Thursday Thinkpiece: Shared Universe Syndrome

                                                                 Welcome to the Age of Branding!
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Talking strictly from a cinematic sense, of course- branding’s been lording over every other market for generations. It’s not like it was absent from movies all this time either, it’s just that now it has become the single greatest asset for films. This proves difficult, however, if there are no brands.

And so somewhere in the mid-late 00’s the executives and corporate brass began mining the past for brands, for familiar properties that would not require pesky things like “establishing plots” or “character development”. It was harder and harder to create cultural touchstones; in turn the nostalgia market blossomed. Suddenly a load was taken off the backs of Hollywood’s thinktanks as they no longer needed to imagine ideas for blockbusters. They just needed to re-imagine them.

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Dark and Gritty™

 

It boiled down to two genres, loosely divided by gender demographics. Comic books for the fellas and the classic fairy tales for ladies. This is by no means a static divider, but from a marketing perspective this is how the trends skewed. Trends that are still healthy to this day, though they’ve required a little augmenting as the decade turned.

Why have one brand when you can have two? Or three? Or ten? All in one property, too! Hollywood was more than happy to oblige and sate the public’s appetite for brands and thus was born the shared universe.

Although crossovers and spin-offs have popped up throughout cinematic and televised history (remember, the Flintstones and the Jetsons live in the same timeline), the roots of the modern incarnation of the shared universe model can be traced to one early millennial franchise: Shrek.

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It’s all your fault! All your fault!

Seven years before Tony Stark got a knock on the door from Nick Fury, the green ogre and his postmodern adventures gave audiences the thrill of seeing Pinocchio interact with the three little pigs, the gingerbread man and the magic mirror in the same room, and all the famous princesses walk down the red carpet together. Not only that, but they were all so sardonic and witty! They referenced modern expressions in fairy tale style! It would set the stage for the fairy tale renaissance towards the latter part of the aughts.

It’s also worth mentioning that the early 00’s also gave us Nintendo’s Smash Bros. franchise and the Kingdom Hearts franchise, with Kingdom Hearts also incorporating classic fairy tale characters (Disney versions of course) into their universe.

Disney would eventually become the king of the shared universe. They bought Marvel Studios one year into their epic undertaking and took the reins of what has become the most lucrative franchise in the cinematic world. The Marvel brand at this point is unassailable; a Midas blessing for whatever it’s attached to. Even without the rights to the X-Men and Spider-Man brands, they have a vast vault of comic book characters to use in their properties and populate their one world.

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Agents of cross-promotion.

Although navigating a universe where everything is canon is tricky, the payoffs are very literally worth it. With each franchise that rakes in box office dollars they gain another hype generator for any and all crossovers that will happen. Guardians of the Galaxy were virtually unknown prior to 2014, but thanks to the Marvel brand have become just as valuable as the heaviest hitters. They’re now seen as a property that will increase stock of a future project.

As will Marvel’s rapidly expanding ventures outside of the cinema. TV series like Agents of SHIELD and Agent Carter are also incorporated in their universe, along with future Netflix series Daredevil and Jessica Jones. All of these will one day tie into one massive project, presumably the two-part Avengers Infinity War movie- a film that is epic in the truest, most literal sense of the word.

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aka Desperate Housewives…with magic.

But Disney haven’t forgotten what got them to this point- their fairy tales. Owning the rights to the “definitive”, most culturally accepted variations of fairy tale characters has given them another massive library to cater to those who are less fond of explosions and explosion accessories. Taking a cue from Shrek, Disney created TV series Once Upon a Time and The Descendants with hip new versions of their classic characters. Video game Disney Infinity has access to not only Disney characters, but Marvel and Pixar characters as well. It’s a smorgasbord of familiarity that thrives simply on the fact that people are attracted to all these brands separately, making them even more powerful together in one package.

Disney aren’t the only company privy to public domain properties, however, which has led to films like Into the Woods and television shows like Grimm, both based upon shared universes populated with these same bankable characters. TV series Penny Dreadful attempts to pull off a similar trick with slightly more recent literary icons such as Dr. Frankenstein and Dorian Gray. None of these have reached the same celestial heights as any of Disney’s universes though. In fact, the same can be said about the comic book side of their business as well.

Make no mistake, the Spider-Man, Batman, and X-Men movies have been hugely successful in their own right. When it comes to the shared universe gimmick though, Disney is thoroughly thrashing every single competitor due to a variety of reasons.

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* Sony’s Spider-Man series is the least effective. A premature reboot of the series lead to another origin movie, and had the studio rushing to make up for lost time. This gave us two below-average movies crippled by the weight of studio mandated references. Sony wants more movies so badly, they’ll cram in plots and characters unnecessarily just for the sake of hinting at a larger franchise. Which they don’t really have, seeing as the only comic book property they own is…Spider-Man. These limits have trapped them in their own web, forcing them to come up with hilariously bad ideas like an Aunt May movie.

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More plot holes than a speeding train!

* DC comics have bungled it up as well. At the time of writing this, they have exactly one movie in their universe (the subpar Man of Steel) to Marvel’s 10. Green Lantern was a flop, the Nolan Batman movies are now unrelated, all DC based television series are unconnected, and the unreliable Zack Snyder has control of next year’s Dawn of Justice. There are bound to be a few more trainwrecks down the road.

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Degrassi: The Next Generation

* FOX’s X-Men are the best off. A rebound after the disastrous one-two punch of Last Stand and The Wolverine has led to three decent films. Thanks to time-travel plot devices they can bring the older stars back for a few more rounds while their universe is expanded with the Gambit and Fantastic 4 movies. Although the troubling production tales about the Fantastic 4 film set may mean that world does not get incorporated.

So what’s next? What will bring in audiences once the novelty of shared universes finally wears off?

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I control the shared universe…literally

* After Infinity War Part II Marvel will probably do a comic-logic approved soft reset. Messing with time and space along with inevitable tragically heroic sacrifices will lead to a semi-new timeline starting around 2020. Some new actors, some old, but well-established brands still in play. A “boss bad guy team-up” is probably in the cards in Phase IV of Marvel’s plan.

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The Force awakens…then remembers the rebellion is TOMORROW, and goes back to sleep.

* Outside the comic book universe, Disney still has a horse in the form of their Star Wars acquisition. Not content with just new sequels, they’ve also begun constructing a Star Wars shared universe with films centred around individual characters that will tie into the main story.

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The Boy Who Will Continue To Live

* Warner Bros is doing the same with the Harry Potter books and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a trilogy of movies based upon a tiny sliver of a book. More Harry Potter films would not be unexpected.

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Just let him sleep already.

* Verging on the slightly ridiculous is the Universal Monsters universe. Dracula, the Mummy, Frankenstein, and Werewolfman all adding up to…what? How will this even make sense? Expect this idea to collapse.

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If Russell Crowe can’t start a franchise…

* Past ridiculous is the “Robin Hood” universe, which is unbelievably stupid. Robin Hood is no longer a viable brand on his own. What makes the studios think people will come out for a Friar Tuck movie?

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Tony the Terminator vs. Trix-1000! Darth Chocula vs. Lucky Skywalker!

* Far beyond ridiculous and into sheer conjecture are these ideas: Avengers vs. Star Wars, cereal mascots universe, board game universe, Pixar universe. Though they might seem impossible now, they just might come to fruition.

The shared universe itself also has an inherent problem: what happens once people tire of the old crowd? If all time is spent on the novelty of old characters interacting and none is spent on creating new ones, what legacy is left for the future? What stories will future movie studios mine? It’s what I like to call the Smash Bros Dilemma. Nintendo has had no memorable characters for nearly a decade; the character roster can’t expand if there’s nobody worthy of putting in there. Smash Bros is a franchise that can’t grow without the success of new franchises, which simply aren’t developing in our stagnant cultural void. Disney’s Once Upon a Time gorged excessively upon the introduction of Elsa, one memorable touchstone in a landscape with fewer and fewer of them. This was a clear sign that our generation is starved for new icons in every field. Executives, take heed, if you don’t start developing new properties now, future generations will have no icons to call their own.

And they won’t buy your stuff.

Thursday Thinkpiece: Is Music Dying?

Is Music Dying?

Yes, it is.

If you came to find that out but don’t feel like wading through a meandering thinkpiece, there’s your answer, now get out of here.

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Music, both as a commodity and as an art form, is dying. A contentious statement, for sure, and easily misconstrued as sensationalist clickbait. The unavoidable truth however, is that popular music as a modern entity is now not only far beyond being lucrative, it is on its last legs as a legitimate creative medium. It’s not simply a lull in the cycle, it’s a total breakdown brought on by a multitude of factors, including streaming music and the revival market. Oh, and the fact that mainstream music sucks nowadays- but we’ll get to that later.

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Recorded music sales have been in an indisputable decline for years, but nobody really cared that it had actually gotten pretty bad. HMV now values books and video games over  music. Big box stores like Best Buy have relegated their entire music section to a small section about 10 feet wide. Where there were once aisles of different genres available, now every CD is grouped together in one poorly stocked, shadowy corner of the store. Tim McGraw, Beethoven, Slipknot, and Lady Gaga all share the same shelf.

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The inevitable Music: The Movie franchise.

Of course this is a slightly quaint argument, well-traversed by Metallica nearly 14 years ago when Napster reared its catlike head. However now the fact is taken apathetically rather than with any sort of outrage. Apple recently discontinued the once iconic iPod classic, a story that was overshadowed by people complaining “why is U2 on my PHONE??”. Devices solely devoted to playing just music are no longer a hot commodity. They’re barely a commodity at all.

Music itself just isn’t worth owning anymore. Not when streaming allows for anyone to have any song, ever, at any time. The youth market is now dominated by people, coincidentally enough, born in the year 2000- when Napster arose. These tweens and teens grew up in a time of mp3s, file-sharing, and torrents. Now that they are of age to be consumers, they don’t see recorded music as something you pay for. That is just not a possibility in their minds, not when their older siblings have been downloading free music for their whole life.

It was only this past month in fact that doomsayers such as myself were vindicated when it was revealed that not a single album in 2014 has hit Platinum certification.* I of course, had been saying this for months.

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It’s a little baffling as to why people didn’t see this coming. The summer of 2014 was the first ever to be missing its own anthem. Not a single song broke into cultural omnipresence, despite intense lobbying for Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy”. **

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Sorry, almost but not quite.

There was no Song of the Summer 2014. There just wasn’t. No Blurred Lines/Call Me Maybe/Super Bass/Poker Face/Umbrella.

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Congrats, Ms. Trainor. 2014 music is all about your bass.

Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” has come close to zeitgeist levels, but it’s still not a bona fide smash hit. There have been only two songs that have hit the stratosphere in 2014…and they’re both songs from 2013. Frozen ballad “Let it Go” and Pharrell’s “Happy” are the sole offerings from the music industry ingrained in the public consciousness so far this calendar year.

But what if we were to set sales and careers aside? Even if the notion of an album has become antiquated, shouldn’t there still be a smattering of big singles? Yes, except for one simple problem: most popular artists just don’t have good music anymore.

It seems like a subjective stance, held by out-of-touch traditionalists clutching their “real” instruments and sepia-toned Rolling Stone photographs, but can you really argue it? Most songs deigned as hits nowadays have choruses that are flat and flavourless (see: Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball”, Bruno Mars’ “Locked Out of Heaven”, almost anything by Imagine Dragons) or entirely non-existent (see: 90% of EDM songs where the build-up leads to nowhere). Because music has become so devalued and easily produced, no effort is being put into songs pushed by the music industry. Why should they bother, when the returns are so minimal? It’s a hit-and-miss kamikaze mission. Throw out any repetitive loop, a I-III-V chord structure, and a lazy melodic hook (the two most overused sound either like ELO’s “Don’t Bring Me Down”…or the theme from Shrek)  and hope that something will stick in the public’s ears.  

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Interesting that an anagram for Imagine Dragons is “Managed Origins”.

A common strategy that’s been pushed hard in recent years is the piggyback technique, where an industry-approved “rising star” is featured on tracks of established recording artists until they finally become a household name. It worked extraordinarily well with Nicki Minaj, somewhat with Ariana Grande, and bombed spectacularly with Skylar Grey, one of the biggest failures in recent history.

Legitimate stars are increasingly rare, in part because of the public’s short attention span, but also because the industry doesn’t allow for growth. It’s been streamlined so the focus is on a select few lucky performers, with a few minor players being swapped in and out each year and foisted upon us as genuine stars. (See: Ed Sheeran, 5 Seconds of Summer, Fifth Harmony, Emblem 3, Austin Mahone, Cody Simpson). Doted upon by the teen twitterverse but not really adding any sort of value to music or culture whatsoever. None of these acts are going to leave any sort of legacy, musical or otherwise. Not only do they leave minimal impact during their time on the charts, but none stick to a defined “sound” that they can claim as their own. Everyone can be lumped into one generic glob of genre.

Making matters worse is the fact that the industry peddles this faceless sound. Songs are written by one core team of evil producers (among them Ryan Tedder, Red One, Dr. Luke, Max Martin) and these are mixed and matched to whichever star they want to have a good year. Avril Lavigne, Pink, Katy Perry, Daughtry, Kelly Clarkson, Rihanna- they’re all drawing from the same pool of recycled filler.

This is not to say that there aren’t talented acts still left out there. There’s an abundance of artists in every genre with great ideas. They’re just not profitable. Kanye West released what was hailed as his creative apex in 2013 with his album “Yeezus”…off which not one charted.

So what’s happened to music in the public eye then?

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is this music?

It’s a relic. Fortunately for music the rest of the media world is obsessed with nostalgia now, so in terms of sales it can latch onto that for at least a few years. Vinyl records are selling extraordinarily well because of this perceived cultural cachet, and legacy acts are doing very well live due to this as well. The wave is still fairly strong- classic rock acts are still touring and baby boomers are coming out in droves to see them, so any band from the 60s until the early 2000s have a safety net ready as long as their old fans are still around.

Newer bands can also find solace in performing live, as it will at least get them some money in the bank, if not any lasting success. Simply put, people want something to do and concerts are sometimes that something. Major festivals are even more of a something to do and millennials will come out regardless of who’s playing, if only to #document what they’ve been up to this summer. So chin up, local electro-ska outfit, you’ll have an audience for an hour or so at each gig.

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these guys will like you for as long as the molly’s around

So what next? Probably more of the same. Fewer and fewer stars, more emphasis on the established ones. Music acts concerned more with developing a “brand” rather than music; being known for antics and personal drama instead of songs they play (see: Kanye West). 

One Direction are more of a brand than a band and can live comfortably for the rest of their lives. Some bands will be lucky enough to gain a cult following. The music industry itself is done for, shrinking exponentially every year. Once the nostalgia craze fades away there will be very little left to promote. Music will be just a side-note, and the notion of it being useful on its own merits will be laughable. It will obviously always play a part in other mediums, but by itself it will be considered pointless.

And people won’t care.

*- Taylor Swift just managed to score the (so far) only platinum record of the year, in the first week of November.

**- “Turn Down For What” has become a fairly large earworm/social phenomenon, but it’s mostly just the one line that people repeat. I’m not even sure who it’s by, just that Lil’ Jon is in there yelling.

Tuesday Thinkpiece: Millennials and the Power of Feel-Good Music

In case you haven’t heard (and you very possibly may not have), there are a lot of terrible things happening around the world. Economic collapses, civil unrest, mass kidnappings, disease outbreaks, amongst a plethora of other unpleasant situations. Yet the world’s vitriol hasn’t been aimed at any of these recently, but at an old racist saying cartoonishly racist things.

NBA: New Orleans Hornets at Los Angeles Clippers

Let’s not display any sort of lenience to Sterling- it’s an understatement that what he said was unquestionably wrong. However the fact that this story has become the top news headline, addressed by the president, and inspired a collective hand-holding campaign is kind of a joke. This should have been a three sentence blurb in the sports section, dealt with in private. That way at least we wouldn’t get the global back-patting everyone’s giving each other now that Sterling’s been reprimanded. HEY EVERYONE WE PERSONALLY DEFEATED THE EVIL RACIST! OUR GOOD VIBES BROUGHT HIM DOWN!

IT’S TIME TO FEEL GOOD.

Continue reading “Tuesday Thinkpiece: Millennials and the Power of Feel-Good Music”

Thursday Thinkpiece: Happy Kony Day!

Share a Link, Save the World:

Armchair Activism and What We Learned from Kony 2012

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A video of a cat falling off a table, and a campaign aimed to take down a child kidnapping despot in Africa. At first glance the two seem incongruous. The former is a joke, meant to be digested and forgotten in the span of a few minutes. The latter, on the other hand, is a pressing matter that concerns a social issue happening in real time. In fact though, the general public invests the same amount of interest in both, each having a shelf life of approximately one week. Less if the Leafs are having a good run. (Pause for wild laughter.)

Internet friends, I’m here today to talk to you about a social phenomenon called armchair activism, or in more hip terms, slacktivism. It’s a trend that’s been around for ages in various forms. Signing a petition form, but using a fake name or phone number so they can’t bug you further. Dropping thirty-six cents of loose change into a vagrant’s empty coffee cup. It’s a well-meaning intention, but ultimately does very little to change the larger picture. There’s no accountability, just the feeling of being a part of something.

Continue reading “Thursday Thinkpiece: Happy Kony Day!”