The End of Movies

Yesterday at Grantland, in a kind of harmonic convergence with Sony’s unprecedented cancellation of a major Christmas-season movie in response to pressure and threats from the North Korean-affiliated hackers who had already exposed various studio secrets, Mark Harris had an essay on the theme of Hollywood’s ongoing transformation from an industry invested in original storytelling and ad hoc experimentation, in which franchises and sequels exist to help “finance the rest of a studio’s lineup,” to a business in which “replication” and “reliability” are everything, and “a studio’s lineup is brands and franchises, and that’s it.” Harris has made versions of this argument before, as have others — it’s not exactly news that Hollywood is increasingly enslaved to the “pre-sold” property — but in this case he’s put together two grimly detailed documents, two release schedules showing the five-year plans that the major studios have built for themselves out of superhero movies (above all) and then also “Star Wars” sequels and “Harry Potter” arcana and reboots of everything from “Jurassic Park” to “Max Max” to “The Terminator” to “Beverly Hills Cop.” And to stare at these extraordinary lists of movies pre-planned entertainment properties, at “Aquaman” and “The Bourne Identity Five” and “Pirates of the Caribbean Whatever,” is to find oneself contemplating a kind of tentpole totalitarianism, a moviegoing future from which even the imagination will have no means of escape.

The cancelled release of the “The Interview” is connected to an entirely non-metaphorical totalitarianism, of course, and it’s significant on a much higher level than the business of cinematic art. Right now this looks like one of the most successful (and most unlikely) terrorist coups in recent history, whose success could have all sorts of unpleasant implications for other entities — not just public institutions, but corporations and citizens — that might find themselves in a rogue-state-affiliated hacker’s crosshairs next.

But if you care about the movies, then what’s happened to Seth Rogen and James Franco’s comedy is also related to the depressing story that Harris has to tell. Not because a coarse comedy about two idiot celebrities assassinating the North Korean dictator represents some kind of brilliant alternative to the sameness of sequels, but because its fate will become (already has become, in fact) a cautionary tale in an industry that’s already so risk-averse, so fearful of political controversy, so determined to make movies that sell equally well in every overseas market, that the North Koreans themselves were one the last available real-world villains for its blockbusters. So for studios already inclined to recycle comic book villains and reboot Reagan-era properties and resurrect Captain Jack Sparrow from here to eternity, the fate of Sony — whose post-hack problems go well beyond the lost revenue from “The Interview” — will offer just one more reason to stick with the tentpoles, one more reason to play it safe with superheroes, one more reason to pause before greenlighting an original story and say, “okay, but maybe if the villains were neo-Nazis instead?” (And that’s just until the neo-Nazis find a hacker of their own …)

The title of this post is hyperbole, of course. Lots of good movies are still being made in this era, lots will still be made post-“Interview”, and television has expanded the frontiers of cinema in ways that help make up for what’s being lost on bigger screens. Perhaps the best film from a major director I’ve seen this fall is Jane Campion’s “Top of the Lake,” which of course is a TV miniseries that first aired on the Sundance Channel last year. I’m sure eventually I’ll see a great film that has its premiere on YouTube, and that Frank Bruni and I will find a way to argue about its politics.

But if you love the movies, and stare long enough at Harris’s lists, should you be discouraged? I think you should. And will what just happened make things worse? Almost certainly it will.

See you at “Aquaman 3.”