The American commercial film industry as it exists today is a slouching behemoth that seems to exist solely to throw up the most vivid, self-satirizing farces at its own expense, distilling not just in economic practice, but also in narrative and spectacle, the psychotic and parasitic obesity of late-stage capitalism. Without rival, the most entertaining of these farces in the last ten years has to have been Universal Picture's "Dark Universe" project, a proposed franchise of tentpole blockbusters that would have rebooted the studio's roster of classic monster I.P.s as interconnected serials in the vein of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The misguided commitment of taking decades-old "B" movie staples based on century-old romanticist literature, and trying to revive them as slightly more gothic variations on standard action-adventure fare, obviously goes back slightly further, particularly to the success of Stephen Sommers' The Mummy and The Mummy Returns. The knockout success of that reboot (before anyone was calling them "reboots") even convinced Universal to hand the reigns of the entire House of Frankenstein over to Sommers, the result being 2004's Van Helsing, with X-Men heart-throb Hugh Jackman as a peerless vigilante hero who goes toe-to-toe with almost the entire "monster mash" roster. The under-performance of that film should have been the first lesson for the studio, that to the average movie-goer there is nothing inherently appealing about high-adventure and high-fantasy movies about old monsters; and that centering such a project as a star-vehicle for a guy that people only knew as Wolverine, playing a guy that nobody knew or gave a shit about, was probably not such a hot idea, either. Especially in light of the cult or sleeper success of its clear antecedents in post-Matrix urban-fantasy and action-horror -- Resident Evil (2002), Underworld (2003), Blade II (2004) -- they at the very least should have learned that genre-bending projects such as these, with one foot in cult nostalgia and the other in mainstream pandering, are better suited to a lower floor of investment.
The contract studio producers of old didn't need to learn lessons like these. They understood them intuitively. There are obviously numerous systemic factors at play here, not the least of which is competition from television and digital media, and the extent to which such a fast-paced over-saturation of the market for popular entertainment heavily problematizes the very ability to target a reliable audience base and adjust project investments accordingly. But at the end of the day, the buck has to stop with the major studio yes men, who are paid far too much to learn lessons. Executive positions at these financing and distribution companies -- which are really just the tendrils of vast conglomerates, with no particular investment in filmmaking, per se -- are awarded with the express purpose of keeping business practices "up-to-date," while simultaneously shoring up established intellectual properties, no matter how old or stupid, in order to, ostensibly, minimize risk. Studios announce the sorts of projects consistent with those objectives, they hear pitches, and award contracts based on their symmetry with those objectives. And at no point does anyone take a long hard look in the mirror and ask if there is any continuity between the plan and the goal.
Now add to the mix some healthy pinches of self-dealing, favoritism, and downright delusion, and you get "Dark Universe," an attempted update of one of the oldest "expanded universe" franchises in film history, that nobody has given a shit about since the end of the Second World War.
In 2010, we got a star-studded remake of The Wolfman that cost an absurd $160 million in production costs alone, and which bombed miserably. There must have been a chilling effect on Universal's next stab at a Dracula film, which began development around the same time as The Wolfman, but wouldn't be released until late 2014. Dracula Untold only cost $70 million, however, and managed to gross a cool $217 million globally, not too shabby at all for what was advertised to be, for all intents and purposes, a bizarre fusion of young adult dark fantasy and broader fantasy epic. Think something like belated Twilight ripoff meets even more belated 300 ripoff meets at least timely Game of Thrones ripoff. As puerilely derivative as one can get, the film also, however, was more notable for just how blatantly it telegraphed Universal's interest in aping the Marvel Studios formula, but with Universal Classic Monsters, last-minute reshoots being used to foreshadow an eventual second Mummy reboot.
On its face, the objective makes some kind of sense. Universal's roster of classic monsters is unique in that, while it does include intellectual property, it is largely predicated upon a prestige of cultural exclusivity, rather than commercial exclusivity. Anyone can make a movie about Dracula, or Frankenstein, or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But Universal's presumptive legacy is one in which all of these various public domain sources not only assumed their most iconic variations, but were also crassly consolidated very early on in the form of cheap crossovers. Pretenses of narrative continuity weren't particularly valuable in the '30s and '40s, but Universal nonetheless capitalized upon an undefined sense of all of these characters occupying the same "universe." Between the beginning of development on reboots of The Wolfman and Dracula in 2006 and the post-production of Dracula Untold in the spring of 2014, Marvel Studios had exploded onto the international film stage with its own, albeit more systematically "exclusive" universe of intellectual properties, that seemed to pave the way for a future in how audiences wanted to related to the movies, through explicit serialization and interconnectivity between discrete brands. Universal certainly weren't the only company tailoring their development slate to capitalize on Marvel Studios' success. But whereas Warner Bros. Pictures and partner-subsidiary DC at least had their own competitive pool of intellectual properties, and smaller companies from Paramount to Sony to Legendary were simply recognizing the "expanded universe" trend as the next logical development in packaging pre-existing franchises; Universal, parent company NBCUniversal, and public owner Comcast likely saw a "Dark Universe" as the perfect opportunity to shore up a legacy of content that they had been struggling to revitalize for decades.
The problem is that what is technically analogous is not necessarily adaptable under similar circumstances. In today's terminally online film discourse, uncritical enthusiasm rules the day. The Marvel Cinematic Universe becoming one of the most profitable franchises of all time becomes narrativized as being rooted in their essential purity, in Marvel "giving the fans what they want," whereas those movie studios never respected them, or whatever -- as if profitability is a metric of quality, or as if a cohort of obsessives are representative of the mass culture that makes billions of dollars in profits possible. Even from supposedly educated film critics, there is very little in the way of a coherent explanation of film as industry, rather than niche culture.
A big reason Marvel Studios was able to pull off what they have is because of specialization: They produce one kind of product, and one kind of product only, which are movies and television based on superhero comics. Themselves a division of the larger Marvel Entertainment, they may have been acquired by Disney as early as 2009, but since more or less the late-'90s up to the summer of 2015, they have acted as a quasi-independent enterprise dealing exclusively in the packaging and licensing of the vast library of Marvel's I.P.s, moving progressively further into self-finance and in-house production. Even when they were effectively just licensing package deals for distribution by Paramount and, tellingly, Universal, they themselves were effectively assuming most of the responsibility for financing and production, and were further doing so in a gamble that they, as an exclusive enterprise, could do better at consolidating and capitalizing on their intellectual properties than simply licensing characters to the Hollywood majors had proved. As co-founder Avi Arad said as far back as 1996, "When you get into business with a big studio, they are developing a hundred or 500 projects; you get totally lost. That isn't working for us. We're just not going to do it anymore. Period."
In other words, Marvel Studios was self-consciously a project in attempting to overcome the lack of specialization in major Hollywood film production and distribution, which makes it harder to develop and consolidate intellectual properties around a specific genre and brand quickly and efficiently. And the gamble paid off, because it's hard to compete in a specialized arena with an entity that exists only to produce content -- two to three features a year -- in that specialized arena, if your entity itself is not organized for that type of specialization. Being repped by the Walt Disney Company certainly doesn't hurt in terms of getting you the monopolistic market saturation, but let's be real here. Marvel Studios may have been a subsidiary of Disney as early as 2009, but the vast majority of people became aware of it only as an independent banner that was, ironically, attached to Disney's struggling competitors. That's how you get a juggernaut, by combining specialization and saturation in order to bore your market presence into the folds of as many brains as possible.
Now you may say, "But Ian, Warner Bros. also has a subsidiary, DC Entertainment, that specializes in the exact same thing, and yet they have struggled mightily to compete with Marvel, despite being to the game first!" And my answer to that is, again, that the uncritical enthusiasm of nerds has completely poisoned film discourse right down to the level of basic accuracy. Whereas any company or project baring the name "Marvel" has largely existed on a quasi-independent basis until quite recently, both DC Comics and Warner Bros. were purchased by the Kinney National Conglomerate all the way back in the late-'60s. Whereas Marvel Entertainment and Marvel Studios, as they are currently constituted, are specialized subsidiaries of The Walt Disney Company, but existed well before that purchase, DC Entertainment and DC Films are literally ad hoc subsidiaries of Warner Bros. Entertainment and parent conglomerate WarnerMedia, created in 2009 and 2016 respectively, in order to compete with their biggest conglomerate rival. There's no need to get anymore into the weedy minutia here. Suffice it to say, the relationship between DC Comics and Warner Bros. Pictures before the Marvel Studios boom and "expanded universe" bubble was not one of an independent company pre-packaging production deals to be sold to the highest distribution bidder. It was one of an already consolidated, exclusive commercial relationship spanning decades. There is specialization in this arrangement, as well as a uniquely afforded level of market saturation from the world's second-largest media conglomerate. But that much longer exclusive relationship has also meant that, ironically echoing Arad's own 1996 criticism, that the initials "D.C." have gotten "totally lost" in the waters of W.B.'s hundreds of other consolidated interests. And with virtually no competition from the quasi-independent licensers of competitive properties, Warner Bros. Pictures was under no gun to create such highly specialized models. The inelegance of their mimicry of Disney/Marvel is the direct function of a rapid shift in their entire model of how they consolidate and specifically brand intellectual properties, and how rapidly they develop and turn out a specialized product.
Much further down the rungs of market hegemony, however, is Universal, who also wanted to emulate the Marvel Studios production strategy and success model, but was also sitting on a legacy of borderline fraudulent intellectual properties with a proven track record of lacking cultural salience. What's more, the emulation of this strategy was itself dependent upon less specialization in the development of these properties; an attempt to "revive" horror franchises in a manner that specifically made them less like horror movies, and more like superhero movies.
Thus, we come, again, to The Mummy, a crass attempt to recapture the lighting-in-a-bottle of the Stephen Sommers/Brendan Frasier movies, but with Tom Cruise, and directed by a veteran screenwriter who, unlike Sommers, has never once been vetted at the helm of a big-budget action-fantasy. In total production budget, plus advertising, it cost a baffling $345 million. With a global gross of $410 million, it effectively lost the studio $95 million. And who could have foreseen such a stupendous bomb, from such a calculatedly derivative product, arranged entirely on its being the bank-shot for an "extended universe" franchise, while being based on an I.P. that absolutely nobody gave a shit about, and only being tied into a movie that came out three years earlier? In a just society, anyone responsible for such wanton burning of financial resources would be tried for social parasitism and hung.
But this is America, and our conglomerated industries are perpetually "too big to fail." Universal is currently downplaying any futures aspirations for a "Dark Universe," but that hasn't impeded the tentative development of at least six, now "standalone" films based on their only exclusive-sounding, but more accurately unwanted properties. Included among these are remakes of both Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein; projects from Paul Feig and Elizabeth Banks, both of whose recents stabs at reboot blockbusters, Ghostbusters and Charlie's Angels, have bombed; and a pop musical based on the "Monster Mash." Surely all of these projects will come out to an appropriately modest price-tag, and do not sound anything at all like the sort of de-specialized nonsense that is absurdly uninteresting to the vast majority of audiences, and outright alienating to a reliable core demographic of consumers who just want to watch a horror movie.
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The ironic punchline to these fifteen years of misspent time and dollars on Universal's part ends up being that their latest "standalone" outing, The Invisible Man, manages to function perfectly as just the sort of 'de-specialized,' crossover rebooting of their classic monsters legacy that they've been attempting to manufacture for so long, just without the exorbitant price-tag and franchise pretense. Only very loosely derived from H. G. Wells's 1897 novel, this co-production with low-budget horror leader Blumhouse Productions, written and directed by Leigh Whannell, trades in a mad science serum for an enhanced suit as the source of invisibility. A tech-industry multimillionaire with English actor and model Oliver Jackson-Cohen's conventional good looks to complement his pathological narcissism -- rather than the asocial, boardinghouse-dwelling albino of Wells's book -- this variation on Adrian Griffin comes right out of a comic book. Gothic horror is all but totally excised in favor of sci-fi supervillainy. But coming in at just $7 million in production costs, this observably modest affair can blur genre without the compromises of blockbuster means-testing. The Invisible Man is still demonstrably a horror movie -- and a monster movie -- instead of a facsimile comic book movie with horror elements.
The film is consistent of a type that has emerged in the low budget realm, synthesizing elements of cult horror, sci-fi, and action into a chimera of puerile tastes that now overlap with socially-conscious hipsterism. By centering not the Invisible Man, but rather Elizabeth Moss as his desperate ex-partner attempting to convince others about his ongoing manipulation and abuse, Whannell courts contemporary feminist tropes. But any coherent critique of the film as authentically concerned with patriarchy is undermined by Whannell's hackneyed repetition of motifs now germane to this cycle of "alternative" genre cinema, and which Whannell himself leaned on with his previous hit for Blumhouse, Upgrade. Preoccupied with making Griffin a locus of not only patriarchy, but also inscrutable wealth, the filmmakers participate in a trend of these kinds of films, which manifest a legitimate fear of contemporary oligarchy only in the narrow terms of sadistic conspiracy. Superficial class-consciousness never translates to a coherent critique, with the cabalistic supervillains of these films instead becoming assuring archetypes, whose dependence upon fantastic technology and secrecy fundamentally fails as allegory for the transparent incompetency and legal corruption of the status quo. Similarly, the pathological need to make Griffin not only an abuser, but also a super-rich, super-intelligent, narcissistic psychopath, relinquishes the film's saliency as feminist allegory. There's a big difference between "gaslighting" -- as the term is specifically used in feminist circles to describe psychological abuse -- and using phantom technology to frame someone for murder. The latter brings us totally outside of the far more broad and banal circumstances in which patriarchal authority is culturally and systemically enabled; and it further clarifies that, as with the conspiracy of wealth, that these superficial allusions to feminist tropes are themselves ideological safety valves. Their strategic deployment is as an ideological safety valve, to alleviate our sense of shame in participating in a spectacle of voyeuristic sadism in which, once again, a vulnerable woman is the raw material for our own catharsis.
All-in-all, however, The Invisible Man is a thoroughly entertaining work of suspense. There's no mystery, here, only a marginally above-board production carried by Moss's starring performance. But as a standalone capsule that somehow inexplicably still touts that "Dark Universe" banner along with the rest of the opening studio logos, it turns to a fitting rebuke of the gormless cynicism of blockbuster filmmaking. The economics of B-movies might as well be a dead language, reduced to such archaic finitude that even monster flicks must cost at least $100 million, and be part of some contrived long-term plan to manufacture audience commitment to an ongoing franchise, if a major conglomerate subsidiary is developing them. The contemporary evidence of a thriving and successful low budget genre film market continues to evade the acknowledgment of major studios. But the fact of the matter is, you simply don't need to spend that much money on monster movies. In this sort of contest, the B-tier may yet win in the end; and handily, too.
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