Hollywood, it’s Time to Stop Banking on IP
By: Tim Kimber
Tags: Movies, Feature, Culture, Film, Business

Fostering fresh filmmaking

What I hope all this means for cineastes is more money going to riskier projects — scripts that don’t have characters we already know, monsters we’ve never seen before, settings we aren’t bored to death by.

Thankfully, in that search for originality lies the inevitable upshot of increased diversity. There have been huge successes over the last few years for diversity in film, particularly from black directors — Jordan Peele enjoyed an astonishing rise to prominence with his haunting and hilarious debut Get Out and his underappreciated but deeply affecting follow-up Us. Meanwhile, the best film of 2018, in my opinion, was Boots Riley’s weird and wonderful race-relations comedy-horror Sorry to Bother You. All original scripts made by new blood with fresh ideas.

Concurrently, Netflix, for all its faults, is a tremendous bastion of international filmmakers — most famously Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma. The Mexican director’s glorious homage to his childhood nanny is as beautiful as it was successful, collecting a cavalcade of accolades including Best International Feature Film at the Academy Awards (and unceremoniously robbed of ‘Best Picture’ by the trite and tedious Green Book).

More significantly, though, was Roma’s prominent placement on Netflix, introducing it to millions of people who wouldn’t have ordinarily watched a foreign-language film in a cinema. Compare that with other recent ‘Best Foreign-Language Film’ winners — how many people saw Ida, Son of Saul or A Fantastic Woman?

That’s the beauty of home cinema — we devote more time to films we might not have risked spending a tenner on to see in a cinema. We spend more time researching the choices, because there are more than ever before, and we have the internet in our pockets to quickly read reviews. There’s now some safety in being adventurous.

And while a multiplex will screen the most popular film 30 times a day, and nothing else, viewers at home can watch the first 10-minutes of half a dozen films until they find something that connects with them, if they were so inclined.

The mask ceiling

The era of movies collecting upwards of $1BN worldwide is almost certainly over, at least for as long as COVID-19 remains a concern. The opening weekend buzz required to build that momentum is surely unattainable with reduced-capacity cinemas.

Still, movies can make a tidy profit being sold to streaming services. Netflix notably paid $105M to host The Irishman, plus finance its burgeoning production budget. Martin Scorsese’s gangster epic was dropped by Paramount when costs began to spiral in order to cover the de-ageing VFX required to make stars like Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci look 30 years younger. Would the movie have made that money back in the cinema? Who knows, but it would have had no chance if released in 2020.

What is exciting about the streaming model is the intrinsic absence of the box office. The Irishman was considered a success not for getting bums on seats, but for boosting the Netflix brand — both in the eyes of filmmakers who saw an ambitious film rescued from incompletion and in the eyes of potential subscribers who saw a company willing to take risks to produce interesting, original movies, from acclaimed directors with big-name stars.

I’m not here to sing Netflix’s praises — let’s be honest, it hosts as much dross on the platform as quality, and for every Roma and Bird Box there’s a Ridiculous 6 or Bright — but if its business model fosters a creative environment in which filmmakers can get inventive scripts turned into quality productions, then I unapologetically welcome them into my living room. Netflix taking punts on Annihilation, I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Anymore, Da 5 Bloods, Marriage Story, and Okja, among scores of others, is to be applauded.

Back to the future

Considering this shift away from cinemas, the probable growth of streaming services during a pandemic lockdown, and studios launching proprietary platforms to host their franchise content, Hollywood no longer needs to focus on guaranteed home-runs. They can make the movies the filmmakers want to make, not the ones that executives hire directors to churn out.

It’s no longer about risk or return — it’s about viewer engagement, creating a buzz among an audience, and earning critical acclaim. How can that not creatively reinvigorate an industry that’s been monopolised by cookie-cutter thrill rides?

Sure, Disney’s coffers will not be so thoroughly engorged, but the rest of the industry will surely flourish. And that can only be a good thing.

Header photo © Parenting NH