Flasz On Film

If you presented me with a list of films to be released across the summer of 2023 and asked me to circle the ones I think would do the best business at the box office, I don’t think I’d correctly predict the outcome we are witnessing today. I would honestly expect Elemental and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (maybe with Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny somewhere in the mix) to rule the roost, but instead the world has succumbed to the “Barbenheimer phenomenon.” As a matter of fact, as of this moment, Barbie is well on track to take at least a billion dollars and Oppenheimer is likely going to end up as one of the most financially successful biopics of all time, behind Bohemian Rhapsody and ahead of Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper.  

It will take a while to parse what’s currently unfolding, especially if we’d like to factor in the influence of calculated PR, organic online hype and a variety of outside influences, but at least from the point of view of here and now, it is perhaps easy to surmise that the world might be ready to move on from polymer chain sequelization as the default risk-averse strategy for box office profit generation and embrace… originality. But at this point it is probably a good idea to interrogate such a simple and fundamental concept as originality and understand what it even means in the current cultural context.  

Even as far back as in the early days of Hollywood, studio producers were already cognizant of the simple fact that familiarity translates into box office receipts because viewers on average were more likely to purchase a ticket to see something they had at least a vague understanding of, rather than go into something completely novel. This is perhaps why many successful movies from that era would have been adapted from popular or classic novels and stage plays. Such was the barrier to entry for narrative originality that, for instance, after the Universal Monsters series got off the ground with Dracula and Frankenstein, the initial guidance ahead of producing The Mummy was to find a literary source material from which this otherwise original story inspired by the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun could be adapted. The writer couldn’t find anything to use as a direct source material and ended up appropriating bits of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Ring of Thoth, thus producing an original product. Originality was a risky measure of last resort. 

Hence in the most basic form, to say something is original it is to suggest the storyteller invented a narrative and characters from scratch – even if aided or inspired by other stories or cultural touchstones – instead of adapting pre-existing material. So, how is Barbie original? If you looked at it with a critical eye and applied this rudimentary definition, you’d see that it is not in fact original at all. It is original as much as Michael Bay’s Transformers was original in 2007; it’s an adaptation of already existing intellectual property. However, leaving it there would be at the very least unfair because while Gerwig’s movie does rely on brand familiarity to lure the audience into the cinema, its storytelling, visual language and thematic messaging add up to a rather fresh experience.  

Equally, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is not an original piece of work either. It’s a prestige biopic adapted from a book, so at least as far as narrative ideation is concerned, it is as far from original as you can imagine. Yet again, to leave it there would be to seriously undermine the movie, as it ambitiously attempts to exercise structural novelty in an effort to put some makeup on a tried-and-true genre usually executed without pump or panache.  

Consequently, neither Oppenheimer nor Barbie satisfies the fundamental definition of canonical originality. Fresh is what they are. Not original. Yet, the world at large has not only fallen in love with these movies (in one case, understandably so; in other, because of cultish loyalty to Christopher Nolan, at least in my opinion) but effectively decided that what Hollywood needs is more original movies… like those two dubiously original ones. So, are they original or not?  

I suppose this is a sad illustration of the state of movie entertainment because a brand-tethered comedy and a prestige biopic told backwards are now champions of cinematic novelty, simply because they are not sequels, prequels, legacy sequels or remakes of already existing movies. It only goes to show that a sufficiently large open-air paddock is essentially indistinguishable from freedom in the eyes of a caged animal. We have been pummelled over our heads with sequels and nostalgia festivals for so long that going to see a biopic or a superficially Mattel-branded comedy musical counts as experiencing something original. In fact, at this point, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, another brand-tethered piece that’s not necessarily original but sufficiently fresh, stands as the most financially successful movie at the global 2023 box office, flanked on all sides by Marvel movies, Fast X, John Wick: Chapter 4 and other sequels or remakes… and Barbie. Which is the other “original” movie.  

So, it turns out we don’t necessary require our movies to be original. We are just tired of looking at sequels, because branded products are still fine, and they can still exercise genre and narrative freshness with ease. The state of play is so dire that even a prestige biopic, which would normally be pushed out around Christmas hoping to spin up some awards appeal, is enough to whip up a storm.  

However, again I would be disingenuous if I failed to acknowledge the elephant in the room – the Barbenheimer effect of memetic hype coming to reinvigorate the box office. What originated as a bona fide quarrel at the highest echelons of film production where Christopher Nolan lobbied unsuccessfully to have the box office to himself for a few weeks, the audiences – and later PR departments at WB and Universal, I am sure of it – stepped in and collectively decided to turn this unconventional piece of counterprogramming into a let’s-go-to-the-movies cultural event. Why not? Why not celebrate that for once we got a weekend without another well-established franchise adding an umpteenth instalment to its length? Why not make it a double bill? After all, it was a high time we remembered that going to the movies should be fun and if we must go out of our way to make it fun, so be it.  

And what I think we were all quietly keeping our fingers crossed for was for Hollywood moguls to take note and draw conclusions. The world of moviegoers all dressed in pink tried to send Hollywood a message that we are sick and tired of keeping track of a myriad of shared universes, remembering what happened to Ethan Hunt’s friends six years ago, having our nostalgia glands tickled against our will by way of forcing the aging heroes of our childhood to come out of retirement for one last dance, and trying to stay on top of who’s part of the Toretto family. We are done. That’s the message. The world is ready for the history to rhyme and to replace the franchise-laden land of risk-averse cinema beholden to Wall Street investors with a breath of fresh air coming from filmmakers telling not-necessarily-original-but-fresh stories. The world is primed for New Hollywood Mark 2. 

No such luck, though. It turns out you can’t teach an old dog new tricks because on the back of the stunning success of Barbie at the box office, Mattel have immediately greenlit a slew of follow-up products based on their other toys. So, get ready for Lena Dunham’s Polly Pocket because it’s coming. Whether you like it or not. Also, you can be sure that on the back of Christopher Nolan’s successful deployment of Oppenheimer, the biopic presence at the box office will be bolstered by an incoming wave of structurally audacious stories about persons of historical relevance, all dressed in spectacle and temporal ambiguity.  

We are well and truly doomed. And that’s because whatever we do as audiences and regardless of the feedback we send upstairs, what matters to the powers that be is a risk-averse promise of short-term growth, not audacious freshness, let alone wholesale originality. This is what we get for welding the entertainment industry to the back of the financial one. Originality and boldness rarely win money on the stock market. Making boring yet safe decisions does, on the other hand. So even presented with unquestionable evidence that viewers are prepared to embrace anything but sequels, requels and premakes, the answer is always going to be more of the same.