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.
And Oppenheimer fits in here somewhere, as a possible direction but also an easily exhaustible genre - the not-quite-biopic/historical perspective of famous (or infamous) people who did a, uh, very bad thing. Or controversial thing, whatever. (I don't want to tell anyone how to feel about Oppenheimer, man or film, just that the film and that kind of person are one more avenue for films to exploit)
OK, but I've got a more pressing issue: Starfield - thumbs up or thumbs down? I just paid $70 (!!) for this thing before reading user reviews. They seem pretty hostile, and then I remembered that Bethesda is not exactly the same group that created Morrowind now. I want to return this thing ASAP if it's going to suck. Anyone dig into yet?
Along those lines: does anyone know a decent blog or substack for game reviews? I had to give up on the review sites I used to use. Too political and terrified of giving a bad review to anything for reasons other than politics. I'd love a decent place to read reviews and talk games.
Scott, really sorry for posting this. Feel free to delete - you won't hurt my feelings or anything.
The Besties podcast is a good mix of entertaining and respectful of time (rarely goes over 50 minutes), but not super smart. Remap Radio (née Waypoint at Vice Media) is very smart and dialed in, feels like actual journalists talking, but incredibly self-indulgent and disrespectful of my time as a listener. Triple Click podcast is somewhere in between, but I got to the point where I couldn't stand listening to them prattle on.
Websites... meeeh? I hear good things about Eurogamer but haven't seen it myself. I'm pretty sure Polygon is 80% paid-for content. Rock Paper Shotgun was great like 10-15 years ago but the paywalled content essentially made the site somewhat useless.
Gaming really needs its early-2000s AVClub website but I think those days have passed. I've been trying to read more academic articles on video gaming but had a hard time finding reliable sources. Too bad Kill Screen magazine didn't make it.
Thanks! I’ll check out these podcasts. I definitely miss the old AVClub. There was a successor/spinoff gaming website, the name escapes me now, which wasn’t bad at first either. But those were the last. I’ve never found a decent place for reviews and discussion after that.
I haven't seen people really note this but I blame this trend on the Jobs/Facebook movies from a few years back, which hit a sweet spot of making money while also getting critical love.
But REALLY I blame Preston Sturges for 1941's The Great Moment - dude set a TONE.
This is fun. Going one step back from blaming "Jobs" and "The Social Network", I'm going to blame this on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.
For a happy decade, Aaron Sorkin wrote fictional stories where the most important people in the world, who are completely indispensable at their jobs doing the most important things in the world, delivered screwball banter about their superiority and importance and how their work is the most important work in the world and etc. He was great. Everyone was happy. Then he wrote Studio 60, which was this exact story - the only story he knows, with the only characters he knows - except the alleged most important work in the world was a knockoff version of MAD TV with Howard from "The Big Bang Theory" doing his Nicolas Cage impression. This bombed. Sorkin has since made seven movies where he's just tried to find the real-life people most like Josh Lyman, and then bring their stories to the big screen. And while these stories have been more about the people than the brands, there's a reason people remember them as the "Facebook movie" and not the "guy from Facebook movie".
Because his shtick is so appealing, and because two to three of these seven movies have even been really good, people try to rip the formula off. AIR feels like second-rate Sorkin. It's not a coincidence.
It's vaguely impossible to find now but in 2012 the Russian film Branded went to a similar (fictional) extreme with an ad exec eventually going crazy because he could "see" what brands were attached to people. Eventually every world government agrees to ban advertising. And do not watch the trailer or look at the poster because the film itself is so wildly different that watching it with any expectation will disappoint you. Max Von Sydow's there as well as "Marketing Guru."
There are a million special things about Blackberry. Glenn Howerton's glare. Jay Baruchel's perfect physical performance of extremely smart/very socially awkward. Every musical choice. The way it gets every single late 90s nerd detail exactly right (Wolf 3D, Civ II, love it!).
I view this as somewhat less dire than you do - is this so different than making a movie with shameless product placement? Or making 7 movies (and counting!) about Transformers? The corporate-cinematic synergy has been there for decades. A few movies about products being released in the same year doesn't strike me as a dangerous or alarming trend.
Sports movies are also a mainstay and what's more corporate than professional sports? We all loved Moneyball, even though it was basically identical to what ppl hated about Air: a multi-million dollar corporation using scrappy, outsider methods to become a multi-billion dollar corporation.
FWIW, I really enjoyed Air. It's an interesting story! Sometimes interesting stories happen at corporations, shrug.
It's maybe unsurprising that Ben Affleck is the only director I can think of who still makes movies that feel, tonally, like Good Will Hunting---like something made for AMC that you can have on in the background and be vaguely comforted and amused. From someone else, this might be a putdown, but I love that kind of movie, and they're basically extinct except for this one guy.
That said, Air kind of lost me early on by going to the hindsight-irony-joke well a little too much. I should give it another try.
Agreed, and doesn't the hand-wringing over superhero movies and more Star Wars fit the bill, too? Maybe not in such an easy all-in-one categorization (i.e. "Here Come the Brands!"), but as a concerning trend that the only way we can tell stories about ourselves and mediate our culture is via special powers or an overextended hero's journey though a different, very mystical galaxy from another time? I *think* we got through these, albeit not unscathed.
This is actually a kinder and more productive way of looking at this trend than I usually do, and you've given me something to think about here.
The past, oh, twenty years, has given us a world where social media amplifies every voice - except, of course, if everything is amplified, nothing is amplified. In terms of our ability to generate content and put our opinions out there, now is maybe the moment in history when it's easiest to do that - and that forces us to contend with how little our opinions actually *matter*. So we can see superhero movies as a means of wish fulfillment - this guy really does get to be the star of the show, like Instagram promised us we would - and also as a means of escapism.
My less-gentle read has long been that people are simply getting stupider and more childish. For me, "What if TAXI DRIVER...but a Batman villain!" was the absolute nadir of people not wanting to eat their vegetables and wanting everything to be superheroes. But maybe it's not about being unable to grapple with real humanity. Maybe it's being so exhausted from the world today that we want movies to be less real.
Woof, that is a spot-on denunciation of Reeves's The Batman, I movie I thought I liked more but once you spat out a line like that... it's hard to go back and not think of it in that way.
But to your point, it made me examine my reply a little more. I wonder if I wasn't being as charitable to Scott's critique - and yours - if I was brushing off the "popular thing right now is being done to death" in movies. There's a damning line of thought that both the superhero and Star Wars movies were aping some of that "auteur" thing, but for mass public consumption, so that it was harder for actual, original films to break through with actual, original visions when heroes in capes or tights had addictions and trauma to play out for four-quadrant audiences, and Star Wars experimented with morally-ambiguous protagonists.
I just expect that each one of these tired cycles burns out - which they do - but eternally hope they do not have the collateral effect of taking swaths of cinema with them. Unfortunately I think that has happened with the concurrent Capes & Wars cycle, but I do think we'll be more fortunate in that regard when the Brand Movie cycle ends.
Oh, I was talking about the JOKER movie with Joaquin Phoenix - is there actually a Batman movie that's even *more* a blatant "here is TAXI DRIVER, except with Batman!" than JOKER? That's...something.
Lol, wow... no, your intent probably fulfills that description for Joker better... I went literal where you used the line "...except *with* Batman!" (added ** emphasis mine) meaning the titular Taxi Driver is in an actual movie with Batman. But I hate Joker unreservedly, so there's no change in my overall opinion. The Batman is by far a better movie than Joker, if only because it aims lower.
I'm trying not to get down because, by September, the only non-IP movies that are my favorites of the year are Asteroid City, How To Blow Up A Pipeline (okay, based on a book), and Past Lives. I haven't seen any other truly excellent movies that aren't IP driven, and that's a BIG step down from last year, where by this time we'd already had Petite Maman, After Yang, Moonfall (you heard me), Nope, Marcel, and Everything Everywhere, all endlessly creative and powerful works by iconoclastic creators.
This year, even my favorites are kind of more subdued, less passionate recommendations. I haven't felt any passion from anything this year like I felt for Babylon, for example, no movie so far this year that I will fight someone over, and while I'm excited that IP owners are getting more daring and flexible with their creators (Barbie and Ninja Turtles are great examples), this is also going to open the floodgates, potentially choking out future, original, creative work.
I'd recommend Passages if it wasn't just shilling for the corporate fat cats who make super tight, wildly patterned, midriff baring shirts for sexually ambiguous European men.
That one did look interesting, and I recognize that this is a me problem, but viewing the trailer, I felt like I saw this movie already in the 90s. I do have a mubi subscription, so I'll have access to it. And who knows. Maybe that subtle advertising will make me want to buy some midriff baring shirts.
The advertising for midriff shirts or flooffy red robes is anything but subtle.
It's possible you've seen versions of this movie before, but this one was executed exquisitely. The details! The acting! The characterizations! And most importantly: this is a movie that trusts you, that doesn't spoon feed you or hand hold you through the plot.
The unending reliance on existing IP and recognized brands to promote progressive values forms a fascinating intellectual dichotomy to me. It reminds me a bit, if you’ll pardon a niche classical music analogy as that’s what I know and love best, of when they play a piece of contemporary music sandwiched between, say, a piece or two by Mozart and a Beethoven symphony, like it’s medicinal. I’ve no doubt that a great artist can manage to make something worthy in this environment, but I very much do doubt that it can happen with any frequency.
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.
And Oppenheimer fits in here somewhere, as a possible direction but also an easily exhaustible genre - the not-quite-biopic/historical perspective of famous (or infamous) people who did a, uh, very bad thing. Or controversial thing, whatever. (I don't want to tell anyone how to feel about Oppenheimer, man or film, just that the film and that kind of person are one more avenue for films to exploit)
OK, but I've got a more pressing issue: Starfield - thumbs up or thumbs down? I just paid $70 (!!) for this thing before reading user reviews. They seem pretty hostile, and then I remembered that Bethesda is not exactly the same group that created Morrowind now. I want to return this thing ASAP if it's going to suck. Anyone dig into yet?
Along those lines: does anyone know a decent blog or substack for game reviews? I had to give up on the review sites I used to use. Too political and terrified of giving a bad review to anything for reasons other than politics. I'd love a decent place to read reviews and talk games.
Scott, really sorry for posting this. Feel free to delete - you won't hurt my feelings or anything.
The Besties podcast is a good mix of entertaining and respectful of time (rarely goes over 50 minutes), but not super smart. Remap Radio (née Waypoint at Vice Media) is very smart and dialed in, feels like actual journalists talking, but incredibly self-indulgent and disrespectful of my time as a listener. Triple Click podcast is somewhere in between, but I got to the point where I couldn't stand listening to them prattle on.
Websites... meeeh? I hear good things about Eurogamer but haven't seen it myself. I'm pretty sure Polygon is 80% paid-for content. Rock Paper Shotgun was great like 10-15 years ago but the paywalled content essentially made the site somewhat useless.
Gaming really needs its early-2000s AVClub website but I think those days have passed. I've been trying to read more academic articles on video gaming but had a hard time finding reliable sources. Too bad Kill Screen magazine didn't make it.
Thanks! I’ll check out these podcasts. I definitely miss the old AVClub. There was a successor/spinoff gaming website, the name escapes me now, which wasn’t bad at first either. But those were the last. I’ve never found a decent place for reviews and discussion after that.
You wouldn’t think this would be difficult.
I haven't seen people really note this but I blame this trend on the Jobs/Facebook movies from a few years back, which hit a sweet spot of making money while also getting critical love.
But REALLY I blame Preston Sturges for 1941's The Great Moment - dude set a TONE.
This is fun. Going one step back from blaming "Jobs" and "The Social Network", I'm going to blame this on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.
For a happy decade, Aaron Sorkin wrote fictional stories where the most important people in the world, who are completely indispensable at their jobs doing the most important things in the world, delivered screwball banter about their superiority and importance and how their work is the most important work in the world and etc. He was great. Everyone was happy. Then he wrote Studio 60, which was this exact story - the only story he knows, with the only characters he knows - except the alleged most important work in the world was a knockoff version of MAD TV with Howard from "The Big Bang Theory" doing his Nicolas Cage impression. This bombed. Sorkin has since made seven movies where he's just tried to find the real-life people most like Josh Lyman, and then bring their stories to the big screen. And while these stories have been more about the people than the brands, there's a reason people remember them as the "Facebook movie" and not the "guy from Facebook movie".
Because his shtick is so appealing, and because two to three of these seven movies have even been really good, people try to rip the formula off. AIR feels like second-rate Sorkin. It's not a coincidence.
I enjoyed BLACKBERRY but I couldn't help but feel that it was a watered-down SOCIAL NETWORK (down to the score) so your argument is pretty compelling
It's vaguely impossible to find now but in 2012 the Russian film Branded went to a similar (fictional) extreme with an ad exec eventually going crazy because he could "see" what brands were attached to people. Eventually every world government agrees to ban advertising. And do not watch the trailer or look at the poster because the film itself is so wildly different that watching it with any expectation will disappoint you. Max Von Sydow's there as well as "Marketing Guru."
2023, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment
The other special thing about Blackberry: it’s Canadian.
There are a million special things about Blackberry. Glenn Howerton's glare. Jay Baruchel's perfect physical performance of extremely smart/very socially awkward. Every musical choice. The way it gets every single late 90s nerd detail exactly right (Wolf 3D, Civ II, love it!).
I view this as somewhat less dire than you do - is this so different than making a movie with shameless product placement? Or making 7 movies (and counting!) about Transformers? The corporate-cinematic synergy has been there for decades. A few movies about products being released in the same year doesn't strike me as a dangerous or alarming trend.
Yeah, I'm with you.
Sports movies are also a mainstay and what's more corporate than professional sports? We all loved Moneyball, even though it was basically identical to what ppl hated about Air: a multi-million dollar corporation using scrappy, outsider methods to become a multi-billion dollar corporation.
FWIW, I really enjoyed Air. It's an interesting story! Sometimes interesting stories happen at corporations, shrug.
Well said!
It's maybe unsurprising that Ben Affleck is the only director I can think of who still makes movies that feel, tonally, like Good Will Hunting---like something made for AMC that you can have on in the background and be vaguely comforted and amused. From someone else, this might be a putdown, but I love that kind of movie, and they're basically extinct except for this one guy.
That said, Air kind of lost me early on by going to the hindsight-irony-joke well a little too much. I should give it another try.
Agreed, and doesn't the hand-wringing over superhero movies and more Star Wars fit the bill, too? Maybe not in such an easy all-in-one categorization (i.e. "Here Come the Brands!"), but as a concerning trend that the only way we can tell stories about ourselves and mediate our culture is via special powers or an overextended hero's journey though a different, very mystical galaxy from another time? I *think* we got through these, albeit not unscathed.
This is actually a kinder and more productive way of looking at this trend than I usually do, and you've given me something to think about here.
The past, oh, twenty years, has given us a world where social media amplifies every voice - except, of course, if everything is amplified, nothing is amplified. In terms of our ability to generate content and put our opinions out there, now is maybe the moment in history when it's easiest to do that - and that forces us to contend with how little our opinions actually *matter*. So we can see superhero movies as a means of wish fulfillment - this guy really does get to be the star of the show, like Instagram promised us we would - and also as a means of escapism.
My less-gentle read has long been that people are simply getting stupider and more childish. For me, "What if TAXI DRIVER...but a Batman villain!" was the absolute nadir of people not wanting to eat their vegetables and wanting everything to be superheroes. But maybe it's not about being unable to grapple with real humanity. Maybe it's being so exhausted from the world today that we want movies to be less real.
Woof, that is a spot-on denunciation of Reeves's The Batman, I movie I thought I liked more but once you spat out a line like that... it's hard to go back and not think of it in that way.
But to your point, it made me examine my reply a little more. I wonder if I wasn't being as charitable to Scott's critique - and yours - if I was brushing off the "popular thing right now is being done to death" in movies. There's a damning line of thought that both the superhero and Star Wars movies were aping some of that "auteur" thing, but for mass public consumption, so that it was harder for actual, original films to break through with actual, original visions when heroes in capes or tights had addictions and trauma to play out for four-quadrant audiences, and Star Wars experimented with morally-ambiguous protagonists.
I just expect that each one of these tired cycles burns out - which they do - but eternally hope they do not have the collateral effect of taking swaths of cinema with them. Unfortunately I think that has happened with the concurrent Capes & Wars cycle, but I do think we'll be more fortunate in that regard when the Brand Movie cycle ends.
Oh, I was talking about the JOKER movie with Joaquin Phoenix - is there actually a Batman movie that's even *more* a blatant "here is TAXI DRIVER, except with Batman!" than JOKER? That's...something.
Lol, wow... no, your intent probably fulfills that description for Joker better... I went literal where you used the line "...except *with* Batman!" (added ** emphasis mine) meaning the titular Taxi Driver is in an actual movie with Batman. But I hate Joker unreservedly, so there's no change in my overall opinion. The Batman is by far a better movie than Joker, if only because it aims lower.
Oh, yeah, no, I'm an old fuddy-duddy - by "with Batman", I just meant "with Batman accoutrements".
But, yes, Joker might be my most hated movie ever.
I'm trying not to get down because, by September, the only non-IP movies that are my favorites of the year are Asteroid City, How To Blow Up A Pipeline (okay, based on a book), and Past Lives. I haven't seen any other truly excellent movies that aren't IP driven, and that's a BIG step down from last year, where by this time we'd already had Petite Maman, After Yang, Moonfall (you heard me), Nope, Marcel, and Everything Everywhere, all endlessly creative and powerful works by iconoclastic creators.
This year, even my favorites are kind of more subdued, less passionate recommendations. I haven't felt any passion from anything this year like I felt for Babylon, for example, no movie so far this year that I will fight someone over, and while I'm excited that IP owners are getting more daring and flexible with their creators (Barbie and Ninja Turtles are great examples), this is also going to open the floodgates, potentially choking out future, original, creative work.
I'd recommend Passages if it wasn't just shilling for the corporate fat cats who make super tight, wildly patterned, midriff baring shirts for sexually ambiguous European men.
That one did look interesting, and I recognize that this is a me problem, but viewing the trailer, I felt like I saw this movie already in the 90s. I do have a mubi subscription, so I'll have access to it. And who knows. Maybe that subtle advertising will make me want to buy some midriff baring shirts.
The advertising for midriff shirts or flooffy red robes is anything but subtle.
It's possible you've seen versions of this movie before, but this one was executed exquisitely. The details! The acting! The characterizations! And most importantly: this is a movie that trusts you, that doesn't spoon feed you or hand hold you through the plot.
Sold! I love it when a movie trusts you to understand it.
I read that Paul Thomas Anderson is attached to the Mattel and Mars Bar Quick Energy Chocobot Hour adaptation.
"I EAT YOUR MARS BAR!"
The unending reliance on existing IP and recognized brands to promote progressive values forms a fascinating intellectual dichotomy to me. It reminds me a bit, if you’ll pardon a niche classical music analogy as that’s what I know and love best, of when they play a piece of contemporary music sandwiched between, say, a piece or two by Mozart and a Beethoven symphony, like it’s medicinal. I’ve no doubt that a great artist can manage to make something worthy in this environment, but I very much do doubt that it can happen with any frequency.