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George's avatar

As always, good points all around, but I think this wave of brand movies is just a byproduct of the broader all-biopics-all-the-time trend, rather than saying anything in particular about our relationships to brands.

One thing I think about a lot is the possibly apocryphal story of the person who came out of Todd Field's latest movie wanting to learn more about the true story, and was completely baffled by the notion of a "fictional" movie. Similarly, Jason Katims recently had a streaming series, "As We See It", which was very Jason Katims-y - which is to say, like a high-quality network TV series from the '90s - and someone in my life kept asking me if it was a documentary. Like, not if it was based on a true story - if it was a documentary. And it's, like, "Yes, of course it's a documentary, real video footage of people living their lives is always delivered in a highly regimented three-act structure with a cute button before it cuts to commercial, and Joe Mantegna as the dad."

It's not news that all we lionize anymore, pretty much, are superhero movies (which are big on origin stories) and biopics. It makes sense to me that, in that climate, creators are leaning into origin-of-the-brand stories. We're running out of people to make biopics of, for one thing---the 2017 Oscar for Best Actor went to a guy playing Winston Churchill (actual famous guy) while the 2021 went to the guy playing...Venus and Serena Williams's dad (less). We're kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel, famous-person-wise. As long as studios are resistant to fiction, and unless they want to make a movie about Beyonce's mailman, a biopic of the inventor of the Blackberry is pretty much what's left.

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Zack Handlen's avatar

2023, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment

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