Movie Enthusiast Issue 36: Streaming vs. Theatrical, Death to Superheroes, and Upcoming Projects
Welcome back to Movie Enthusiast, after a short and unplanned July 4th hiatus! Summer is a bit slower on the film-world happenings, so this week will be more of a digest than usual.
Some weeks ago Film Comment put out a podcast timed to the Netflix release of Bong Joon-Ho’s Okja (which I haven’t seen yet, so don’t spoil it!) about the ongoing debate over the merits of theatrical movie releases vs. streaming-only releases. As is usual for Film Comment, the discussion avoided glibly pronouncing one model of movie watching better than the other—though the house preference for in-theater releases was obvious. Most interestingly, the guests on the episode fleshed out some ideas about independently-operated American theaters and the potentially untapped markets in every city with a population of over, say, 100,000 people. In any such metropolis, the argument goes, you’ll find enough movie lovers—between former video store employees to local college and university film societies, among other channels—to sustain an independent theater and area-specific programming. This makes some intuitive sense to me, especially in light of my own paltry research and writing on the subject. The whole episode is worth a listen: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/film-comment-podcast-streaming-vs-theatrical/
Also from the Film Comment front, Nick Pinkerton has an excellent essay on the superhero movie phenomenon in the latest print issue. Provocatively billed on the cover as “Superheroes Must Die” (and on the interior as “Please Send Help”), Pinkerton’s piece dodges the points you would assume a highbrow critical analysis of the subgenre would make. He’s more interested in revisiting the history of superheroes at the movies than most authors of think pieces would be, so the conclusions he arrives at about the subgenre’s relationship to the American demographic it caters to, situated in a broader history of large-scale popular Hollywood productions, are unexpected (emphasis mine):
The early western had first to represent itself to a rural audience that recognized proper horsemanship; the action film of the compulsory service period had to address a viewership with a basic-training understanding of tactical combat. By contrast, the superhero film’s principal responsibility is to “fan service”—not disappointing the expectations of the property’s inscribed audience. In this way, the superhero film is a distinctly postindustrial manifestation of the action film—witness the Reddit-circulated images of Marvel movie shoots before CGI tampering, in which Chris Hemsworth, Benedict Cumberbatch, and the like can be seen making feeble leaps in cumbersome costumes, which a battalion of technicians will turn into seamless up, up, and away. They are the products of—and the fantasy life to—a white-collar America, and as such it is only appropriate that their market triumph represents the dominance of managerial intelligence over the hands-on worker. For this reason, as much as any other, they may be the quintessential films of their time.
The full article isn’t online yet, but you can count on me to be sharing it around widely once it is.
Movies In Development
Maybe as many as half of these newly-announced projects will fail to come to fruition, but until then put all the following on your radars:
After adapting Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning The Underground Railroad into a miniseries for Amazon, Moonlight director Barry Jenkins will get to work on a film adaptation of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk…
…Quentin Tarantino, you may have already heard, is in the early stages of shopping around for actors for a film about the Manson family murders. I am extremely uninterested in commenting on this project, so go ahead have a field day with this news if you want…
…David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon, a recent nonfiction favorite that some of you have already read, is going to be getting the Scorsese treatment, with Leonardo DiCaprio also attached. Granted, Scorsese has a half dozen rumored projects in various states of production, so who knows what will happen with this one…
…Woody Allen’s next movie (the one after the one with Kate Winslet, Wonder Wheel, expected out this fall) will star Elle Fanning and Timothée Chalamet. You don’t know his name yet but you will by the time this awards season is over…
…Top of the Lake and The Piano director Jane Campion has begun work on her next film, an adaptation of Rachel Kushner’s 2013 novel The Flamethrowers about a young artist moving to New York in the 70s…
…Disney unveiled their schedule of tentpole releases for the next three years at their D23 Expo last week. Notable properties include a CGI Lion King remake with Donald Glover as the voice of Simba, a live-action Dumbo to be directed by Tim Burton, and a live-action Aladdin that’s evidently been difficult to cast. (The previously-announced live-action Mulan is still in the works, but will hit theaters later than first planned.) Notably absent from the table: any original stories. I for one am not looking forward to the inevitable third wave of Disney remakes in 7–12 years when we get a VR Beauty and the Beast…
…hmm…so…there’s a movie on its way called Book Club, which will star Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Mary Steenburgen, and Candice Bergen as a group of “lifelong California friends whose lives are changed” when their book club reads…50 Shades of Grey…um…well then…
…surely at least one of you is a Brian De Palma fan, so it should please you to hear that production on his next film, Domino, a trans-European terrorism thriller starring Game of Thrones actors Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Carice van Houten, is underway…
…and, finally, I had previously announced that Beau Travail director Claire Denis would be making a sci-fi movie written by Zadie Smith and starring Robert Pattinson and Patricia Arquette. Production on High Life, as it’s been titled, was delayed for Denis to shoot a Cannes quickie with Juliette Binoche and Gerard Depardieu, but words has it the film is back on schedule!
…okay one more sci-fi related news item: James Gray (The Lost City of Z) will be making his own foray into outer space with Ad Astra, set 100 years into the future with Brad Pitt as the astronomer son of Tommy Lee Jones, who disappeared while leading a space colony near Neptune 18 years before the movie’s start. Buckle up!