The IP Era’s Venture Capital Philosophy Has Poisoned Movies

Two of them even let you see a person.

But in the IP Era, people are merely a liability. Movies seeking this modern kind of success—as many sequels, spin-offs and merchandise tie-ins as possible—only need humans in front of the camera when they function as an extension of IP. Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum were brought back for the latest Jurassic World cash-grab to excite us as embodied reminders of a better movie. They’re not actors anymore. They’re mascots. 

When you realize that that’s all AAA actors are being cast as, it becomes obvious why the biggest blockbusters have recently boiled down to ensembles standing around reskinned warehouses and parking lots. As Jake Ures writes, “when acting has been reduced to stewarding IP,” you don’t want people getting invested in the stars. Rather, “it’s better for investors if they function as empty vessels for stories much bigger than them, ones that can be endlessly iterated long after they’re out of the picture.”

Ah, endless iteration. It’s like investor dirty talk. And we’re being made more and more comfortable with the technology and techniques enabling it. We were all (rightly) disgusted at the digital necromancy used in Rogue One to Weekend at Bernie’s the corpse of Peter Cushing. There was less hubbub when Carrie Fisher was assembled piecemeal in The Rise of Skywalker, and even less when Ghostbusters: Afterlife conjured up Harold Ramis, possibly because the latter movie doesn’t really exist.

Performers have long feared being themselves turned into IP. Jet Li famously skipped out on The Matrix sequels so his moves wouldn’t be digitized in some Warner Bros. library, to be used to whatever future end by a company that no longer needed his martial artistry. This, by the way, is the plot of Space Jam: A New Legacy, as LeBron James attempts to avoid the same fate…threatened by the in-universe Warner Bros. Really, this idea is so normalized as to be the bad guy’s plan in a kid’s movie. Netflix is trying to own the rights to its actors’ simulated voices “by all technologies and processes now known or hereafter developed, throughout the universe and in perpetuity.” It’s not about creating something, it’s about owning something, forever.

And that’s the success model. Increasingly, it’s the only model. Because now we crave it, beaten into submission by the sheer onslaught of “Remember that?” requels, legacy sequels and reboots released since Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Star Trek and Star Wars: The Force Awakens helped establish the monoculture model of filmmaking. Audiences didn’t do this to pop culture. It was the corporate powers that invested in and encouraged their most ravenous demographic, turning “audiences” into “fandoms.” We’ve had slop shoveled onto our pop culture prison cafeteria trays for decades, and the prison-industrial multiplex expects us to give our compliments to the chef for another meal of empty-calorie Easter eggs.

It would be something if those behind these exhausted series were given artistic freedom to subvert expectations or play with these properties. But another facet in how this trend manifests is in its pandering, simplistic, safe filmmaking, aimed at siphoning the memories and wallets of arrested adults.

You don’t need jokes, or plots, or images. Just referential, cover band filmmaking. Make a movie about visiting all the old stars of another movie. Make a movie about getting sucked back into an old movie’s world. Make a movie where the events of another movie…happen again?! These structures abound, followed by Pavlovian post-credit scenes that, with their Glup Shittos and Blorkos, jangle in front of us like so many Mickey Mouse keychains. Photoreal “live-action” remakes spin their uncanny wheels, creativity cowering in the face of raw computational power. There are few clearer examples of how a Silicon Valley mindset has infected how we look at movies than Disney adults equating new developments in a technocapitalist arms race with artistry. People didn’t always cape for tech demos.

A few savvy operators continue trying to game the IP Era, backdooring in personal and competent filmmaking that just happens to be dressed in marketable spandex or flowing Jedi robes. Peter Pan & Wendy is perhaps the most recent of these to see an artist try something, a reminder that our best filmmakers are being snapped up by studios to make this dreck just so they can feed their families. 

There was a time a filmmaker like David Lowery could succeed in coming out on top of his deal with the IP devil: Pete’s Dragon is a warm little miracle, a true-blue Lowery film that happens to be using a familiar property to secure the bag. But Pan makes it clear that even the smoothest stepper in the “one for them, one for me” dance is finding it harder and harder to get to that second song—and that their moves in general are increasingly hampered by heavier and heavier brand baggage.

And it’s not just award-winning indie filmmakers, gobbled up by the machine, who are struggling with this increasingly difficult task. If you’re on a shoestring budget and want to—need to, really—associate your film with something familiar to audiences? Well, you could capitalize on pseudo-franchises like Amityville, which remain accessible because of a complicated inability to be copyrighted. You could also start throwing the grist of public domain into your terrible mill, as long as Disney doesn’t lobby to change the law (again). Just make sure you get your hands on a name that people know, even if it’s free, and remember to orient it towards nostalgic adults.

With the MCU and its pretenders on one end of the financial spectrum, The Banana Splits Movie and Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey are perfect case studies for the opposite side. The budgets might be different, but the business model is the same: Dig up characters half-remembered from childhood while reminding us that, now, it’s definitely for adults. Nothing says “brilliant and edgy” like turning children’s characters into slasher villains.

These projects, the cinematic equivalent of those t-shirts where the Looney Tunes have Glocks, feel extra pathetic because it’s clear how desperate the IP Era has made everyone involved—and how clearly it rewards those that play the game. Blood and Honey made bank, encouraging the production of an R-rated series positioning Christopher Robin as “a disillusioned New Yorker navigating his quarter-life crisis with the help of the weird talking animals who live beyond a drug-induced portal outside his derelict apartment complex, the Hundred Acres.” Yeesh. I wonder if Christopher Robin is disillusioned because he once thought that there was a place in this blighted world for creative thought.

But of course filmmakers are going there, marketing whatever half-subversive take they can to the Comic-Con crowd that’s become the mainstream audience. They’re not snickering. They’re surviving. Because before the bubble finally bursts—when younger generations realize that the only media marketed at them concerns characters they have no relationship with—things will get worse. This predictable template, its undiscerning audience and those still trying to scrape by in the industry will be exploited as deeply as possible, on the off chance that injecting the GDP of Sierra Leone into new Lord of the Rings movies will work this time.

Maybe it will work. But when you listen to Neuner, the guy whose business got steamrolled by WeWork before it WeCrashed, you remember that it doesn’t really matter either way. “When you get involved in the startup world,” he says, “you meet all these amazing entrepreneurs with fantastic ideas, and, over time, you watch them get pushed by V.C.s to take too much money, and make bad choices, and grow as fast as possible. And then they blow up. And, eventually, you start to realize: no matter what happens, the V.C.s still end up rich.” The robber barons continue their suicide run, even if it’s only originality paying the fatal price. The IP Era will drag on as long as this venture capital philosophy poisons Hollywood. Keeping your money far away from their franchises is the only antidote.

Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.

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