By now we all know about the already infamous Sony Pictures hacking incident, which occurred earlier this month, and resulted in bomb threats, pirating, widespread embarrassment, Marvel movie rumors (I think just about anything can be linked to Marvel movie rumors these days), and, most famously, the pulling of the Rogen/Franco comedy The Interview from commercial theaters, originally slated for release on Christmas Day. This hacking job was allegedly a political act by angry Korean agents, incensed that their president-for-life Kim Jong-Un was depicted as a mere human who indulged in marijuana and strippers.
But politics is not the issue of the day here, nor is The Interview. The issue of the day was that embarrassment I mentioned.
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Sony was damaged and violated, yes, and they may even lose millions of dollars to pirates and terrorist tactics, but more than anything, they were embarrassed by the sudden dissemination of their own secret internal memos. The secrets were out. There may have been a deal in place to give Spider-Man to Disney for incorporation in the ongoing Marvel saga! Actresses were insulted! Even Sony was ashamed of their own Adam Sandler films! All of a sudden, we got to see – in rather stark relief – just how important the control of information has become to big studios. Sony, in having its hand tipped, revealed in their reaction exactly how touchy and careful and protective movie studios have to be about something as trivial as their internal memos.
And why do studios have to be so cagey? Because we’re prying. A lot. We’re prying so hard for news, for movie info, for details that essentially don’t directly effect anything in our lives, that studios have been forced to hold their cards close to their chests at all times, merely for the privilege of mildly surprising us from time to time. Our own voracious need for 24-hour-a-day film info has now reached a breaking point, and our scrutiny might be effecting the industry for the worse.
It’s come time to ask: do we know too much about movies?
What Was the Top-Earner This Weekend?
Do you check on the weekend box office? Do you, like me, check casually for the numbers on a big summer release? Do you find yourself idly thumbing through a website like BoxOfficeMojo, secretly cheering on your favorites to cross the 90 million dollar mark?
Why? Why do you do that? Indeed, why does anyone who works outside of the industry care about a film’s financial success down to the dollar? We find ourselves internally betting on horses, keeping track of earnings, and recording financial data when we have no financial stake in these movies at all. Indeed, if we want to see a movie, the only monetary impact it will have on us directly is that we lost eight to twenty dollars on a ticket or two.
And yet, check on boffo BO we do. All the time. We contrast release dates with their box office expectations, and compare hit films’ earnings with others of its ilk. None of us are financial analysts, but we’re going to pretend we are. We’re absorbing information that was, at one point in film history, only under the purview of studio accountants. Now we treat the information like it’s somehow important to us. The box office grosses for movies shouldn’t validate us. They just show how much money somebody else is making.
What’s Your Favorite Studio?
And then, in addition to tracking BO numbers, we also tend to keep a close eye on studio shenanigans. Back in Hollywood’s Golden Age, different studios tended to be a little more clearly delineated. Warner Bros. made one kind of movie, while Universal made another. Even if you had no real emotional or financial stake in a studio’s business practices, you could still perhaps consider yourself a fan of one or another.These days, big studios tend to handle such a large swath of films that rooting for one over the other is kind of meaningless. Indeed, big studios now buy the product of other studios. Universal and Warner Bros. (just to cite two of the biggies at random) are virtually indistinguishable. And yet, we follow the deals made and, once again, find ourselves betting on our favorite horses. We look at the contracts signed. The number game is still in force.
This has fostered a weird expectation when it comes to knowing about the making of feature films. As ersatz Hollywood insiders, we now have the appetite – and a definite feeling of righteousness – when we seek film info. Thanks to the internet, we can now know about the production of a film from beginning to end on a day-by-day basis. We can track a film from its inception to its writing to its casting to its filming details. We can follow on-set rumors and disasters. We know when a director leaves and another one joins up. We know when a film goes over-budget. We know how a film is advertised, and keep an eye on a film’s advertising budget. If we’re particularly resourceful, we can steal copies of the completed script online and read it before it’s released. By the time the film actually comes out, seeing it is almost a formality. It’s simply the final chapter in a long business saga.
There was a time when we didn’t know this stuff. When a film was announced to the public, and we didn’t know anything else about it until its release. We didn’t have to express concern when a director was replaced, because we wouldn’t be paying attention to that. We would, I think, be paying attention only to the finished film. We didn’t require the pretense of a year of movie news to explain the film to us. We would just watch it.
The Question Arises…
Here’s the question I’m getting at: Does the hounding and hunting enhance our enjoyment of movies? Why have we tried to transform ourselves into Hollywood insiders? What are we really getting out of this?
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Indeed, by keeping close track of a film’s production schedules and grosses and contracts, by sniffing out casting rumors and script pages and story secrets, we have essentially begun to spoil the movies for ourselves. This is why we see so many signposts online with “SPOILER WARNING” scrawled across them. Information is being so widely and freely spread, that maintaining any small sense of surprise is all a movie has left. Marketing and hiding information from the public has become a massively complex game. Say what you will about J.J. Abrams’ filmmaking style, the man is a master of hiding information from the public, usually using secrecy as a selling point. Thanks to Abrams’ marketing skill, we probably won’t know the whole story of the new Star Wars film until opening day, and thank goodness. If only all filmmakers and studios were so savvy.
Whither Magic?
We know too much about movies. Nothing is sacred, we all know about how movies are made, and actually being surprised, delighted, dazzled by movies… it has all been eclipsed by a weird entitlement of information.
I’m a film journalist, so maybe my view of this information is skewed; perhaps not everyone is as passionate an info junky as the 24-hour internet news cycle would lead me to believe. But I do see what kinds of stories are considered news, even in the film section of CraveOnline, and they tend to consist of casting rumors, studio deals, and information about upcoming blockbusters. It’s all delving, dissecting, and looking for clues.
And in looking for clues, we’re missing out on something vital; the simple joy of discovery. Of going to a theater largely blind, and allowing the film to reveal itself to us the way the filmmakers intended. What was your favorite blockbuster of 2014? Can you imagine seeing that film, whatever it was, after having learned about its existence a mere month before its release? It seems to me that sort of organic excitement is of a better quality than the manufactured kind that snooping provides. No longer do we see a single preview, and then merely wait to see the movie. Thanks to the internet, we now can watch the trailers at home, multiple times, and then seek out as much information on the film as we can. We’re encouraged to seek out information to build ourselves into a weird fervency. By the time the actual film comes out, we are frothing mad with anticipation. Even though we know what will happen in it.
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Indeed, a shift has occurred. Information is marketing now. Casting rumors, “leaked” pages, stills from the set. They are all commercials for the upcoming film. Many studios are now counting on you to watch trailers four or five times in a day, read the news stories, and be savvy to their plans. Would you have watched Thor back in 2011 if you didn’t know there was an Avengers film in the works? How about if you knew for sure there wouldn’t ever be an Avengers film in the works? We wanted to be part of the big studio story, and not necessarily of Thor.
This is why Sony was so touchy, and why studios feel the need to wrangle all this. They’ll only ever have limited success, but information is all they have. It’s the way they advertise, and they need to keep anticipation at just the right boil, otherwise people may lose interest.
We, meanwhile, are so busy eating information that we’re missing the movie for… well, the movie.
Do You Know What a Franchise Is?
One final point to go out on: There has been a subtle shift in film lingo that illustrates my point the most explicitly.
Back in the near-forgotten halcyon days of who-knows-how-long ago, a long string of interconnected films was called a “series” by fans. We had the Rocky series, the Nightmare on Elm Street series, the Police Academy series, etc. We referred to sequels, to follow-ups, to continuations, and even to trilogies. But you know what word was never used? Franchise.
Franchise is a business term. To cite the dictionary, a franchise is “an authorization granted by a government or company to an individual or group enabling them to carry out specified commercial activities, e.g., providing a broadcasting service or acting as an agent for a company’s products.” It’s a term that refers specifically to products, commercial activities.
We refer to film series as franchises so casually, we can’t even think of an alternate term anymore. Indeed, even in the pages of CraveOnline, we recently published an article on the 50 Greatest Movie Franchises. We see films as products now. Sure, films have always been products, but only to the people standing to make money off of them.
Audiences don’t stand to make money off of them, but we’re looking at them as if we do. We know so much about movies, we are now looking at them as products exclusively, totally comfortable to use the term “franchise” without any sense of irony or pretense.
And somewhere in this hurricane of information, there are movies hiding.
Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
