The Massacre of Summer '16: Why Ghostbusters Did Everything Wrong, or Five OTHER Hollywood Words You Will (Hopefully) Never Hear Again in 2017

I've kept a strict policy that I try not to talk about current movies on the blog unless absolutely necessary--Or at least unless there's some trend that we can all stand back and take a good long clinical observation upon.  I'm not just an Activist Without a Cause.

There are plenty of fan-blogs to wage schoolyard dodgeball contests over the current movies in theaters--some months before they open--and if I had simply put out a post the week the Ben-Hur remake opened in theaters saying "Well, what did you THINK was going to happen?--That we'd all suddenly realize Charlton Heston had been doing it wrong all these years, and feel sorry that he only had to race a real chariot instead of a CGI one?", it would just get lost in the rabble of other arguments.  That's how the slope always turns slippery.

And as our Labor Day holiday traditionally brings Endless Summer to a close, we can survey the wreckage (and watch Finding Dory come back to theaters, the same way that Finding Nemo survived the Massacre of '03 because we always come back to a Pixar movie when in doubt), and see what lessons can be learned.  Oddly enough, one key player seems to run throughout...

The Dictionary of Hollywood Summer 2016:

• Reboot (n.): 1) A sequel that can enjoy the title-recognition benefit of being a "sequel" without actually having to follow any previous-film canon or bring old or stubbornly-avoiding actors back (except in vanity cameos), namely by starting the story over from scratch with whatever they can think of.  

2) A remake that can enjoy the title-recognition benefit of being a "remake" without actually having to follow any necessary accuracy to the original film, so long as they believe they look cool and homage some tribute to the one or two scenes of the movie they selectively fan-remember, and just plain make up the rest.  

3) A tribute to the original series that now comes up with a plot excuse--usually unreliable-narrator or time-travel paradox--why their new version is now "correct", and the better, more universally loved and established one that fans remember no longer exists, so there, now you don't have anything to complain about, nyeahh.  (See:  Star Trek, Terminator:Genisys, Alice in Wonderland)

The key definition is that a "remake" is its own entity, while a "reboot" believes that now that it's started things over, more is on the way.

It was the second-most heard complaint from audiences this summer (first was "Why so many superhero movies?", when they were usually just complaining about the bad ones from Fox and Warner):  "Why so many remakes and sequels?  Are the studios running out of ideas?"  The answer--No.  Ideas they got.  CONFIDENCE, they ain't.

It would take an entire additional column to retrace the evolution of how it happened, but studios today are literally terrified of risking money on a movie the audience doesn't already know walking in.  We recognize a sequel, we recognize a character from a previous movie, we recognize a pop-culture TV or book series, or we recognize the reboot/remake of a movie we associate with those Glorious 80's or early 90's when everyone still went to the theater...So whew, we already know what the movie's about.  No need to work too hard on the trailer or poster to do the selling, just let audience expectation do the trick.

What Ghostbusters Did Wrong:  Two things, actually--First, the reason movies were "better in the 80's", and why we had all that darn "nostalgia" in the first place, was because it was the days of optioning screenwriter concepts, which means writers could walk in with an idea nobody had heard of before.  And audiences could get movies they hadn't seen before.  When writers got a little too happy about their own marketability, and a name-screenwriter bidding-bubble erupted to try and break salary records in '88-'91, studios decided to drop one added expense that was making already expensive projects even riskier, and protect their investments on icons that sold themselves.  And, not coincidentally, wrote themselves.

Second, a sequel transforms into a "reboot" after it just can't get made for ten or fifteen years, due to abandoned scripts, stubborn/aging actors, or misfired sequel concepts, until the property changes producers and they decide to just flush the works and start over again.  In a nutshell, that's exactly what happened to Dan Aykroyd when he spent twenty years trying to get Ghostbusters 3 off the ground, with or without Bill Murray's stubborn refusal to be in it.  When Men in Black 3 showed that 3D could revive nostalgic stalled triquels from the 90's, Sony thought they could take over and give their problem child one more go, even after Aykroyd's options lapsed.  Which leads to...

• Marvel-Style (adj.) - Describing the act of taking any two or three pop-cultural fan properties a studio may happen to own, creating a separate open-ended movie to introduce each of them, and creating an additional movie where they happen to meet.  And since these might each take at least two years to film, creating additional solo "spinoff" movies about the supporting characters in between, to fill in the space.

It's no secret why every studio wanted to do what Marvel Studios was doing--Their movies were following in the spirit of their print comics, in which we didn't so much grab issues off shelves to read an actual A->B story, as to follow the characters regularly in what serial adventure was happening to them this week, and knew what they were doing if they'd show up in some other hero's story.  Most of them lived in NYC, after all, and if Spiderman needed some help from Tony Stark or Daredevil, they might be just around the corner.

And that turned out to be the problem:  Marvel had already been doing it in said print comics for FIFTY YEARS.  They knew what they were doing.  They also created only one major universe for their characters to live in, so it would make sense that they would run into each other at some point...It's a small Marvel Universe after all.

Universal got a little overconfident because they had also been doing it seventy years earlier, when Frankenstein battled the Wolf Man, or when Bela Lugosi's Dracula wanted to put Lou Costello's brain in the Monster.  And because Toho told us fifty years earlier that Godzilla lived on Monster Island with Mothra, Rodan, and Minilla, which gave Warner a bit of confidence when they rebooted their new monsters. 

And soon, like any ten-yo. pushing two of his plastic dinosaurs together and going "rawrr!", studios soon wondered how any two random corporate-icon properties they owned could live in the same universe, and promote each other over the course of some larger united seven or eight-film arc.  If Universal says that Dr. Jekyll met special-forces soldier Tom Cruise, and they both fought the Mummy's Bride, well, who's to say it COULDN'T happen?

What Ghostbusters Did Wrong:  The next movies (assuming we ever got them) in what was now a, quote, "franchise" would tell us how the 'Busters could be called upon to help the survivors of the upcoming Jumanji reboot, stop all those monsters coming out of the Goosebumps books, and maybe even team up with the new Men in Black...It's a Sony World!  

Sony, if the Ghostbusters lived in R.L. Stine's world, why the heck didn't he just call them in the first place?  Oh wait, I remember--Because the linear sequence of movies hadn't been established yet.  It wouldn't be until 2018 or '19 that we would discover the film-by-film-by-film explanation of how they all met each other.  Have to take these things in stages.

• Haters (n., pl) - Fans whose complaints, valid or invalid, can be instantly and publicly discredited outright by studio publicity if they don't happen to live up to the "Popular fan outreach" the producers had imagined for themselves on the marketing strength of the property--Since such people who would complain about a film before seeing it, just on the basis of a bad trailer or just plain danged crazy on-paper description, were clearly doing so out of ulterior motive to serve some fan-faction or rival-studio plot, or just being nasty like Those Kids on the Wild, Wild Internet will always do.  Haters Gonna Hate, and obviously live in trash cans on Sesame Street.  (Heh-heh.)

[See related definition on "Disney Conspiracy", the idea purported by disgruntled Batman and Harley Quinn fans that critics were clearly being "bribed" to like fun, fast-moving Marvel and Star Wars films, and warn people away from dank, dreary, overwrought Warner/DC films.  Apparently, under this theory, Disney spends all its "bribe" money trying to boost Marvel films to crush all pretenders to the throne, and thus had no money left to aid "The BFG" or "Pete's Dragon", which could have used it.]

What Ghostbusters Did Wrong:  Sony noticed the loyalty with which an angry fanbase tried to rally to the support of Batman v. Superman, and hoped that core 80's-nostalgic 'Busters fans would shout down any "meanies" who said that Bill Murray was funnier thirty years ago than any female comics, let alone Melissa McCarthy, could be today.  And soon enlisted all of the cast and director's pals to go on the quotable Internet to explain why the trailer's record-setting 'Net-hate on YouTube was just the work of "stubborn cellar-dweller fanboys", "misogynist women-haters", and "racists" who didn't happen to like Leslie Jones. 

Okay, here's the thing:  Just because 14-yo. fans get a pubescent thrill out of waging Internet fan flame-wars, out of raging wishful-thinking that a movie they were hyped to see was "good" when it wasn't, doesn't mean that 54-yo. Hollywood producers and directors can do it with their own movies as well...Join the 14-yo.'s on the Internet, and the world will think you're one of the 14-yo's., too.  And they may not be far off.  A grown studio exec should be concentrating more on the grownup ticket-sale bottom line of "Do not pick Internet troll-wars with your paying customers BEFORE they buy a ticket."

• Out of Touch (adj.) - The wishfully-politicized view that if critics don't happen to like the same movie you do, well, it's only proof that they're from an older generation that doesn't understand current trends, follows outdated ideas and lives in an OUTDATED PROFESSION!  

And in 2016, Donald Trump was not the only one attracting loud crowds of angry, paranoid persecution-complexed fanatics who believed change could happen by all gathering in the same room to chant about how we should fix things by rounding up all the Bad People, sending them out of the country, and putting them all behind a big Wall where they would never have to bother us again.  The Gotham City fans who didn't want to hear that Batman v. Superman was getting low marks weren't exactly in an openly discursive mood either.  And like the Trump supporters who wanted their Wall, DC Comics fans wanted their followup Justice League and Wonder Woman movies, and would unite as an "army" to overcome whatever social obstacles stood in their way to get them...Get that guy out of the room!--No, seriously, we love our critics, they're wonderful people, but don't we wanna get rid of the old snooty ones who love those boring Sundance movies, and those loser wannabe-bloggers on the Internet?

After Suicide Squad was also slaughtered in the press, fan-petitions arose saying we should get rid of RottenTomatoes.com just for the majority of their critics giving a low score to Warner's DC Comics movies--And then tried to make the argument sound Important and Abstract (it's not just that bad-people hated Batman, you know!) by asking whether movie critics still had a role in the industry, or were just carrying on some "elitist" cultural relic of the 40's and 50's.  Can't we make up our OWN minds?

Well, true.  In our democratic society, there are many things you have the freedom to do. There is no law that stops you from smashing your face into a brick wall as many times as you like, and there is no policeman to tell you when it would be smarter to stop for your own good.  And if anyone does, our First Amendment does not compel you to listen.

However, the late Gene Siskel (or maybe it was Roger Ebert quoting him) summed it up quotably:  "The critic does not simply say he 'hated' the movie.  He asks 'Why wasn't it better?'"

And when we deal with movies on the grand studio-ambition scale as we got this summer, um, yeah.  Why weren't they?  Over the three years of time to work on them, didn't someone take the time and trouble to gauge audience reaction, and say that less money could be spent here and more trouble could be taken there?  Or did they just think the title icon would sell it?  For a business that claims to work so hard, the worst thing it can appear to do is be lazy.  Please don't shoot the piano player, he's only speaking the ugly Truth.

What Ghostbusters Did Wrong:  The "rallying cry" for why a remake needed to be made was that the Haters were clearly being motivated by angry personal misogyny, and that the movie needed to exist as a role model to our daughters, who might want to strap on a proton pack of their own someday--Don't listen to an isolated chauvinist voice of the Patriarchy, trying to preserve the status quo of a clearly glass-ceilinged industry!  Women can be funny, get over it!...You're wrong if you don't agree!

• China (proper noun) - A country in Asia whose moviegoers have an abundant preference to see movies with amazing big-budget CGI effects, especially if the stories take place in fantasy, sci-fi or historical settings that don't reflect modern-day international issues or Western cultural references, and if they contain plenty of action scenes that don't need to be explained with lines of English dialogue that need to be dubbed and translated...And as such, can be counted upon to boost the business for bad overblown blockbuster epics that didn't do well on their home turf.

At least, that was the case with the movie that gave us one of summer '16's other major dictionary buzzwords:  Warcraft.  Apart from the above-stated reasons, it's hard to say why they liked it so darn much without going into snooty jokes about the moviegoing naivety of countries that can't afford as good quality CGI as Hollywood, or without making similarly ethnicist jokes about why the French liked Jerry Lewis or the Australians liked Yahoo Serious.  The studios are too blinded by numbers to consider that There Is No Accounting For International Taste.

In Warcraft's case, it may have just been the element of surprise given how badly it had performed at home, but also just timing--China, usually a little tight on its Internet, was only recently adopting Western computer games, and World of Warcraft was just becoming a big trend at the time.  Unlike the US, where most audiences had forgotten the 90's CD-Rom game the property was based on, and didn't want to see a game their parents played, just because it had CGI-enhanced armies of Orcs.  

The studios grabbed the wrong end of the stick and started beating the industry with it:  Even though the state's tight hold on theaters meant that capitalist studios would only get a small percentage from theaters (unlike the 50% or more they enjoy from US chains), they now believed that those faithful Transformers-loving Chinese would always come to the rescue of the entire blockbuster industry, and show those naysayers at home a thing or three.

What Ghostbusters Did Wrong:  The proud, progressive, gender-empowered producers, undaunted by the disastrous reaction they'd gotten at home, hoped that SFX-loving Chinese moviegoers would boost the box-office up to a cool international billion, and THEN who'd be laughing last?  

Unfortunately, someone forgot that China is a state Communist country.  They don't like the Masses being persuaded to believe in anything as unscientific as superstition, particularly if it involves ghosts who could be your ancestors.  The Chinese government banned the movie from theaters, which meant...so sorry--No billion.

And that didn't turn out to be the only victim of political repression, when the state also silenced Warner/DC's Suicide Squad for depicting psychotic criminals as heroes, or Ben-Hur for promoting a religious Christian message.  Some hardliners even questioned the "corrupting Western influence" of Disney's Zootopia unscientifically teaching young children that foxes and rabbits can ultimately get along, never mind the dangerous metaphor that smart, ambitious rabbits on the job in the city can upset the social hierarchy and outwit their ruling natural predators.

Here is the first lesson in why a different country is a Different country, and can not be counted upon to do what US audiences do--And why a studio can't necessarily run crying to the International market every time one's own movie does badly at home, like the 4-yo. who runs to hope Grandma will say yes even when Mommy says no.

So, what have we learned, after all the rubble has been cleared, and all the fallout has settled?  (Besides helpfully knowing who to blame, that is.)

That when we throw X-Men, Alice, the Ninja Turtles, Jason Bourne, Star Trek, Independence Day, etc., into the mix, perhaps that a lot of big-budget central corporate-tentpole movies this summer were made AT the audience, rather than FOR them.  Studios embarked on long-range marketing strategies that would have them smugly and comfortably set for the next three years with pre-greenlit tentpole "franchise" movies, tore their hair in bafflement when it didn't happen, and threw tantrums at the paying moviegoers who weren't letting them do it.  And then tried to find excuses why what US moviegoers thought "didn't matter" anyway, since the boardroom-franchise money would all eventually come from somewhere, and numbers wouldn't lie.

The problem happened when the money didn't come in.  Because someone forgot where that money came from, and burned their bridges to getting it.

If we learn a lesson from 2016--and that's still a big "if"--it's that if you make a movie without an audience in mind, that's exactly what you'll get:  A movie without an audience.

The Elf on the $800 Shelf

First off, let's disclaimer a few things clear, ahead of all possible discussion:  

I'm not a raging dyed-in-the-wool Peter Jackson "Lord of the Rings"-series fanboy, but I don't in the least bit hold it against those who are.  I agreed with the AFI 100 including '01's Fellowship of the Ring on their revised list of Greatest American Movies, and I laughed long and loud in the overconfident faces of those whose '04 Oscar-pool bets I collected upon, when they smugly believed the Academy would never pick Return of the King over a depressing Sean Penn movie because "fantasy wasn't good enough" for Best Picture--There hasn't been a Better Picture winning the award since.

The Hobbit Trilogy, OTOH....oh, good lord.  Do NOT get me started, either as Tolkien reader or film fan.  No, for the sake of the blog, just don't.  We began to suspect a lot of personal issues Peter Jackson may have had that we never wanted to know about, and the George Lucas prequel-trilogy comparisons, all of them deserved, flew fairly hot and heavy.  (Let's just leave it at saying that An Unexpected Journey was an amazing book adaptation for about half an hour, until Bilbo Baggins left his house, the Seventh Doctor Who showed up with bird-poop on his head, and then the entire three-year trilogy promptly shifted gears and slammed down the accelerator pedal with burning rubber tires on a highway to Hell.)

The big controversy among core Jackson-Tolkien fans at the moment concerns a Warner Home Video Ultimate "Middle Earth Collectors' Set" Blu-ray disk collection, as pictured at the top of the page, that joins the complete existing 4-disk (each movie) sets of the LOTR and Hobbit Trilogies into one entire collection, street date Oct. 4.

Well, that's hardly surprising:  There's usually a complete Batman or Harry Potter set every year by the clock around fall/Christmas shopping time, for those folks who haven't bought it yet, or with that one must-have collector-packaging concept.  The Warner "Holy Trinity", of the last remaining three core studio house-franchises they believe they can repackage every year for mass-retail--Batman/Dark Knight, Harry Potter and Peter Jackson's Tolkien--has already been addressed on this blog.  (It used to be four Warner house-franchise properties, but bad update series have now traumatized WHV into the unshakable belief that "nobody cares" about the Looney Tunes characters, unless they can repackage Space Jam again.)

In a promo-video unboxing on YouTube, Warner even hired Dominic ("Merry") Monaghan to show off the rich bounty of the Middle Earth set, for those who wanted the details:

The price?  $799 + tax.  But if you pre-order the set early on Amazon, you can get it with 25%-off discount for $599.

Now, I'll confess a secret passion for Digibooks--The premium collector packaging we USED to get whenever Warner, Fox or Universal released classic films like Unforgiven or The Right Stuff, that packaged the Blu-ray disks inside small hardbound photo/essay books, and the disk case bound into the inside back cover.  But then, I remember the days when you could buy collectible souvenir theater programs to E.T. and Star Wars at the popcorn counter, and to think of a collection of hardbound movie programs that now had the real actual movies included was beyond our wildest dreams back then.  I'd even given up the digital copies on Disney's animated classics, just to get those hardbound Target store-exclusives of Aladdin and Peter Pan with the storybooks attached.  Me, I always dreamed of a movie shelf as one of those Edwardian manor libraries, that needed an entire room for books from floor to ceiling, and movies packaged as leather-bound volumes hits my fantasy sweet-spot.

At a clinically-sane price, I might have considered Warner's deal...If it contained the 3D Hobbits.  And if, for that matter, they'd just forgotten about the Hobbit Trilogy to begin with, put it out of our misery, and simply gave us those shelf and bindings with the Original Trilogy.

There's more to this issue than just the price...Well, okay, there IS the price.  It's always been an issue.  Let's just feed that big elephant in the room its peanut, and move it over to the corner where it won't trumpet.  The Digital Bits, which has also been following the story, did a humorous breakdown of whether the set was any bargain vs. buying a la carte.  (If you can go without the bric-a-brac and don't care which cut you watch, Warner does have just the Theatrical disks for a more sensible $60.)
The point of creating the set, and why fans had been looking forward to it for literally years throughout the Hobbit Trilogy's theatrical run, was that Peter Jackson had been hoping to extend the bonus material as he had on the first LOTR DVD set in the early 00's. Hours of bonus material had been assembled, intending 2-hour documentaries on the making of each movie, as an arc of production material to actually unite the complete six-movie canon.
Tolkien fan site TheOneRing.net has followed the story particularly closely, and offers more detail on the Peter Jackson Set That Could Have Been.  And, more to the point, why it Wasn't:
TheOneRing.net 8/22/16
Basically, by the time WHV was finished with it, the Ultimate set was hardly even Ultimate, or even Penultimate.  It was simply a repackaging of the existing theatrical-cut editions of the six movies, with new artwork, and movie-themed collectible casings.  It became, as Blu fans and "Ringers" dubbed it, "The $800 Shelf".  (I could buy probably as good a wooden shelf for my disk sets at Yankee Trader for $20, but without the Hobbit-hole design.)

The basic problem, perhaps, seems to be in Warner's current mindset of defining what is a Blu-ray "collector".  To disk collectors, we collect the movies; we want to know everything about them, and house any analysis or any rare footage that could ever be said or shown about them on one compact case on our shelf.  To Warner, who must repackage the same seventeen titles to a core base of fans who want some new visual representation of their loyalty, "collectors" collect Things.  So the Things must be made a more entertaining case with which to hold the nominal representation of the fan brand they represent.  
One buys a documentary, the other buys a Batmobile with old repackaged disks already in it.  One sees it as an industry about preserving art, the other sees it as a business of how to remind the public who owns which copyright, and collect thereupon.  And to a studio that increasingly wishes not to make their movies physical, and let fans get the smash-hit movie online without the "pointless" off-the-subject featurette extras, making a disk might just as well be making a plastic Batmobile for some crazy franchise-obsessed nut who can't buy enough things to demonstrate his personal issues.

This is not a "Collector's" set.  This is not even meant by Warner to be a set with any love for the Tolkien fan or the video collector.  This is a an act of cynical desperation that Warner does not even realize how condescending the targeted listener hears.  

Loosely translated: "Okay, here's the deal--We don't think that anyone can sell any more disks in mainstream retail, except for the three core studio properties that Best Buy will display on their shelves if we creatively package them in large sets with standout visual cases.  And we'd be all-digital by now if our entire studio didn't revolve around you anal-nitpicking SDCC kids with the brooms and the Joker shirts and the Spock ears...So here's something creatively packaged for your fancy-pants disk-freak collector's shelf, without the effort of changing the film content.  And since you're one of the last three folks we can depend on to buy Blu-ray disks anymore, it's YOUR job to keep the company's division afloat--If you're too stubborn to go digital like normal customers, then chip in, soldiers, everyone has to do their part, and nobody said it would be easy, we've got a whole quarter of WHV losses to pay for."

And that's even going on the assumption that they believe Tolkien fans, even a "limited" number of them, will buy it at the price.
Let's briefly put on our tinfoil hats, for a moment, so that the squirrels can't control us, and make the darker counter-assumption--What if this is actually the set WHV is expecting, even counting on, fans NOT to buy?

And that the studio intentionally priced LOTR fans' pledge-drive "charity contribution" to the Support and Preservation Of Blu-ray outside of the reasonable customer price range by claiming the prestige set and "Limited" status, for only a few select high-end philanthropist customers, clearly necessitated the high price?  Then, they would have headlines to tell the video industry at the '17 CES--"Surprisingly, despite the high quality of the set, one of our most reliable and widely-recognized franchise properties had low Blu-ray disk sales for the Ultimate Collector Edition, proving that even the fanbase seems to have finally embraced the decline of physical media...Or at least illustrates the difficulty for studios to continue to re-sell reliable titles in mainstream retail."  
Nice plan, Warner:  Shoot your own highest-profile year-tentpole disk sale in the foot and then quickly toss the gun to the fans, so that everyone in the industry can see them bewilderedly holding it...And then let the "ungrateful" core Tolkien collector-fans discredit themselves the minute they all start knee-jerk shouting that the reason it didn't sell was that poor Warner who worked so hard on the disk-collector set just didn't bend far enough over backwards to personally satisfy them, so maybe no one can, and you're better off just selling to the mainstream Wal-mart customer you know.  Clev-er.

But that's an If.  Until we hear from Warner's side of the story--which we probably won't until the studio feels cornered by the entire fan-Internet as reposted by the mainstream media, and then we'll get a carefully worded statement that they didn't think they were doing anything wrong, or even doing us a favor by it--all we have are Ifs.  And tinfoil theories.  We can juggle them like balls and clubs until someone just steps forward with the facts, and then it's a little closer to reality.

The least we can do is take the issue to Warner's doorstep, and hope the Silent Sphinx will give us an answer to the riddle.  The issue is not simply why they didn't give us a documentary (although bonus features on disks are nice things to take the trouble and expense for), or why they didn't include the Theatrical or 3D editions in an already disk-drowning set, or even why you the Tolkien Fan were upset the edition didn't come with Rice Krispies Treats and a pony as their personal gift to you.  
The issue is a question that unites ALL Blu-ray fans in 2016, and that is the recurring question of Why Didn't Warner Care?  And more frighteningly, Does Warner Home Video Care Anymore?  Is Blu-ray disk now officially a second-class citizen at the studio, and only trotted out in retail as an excuse for Best Buy to sell plastic figurines?  Did they believe that Blu-ray buyers are now a specialized "limited" cadre of quaint old-fashioned high-end collectors, like wine-tasters or sports-car-auction enthusiasts?  What made them believe Less needed to charge More, or that the bonus feature that talent was willing to co-operate with was simply Not Worth the Effort, which they called the Expense?  I know studios, desperate for short or long-range profit, are not in the business for their health.  But the Surgeon General has determined that open apathy, manipulation and cynicism towards their customers is hazardous to a company's continued health.

Some may think I give Warner a hard time on this blog, and put too much of the blame for the Digital-vs-Disk "war" (such as it is) on the doorstep of one of the few studios that controls a third of movie library titles in the country.
I don't really--The studio has put out some good editions in the past.  I only try to put blame where I see blame due.  And every time something in the industry happens, I keep dearly wishing that blame for "Blu-ray genocide" would be due somewhere else for a change.
To wrap up this question, I leave you with this image of Warner:  When WHV had to produce a studio-anniversary disk anti-piracy ad...well, we've all seen those at the theaters and on disk-intros, haven't we?  "Movie piracy hurts everyone", "You wouldn't steal a purse", etc.
When Warner wanted to deliver a message to the "common folk" who might hurt their business, they chose a different, and more humorously studio-iconic message, albeit one rather disturbingly unclear on the concepts:

Who...on earth...SYMPATHIZES with the Great Green Head of Oz as the role-model "hero" of the movie, and dreams of the thrill of telling Dorothy, the Small & Meek, "Silence, whippersnapper!"?  Why, the studio, that's who.  Dreaming that you can eliminate obstacles to your profit by being great-and-powerful enough to crush them under your heel is a nice little stroke-fantasy clip, especially when they can selectively cut out the scenes where Dorothy protests "You ought to be ashamed of yourself, picking on him like that!" which might otherwise ruin the image.  Uh, yeah, Warner, could you step aside for a sec and let us talk to the Man Behind the Curtain?--Or should we pay no attention to him?

Again, the $800 Shelf seems to have backfired into something of epic proportions that goes beyond Tolkien fans at conventions with Arwen dresses and Orc costumes.  It is an issue that all Blu-ray fans need to confront Warner on, as a concern may have finally become an Intervention.  An Intervention is the word for how one tries to deal with a lunatic or addict, telling them you do so because you care, and don't want to see them sink into further self-destruction and ruin everyone else's lives around them--And to which the subject usually replies with saying you're only interfering, he doesn't need you or anybody, he's already got everything he needs, and you're too square to understand the world he lives in anyway.
Questions of "public shaming" aside, if Blu-ray and Tolkien fans can both come together and help Warner open up and face the press on this issue, we may see what comes out of it for the company.
But we should be be prepared for what happens if Warner's first official corporate answer to the complaint is, quote, "DO not arouse the wrath of the great Oz, ungrateful creatures!  Go away and come back tomorrow!"

What If They Gave a Digital-vs-Disk War, And...

For a big splashy illustration at the top of the column, I did a search for home-theater clip art, and for some odd reason known only to Google's image-search, a Green Eggs & Ham image came up--Given the headline, that turned out to be more uniquely appropriate.

Over the last two to three years, studios facing what they believe are declining Blu-ray sales (caused, mostly, by a decline of Best Buy stores), thrilled by the new possibility of selling their movies directly to the public online through Ultraviolet distribution services, and buoyed by streaming Netflix's "cord-cutting" success against cable, have been scaling back their wide mainstream retail disk sales for the coming "Digital revolution".
Fox and Sony have just announced plans to further back Warner Archive's MOD model for catalogue Blu-ray/DVD disks, since physical media, we're told, is "on the way out"--It's part of that new Millennial mindset of the 21st-century generation, social critics theorize, that the 18-24 demographic doesn't want to tie themselves to personal possessions, since they see it as a "mistake" of the earlier generation, and grew up more instinctively tuned to the convenience of renting their needs or getting them online instead.

And as new findings came in this past week, turns out there's just one little hitch to that long-range strategy:   It's NOT HAPPENING.  

The studios' biggest current obstacle to the "New digital revolution" and the "Decline and death of physical Blu-ray disk" seems to be more that universal problem of "'Reality', that's the part on the outside of the head."

Last Tuesday (8/23), data research site GfK published their latest survey findings on the public's acceptance of digital downloads.

A few samplings, from 1,009 customers surveyed in spring 2016:
- Less than half of viewers today rent digital movies compared to DVD and VHS at their highest point.
- The peak customer has about 23 digital titles in his collection, either purchased or free bonus digital-copies included with the disk, while the peak DVD/Blu disk collection had 89 titles.
- 68-70% of customers surveyed have never bought or rented a digital title.
- When surveyed the reasons why not, the 18% majority opinion was "Availability of hard copy", followed by the 11% "No need/Not interested".

To extrapolate a more simplified observation from the data, it can be theorized that the larger home-theater public simply does not want Green Eggs and Digital-Lockers, whether they're "convenient", "the Future", or no. 

They do not want them in their home, they do not want them on their Chrome.  
They do not want them fast or slow, they do not want them on the go.  
They do not want downloads to try, they do not want Blu-ray to "die".  
The public does not LIKE digital downloads, they do not want them, Warner-the-Market-Cornerer.

"Try them, try them and you will see?"--Well, that's the prob, from the data, they're not doing that either, and even those that did try them don't really quite seem to be getting the point with any palpable degree of enthusiasm.  
What words can we use?:  They just don't appear to be that flippin' popular.

So why does the industry put such near-religious faith in the belief that Blu-ray is "dying" and that digital is catching on "like wildfire"?  Like most faith, wishful thinking.  It would be a more useful world for the studios if all movies could be sold online without the production expenses of plastic, cardboard and mass-retail rollout, and even pre-ordered while the movie was still playing theaters, so they wouldn't have to wait to start recouping on it.  And any reason that particular utopia isn't happening yet is simply an "unfortunate" obstacle.
Another reason is the search for questions they're unable to answer:  Studios are not subtle thinkers, leap quickly to any rescue, and believe one found explanation will work for all, regardless of context--Because of MP3, there are no more CD's, ergo, if Digital exists, there must be no more Blu/DVD's.  This to them is logic, unlike the nervous fears and business hyper-defensiveness of the earlier posted "Welcome our new Overlords" theory.
All execs know, from a tech-luddite layman's viewpoint, is that the strange trendy-announced New Thing always comes along and crushes the previously accepted Old Thing that everyone made the stubborn, expensive mistake of clinging to. So, c'mon, why hasn't Digital done its duty and crushed physical Disk off the face of the earth yet, like it says so right here in the script?--I mean, print magazines and E-books, fer cryin' out loud!

To answer the question of whether any new format or technology will become the Next Big Thing as a "replacement" technology, making the old one culturally and technologically obsolete, depends on three test conditions:

• 1) It must solve a problem:  Usually, an annoying problem of physical barriers that was the tradeoff of enjoying it.  DVD had this when it first caught on after the format war--Most here of the right age remember where they were when they first saw a DVD at a friend's house, and marveled not so much at the picture and sound quality of the disk, as the miracle that you...(happy tears)...didn't have to REWIND it!  MP3 music on your iPod not only didn't snarl like cassette tapes, or jog like heavy portable CD players, it also allowed you to buy only the song you wanted, without album filler.  And the cellphone in your pocket not only meant that you would never be stranded for pay-phones again on the street, you didn't even have to run for that landline phone in your kitchen.

• 2) It needs a "killer app":  Namely, the one title that not only demonstrates what the format can do that the others can't, it so tantalizes you as a must-own, you would gladly make the sacrifice to try the new format, rather than suffer through seeing it on your own existing inferior one--A generation of teens suddenly devoted themselves to DVD with fierce passion once they learned that The Matrix would not be premiering on VHS.  

And if you had that '10 passion for Avatar, there was no way in heck you would be watching it on "flat" 2D Blu-ray if you knew a real 3D version existed for the home.  (And just how Fox and Panasonic, among others, nearly sank the Blu3D industry overnight by holding their killer-app "hostage" to hardware sales is something for another column.)

And

• 3) It needs to be accessible:  Very few people go to the January CES and buy the latest curved 4K UHD screen for four-figure sums simply because it's New or Looks Cool.  Most people are, I think the proper word we can choose is, stingy.  They don't want to buy new things, especially if it's a technology that followed too quickly upon the last one and didn't allow the previous honeymoon to cool--Even with the FCC-ordered changeover to digital HDTV in '08, Blu-ray had quite an uphill battle coming eight years after we all suddenly realized "why" we should change our lives and throw out our VHS tapes for DVD, and when Blu3D came out two years after Blu-ray, after most of us had literally just paid for our 2D Blu player and flatscreen, there was some...stubborn resistance.  

What most hesitant adopters want is a "test run"--They want to be able to experiment with one part of the technology and use it on the equipment they already own, and if it's got that sell, it'll hook them into making the upgrade.  New standalone hardware players, which hardware companies believe will make them an instant phenomenon, is usually the very LAST thing to be bought, and only by those already converted through other low-tech means.  DVD knew this when most users were watching those strange new disks on their desktop and laptop computer disk-drives--turning it into the first portable movie technology--and a generation was hooked early when more kids with Playstation 2 game consoles were playing the disks than early player owners.  Even the Blu-ray vs. HDDVD war of '05-'08 soon descended into a gamer-war between the Playstation 3 and the X-Box console owners, and gamer passion can get a little out of hand sometimes.

Okay, there's the obstacle course, laid out nice and pretty.  How does locker digital-to-own stack up?

- Accessibility--YES:  This seems to be the main selling point, as most everyone has a smartphone or tablet computer by now, with an OS that at least has some app for Amazon, Google or Vudu.  It's the bragging-rights of taking video on the go, even if there's not as many commuter situations that would involve an hour of staring at one's tablet (in bed, OTOH...)--And most airline flights do not offer enough wi-fi to stream the movies in-flight, in which case most have to download the entire movie before takeoff, or just bring the laptop with the DVD drive.  But at least users can get a taste.
- Killer app--NO:  With digital offering only a scaled-down "travel" option of disk titles already available, with no bonus features and less scene access, there is no carrot on the stick.  Either you own the movie already, or you don't care how you get it.  
And the big one:  
- Solves problem--No.  No, no, no, no.  NO.  The complete and utter lack of an everyday technical problem for digital libraries to solve has made any attempt to even think of a problem sound like First World Problems.  If we happen to like them, that's fine, but Tastes Great did not singlehandedly wipe Less Filling off the face of the earth.  Digital libraries have found their niche in travel trips where a data-plan smartphone or tablet would come in handy, but have not demonstrated one single technical advantage for the in-home living room beyond "My shelf looks cluttered" or "Not wanting to leave your chair to change disks."  Disk users who have used their digital codes on long trips have accepted the idea of co-existence--and that home and travel entertainment each need the right tool for the right job--but in the business world of corporate studios, there is no concept of Co-existence...Only the Darwinian fear for one not to be crushed by the other.
Which is why Warner, in their ad copy for Flixster, has literally had to INVENT problems for digital to "solve"--Otherwise, it would be a solution without a problem.  If we do not believe, like the hypnotist's willing subject, that every disk we buy is a millstone material possession around our Millennial neck, that we lie awake at nights fearing they will break or be misplaced, or that we watch movies and TV shows everywhere we go, but groan in frustration at how we can't tote our entire living-room shelf with us and wish someone "could take care of it" for us, then the pro-digital argument that physical disks are "Losing popularity with the public" disappears like smoke into thin air--As do Warner's hopes of never having to risk selling a mean-ol' wide-retail non-MOD Blu-ray at Best Buy ever again.  If we, in fact, have no actual demonstrable, tangible reason to hate physical Blu-ray disks, then, um...I guess we don't hate them or want to get rid of them, do we?  Seems to stand to reason.  Aren't we such spoilsports for not playing along?

How about digital Rental?:
- Accessibility--YES:  Titles can be rented on existing set-top, phone/tablet and TV smart-apps for Amazon, iTunes and Vudu.
- Killer app--Not as such:  Some titles may be promotionally available a week or month before their disk release, but rarely offered for rental.
- Solves problem--YES:  A rental is a movie we probably haven't seen yet and don't know whether we want to keep, and if we do, we'll buy it later if we feel like it.  And if being able to enjoy the movie with a click, and then eliminate it with a click, is easier than making a separate Redbox or library trip to return a disk, that's just as handy in the summer as in a snowy winter where we might not want to make that second trip.  If digital gives us our fear of "What if the title disappears later?", well, not having it around later was pretty much the idea all along.

Now, y'see, here's where the confusion gets even worse--How does the monthly SUBSCRIPTION STREAMING of Netflix or HuluPlus make it past the test?

- Accessibility--YES:  Subscription services had no actual device of their own, and only came in on existing set-top boxes such as AppleTV, Roku, new generations of smart-TV's and Blu-ray players, and of course the major game consoles of PS3 and X-Box.  If you had something to play disk, it's likely you already had something to play Instant Netflix, and if you were using the mail service in the early days, you already had a subscription to the streaming service. 
- Killer-app--POSSIBLE:  I hesitate to say "Yes", as I'm not a fan of original subscription series (I prefer movies on the services, myself, if you can still find them) but if Daredevil or Man in the High Castle influenced your main reason in choosing Netflix over Amazon Prime, or vice versa, or both, then their work was done.  You were hooked into buying something you couldn't get anywhere else.
- Solves problem--YES:  Ohh, did it ever.  Up to that point, network cable was like the weather--Everyone complained about it, but nobody could ever do anything about it.  It's one thing for the public to thumb their nose at cable networks losing their compasses and identity to become a half-dozen corporate masses of marketed reality shows, but now bring in the possibility to choose shows with no set start or stop time, and the writing was on the wall.  Suddenly, "Cutting the cord" became the new trendy term, and everyone started looking at their bill to see what exactly they were paying $99/mo. for, when the same shows were available for the one cover-charge of $10/mo. or less.  Never underestimate the combined customer forces of Angry and Stingy.

From what we've seen over the last few years, and studios have gotten a bit overconfident from, Subscription and Digital Rental have passed their obstacle tests and become replacement technologies while Redbox and network-cable paid the price.  Digital Ownership, it seems, couldn't quite pass its tests.  They're not quite the same thing as Rental and Subscription, you see, and can't quite measure up where it counts.
And that's why, apparently, from GfK's data, nobody likes it.  At least as much as they like the others.  As Charlie Brown once observed, statistics don't lie, but they do shoot off their big mouths a lot.

Theater Roots, Pt. 3 - Off the Wall and Off the Street

In trying to dig up my Theater Roots, and try to trace just what and where got me hooked from my early years the way it did, I keep finding myself coming back to one point--I don't remember the cineplexes.  Growing up in MetroWest outside of Boston, I remember the big 8-12 screen 'plexes just off the highway in Framingham and Woburn, MA, but I only remember them for the films I saw there in the 80's and 90's...I don't remember what they looked like.  Which isn't much of a miss, since they were chains and designed to look exactly like all the others.

Talking about a small one-screen somewhere downtown in the coffee-town parts of the city immediately brings up images of small intimate arthouses, and the strange, obscure Sundance pictures that played them.  It hasn't done much for the image, and polarized the industry into believing that Bigger must be Better, in order to serve its "duty" as part of the corporate studio system, if you're going to get those A-list box-office weekends.

Off the Wall Cinema, in Cambridge, started out as one of those small arthouses, back in 1974.  It was a good time for small theaters to start up, since most commercial theaters were 1-3 screens too, and arthouses could compete with theaters on the same playing field if an acclaimed foreign film or documentary had enough breakout appeal--If you wanted to see a movie back then, it was just a question of where it was playing.  

The managers of Off the Wall lived up to their punny name by specializing in cult revivals, movies that didn't get a lot of play, but could be dug up with the right audience.  Situated in the Central Square stretch between Harvard and MIT, it had the perfect blend of odd, curious intellectual college audiences to play to, often with the new trend of art-rockumentaries, or restored silent films, or even just the culty sci-fi films from the fifties, that were just coming back into style with the mid-70's.

The name fit--It was a "Cinema art-cafe", which didn't have rows of seats, stadium or otherwise.  There were coffeehouse tables, where you could take your coffee and local-baked brownies/muffins or popcorn from the cafe' counter.  Local artists had their work exhibited as theater decoration, and the movie was shown, well, on the big screen that hung off the back wall.  Like most privately-managed arthouse theaters, it got by on supporter member subscriptions, and having your red card, that got you the discounted member price, was a badge of honor for searching out your Boston/Cambridge moviegoing.

In '79, it had become so much of a trendy Boston/Cambridge discovery, the theater tried to hit the "big time", and moved to the expiring Where's Boston theater in the downtown-Boston tourist-market of Faneuil Hall, where it would have the biggest crowd exposure.  Which was not a good move--In their Central Square spot, seated right smack between Cambridge's Harvard and MIT college-towns, they had been able to attract the right blend of intellectually curious audiences that wanted to blow off a Thursday night watching "The T.A.M.I. Show" or a John Hubley animation retrospective. Upscale-hotel convention tourists picking up a lobster or pot of beans, not so much.

When they returned to Central Square in the fall of 1980, OTW's programming was just in the right place at the right time for their big break--As a response to the big-budget (and muddily Altman-directed) Robin Williams "Popeye" movie that was all the rage that December, OTW's specialty in cult-cartoon festivals counter-programmed that same week with a festival of the original B/W 30's Dave Fleischer cartoons.  While it was just using their own strengths to compete with the big trend, you couldn't ask for a more rebellious, or, well, off-the-wall strike against the system.  The Boston Phoenix gave Williams two stars, but the Fleischer festival four stars, and this was a full eight years before knowing your classic cartoon stars was even remotely considered cool.  But in Cambridge, it became a lot cooler afterwards.

While I occasionally would take the train into town to see some of the cult screenings--like a "Golden Turkeys" showing of Robot Monster, or a "60's nostalgia" double feature of the Batman movie and the Monkees' "Head", OTW's annual "Magic Movies" summer-long festival of cartoons was an EVENT for Boston moviegoing.  July would feature a different week of classic cartoon retrospectives that only us odd grownups would be curious enough to appreciate--I remember seeing Channel 5's local-celebrity theater/movie critic Chuck Kramer sitting one table in front of me, showing his little girl the Fleischer Popeyes for the first time.  (And telling her not to be afraid of the giant Roc that carries Popeye away to the volcano in "Popeye Meets Sindbad", which Popeye returns from ten seconds later carrying a twenty-foot roast turkey.)  Everyone in 1988 who had gone to see "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" went on a pop-nostalgic baby-boom orgy that they now remembered Tex Avery's MGM cartoons, but in '82 or '83, Cambridge audiences, who had never heard of Avery outside of the local Ch. 56 Tom & Jerry cartoons, marked their calendar for the weeks OTW would be showing their Tex Avery and WWII propaganda/Private Snafu retrospectives, which were trippier in their own mad-genius way than anything you could get from the respectable theaters.

If I remember the collective creative-insanity of a group of willing art-folk getting together to watch Avery's "Who Killed Who?", I also remember the theater for being a small theater--It was, basically, a room.  As a storefront cafe space, just off the street, it might just as well be a cozy little bohemian coffeehouse, or drink-spot, just that this one showed movies.  And ones you didn't want to admit you were curious about, at that.

Sadly, one-screen theaters couldn't keep up with the real-estate, and as Central Square was more the "regular" residential part of Cambridge, the space was eventually sold to a senior center in 1986.

It could never happen again, I thought, not in the days when everything you want to see is on DVD, and Multiplexes ruled the earth.  Well, it could, but it wouldn't be easy--

In Amherst, MA--the college-town for UMass, and Emily Dickinson's town in more ways than one--the local arthouse is still doing well, as the main upscale 5-plex for the indie features, the festival Oscar-bait, the restorations and the touring activist documentaries.

The popularity has created a need to expand, and recently, the theater has branched out "the Amherst Studio Theatre"--Along the side corridor of the building, with a storefront restaurant, frozen yogurt stand and an architect's office leading from the antique front to the back theater, is the Amherst Theater's one-room extension, for smaller, more limited-audience screenings.  It's a storefront space, and the theater is, in a word...small.

Like, would thirty seats be considered "small"?  "It has its pros and cons," one employee joked when I asked him about it.  Depending on the movie, maybe "cozy" would be the better word.  "Studio", after all, is defined in the dictionary as "One room".

The larger plex, down at the end of the corridor, has plenty of room for those watching the current-flavor acclaimed film or a closed-circuit simulcast of the British National Theater--If you're showing a restoration of Orson Welles' "Chimes at Midnight", it won't attract the same crowds, though it may attract some.  The point is, when the movie's showing, the lights are off--You don't really know HOW many people are in the theater, or how big it is.  All you know is that there are people watching it.

When the local theaters moved out of town, multiplied their screens and became Multiplexes, they did bring some advantages with them:  A hit movie could play on as many screens as needed, and there was no more need to stand in line and worry if the Star Wars movie would be "sold out"...If a big movie flops the second week, its number of screens can be fluidly reduced, and make room for something else.  But going Bigger brought the idea that a theater must show EVERYTHING--It must offer every movie available that you could see if you were going out, and why go anywhere else?  It must be the one source of studio income, even if the crushing demand for studio ticket-sales percentages leaves the theater crushing under its own elephant weight for upkeep, overhead and employees, and supporting itself with ads, $7 popcorn and Coke in collectible tumblers.  But when it isn't a big movie season, bigger isn't better, and the glass that was half full now becomes half empty--Underperforming movies that used to leave town quickly now have to stay and fill space until something else shows up, even if it plays to empty screenings.  An old movie or classic revival could play just as well in the empty screen that was showing the "Ben-Hur" remake two weeks earlier--and arguably attract a few more audiences--but then the theater would be shirking its "duty" to provide the studio with those last weeks of sales.  A chain theater is not always in control of its own actions.

It's created in our minds the idea that a theater must be two miles out on the highway, or attached to a shopping mall, and that it be your One-Stop Location...It must offer More, to be able to offer Everything.  When in fact, the definition of a "theater" is simply a room where people go to watch movies.  That's all it ever was.

It can be a big room or a little room.  It can serve popcorn, or it can serve espresso.  It can be a big complex with acres of free parking just off the highway, or it can be a storefront on the local main street just next to the bookstore.  It can show Civil War, in 3D and Dolby surround-sound, or it can show Tex Avery or Orson Welles on a makeshift wall.  It all comes down to a question of what will attract enough people that want to see what's playing.