A Tale of Two Pieties
What the certain demise of Jeff Skoll's Participant and the uncertain future of Francis Coppola's 'Megalopolis' say about the future of cinema.
"We remain committed to inspiring and compelling social change to the world's most pressing problems through the power of great stories and engaging our audiences to take meaningful action." — Jeffrey Skoll. “My dream would be that this movie could be seen on New Year’s Eve and people would — instead of saying I’m going to lose weight or I’m not going to smoke anymore or I’m not going to cheat on my wife — talk about: Is the society we’re living in the only one available? How can we make it better? And if they talk about it, they will. That’s my dream.” — Francis Coppola "I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained." — Walt Disney
I’ve started and restarted this essay at least thirty times over the past five weeks — because Hollywood presently sits in a purgatory of its own making, a crossroads of mixed messages and uncertain destinations which has indefinitely paralyzed what had been, until COVID-19, the most relentless, robust and unstoppable idea factory human civilization had ever known.
Today, no one seems to have any idea when the ideas will start to flow again — and every week brings new fears, hopes, anxieties and forecasts.
“Content,” on the other hand — that detestably antiseptic euphemism with which non-creatives de-humanize and commodify the life’s work of creative people — has never been more ubiquitous. At a time of unprecedented societal and political division, the one human experience upon which everyone can agree is that ever since the streaming spigot exploded like a broken water main, no one can find anything to watch. That was before the pandemic, before the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, and before exhausted labor negotiators plunged right back in with the Hollywood Basic Crafts and IATSE. This time, there appears to be consensus that it behooves everyone to keep quiet, work hard and wrap it up soon lest we risk another strike-crippled summer from which it could take years to recover.
Five years on, box office has yet to claw its way back to pre-2020 attendance figures while linear television’s ratings freefall over the same period shows no signs of abating.
Hollywood has had some hard times in the past — but these are absolutely the worst of times, and with no clear timetable for when production will ramp up again, craftspeople and artisans — many of whom haven’t worked for years and are seeing their life savings and nest eggs going up in flames — are beginning to wonder if the best of times are well and truly behind us.
As I argued earlier this year in my two-part analysis of Barbie and Oppenheimer and their long-term critical and commercial impact, a great renaissance is always preceded by a seemingly insurmountable dark age — whether we’re talking about the Renaissance and the Dark Ages or countless smaller cycles in virtually every culture throughout human history. Humans are fundamentally problem solvers — even if the problems are, more often than not, of our own making. As adept as we are at taking two steps backwards, we somehow always manage to trudge three grudging steps forward again. And make no mistake — people are more than ready to start trudging.
Where that trudging will take us is the more daunting question. Despite the success of Barbie and Oppenheimer, the top-tier decision-makers and their corporate enablers clearly have not yet shed the addictions which got us into this mess. Memorial Day weekend — which studios once proudly claimed to launch their most prestigious summer blockbusters — this year laid an egg with the R-rated Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and a poorly-reviewed Garfield reboot unable to meet the expectations of families who, historically, have taken advantage of the holiday weekend to see movies together. Then there was the announcement from Amazon that a Tomb Raider television series is in the works (did anyone ask for this?), along with Disney’s utterly disconnected-from-reality determination that limiting Marvel output to three movies and two new series a year is somehow the Goldilocks sweet spot for audiences. While there are hopeful signs the summer will soon turn around, the lingering indicators are everywhere that those who most need to accept our new reality — will fight bitterly not to.
I will repeat my regular refrain: so long as decision-makers prioritize shareholder value above audience impact, they will disproportionately elevate the opinions of Wall Street analysts. Unlike audiences and artists, analysts aren’t looking for storytelling and great filmmaking — they’re looking for “the next big thing.” Before it turned into the mother of all money pits, streaming was that next big thing. Now that half the business is burning through billions of dollars in streaming losses, those analysts (who never seem to pay the price for their mistakes) have pivoted to AI (about which we will have more to say in coming weeks). Whether or not this bet pans out, the big picture is that Hollywood has needlessly put itself at the mercy of a gigantic casino and the gambling addicts who refuse to learn that the house always wins.
In the old days, the studios were the house. Today they’re just tagging along with the gamblers.
The good news is that the pushback to get us trudging again has begun — even if it’s facing pushback against the pushback. The kinds of films cinephiles and even casual movie buffs had hoped might spring from the success of Barbie and Oppenheimer are, indeed, being made — big-budget, ambitious, auteurist spectacles like Francis Coppola’s Megalopolis and Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga, both of which recently debuted to mixed reaction at the Cannes Film Festival. They are not, however, receiving the kind of welcome reception from distributors that filmgoers might have hoped. Troublingly, Barbie and Oppenheimer were not welcome successes in all quarters — because to make more films like them means accepting a new level of creative risk. If risky films become the norm and displace more reliably profitable genres of the past, those who are fundamentally risk-averse will be pushed out of the business. In the prevailing view of present corporate management, it’s better to fail and lose money on Madame Web than swing for the bleachers and triumph with Oppenheimer. For people accustomed to playing the odds, individual projects are meaningless alongside aggregate datasets. Sure, Madame Web failed this time, and Oppenheimer succeeded this time… but nine times out of ten, if they had to do it again — they will swear on their mothers’ graves that Madame Web still looks better on paper and will always be the smarter bet.
This is the mindset of a gambler — the person who doubles down after every bad hand at blackjack, certain that the odds will eventually shift in his favor. It is not how artists and audiences think. Filmgoers expect a good movie every time, or they wouldn’t waste their hard-earned money and precious weekend evenings. Artists expect to do their best work every time, because it takes too much of your soul and passion to not give it your all. Until Hollywood once again aligns its management practices with the mindsets of its artists and audiences — it is at risk of suffering the same fate as the brilliant strategists who gave us the wondrous success of Lehman Brothers.
Unfortunately, these are the people who presently wield the power in Hollywood, and they will not easily relinquish it, no matter how many times they are proved wrong. Power will have to be wrested from them.
To do so, artists and audiences will need to prepare for a lengthy fight, rallying behind the films which most need the support to ensure their success in a marketplace the studios still (mistakenly) believe they own. That means backing new companies, supporting alternative methods of theatrical distribution (see Taylor Swift) or simply pressuring existing studios and distributors to defer to the marketplace rather than their Wall Street overlords.
As of right now, Coppola’s Megalopolis has yet to land a distributor while Costner’s intended four-part Horizon saga — the first two parts of which premiere in this month (June) and August — has yet to find financing for its concluding chapters. Both men also put their own fortunes on the line — Coppola sold part of his wine empire to fully finance his film at $125 million while Costner mortgaged his ranch to finance $38 million of the $100 million budget for the first two Horizon films.
Costner is presently in the better position — Warner Bros. will release the first two parts of Horizon, which means Costner can guarantee investors that the final two chapters will also receive healthy Warner Bros. releases. Coppola, despite committed support from IMAX, still needs the backing of an actual distributor who can secure more than IMAX screens and furnish the marketing muscle to justify a wide release.
Megalopolis presents both an opportunity and a warning. Coppola has not been shy about declaring his new film’s ideological pedigree, even scolding one of his stars, Aubrey Plaza, for mischaracterizing the film as a “nightmare” rather than a a fable which he believes will “give hope to society and humanity.” Not long ago, such idealism would have been lauded in Hollywood’s notoriously self-congratulatory inner circles — but the untimely recent shuttering of Participant Media, for some two decades the keeper of the flame of Hollywood’s conscience, has added yet another wrinkle to the current “content” crisis. If a company like Participant can’t stay afloat, the reasoning goes, what chance does a fable like Megalopolis stand?
As outlined in the quotes forming the preamble to this piece, there are two different approaches to the situation — let’s call them “pieties” — which will determine which side wins the current battle of ideas.
The Participant Conundrum
Long before the Silicon Valley caravan of carpetbaggers descended on Hollywood, Canadian billionaire Jeff Skoll dropped in with his pocketbook of ebay cash and set up shop aiming not so much to remake Hollywood as to burnish its conscience. And that he did for the better part of twenty years as Participant Media became the go-to brand for movies with something to say. Once you saw the “Participant Media” logo, you knew somebody was trying to save the world. This in spite of the fact that films and filmmakers with a social agenda have never done particularly well with general audiences. The two exceptions to that rule — Stanley Kramer and Oliver Stone — had noteworthy and successful runs precisely because they made social commentary their brand, but even then their runs were short-lived and their successes — critical and commercial — spotty at best. If there’s a dominant theme to the most successful films of all time it’s that few, if any, spend time lecturing audiences about anything more complex than the power of love and the fallibility of evil. Stone doesn’t make the list at all, and the only Kramer film which does is the one he made precisely to prove he wasn’t just a finger-wagging, self-serious scold: It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.