Category: Thursday Thinkpiece

Nah, it’s doing fine. Just going through some growing pains.

Continue reading “Thursday Thinkpiece: Is Cinema Dying?”

The once-niche rating aggregator has evolved into one of the most trusted and cited websites on the internet- easily the most trusted and cited when it comes to cinema. Is it really the monolithic arbiter of success that Hollywood has made it out to be?

Continue reading “Thursday Thinkpiece: On Rotten Tomatoes Supposed Omnipotence”

Under the guise of convenience, media providers are wresting control from individuals and reaping the benefits in perpetuity.

Continue reading “Thursday Thinkpiece: The Ever-Looming Issue of Immediacy vs. Ownership”

The notion of a “one-hit wonder” might seem simple at first: a performing artist who is only recognizable for one massively popular song. They scored a huge hit and then disappeared from the public’s consciousness, only to reappear on snide and degrading future compilations and lists of other unlucky artists. The problem is that most of these artists aren’t actually one-hit wonders, and the parameters for labeling an artist as such are vague and arguable. And as we enter an age in which the music industry and radio are flailing towards their demise and many massive artists don’t even have “hits”, the label becomes completely meaningless.

At first blush it’s easy to come up with a list of publicly deigned one-hit wonders:

– Gangnam Style- Psy
– Somebody That I Used To Know- Gotye
– Float On- Modest Mouse
– Flagpole Sitta- Harvey Danger
– The Way- Fastball
– I Believe In A Thing Called Love- The Darkness
– Crazy- Gnarls Barkley
– Macarena- Los Del Rio
– Blurred Lines- Robin Thicke
– Nothing Compares 2 U- Sinead O’ Connor
etc, etc

Whether they deserve it or not is up to the individual, but the majority of people only know the one song by its respective artist. This is the sort of playlist a radio station might compile for a themed segment, which is kind of messed up considering it’s the radio stations that decide whether or not to play more than one single by an artist. It’s also messed up because most of the aforementioned artists actually did have more than one radio hit, as most artists in general do.

– Gentleman- Psy
– Eyes Wide Open- Gotye
– Dashboard- Modest Mouse
– Sad Sweetheart of the Rodeo- Harvey Danger
– You’re An Ocean- Fastball
etc, etc

It’s usually a novelty or charity ensemble group that only ever release one single (Live-Aid/Band-Aid, Liam Lynch,  whoever did “Disco Duck”). Regular artists tend to have these things called “albums”, and after they land a big hit they chase it with one or two or three other songs. You know, to keep them in the public eye. Sometimes these songs even chart pretty high! Does nobody remember that Psy’s “Gentleman” was a hit as well? Or that Robin Thicke, Gotye, and Psy all had careers before their big singles? Gotye was already a huge deal in his homeland of Australia with the song “Heart’s a Mess”! Psy was five albums into his career before Gangnam Style! Why is he considered a one-hit wonder?

Furthermore, does this mean that artists that never have that one big song are no-hit wonders? Because there are a lot of artists that are doing just fine without one, including:

– The Script
– Colbie Caillat
– Sara Bareilles
– Christina Perri
– The Tragically Hip
– Jack Johnson
– The Jonas Brothers
– Lady Antebellum

If you asked the general population what any of those artists’ “big song” was, you’ll get blank stares. But they’ve all got comfortable careers with consistently high-selling albums and reliable fanbases. Colbie Caillat, above could release a greatest hits based on all her singles, even though most people don’t know what she looks like (I didn’t until about five minutes ago). It’s not really that big of a deal that they’ve never reached the pinnacle of the Billboard Top 100. Although even that achievement doesn’t matter in this day and age, especially when you consider how few legitimate hits come out.

To date this year, there have only been a handful of big songs, with one (“Uptown Funk”) languishing at the top for 16 weeks. Streaming music has segmented audiences to the point where there may never again be a true “Song of the Summer”, because everyone’s got their own songs of the summer. There are now “micro-stars” who are hugely famous thanks to industry pushing despite not yet having…any recognizable songs.

Who are Austin Mahone (above), Rita Ora, and Five Seconds of Summer? I can’t even picture their faces, much less tell you what they sing or even what KIND of music they play. But I know that they’re rich and famous because I see those names everywhere. They’re doing fine. In fact it seems like these days, NOT having the “one big hit” is more beneficial than having it. Stars have to be careful not to make their songs too good. (note: maybe that’s why music is so bad nowadays cuz they’re purposely making it bad, tee hee)

So WHY is Carly Rae Jepsen so thirsty for another hit?

The halcyon year of 2012 brought us the inescapable “Call Me Maybe”, which is her one big song. The thing about its success however, is that it was a complete accident. A single by a third-place runner up on the 2007 season of Canadian Idol and produced by the former member of a hard industrial group (Dave Ogilvie)? It was a fluke and that’s partly why it was so refreshing. Nobody was expecting it to be huge and its viral spread was completely natural. Jepsen followed it with a guest spot on Owl City’s “Good Time” and another song later in 2012 called “This Kiss”, and could have continued releasing low-key pop and had a stable career like Colbie Caillat or Christina Perri.

But she didn’t. She went away for a little while and started planning a BIG comeback. Which could in turn backfire in a BIG way, as the desperation for another huge hit is palpable. Everything that’s come out of the promotion for her new material has been a transparently obvious grab at the limelight.

– “I Really Like You” was released in March, a calculated date when artists wanting to score a “song of the summer” drop their songs.
– The video had a celebrity cameo in Tom Hanks.
– A big deal was made of Jepsen’s quest in making this album, from the wide range of producers and songwriters to the hundreds of songs she wrote for it.
– She performed on SNL, Ellen, and Castle (??).
– Another (kind of embarrassing) “viral” video was released with a bunch of famous friends (Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande) singing the song.
– Another song called “All That” was released.
– Both songs were very much in the late-80s style that is en vogue right now (as opposed to the timeless sound of “Call Me Maybe”)

Despite all this, as of this writing the song has not charted very well (39 on the Billboard Hot 100). It’s nowhere near the ubiquity that “Call Me Maybe” had and it doesn’t seem like it will be the huge summer hit Jepsen wanted it to be. The corresponding album has no release date due to this tepid response. No doubt the producers are going through the “hundreds” of recorded songs trying to revise them for another hit, possibly with a guest appearance. And it’s all a little sad, because “I Really Like You” is a pretty fun song and didn’t need this massive circus surrounding it. Jepsen could have just released it normally, had the album out by now and toured without pressure and expectations. Her quest to avoid being a one-hit wonder has turned into MORE of a one-hit wonder, something I think she was really, really really, really, really, really trying to avoid.

                                                                 Welcome to the Age of Branding!

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.

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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?

* 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.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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?

* 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.