the presidential election a year later.  Before the 2016 and 2020 elections became the messy situations that we have recently endured, the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore was at the time the most controversial in American history.  Just like the race seen in Election, it was a contest between an ill-informed but folksy son of privilege versus an intelligent but socially awkward career politician and the race did literally come down to just a couple of votes out of millions cast.  When Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor wrote their screenplay, they probably thought that their premise would be far too ridiculous to ever come true, but as we’ve sadly learned about American politics, reality has become stranger than fiction.  Where the movie Election really nails the satire is in showing how politics is a very petty game of one-upsmanship.  Tracy Flick may have the stamina and knowledge to do student government right, but we also see that it’s a desperate cry out for attention for her.  In a way, the movie does present it as a positive point about her character, since she is shown to not have a lot of wealth and influence behind her so she is entirely self-reliant.  But she is also shrill and dismissive of others, believing that she alone is capable of doing the job of student president.  Meanwhile, Jim McAllister is a petty person for putting his own resentment of Tracy before the needs of the student government.  In many way, an audience reading of the film can say a lot about us as a nation when it comes to deciding who’s in the right and the wrong.  Some may see McAllister as the hero for stopping someone as power hungry as Tracy Flick from getting what she wants.  Others may view him as the villain for deliberately disenfranchising voters for his own petty ends.  In the end, the thing that I think Alexander Payne is trying to say is that everyone in this film is a terrible person in their own way, and that that’s just politics has become over time; picking the least awful person for the job.

But what definitely wasn’t awful was the craft that was put into this movie.  Alexander Payne’s become a master at capturing what you would call mid-American ambiance in his movies.  Hailing from Nebraska, he has a fondness for fly-over country simplicity and Election definitely feels at home in that vision as well.  Even while the perspective on the American political process is examined with a lot of cynicism in the movie, the perspective on the people and the place where they live is not.  Payne’s very humanistic outlook for the characters in his movies very much helps this movie from becoming too sour of a portrayal of political machinations.  It also helps that he cast the right people to play the parts in the film too.  Reese Witherspoon is just note perfect as the efficient to a fault Tracy Flick.  Before Election, Reese had been one of the go to actresses at the time to play deeply troubled teenage girls, with breakout roles in Pleasantville (1998) and Cruel Intentions (1999).  Playing the buttoned-up and over-achieving Tracy was a bit of a departure for her, but not something that she wasn’t capable of pulling off.  It also gave her a place to shine her credentials in comedy, something that she would carry with her to box office success in 2001’s Legally Blonde soon after.  Opposite her is a wonderfully sleazy performance from Matthew Broderick as Jim McAllister.  He does a great job of playing this character as pathetically petty while at the same time giving him a sense of relatability that helps to prevent him from being two one-dimensionally evil.  Also, Chris Klein makes for a perfect dim-witted jock in the role of Paul Metzler.  He himself wasn’t too far removed from appearing in the sex comedy American Pie (1999), so he probably knew exactly the kind of charming empty vessel that the movie needed to get the political metaphor across.  Indeed, in lesser capable hands, a political satire like this would have gotten muddled with too much overt symbolism, and with Payne keeping it grounded in his simple Nebraskan style, he was able to create a more provocative film as a whole.

For this film’s release within the Criterion label, the film underwent a new 4K digital transfer, approved by Alexander Payne himself.  Sadly, the film has only been put out by Criterion solely on Blu-ray and DVD, with no word yet of a 4K release in the future.  So while the movie is playing on these lower resolution presentations, it should be said that the movie does indeed still look good.  For a movie reaching it’s 25th Anniversary it still holds up pretty well.  Cinematographer James Glennon’s work shines through in the new transfer, with the naturalistic colors really getting a great treatment in the restoration.  The digital transfer was sourced from the original negatives, so it’s understandable that it would look pretty immaculate.  One can only imagine what a 4K disc version of this movie would look like.  The movie also features a new DTS 5.1 surround mix based on the original film’s sound mix.  Election is not a particularly dynamic sound experience, as like most Payne films it’s a fairly quiet movie from beginning to end.  There are some bright spots that do give you a full aural experience, like the scene where Tracy has a meltdown and starts ripping up campaign posters in the high school hallway.  The film’s soundtrack, which features quite a few country songs, also benefits from Criterion’s very clean and strong sound mix for this release.  I do wish that Criterion gives this movie a proper 4K UHD release in the future, but it’s also not a movie that’s meant to be a showcase for picture and sound.  It’s treated respectfully in it’s presentation on Blu-ray and should look and sound great on most home entertainment set-ups.

Criterion of course delivers a bountiful collection of extra features for this release.  Some are old, taken from Paramount Pictures’ previous DVD and Blu-ray releases of the film, as well as new ones from Criterion themselves.  The most prominent feature is an Audio Commentary track from Alexander Payne himself, recorded in 1999 for the original DVD release of the film.  The commentary is informative, with Payne going into detail about why he made the movie, it’s not so subtle political message, and a variety of other topics.  Of the new bonus features, the most substantial is a brand new interview with Reese Witherspoon herself.  It’s interesting to see her looking back on the film with the perspective of several years being removed from it.  She talks about how the film changed the course of her career, what she thinks about the character of Tracy and how the film has aged with regards to it’s reflecting of real world politics since it’s release.  Another interesting inclusion in the bonus features is the inclusion of Alexander Payne’s student thesis film from his studying at UCLA’s film school, titled The Passion of Martin (1990).  It’s a fascinating inclusion on this disc, giving us a look at the origins of Alexander Payne as a filmmaker, seeing him working out what kind of films he wanted to make.  Also on the Criterion disc is a 2016 documentary called Trulnside: Election, which features on-set footage of the making of the movie and interviews with the cast and crew.  There’s also a very fun inclusion of the local Omaha news reports that chronicled the film’s production, which I guess was a big deal for the citizens of Omaha at the time as many films typically are not made there.  Lastly there is an original theatrical film trailer, which is a standard feature on most Criterion Collection releases.  Overall, Criterion compliments the film with some very nice bonus features about the film’s making, as well as some interesting bonuses that give some perspective on the film’s impact over time.

With a lot of political satires, there is a danger of being too on the nose about your message, or too mean-spirited about the people you are trying to mock.  Alexander Payne manages to reach the right tone with Election.  His mockery is more geared toward the process of American politics and less so of the people.  Sure, characters like Tracy Flick and Jim McCallister are flawed and fueled by jealousy and insecurity, which is a terrible mix in the realm of politics, but Payne allows us to understand that all of his characters are human beings as well; each one broken in their own way and trying to survive in the best way they can while trying to shield the world from their inadequacies.  The characters in Election feel all too real, and that’s what helps to get the point of the film across.  Our political reality has just become increasingly more absurd over time, with social media fanning the flames even more.  And even though Election came at a time long before social media, and really only just a couple years into the era of the Internet revolution, it’s metaphor still resonates.  Just this year alone, we are worrying about bad actors interfering with the counting of votes in order to get their preferred candidate into office, and throwing democracy out the window as a result.  The moment in the movie of Jim McAllister tossing those few votes into the trash can doesn’t seem all that different from reality anymore.  While Payne’s film remains hopeful about the people trying to strive for what’s best in the end, sadly it’s the reality of petty grievances getting in the way that makes Election feel all too prophetic in the end.  The one thing he left out is how bad the demagoguery would get in the world of politics we live in now.  The saddest part of the film is how politics ends up destroying people in the end.  A character like Tracy Flick feels very familiar to us.  She has to perform even harder to achieve her goals by virtue of being a woman, because men are given more privilege in the world of politics.  So many men of privilege like Paul Metzger seem to have the keys to power given over to them without much struggle, as they can make all the mistakes they want and still succeed, while even a simple flaw can destroy a woman seeking the same goal.  Hopefully we’ll move past that obstacle soon in the world of politics (fingers crossed for this week’s election), but as movies like Election have shown us, politics is a game where there is no clean victory.  Another solid entry from Criterion that in addition to a lot of other great films about politics only gets more relevant with time.

Criterion Cellection – Election (1999)