About two years ago, I wrote about the sensation that things were returning to normal at the movie theater after a global pandemic. I hoped then that that meant I would be getting back to my own preferred version of normal - lots of time in the theater - and some two years later, it has come to pass.
I saw three movies in the theater during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, and six from about mid-November on. There were sequels and prequels (Gladiator II, Moana 2, Mufasa: The Lion King), a throwback musical with an Oscar pedigree (Wicked), an indie darling (A Real Pain), and high-concept genre fare (Nosferatu). This is how it used to be and how it is once again.
Yes, some sense of order has been restored, but with it has come serious existential dread.
Most of that cup was filled by the two Disney films, released within weeks of each other and each carrying the mantle of a beloved and original predecessor. They each have their own distinct problems.
Moana 2 looks nice enough to make you want to look up flights on Hawaiian Airlines, but without a single memorable song or coherent storyline, it’s a test of will to not start looking up flights right there in the theater. Mufasa: The Lion King is somehow a better film. This is probably because the guy who directed Moonlight and the guy who wrote f**king Hamilton were the biggest creative forces involved. They only make it a passable experience, and it won’t save you from learning things you never wanted or needed to know, like how Rafiki got his staff, how Pride Rock got its distinct shape, and why Scar is called Scar and is allowed to skulk around the Pridelands. Nor will it save you from Disney’s obsession with “live-action” versions of its animated classics, which, Pridelands or not, still can’t really get out of the uncanny valley, what with their regurgitated themes, aimless backstories and dead-eyed characters.
Taken together, Moana 2 and Mufasa: The Lion King feel like abominations perfectly suited for an age of meritless artificial intelligence hype. Just because a machine can create an image of a realistic-looking family of cats reading Tolstoy on top of a snowy peak doesn’t mean you should burn the Earth to do it. That’s not stopping anyone from using DALL-E, though, and I suppose I shouldn’t expect anything different from a Hollywood studio that has gone corporate, possibly irretrievably.
Of course, that’s not entirely fair. Disney, like every other major studio, has gone through fallow periods and made bad sequels before. Indeed, the period immediately following the release of The Lion King was littered with direct-to-VHS schlock riding on the coattails of newly minted animated classics. The existential dread isn’t bubbling up because a cynical and pointless prequel and a sequel got made.
No, it’s from looking around at the environment in which they got made. A few weeks before the dread set in, when I went out to see A Real Pain, the uncertain future of cinema as an activity that happens outside of your house came in to focus.
My wife and I had a babysitter and dinner reservations. In other words, we were on a schedule, which means the movie essentially picked us. We needed a relatively short, grown-up movie, and to find it we had to bypass two theaters much closer to us to make it work. The cineplexes were functionally only showing Disney stuff, Wicked, and Gladiator II. It’s not that bad sequels for kids and teenagers are getting made, it’s that that’s all there is out there. Three decades ago, the schlock had the decency to go straight to Blockbuster. Now, it opens for $50 million, and God help you if you want to see anything else.
Yes, all of the worst facets of late-stage capitalism have come home to roost fully in Hollywood. It stinks of institutional failure there, just like it does in our nation’s capital, and I am not sure there is any coming back from it.
Sometime in between my jaunts to the movie theater I stumbled across the clip below of thoughterati guy Simon Sinek breaking down the origins of so-called late-stage capitalism, tracing it back to a relatively recent Milton Friedman opinion piece that wound up becoming license for, well, for all of this.
Simon is one of the good ones - at least from a thinking perspective - and he does a great job crystallizing all that is so, so, so wrong with the version of capitalism we have today. Namely: maximizing shareholder value above all else creates all sorts of rotten incentives that hurt workers and customers.
It means that there is almost no long-term thinking in the C-suite - no short-term sacrifices for future gains at the corporate level. This dynamic explains Hollywood just as it does every other part of the economy. It explains why Moana 2 and Mufasa: The Lion King could come out just weeks apart, make a whole bunch of money but also be met with relative indifference upon their release, and become practically forgotten even while both pictures are still showing in theaters.
We’re all consumers, I guess - pigs at the trough hungry for something, anything, while the farmers at the till forget to rotate their crops and exhaust their weary, dusty fields of intellectual property.
Disney is a publicly traded company, so maybe it just has to be this way until something bigger in the proverbial system is broken. But, I don’t know, it could also look to its own past for just a moment - to its own founder - and stand for something.
Just about everything that made Disney Disney in the first place - from Mickey Mouse to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to Disneyland - was an existential financial risk. Walt did the dreaming. Roy made the numbers work even when bankruptcy loomed as a real threat. There’s no way you’d get to walk down Main Street USA if the Disney brothers had been worried exclusively about shareholder value. Now, here we are.
In short, Disney could stand for something. It even has a proper foil in Netflix, which is the true villain in this downward spiral facing film and television.
Were Disney to be the company that doesn’t do this …
Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.” (“We spent a day together,” Lohan tells her lover, James, in Irish Wish. “I admit it was a beautiful day filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.” “Fine,” he responds. “That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.”)
… it might reinforce its brand promise and secure another generation of fans in the process.
Alas, courage, as we have been reminded over and over and over lately, is in short supply. To be courageous, it seems to me, you have to stand for something; you have to have a vision for the future. It’s simply not enough to not be something else. People sniff that out right away and they vote with their feet (or, in the case of our last presidential election, they vote by not moving their feet at all.)
There’s one other phrase associated with the institutional failure of the 21st century that keeps rolling around my head: too big to fail.
In the case of Disney, and indeed the broader Hollywood ecosystem, what we’re staring at here isn’t so much an extinction-level event as it is a faster-than-expected slide toward irrelevance.
In a few months, when you turn on the Oscars and hardly recognize any of the films nominated, it won’t be because the Academy is pretentious. It will be because the big studios hardly make anything worthy of celebration anymore. The Academy is wrong about much, but is right on this point.
As for me, I’ll be thinking of the crew of villagers who reluctantly joined Moana on her latest adventure in Moana 2. That group was unhappy and confused almost the moment they got on the open water. The only reason they were there to begin with was out of a sense of duty to someone in whom they have misplaced their trust.