Plain English with Derek Thompson - How Hollywood’s Hit Formula Flopped—and What Could Come Next

Episode Date: March 12, 2024

Today, we’re talking about movies, the philosophy of hits in Hollywood, and why we might be at a fascinating inflection point in how the entertainment industry thinks about popularity and prestige. We start by thinking about the big Oscar win for 'Oppenheimer' in the historical context. For much of the past 10 or 15 years, popularity and prestige have come apart in Hollywood. The biggest movies have almost exclusively been comic book franchises, sequels, and adaptations, while the Best Picture winners have often been small films, like 'CODA' or 'Moonlight.' But in the past 18 months, two things have changed. First, the old franchise model is showing some wear and tear, as Marvel movies consistently underperform their expectations. Second, original and often daring films—'Barbie,' 'Oppenheimer,' 'Dune: Part 2'—are dominating at the box office. Bloomberg's Lucas Shaw joins to explain how the franchise formula was born, why it's showing its age, and what might come next. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Brian Curtis from The Ringer, and I want to tell you about the Press Box podcast. The Press Box is a podcast for anybody who likes news, whether it's about sports or politics or pop culture, and wants to understand how that news really gets made. We have new shows every Monday and Thursday. We have long interviews with everyone from John Crackhour to Joe Buck. Your social media feeds are bursting with information every day. Let us help you sort it out. Join us on the press box.

Today, we're talking movies and the philosophy of hits in Hollywood and why we might be at a fascinating inflection point in the way Hollywood thinks about popularity versus prestige. So if you think about the last 10, 20 years of film, you have a very specific understanding of what kinds of movies are most popular. They're comic book films, Disney adaptations, action sequels, right? franchises, adaptations, sequels, that is the blockbuster business of Hollywood.

To take one year, as an example here, look at the domestic box office of 2018. The top films are Black Panther and the Avengers Infinity War, but if you think about these films as episodes in franchises, the top 10 films actually goes like this. Marvel 18, Marvel 19, Incredibles 2, Jurassic Park 5, Deadpool 2, Dr. Seuss adaptation, Mange 2, Mission Impossible 6, Marvel 20, Star Wars Spinoff, Spider-Man spin-off. Now, as some listeners, you're going to say, dude, this is obvious. This was a profound observation in like 2015. Today, it is no more profound to point to recent box office lists and say, wow, franchises,

as it is to point to the air and say, wow, oxygen. But to think this way is actually to be very captured by the present. The air has always been oxygen. at least as long as humans have breathed it, but the box office has only recently been colonized by the logic of franchises. It wasn't always like this. Go back to picking a year at random, 1998,

which isn't that long ago, he said to himself geriatrically. In 1998, the top five films by domestic box office goes Titanic, Armageddon, saving Private Ryan. There's something about Mary, the water boy. not a sequel or comic book character in sight. Now, maybe you think I'm cheating by picking a particularly original year. Fine, challenge accepted. Bring up the 1997 box office where the top 10 includes men in black.

One, Liar, Liar, Air Force One, My Best Friend's Wedding, Face Off. Or go back one year earlier, 1996, when the top 20 films included Independence Day, one. Twister, one, the first Mission Impossible. The Rock, Ransom, the Birdcage, a Time to Kill, The First Wives Club, Phenomenon, Eraser, Space Jam, Jerry McGuire, Mr. Hollins' Opus. Where are the superheroes? Where are the sequels? The only number in this entire list is first, as in Wives Club.

During the previous era, you could say, popularity and prestige often went hand in hand. Films like Forrest Gump, Titanic, Gladiator were blockbusters that also won the trophy for Best Picture. But in the age of the superhero, again, something unusual happened. Popularity and prestige somewhat came apart. The Best Picture Films from 2014, 2015, and 2016 were Birdman, Spotlight, and Moonlight. It's not just that these films weren't sequels. They were small movies playing and... and winning a totally different game.

None of them grossed more than $110 million. The biggest films of those years were a Marvel Comic Universe film, a Jurassic Park sequel, and a Pixar sequel. So, lifting up from all of this listing of films, I will freely admit, I am a 37-year-old dude who is nostalgic for the years of my childhood,

a year like 1991, when Silence of the Lambs wasn't just the fourth biggest film of the year, an undeniable smash, it also won best picture, director, actor, and actress. I'm nostalgic for an era where movies didn't have to choose

between being popular or prestigious. So we have something to explain here. Actually, I think we have a few things to explain here. What happened to movies? If Hollywood executives were just as smart in the 1990s and 1980s as they are now,

why weren't they making sequels after sequel back then? Why did the age of the franchise even begin? And most to the point, and the present-day news, is it too premature to say that we've passed peak franchise? Because if you're looking closely, and maybe some people have been screaming this in the back of their heads as I've been going on,

something seems to have changed. In the last few years, almost every Marvel release has disappointed at the box office or received significantly below-average audience. scores. The biggest films of the last 18 months aren't necessarily Marvel or DC universes, but rather movies starring Barbie, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Paul Atrethes. Oppenheimer's going to make $1 billion worldwide, and it just won Best Picture and Director on Sunday Night. And I don't think it's too premature to think that one year from now, if I do an update on this podcast in 365

days, I might be able to say that exact same sentence, $1 billion grossed worldwide, plus best director, plus best picture about today's biggest hit, Dune 2. Today's guest, to walk us through, what happened to movies? What is happening to movies is Lucas Shaw of Bloomberg and the Town podcast? We ask, why was the franchise formula something that had to be invented? How did Hollywood stumble upon a hit formula that looked like it might never fail. Why does it seem like that formula is finally failing? And what might come next? I'm Derek Thompson.

This is plain English. Lucas Shaw, welcome back to the show. Great to be here. So one thing that you do really well, Lucas, in your Bloomberg newsletter and the town with Matt Bellany is you track paradigm shifts in Hollywood. You had a great newsletter recently, for example, about, how major Hollywood studios are at a fork in the road when it comes to their business models. And I think we're actually going to save that for the end. But I wanted to talk to you about another

paradigm shift that I have been really fascinated by when it comes to Hollywood blockbusters. In the 1990s, as I just talked about in my open, I think a lot of people would be surprised to go back and see how little sequels dominated the box office. But sometime around the year 2000, and for much the last 20 years, this has been done. the age of the cinematic universe and the multi-sequel factory. Like, you look at the box office of 2019, for example, last year before the pandemic. It's two Marvel films, Frozen 2, Toy Story 4, Star Wars 9. It's like all Disney and numbers.

And for a while, it really seemed, like that just might go on, if not forever, because nothing goes on forever, than something close to forever. But now you look at Disney struggles. You look at Marvel's struggles. you look at the fact that last year was the year of Barbenheimer, two original films, that in 2024, the biggest films are Dune 2, which is a sequel. It has a number in it, but it's also like a prestige film. It's a Denisville, a new film.

It's more like Godfather 2 for science fiction. The other biggest films the year are Wonka, Bob Marley, Mean Girls the Musical, Migration, The Beekeeper, Anyone But You, Not a Number in sight, and not a superhero in sight. And so it feels to me like something has changed. That's my big windup. Before I throw it to you and ask you to tell the story of how we got here, how would you characterize this thing that I'm talking about, this moment?

What would you call the last 20 years of the Hollywood formula? The age of the franchise, I think. I mean, you're right that, or I mean, you probably use the proper terminology, which is a terminology, which is cinematic universe. I mean, you go back and there have been sequels as long as there's been Hollywood, right? You make something and it works and any sound capitalist wants to make it again, right? But it used to be that you reserved sequels for truly huge movies and you didn't make too much of them, right?

Like there were sequels to Jaws or Star Wars or Indiana Jones or any of these movies. But you're right that throughout the 80s and 90s, most of the biggest movies. A lot of them were based on books, but you didn't see a perils. of sequels. You know, I don't know if we're at the end of that era. It feels like we're in a transitional moment, but I think it's important to recognize that we're in March. And so most of the biggest movies of the year,

Dune, too, is sort of the first truly big one. You know, the Marley biopic, unless the movie business has a really terrible year. The Marley Biopic is not going to be a top 10 movie this year, right? And the biggest, the expected, biggest movies of the year are still primarily sequels, comic books. You know, you've got a Despicable Me, four. You brought up the town, right? Okay, so let's go over the top ten picks in the box office draft. I won't do all of them.

I went first. I picked Despicable Me Four. It's got a four. I think Matt then picked Deadpool two. That's got a two. I picked the sequel to Joker. He picked Wicked, which is a little bit of a curveball. But you still have these sequels and these comic book movies there.

But you're right that this age in which comic books seem to be the dominant form of cinematic pop culture is ending. It doesn't mean comic book movies can't work, and it doesn't mean that they still won't be among the biggest movies, but they are not nearly as monolithic as they used to be. And I got to admit, I'm not entirely sure why that is other than just tastes are cyclical. And you can see that in some of the really popular new comic book movies of the last five years are those that were sort of counters to the traditional comic book movie. You had Deadpool, which was the sort of satirical rye take on a send-up of the Disney movies. You had the Joker, which is as dark comic book movie as you can imagine. Yeah, it's a little bit reminiscent to the fact that I remember when the superhero era was really taking off

some people analogized it to the era of westerns. And if you're thinking about westerns, there's some westerns, you know, High Noon of The Searchers, which are sort of classic John Waynestale films, but there's others like Blazing Saddles, which are not classic Westerns at all. They're a send-up of the genre.

And so once a genre becomes mainstream, as mainstream as superheroes have become, you're playing against type. You are using the fact that people have certain expectations of the genre and then playing against it. If you are still undecided that the, age of franchise is ending, I think you would agree that the age of franchises, at least as we're

discussing it, began. It did not exist in 1996. It's not exist in 1998. Something happened around the turn of the century. So I would love for you to help me tell this story. If we were going to tell the story of the rise of total sequelification in Hollywood, where would you start? I thought about this. And my initial instinct was to pick 2008, because 2008 is a the year that the first Ironman movie came out, which really launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe as we know it. It was one of the ten biggest movies of the year, not one or two, but really, really popular, and forms the sort of the blueprint for Marvel's takeover of pop culture over the next 15 years. You have a sort of pithy, wisecracking superhero who makes some jokes but is ultimately

trying to save the world. And it's just a lighter form of a comic book movie. And it stood in very stark contrast to the biggest movie of 2008, which was The Dark Night, which I think ushered in its own wave of the DC cinematic universe, was this never-ending quest to replicate the Christopher Nolan Batman movies. And Zach Snyder and other directors failed to do so as successfully as Chris Nolan. And those movies still did well, but it created sort of these parallel lines of the Marvel movies and the DC movies. And I'd have to double check, but I'd imagine every year from 2010 to 2020, you had at least three or four Marvel of DC movies among the five or six or seven highest grossing movies in the world.

You know, you could, in theory, go back further. I was looking, and in 2003, which is the year that Lord of the Rings Return of the King won the Oscar for Best Picture. It was also, I believe, the highest grossing movie of the year. Most of the big movies of that year were sequels. You had a sequel to The Matrix, or the start. You had the start of the Pirates the Caribbean franchise. You had a sequel to The Matrix.

You had a sequel to Terminator. And you had a sequel to X-Men. You had a sequel to Bad Boys. You just had a lot of sequels. They were still smaller. Not as many of them were comic books, but you saw this shift towards franchises.

But I think 2008 is probably the fulcrum just because we're talking. When you're thinking about the modern movie era, it's really all about comic books. Right. And I think it goes to the question of what exactly is the phenomenon that we're describing. If we're describing the phenomenon of numbers, and I will acknowledge that this is like a really simplistic way to look at movies. It's just to like look at the box office and count numbers. Well, there's a lot of numbers in the top grossing films of 2003. As you said, you know, Matrix Reloaded. It's X-Men 2, Terminator 3, Bad Boys 2.

So obviously, you're already seeing Hollywood to get wise to this idea that Americans are likely to show up to sequels in a way that they might not be as likely to show up to original storytelling, but I agree. The gas can is poured on the fire when the Marvel Cinematic Universe takes off

with Iron Man in 2008. I want to understand why you think this happened. I suppose there's like two categories of explanation. One explanation is that this is about individuals making decisions. This is about Bob Eiger and Pixar and Marvel. Another explanation is that this is structural. Lots of different movie companies are making this decision to move toward total sequelization at the same time. And so maybe that is about the shape of the global box office, the globalization of the global box office, the rise of marketing costs, which are forcing production costs even higher. So people are saying we might as well make sequels because the cost of movies is getting so.

prohibitively expensive. Where would you begin to tell the why story, why this age of total franchising took off in the last 20 years? Well, I would say it's, I would go, it's structural to personal to structural. The structural start being that you had this sort of growing corporatization of the entertainment business and a desire to satisfy Wall Street with very predictable returns from movies and a globalization of the movie business that you talked about. I mean, the big movies of the 90s made the majority or at least half their money from the U.S. The biggest movies of this century make the majority of their movies from abroad. Majority of their revenue. Yeah. Yeah. And if you are trying to make,

if you're trying to satisfy viewers all over the world, you're going to want stories that feel less distinctly American. You're going to lean into action. You're going to suppress or de-emphasize dialogue. It's why you saw so many good writers go into television. It's a little bit of a chicken or the egg situation. And

that just led to, I think, the reliability of superheroes and interest in that. You also saw, in Bob Eiger, someone who had a very deliberate strategy at Disney to build around these franchises that fed through

using the corporate jargon of the flywheel, right? You have something that can function as not just a film or a television show, but as a theme park ride, as a Halloween costume, although Disney has failed largely in video games as a video game. I think what you then saw was Disney had a lot of success with it. Wall Street really liked it, and so everyone copied it. And Disney was the envy of Hollywood, really, for the last decade. And so then you saw every movie studio try to conceive its own cinematic universe,

most of them with far less success than Disney, but you had Sony spin up its own separate Marvel ones. They had a movie, Madam Webb, that completely failed earlier this year. That was a spinoff from Spider-Man. You saw Universal try to create like a horror or a monster's universe. That didn't work.

There was discussions at Paramount of a Transformers Cinematic Universe. That's, I guess, still an... process but hasn't really worked. And so everyone, and Warner Brothers, as we discussed, had the DC one. So everyone has tried it. So I think it's the long answer is it's a little bit of both. I think you're right.

I also think that, I guess I'm building off of your answer. It's just interesting because Disney understood the concept of the flywheel in the 1980s and 1990s, right? Walt Disney wrote... He understood it in the 30s. I was going to say, Walt Disney drew up that famous flywheel chart that, you know, Matt Ball is always tweeting out. He wrote that up in like the late 1930s, 1940s, right,

before the construction of Disney World itself. So Disney understood how Fly Wheels worked, and Disney was a public company in the 1980s and 1990s, as far as I understand it. And yet, in the 90s, what are the biggest Disney films? They're making the Lion King one rather than Bambi 7. And so I do think that it's important for people like me that talk about media, business,

strategy, to remember that, like, there is such a thing as, like, a mind virus. There is such a thing as a strategic meme where corporate decision makers are infecting each other with a certain understanding of the market that isn't inherent to the market itself. It's just the meme of the time. And just as people in the 1990s and 1980s had their understandings of, like, what it took to make a big hit. Maybe it's, you know, get the biggest stars, pay Arnold Schwarzenegger $20 million, there became, I think, an understanding in the last 20 years, maybe based on reality, that the way to make Blockbusters

was to make the next iteration of the last Blockbuster. But I think it can't be overrated, that this is actually a rather new idea, that the entire business of Blockbusters should be sequels, adaptations, and reboots. Well, and to your point, it was a philosophical shift where there was previously a belief,

one, there used to be a belief that you would have a range of releases, right, where you'd have some small bets, some medium bets, and some big bets. And, oh, by the way, a lot of them would be original and that you thought that there was nothing better than creating something new, because when you have something new, first of all, it should cost less to make it at first, and a sequel to something you have to pay everyone involved, more money, there just more, more goes into it. But they gravitated away from that. you saw the disappearance of the middle. You saw everyone just either wanting to make the micro-budget horror movie,

the occasional micro-budget comedy, or the really big thing. And if they were going to take as big a swing as those movies got, and you talked about kind of the rising cost, marketing got more expensive, but also production just got more expensive. I mean, these movies, you go back, and it was very rare for a movie to cost more than $100 million. Now it seems like every big movie costs $200, $200, $250. 300, all the big movies last summer, a lot of them were between $200 million and $300 million.

And I think how folks thought about it, well, if we're going to spend that much money, we can only do that with something where we can sort of map out or predict reliably how much money it's going to make. And there was the whole Anita Elbertsay philosophy, this Harvard professor, about like the blockbuster model and how if you nailed the blockbuster, then the potential returns on that were so much greater. Like at Universal Pictures, they have two long-time really successful partners. They have Jason Blum who makes horror movies, and they have Chris Meladondry who makes animated movies. Jason Blum has spent 15, 20 years making, for the most part, one successful horror movie after another.

And he has probably made less from all of those movies than Chris Meladondry has made from the Despicable Me franchise. So it's just, if you're a big corporation and you're trying to continue to deliver higher and higher returns, it seemed to them that that was the right approach. But I think as moviegoers and even some filmmakers, they just sort of got tired of it. I want to talk about audiences just a second. To double back to Anita Elber. Is it Elbersay?

Is that a pronounced your name? I know that's how you spell it. Okay, it's E-L-B-E-R-S-E for those at home. Harvard Business School professor who published this book that was really influential to me when I was writing a lot about media economics and when I wrote my book, Hitmakers, that essentially made the point. that you just did, that if you're a smart person in Hollywood, you learn that $1 spent on a

blockbuster is wiser than $1 spent on a non-blockbuster. And while the media often misses this fact, because we pay attention to big expensive flops, we ignore exactly what you said, that the hits pay for all the flops. If you build a Despicable Me franchise, that franchise will pay for as many flops as you can possibly count because it just it just throws off money. The next bit that you were beginning to get into that I find so interesting is the degree to which this total franchising of Hollywood has trained audiences to expect a certain thing from films. You know, in the 1940s, Americans once the movies about 30 times a year. Today, the average American adult buys, what is it, two, two point five movie tickets a year, something. I think between three and four.

Yeah. Okay, 3.5. So they used to go, you know, a couple times a month, and now they go maybe once a season. And as a result, you have a lot of Americans that are holding on to that ticket for these three months, thinking, you know, what am I going to see? And I wonder if you agree with the idea that for the last 20 years, a lot of Americans were holding on to a story that they recognized, that they were almost, you know, treating film a little bit like television, waiting for the next episode. their favorite television show to go back to the theater and catch up with their favorite characters. And so there might have been a bit of a self-reinforced cycle here where if all the money from Hollywood is going to the sequels, then a lot of movie audiences will feel trained

to wait for the sequels to give up their scarce movie tickets. Anything to that idea that audiences are kind of had for the last 20 years been sort of implicitly trained to do this thing that that Hollywood wanted them to do. Yeah, I mean, look, they started to see so much more quality television at home that there were only certain things that you needed to go to the theater for. I mean, if you look at, it's not just that sequels and comic books have taken over, but there are certain genres that have just completely disappeared as theatrical experiences. Comedy, first and foremost, among them.

I mean, it went from consistently being like 15 to 20% of ticket sales to like five. and drama has suffered as well, you're getting at have theaters trained audiences to go for certain things and not for others. Yes, I guess the question I always have with that, and I should probably look at it more deeply, is what happened first? Was it studios training or had audiences already stopped

showing up for certain things, and so studios behaved in response? But I don't know, I actually, when you were talking earlier, one of the things that triggered for me is, okay, yes, Dispicable Me pays for all these other movies. But if you're going to take these other big swings and know that you have this one property that can pay for it, why only take big swings on other franchises?

Why not use a couple of those big swings on a new idea? And there just haven't been many studios willing to try that. Do you think it's that there haven't been many studios willing to try it? Or do you think they have tried it and it's often failed? Oh, it's a bit of both. I mean, look, you think of Disney, And they had that year in 2012 where John Carter and Lone Ranger fail. And Bob Hiker goes, okay, we're not doing that again.

If we're doing live action, we're going to remake one of our animated hits. And that's how you get The Lion King and you get Cinderella and you get all of these retold stories. But you run out of those at a certain point. There's only so many ways. People will never get tired of Cinderella as a story, but there's only so many times in a row that they want to see it. Sometimes, you know, you've got to let it sit for a while and then you come back to it. Other studios, I mean, look, some have been better than others. Universal has done a pretty good job of mixing in original movies.

But its biggest hits are still the franchises. They haven't had a bunch of big original IP. It's interesting. If you're trying to think about, you know, what was the most influential year of the 21st century for film? Maybe it's 2003, maybe it's 2008. It's interesting to think maybe it's 2012, the year that John Carter came out, And Disney said, you know what, if we're going to spend $200 million on a film, it's going to have a number after it. It's going to be a sequel adaptation or reboot.

We cannot afford to spend this amount of money on what's essentially a new myth that we're building rather than a familiar myth that we're clicking back into. So let's move to the present. Clearly, I've been talking about how audiences are trained. Clearly, they're not trained so well because a lot of Disney sequels, a lot of superhero sequels in last few years, haven't done nearly as well as people thought they would. A studios thought they would. Something about this formula that dominated the last 20 years seems to have fallen flat in 2023 and 2024 in particular.

How would you describe that falling flat? What has happened? Have the films just objectively gotten worse or something more complicated happening? I have a question before that, and you guys can totally cut this if you want, but I'm curious. Do you have a theory for why superhero movies

were so popular in the first place. Do I have a theory for it should be popular in the first place? Yeah, no, let's definitely keep this. Yeah, I do. I guess if I was going to pull from the hitmaker's theory, it's that surprising adaptations

of familiar intellectual property are essentially the key to popularity in almost any entertainment market and for almost any consumer good. And Hollywood discovered in superhero books a popular, already popular, right? So you have pre-awareness baked in, an already popular mythology that tens of millions of people are aware of. How many other categories can you

think of? How many other storylines can you think of where there's a popular mythology that tens of millions of Americans are aware of such that you can make movie after movie after movie updating the storyline with these already pre-aware familiar characters? There's comic books, there's Lord of the Rings, there's the Bible, there's Harry Potter, there's, you know, once in a generation phenomenon

of a children's book or of a young adult book, I guess you can throw Hunger Games in there. It's actually really rare for there to exist an intellectual property that has this many stories baked into it,

this many characters baked into it, and this amount of familiarity. And so it's easy for me to say, in 2024, looking back, I can't believe no one bought up intellectual property in the 1980s and 1990s and started, you know, becoming the richest entertainment company in the world by making it. But it's not surprising to me, understanding that pre-awareness and familiarity is critical for buying audience attention in a really

distractible consumer market that something like superhero comic books would be just an absolute gold mine for a company like Disney. I don't know if that's like an overdetermined answer, if that's an answer that it's very easy to say just looking back, like it already happened. of course it was inevitable, but that would be my explanation. There just aren't a lot of other secular mythologies that are as popular as Marvel and DC. It's actually very difficult to name five total. I mean, I'm naming them all again, so maybe I'll kind of ask us to this answer. But, I mean, you've got the Bible, comic books, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars,

which was spectacularly invented the 1970s. it's hard to name five more. Yeah, you could, if you wanted to count derivative works, you could put in Shakespeare because even if not that many people have read Shakespeare, they are familiar with his stories because they have been turned into so many other properties.

And it's possible that 20 years from now, they'll be, now I'm getting really crazy, there'll be an American president's extended universe and that will recognize that history is a shared mythology just like comic books are a shared mythology. And there'll be some

historical fiction expanded universe that make sequel after sequel. Or they'll take the yeah, right, exactly, killing Lincoln and killing JFK.

But, you know, this is, you know, you said before, why in the 1980s, were they making John Grisham books? Because they were already popular.

Because you were buying into an audience that already existed. And so if what you want to do is make not just one successful movie, but 20 successful movies, what do you do? You have to buy into a literature that is large enough and popular enough to make 20 familiar films. Not a lot of things meet the pre-awareness threshold in my guess as comic books. Right. So that's my answer.

And that's why they're now turning to video games. And then, that's why I turn to video games. Let's talk about the next paradigm. I mean, what's changed now? Like, how would you describe, you said you don't entirely by end of the idea that we're seeing, you know, the death of superheroes. But what is happening right now? The comic book movie has become considerably less dependable. There was a point in time at which every single Marvel movie, with maybe one or two exceptions, worked. they would post a huge opening weekend.

They would gross enough money to make a bunch of money. They would be very profitable for Disney. And they just continued to introduce new characters. You're at Iron Man and you had Captain America and you had Thor. Hulk was sort of the only one and that wasn't released by Disney. That didn't quite work. You've had multiple attempts at Spider-Man. They haven't all worked that well.

But for the most part, Spider-Man is just like a foolproof property. And they even, you know, they even had success. something like Guardians of the Galaxy, which I just don't think that many people knew about. It really peaked with sort of the final couple Avenger movies, and then and Black Panther, and after that, the last couple of years, it just feels like audiences are tired of it. You still have certain movies do well. You know, the most recent Spider-Man was, I think, the highest-grossing one in the history of that franchise. Guardians of the Galaxy did fine last year.

People think Deadpool will do well this year. But the average Marvel movie is now no longer a sure thing. The average DC movie right now seems like a disaster. And I mean, just last year you had both the Flash and Aquaman do quite poorly. And you've got these Spider-Man spin-off movies this year that are not doing especially well. And so this leads to this whole debate about comic book fatigue. And it's clear that there's, like I said, there's still an audience for some of them. But I just think, you know, they've torn through a lot of the characters.

They're trying to introduce new ones. You know, they're in like phase, I lose track, but they're in phase four or five of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And at a certain point, audiences just wanted something different. You know, to your point, you made a comment about, you know, they want a surprising or interesting adaptation of something that they've seen before. And so the form in some ways needs to be reinvented. and that can either be reinvent the comic book

or that can mean go into something new which is I'm sure what you want to talk about. It is what I want to talk about. What is there to go into right now? Is it... Comic books? I'm sorry. Video games are a big one. You know, the success of the Super Mario Brothers movie last year

a couple of months after the success of the HBO Last of a show means that you're just seeing... I know a couple of producers who all they're trying to do is set up. up video game adaptations across Hollywood and very successful producers. There's the, and then there's the Barbie phenomena, which there are two ways to learn from, and I fear that Hollywood is going to take the wrong one, which is you've got now Mattel setting up toy adaptations all across town, I think more than a dozen. Don't get me wrong,

I'm sure some of those could work. But to me, the, the, the, the lesson of Barbie and the lesson of media last summer was that these companies need to spend more time building projects for women. So much of the superhero, not to say that women don't love superheroes, but there's a reason it's called fan boys, right? Like the Hollywood target audience for so long has been sort of like men 18 to 34. And whether it's Barbie or Taylor Swift, there's evidence that if you target women 18 to 34 or 18 to 45 or whatever it is,

it can be just as potent a cultural force, if not more so. And for whatever reason, maybe because most of these studios are still run by guys, it just has never happened. Right. I guess if you take my answer to your really smart question from a few minutes ago, if you say, you know, what are other big, vast, popular shared mythologies, properties with a ton of familiarity that are vast enough

to be turned into show after show after show, episode after episode, movie after movie, right? Two of them that just jumped to mind are toys because you can do anything with them. You can tell whatever story, they're just objects, and video games. Because video games are a multi-hour experience, and so you can, of course, tell stories

that go for many, many hours. Right now, the paradigm shift that we're discussing is intersecting with a lot of interesting changes within the industry. So Netflix has a top movie executive, and I should disclose here that my sister works in the film division of Netflix. Disney is trying to figure out how to make streaming a hugely profitable business. Max, as you've written about, is a total mess. Paramount's looking for some kind of merger. How are these new heads of film at some of the largest entertainment companies in Hollywood?

how are they grappling with the question that you and I are talking about right now? Maybe we can start with Netflix. Well, Netflix has just issued movie theaters altogether, and so they're really playing a different game than most of these other studios. They are, because they don't sit on a trove of well-known intellectual property, they have had to make more original films. they have done so at a scale that we have really never seen before

and just in terms of output, they went from making zero movies a year to some years more than 70 or 80 in less than a decade. And they have, again, for the most part, not put them in theaters or given them a traditional release. And so I think their strategy

is hard to compare to others. they did make some very big action movies that were sort of akin to what we were talking about in the 90s. They wanted to make those types of movies, in part, even though they wouldn't say this, because those types of movies didn't just do well in theaters, but they kill on cable because it's just so easy to jump in and out of. And I tend to think of like the Sweet Spot Netflix movie

as the type of movie that you would watch while channel surfing when you were a kid. What is that for you? that is a comedy like an old school or a wedding crashers or a ground hug day or kind of the classic 90s and early a comedy's super bad you know you pick it um it's definitely action comedies like bad boys is something that i will always watch when it's on um some of those you know and some of the dramas but i think comedy action comedy romantic comedy things where you don't have to

have followed sort of every dot and story. Now look, comic book movies, I'm sure, would have been that for a lot of people if cable were still

as relevant when comic book movies entered syndication and became very popular, but those are just not on the table for Netflix. And so I think it's for Netflix

trying to find, like trying to find a sweet spot making the types of movies that other studios are not making. So Netflix is trying to, all right,

find their own niche. Counter program. They're trying to counter program at the same time as they try to essentially become their destiny, which is a streaming 1990s cable bundle.

Disney, are they still invested in the Iger model from the last 20 years or do you sense any kind of strategic shift in that company? Yeah. I don't think there's been a huge shift,

just in that the change that they made was to an executive who wasn't in charge of Marvel or Lucasfilm, which is Star Wars, or Pixar. Or Walt Disney Animation Studios, at least not their big movies. And so if we're seeing any shift in strategy with those, it will be borne out in output and what they say, not in any executive change.

The person who, or the position that changed, which was the guy, Sean Bailey, getting quasi replaced by this guy David Greenbaum, was the job where one of the things that they did was make the live action adaptations of animated movies, which, so, you know, Lion King on down,

Aladdin, and so forth. And then there are some direct-to-streaming movies, which people, you know, they made a Janus, a fictionalized story, of the basketball player, Janice Sant de Kumpo, things like that. It sounds like that position will change a little bit. I don't know that they're abandoning the live-action adaptations of animated classics,

but I do think that they're going to take a few more swings trying to work with top filmmakers. The guy they brought in previously co-ran Searchlight, which used to be called Fox Searchlight, which makes more art-house indie movies. Their biggest hit of last year was poor things. which is not a kind of a traditional Disney title. And so it'll be very interesting to see how they try to marry that more indie sensibility with the Disney company.

I mean, Disney has long had a division that did this in one way or another, but it is not the most important division of the company. And finally, Max is such an extraordinary mess. Warner Brothers is just such a fascinating dumpster fire. what can we say about their future strategy and what Zazlab is going to try to do with the movie business in the next few years? Well, look, the movie strategy and everything else are probably a little bit different.

There's so many questions looming at the corporate level for Warner Brothers Discovery led by, is it still going to exist in a year or two or are they going to sell it or merge it? On the movie side, you know, they brought in these executives, Mike DeLuke and Pam Abdi, to run the studio who do not have a track record of making the kind of your classic franchise films.

They have made, you know, they most recently ran MGM, where they made a bunch of movies with really great directors that made no money. And have there's sort of long been a pipeline, at least in the recent history, between creative artist agency, one of, if not the biggest agency in Hollywood, pushing its clients to make big movies for Mike and Pam. And I'd still need someone to explain to me exactly how that works. David Zazlav, the CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery, has articulated, they are rebooting the DC strategy.

They brought in a filmmaker named James Gunn and a producer, Peter Safran, to try to reimagine what they're doing with that. That will start with the new Superman movie. David Zazel's strategy is usually to try to program to the middle of the U.S., and so I assume that we'll see, you know, But we'll see a slightly less dark version because James Gunn was involved in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, which are some of the more fun Marvel movies. How that ties together into a broader movie strategy, sort of combining these very filmmaker-friendly studio executives with a new DC and with something else is uncertain, which I think can be said about everything at that company because it seems like they're trying to do a bunch of different strategies at the same time. It's interesting because when I compare the first half of our conversation to your last three answers,

it sounds like, and maybe this is just an example of me being wrong, my thesis is there's some kind of paradigm shift that we're in the midst of, and maybe it's a messy paradigm shift, but the formula that worked for the last 20 years of total equalization does not seem to be similarly or equally successful going forward. But if you look at the short-term strategy of Disney or Warner Brothers Discovery, they still seem to be all in on comic book sequels and comic book universes. And meanwhile, you have Netflix sort of doing their own kind of programming because they don't play in broad cinematic release in movie theaters. So if I'm right, it'll be interesting if these companies' strategies for film in the next few quarters,

just need the next few years, just continues to underperform expectations. And this shift that I'm discussing is just going to take a little bit longer, potentially, to actually play out. Well, it takes long for any of these shifts to play out, because if you think about it, the development and production of the movie will take anywhere from a year to many, many, many years. So if you have studio executives looking at the success of the Marley movie, which, by the way, there have been many successful music biopics.

So that's sort of a tried and true genre. You can go, we have the Queen one, we had the Elton John one, all these movies. That's just sort of, is a thing. You look at, I mean, what do they take from the success of a movie like anyone but you? This rom-com darling that cost $25, $30 million to make, it's now grossed more than $200 million. Relative to its budget, it's a really good success. But it is in the, for the, for a studio, it is a single, maybe a double. Now, you and I as moviegoers would probably like to see studio.

take more of those swings. But as discussed, studios have committed to the business of making home runs. And so are they going to see that and say, you know what, maybe we should have a few more modest swings on our slate? Maybe. But they haven't articulated that other than maybe

Tom Rothman at Sony. And so I think one of the reasons why you're not seeing the sudden shift is studios aren't quite sure what the next phase of the... strategy should be. And for the time being, it's going to freak, probably freak out investors if they come out and say superhero movies aren't working, right? Like, think back to cable. There were many years where we could see that cord cutting had started and that ESPN was probably a little bit vulnerable. And yet no executive was going to say that out loud. Bob Iger did not say

ESPN has problems. You want to know why he didn't say it? Because when he finally did in like 2015, 16, whenever that was, his stock tanked. and everybody just decided that was an inflection point where the industry had to start leaning into streaming and there's this full recognition that what had been the Golden Goose wasn't working now. It still took them forever and they're still in the middle of digesting those changes. But I think if there's a turn away from or a reinvent from comic books or reinvention of the strategy, it's not going to be something that they're going to communicate overtly. It's going to be stuff that we start to see and what they're buying and what they're making.

and then at some point they might have to say something. The analogy of the decline of the profitability of comic book sequels to cord cutting is so interesting. Because yes, it's something that you can see if you look at the numbers, but you're right. It wasn't recognized publicly until you were several years into the trend. So maybe that's just something that we're all going to hear in 2027. Lucas Shaw, thank you very much. Thanks, sir. Thank you for listening.

Plain English is produced by, Devin Biroldi. One quick programming note, we in the month of March are going to move just temporarily to a once-a-week publishing schedule. We'll be coming at you every Tuesday. No Friday episodes for the month of March. We've got a little bit of extra work. We got a little bit of travel. This is just the best way to smooth out the time that we have to bring you consistent weekly entertainment. So one show a week in March, and we will be back to our regular two-episode pre-week schedule in April.