Reboots, Reimaginings, Live Action Adaptations & Sequels

Back in the 80s, Film Twitter (notwithstanding Twitter's lack of existence) used to bemoan the infantilisation of movies. After all, the 70s had given us the first two Godfather movies, Apocalypse Now and The Conversation and those were just the work of one director. The 80s gave us, well, Mac & Me. I'm being facetious, of course - the 80s also has some absolutely terrific cinema. In the 90s however, the then equivalent of Film Twitter started to bemoan the preponderance of TV adaptations, some of which have probably sunk back into the ether; The Fugitive, The Flintstones, Maverick, Mission: Impossible & The Brady Bunch Movie are just a few off the top of my head.

Since then, everyone's noticed that reboots and sequels seem to be making up an increasing proportion of new movies released every year. Last year saw the introduction of the third iteration of Spider-Man in less than a decade. While Indiana Jones and Die Hard have been sequelised to the point that new instalments are being dreaded rather than anticipated. Some series are going strong: James Bond - I know, I would say that; Mission: Impossible - although its financial success is unarguable, I've personally found the last couple of movies pretty creatively bereft. Others seem to keep going until audience fatigue kicks in (yup, Pirates of the Caribbean, I'm looking at you). And this trend has been crossed with the rise of the comic book movie - these may tail off at some point, but there seems to be no sign of it happening soon.

What studios tend to refer to as new IP (intellectual property - the foundation for a movie, which used to be a script, a novel, a memoir, but can now be a game, a previous movie or even a theme park ride) has become rarer and rarer. Studios have also shown an increased preference for a movie slate (the year's offerings) consisting of a smaller number of would-be blockbusters than the wider, more varied blend of old, leading to many of the studios actually shutting down their specialist/ semi-independent divisions. Meanwhile, huge increases in global audiences and screen counts mean that China is expected to become the largest single movie market in the world at some point in the next three years and the 'rest of the world' is regarded as even more important than the once-dominant US market.

This has led to simpler/ more simplistic movies than we used to see, with less dialogue (e.g. action movies), as these can then play internationally much more easily than films used to. And although in some instances casting has become more diverse (see how the Fast & Furious films have developed over time) other movies have been accused of cultural appropriation (see Ghost in the Shell), whitewashing (er, Ghost in the Shell again) and pandering (see Looper among others).

What does this mean for what we're seeing now and going to be seeing? If you'd asked anyone fifteen years ago what the word 'reboot' meant in a cinematic context or indeed what the words 'sidequel' or 'reimagining' meant at all, you'd have been met with a blank face. If you'd asked anyone about making a live action adaptation of Beauty & The Beast or The Lion King, you would have been told that there's nothing wrong with the animated originals (for the record: there isn't).

If these trends proliferate and we keep rewarding these movies with our money, this situation will just carry on. The creativity we'll see in movies will be restricted to how they're marketed to us, promising us that a reimagining isn't the same as a reboot, that this time will be different and that this time the movie really will satisfy.

A lot of my needs for narrative cinema are already being satisfied by great novels and the Golden Age of Television. And in a year where US summer box office takings are down for the first time in a long time, it seems I'm not the only one. Martin Scorsese's next movie is being funded by and will premiere on Netflix. Francis Ford Coppola has talked about how cinema as a form appears to have migrated to other forms. The only way to get the movies you want is to vote at the box office and/ or on your television. After all, there's no fate but what we make. Choose wisely!

Why I Love: Film Posters

I recently realised - the reason for which will be the subject of a separate post - that the highest form of non-narrative art as far as I'm concerned, is a movie poster. Sure, I've been to various galleries and seen and enjoyed various sculptures and paintings. But movie posters? That hits my spot. And in the same way that my growing up slightly before the web meant that my understanding of media predates the internet revolution a little (something I'm very grateful for), I'm also glad that I grew up with painted movie posters, before the prevalence of photo montages and Photoshop overtook everything else. The reason for this is that there's just something about painted posters that provides a sense of heightened reality or fantasy that a touched up set of photos just can't quite compete with (don't even get me started on so-called motion posters) - although having said that, a side order of childhood nostalgia probably has a part to play as well.

Everyone knows Drew Struzan's fantastic work for the Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Back to the Future movies (among many, many others!) which still looks as great as it did on the movies' original releases, but there are also numerous other well known poster artists who've delivered iconic work. My own Bond fandom means that Bond posters are, of course, my absolute favourites and I recently found that a huge chunk of my favourite posters were all designed by the same artist: Brian Bysouth.

Bysouth plays an interesting role in Bond history, as apart from images like the poster above, he was also involved in the first photo montage the Bond series ever used (the UK poster for Licence to Kill - a poster I like a lot, although sadly, he doesn't) while his last contribution to the series was the main UK poster for The World is Not Enough, which is probably one of the better efforts from that particular period. Bond posters have a history of committing to giving the audience a rollicking ride with action & excitement coming out of your ears and despite differences in individual movies and posters, for the most part, I'd argue both that that's what you get and that the side order of unnaturally forced perspective is just a bonus.

Nowadays, the proliferation of media means that we all have a strong sense of whether or not we're interested in seeing a movie long before we see the poster. All the poster tends to do is confirm what we're thinking, increase a movie's awareness with an arresting image or - very rarely - make us think again (sometimes in favour, sometimes against?!). But back in the olden/ golden days, posters were sometimes one of the few ways we could find out about a movie and what might possibly be in store.

I have a strong preference for narrative art (movies, novels, music) over other forms. And it only recently occurred to me that many movies never quite deliver against what the poster suggests. So despite these issues, why do I love static movie posters so much? Ultimately, any great poster is a promise. And even if the film subsequently lets its audience down, who doesn't enjoy the excitement of the possibilities?

mother!

The past few years at the cinema haven't been overly kind to me. Years where I regularly went to see somewhere between 100 and 150 films a year at the cinema seem to be quite a long time ago. Some of that is undoubtedly down to how I've changed with age; I'm not as willing as I used to be to risk a couple of hours of my time and/ or £10 just on the possibility that I might like something that has little or no obvious appeal to me (I say this as someone who walked out half an hour into a screening of 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' when I realised that there really was nothing of interest to someone on their own aged more than 10). But I'm pretty sure the movie industry has changed quite a lot over the last few years too. Truly independent movies appear to have largely disappeared from the cinema circuit and we're now reliant on services like Netflix for anything remotely non-mainstream, which may indeed be (as Christopher Nolan has suggested) the canary in the coalmine predicting the death of the cinema experience.

I was fairly indifferent to 'mother!' when I saw it; there were a lot of things I liked, but equally I found much of the experience beyond the limits of my interests. Even before I'd read interviews with the director, Darren Aronofsky, it was pretty obvious that the movie was designed to be loved or hated and my indifference wasn't meant as some kind of bloody-minded superiority. Nevertheless, I'm pleased that the studio behind the movie has leant into the divisiveness that's met it's release, even if I am somewhat suspicious of their motives (a studio publicly supporting a film with major stars and an important director? Clearly not the latest Uwe Boll release). Having said that, the thing I was most pleased about when I went to see it was, as per Paramount's publicity, that the movie exists at all. I'm just as bored by-the-numbers wannabe blockbusters as anyone else. Everyone's tastes change over the years and mine are no exception. Nowadays I have less interest in spectacle and more in characterisation and strong narratives than I used to and more and more I'm finding that that itch is getting scratched on my TV much more than on my still weekly cinema trips. So seeing movies with ambition and ideas in their heads at the cinema is still a bit of a thrill. Even if I'm not mad about the actual movie itself.