Anti-Trust in Faith: Why Sony Needs to Play Hardball with Spider-Man

by Gabriel Valdez

Sony is playing hardball with Disney over the next “Spider-Man” movie. Will they still share production of the next movie and allow the character to remain in the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Or will the character revert to Sony and once again go solo in their own movie? The more important question might be why Sony is digging in its heels at this moment.

Disney’s Dominance

Chances are probably good that the two will figure out a deal. Yet the impasse reveals something more core about how studios need to begin interacting with Disney. Disney was already the most successful studio before its purchase of Fox. Now, it’s unquestionably the most dominant studio in the field.

Buena Vista is the releasing arm of Disney. According to Box Office Mojo, it’s controlled 36.5% of domestic studio market share thus far in 2019. That represents $2.79 billion.

The next closest studio is Universal at 13.9%. That represents $1.06 billion. And that’s before Disney really gets a chance to push any of their Fox properties onto the calendar.

Buena Vista has hovered around 20-26% market share for years, but the last time another studio came first was Universal in 2015.

This informs why Disney has been pushing so much material out. Good, bad, it doesn’t matter so long as they’re releasing an event film regularly.

Calendar Control

A big part of what Disney’s doing is trying to choke out the calendar. Movies only tend to have extremely large openings during certain times of year – mainly the extended summer and holidays. The fewer dates available for other studios to get event films in, the worse a situation those other studios face and the more their properties are de-valued.

It doesn’t matter so much to Disney if a movie’s successful or not. They can weather a bad opening, such as the one for “Solo”. They’ll still be fine, and the franchise as a whole will still be fine. It matters that they can control the calendar and deny dates to other films. A major “Avengers” or “Star Wars” film can block other movies opening big for three weeks. Even a minor MCU film can scare off other studios for a two-week block.

The fewer good dates available for event movies, and the more other studios fail to launch their own franchises. Yet to do this, Disney needs franchises. They need new material constantly churning out of the MCU, “Star Wars”, and their live-action remakes of cartoon classics to be able to take up those dates. They often reserve them years ahead of time. This still isn’t enough to sustain Disney blocking all these dates out indefinitely. That’s a major reason it’s in other studios’ interests to play hardball with Disney about sharing or selling any properties.

Disney Needs Franchise Fuel

Disney still needs more fuel – more franchises. Sony and other studios are fully aware of this, and they own or have the rights to those franchises. The only way non-Disney studios can keep their ability to stake out dates in the calendar is to retain these franchises while denying them to Disney. The deal has to be much sweeter for a studio like Sony to essentially sabotage access to event dates in the future.

This approach by Disney is reminiscent of classic monopolistic behavior. Now, it’s important to point out that Disney is not a monopoly. It is striving to become one, or as close to one as it can get, and to do that requires monopolistic practices.

Monopolies don’t start exercising monopolistic strategies only after becoming monopolies. They use them in order to become monopolies in the first place. They often try to undercut a competitor in one area, and only once that competitor is driven out of that area, will they raise their prices.

This isn’t selling oil in 1890 Ohio, though. Movies are released nationally, and theater chains charge the same regardless of which studio releases a movie. How exactly is Disney able to make their approach most effective?

Blocking Competitors

Disney has done this in an even more direct way. They’ve made theater chains sign ridiculous contracts – if they want to carry a large Disney movie like an “Avengers” or “Star Wars” release, they have to make agreements to show them on their largest screens for four weeks straight. In some cases, theaters have even been required to show more minor Disney films later in the year on a set number of screens for a set number of weeks. Both factors directly block the number and quality of screens available to other studios’ releases at key dates.

They’re also poisonous to smaller theaters that only have a few screens. It means that these theaters will often be blocked a month from showing any other movies if they want access to any Disney event films. Since another major release from another studio is likely within two-to-four weeks, it means that it’s going to be blocked from those small theaters entirely. Often, the only way for small theaters to change the films they’re showing is to carry whatever the next Disney event film is – with a similarly restrictive contract. This can create a cycle where smaller theaters are essentially locked into only showing Disney movies for months at a time.

This means that having more properties to fill those dates doesn’t just lock in more of the calendar for Disney. More to the point, it blocks those dates from other studios. More franchises means more large releases to force more imbalanced contracts with theater chains and to strong-arm smaller theaters. That means that Disney can deny screens to the releases of other studios. Even a flop can be contractually required to take up screens for four weeks.

Digging in Their Heels

This is what forms the context for Sony – and when their time comes, other studios – being very strict about negotiating favorable deals with Disney. The more franchises they allow Disney to have, the more event dates Disney controls. The more event dates Disney controls, the more screens they can force theaters to block from other studios’ releases – sometimes just for that event release, but sometimes by including even more minor films that take up screens on certain major release dates.

Sony is not just negotiating a favorable “Spider-Man” deal. They are also effectively negotiating the access their own films will have to the calendar in the future.

Of course it’s a goal for their films to make money. Of course it’s a goal for Disney to release on good dates. The best way to look at Disney right now, however, is to understand that their primary goal is to deny dates and screens to other studios’ films.

This is why they’re pushing so much material out the door. Regardless as to whether there’s a reason to make certain films, or even if some of them are record flops, each one can deny dates and screens to other studios for up to a month’s time. That’s good for Disney. It de-values the properties they’d seek to buy from other studios in order to further strong-arm theaters and further control and block the calendar.

What Can Be Done?

Neither Sony nor theater chains are heroes to Disney’s villain in this. They each have their own godawful business practices. Disney’s just the one that got there before the others, but it still makes sense for the others to dig their heels in before they can’t anymore.

It’s also difficult to figure out how to combat this. I’m going to be in theaters for “Black Panther 2” and “The Rise of Skywalker”. Disney’s making a decent amount of progressive event films and doing a better (though still far from perfect) job with women leads and actors and directors of color than many. I want to support those films, and at the same time not see Disney increasingly take over the industry.

The best answer I can give is that the key rests in greater regulation. Media and entertainment laws have become more and more de-regulated in the U.S. on endless fronts. In particular, the Paramount Consent Decrees need to be extended to Disney (and other players like Amazon). Aggressive enforcement of the decrees has all but evaporated. As in so many areas today, it needs to come back.

Floating Belly Up — “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”

I’m not convinced Megan Fox is a bad actress. I’m not convinced she’s a good one either. She’s never been given much to do aside from scream and run in slow motion. I can’t think of another actor, outside motion capture, who’s spent as much time opposite green screens and cars and so little time opposite other actors.

For that tough job alone, she’s got my respect. Unfortunately, as reporter April O’Neil, she’s the only part of the rebooted Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that does. If you’re sitting down to see a story about four 6-foot tall, walking, talking, sewer-dwelling turtles who use their ninja skills to combat a crime wave in New York City, you’re probably there for cartoon action and zingy one liners. TMNT will get to these, but not before bending over backwards to create a murky origin story about how O’Neil and the Turtles are connected since childhood by a mystery surrounding her researcher father.

Coming out the week after Guardians of the Galaxy, which gets its origin story out of the way in a few minutes so it can jump into the action when everyone’s already blasting away at each other, TMNT feels especially old-fashioned in its tedious obsession with origins. We’re told the Turtles’ origins in an opening animation, again by the Turtles themselves, a third time by O’Neil herself, once more by their ninja master (a mutant rat named Splinter), and finally by the villain’s billionaire accomplice. Perhaps they think if they repeat it often enough, we’ll forget their laboratory-based origin story is lifted wholesale from The Amazing Spider-Man.

The action itself is a mixed bag. Early fights are filmed in so many shadow and strobe effects, and cut so quickly, you can’t tell what’s happening. An all-out battle in the sewer waffles between tracking shots where you can’t distinguish what’s happening to whom, and slow-motion shots that are actually very well orchestrated. It’s annoying to switch back and forth between seeing things clearly and being in the dark every other second. Later action, including a clever mountainside chase and a rooftop fight scene, fix these problems with brighter lighting and more slow-motion.

The big bad in TMNT is a ninja named Shredder, whose evil plan is the lousiest I’ve seen in two years, three months, and three weeks. How can I be so exact? I looked up when The Amazing Spider-Man was released, because the climax of TMNT steals it beat for beat, detail for detail. Are you noticing a pattern?

It’s one thing to deliver an underwhelming film, it’s another to steal large chunks of someone else’s movie and pass it off as somehow original. I’m sure enough details are changed to avoid a lawsuit, but this is as egregious a job of legal plagiarism as I’ve ever seen. More importantly for the viewer, the laziness shows in the final product.

The visual effects are passable. The Turtles look pretty good and Shredder, for all intents and purposes, is a mini-Transformer. There’s energy to the action when you can tell what’s happening. Splinter is a complete disaster, however, looking like someone left a giant, rubber Halloween mask out in the sun so long it’s half-melted and doesn’t fit right. I don’t know what they were thinking.

Fox herself is wasted. Her strength has always been as the comedic “straight man.” She can look a babbling Shia LaBeouf or a raving John Turturro or a giant, mechanical alien in the eye and deliver a measured reaction. She doesn’t create the comic beats so much as she makes sure the foundation under them is stable. Giving her world-renowned comedians, like Whoopi Goldberg (The View) as her editor and Will Arnett (Arrested Development) as her cameraman, is actually a very good idea. They’ve been baptized by the fire of live crowds and sitcom production schedules…so it’s not just a bad idea to make them the unfunny straight men to Fox’s comedic stylings, it’s downright disastrous. At least the Turtles themselves, particularly Michelangelo (Noel Fisher) are pretty funny.

Like I said, I don’t blame Fox (or any of the other actors) for how bad this film turned out. I blame the writers and filmmakers, especially for how blatantly (and badly) they ripped off a two year-old Spiderman movie. To make matters worse, the whole effort is drowning in some of the worst hidden product placement I’ve seen. You’ll be yearning for subliminal advertising by the end of this.

Trust me, go see Guardians of the Galaxy instead. If you’ve already seen Guardians of the Galaxy, then you’re probably planning to see it again anyway. Stick with that choice.

Thursday’s Child — Caravaggio, Poverty P*rn, and Superhero Wardrobes

Thursday’s Child is what happens when Wednesday Collective runs long or gets pushed a day. The only requirement is that it features a David Bowie song in the opening paragraph. Let’s go with that time he told Trent Reznor how he feels about Americans.

ARTICLE OF THE WEEK
Get to Know Filmmaking’s Most Influential Painter
Stephen Akey

A big part of filmmaking (and critiquing) is knowing your art history. Hell, we wouldn’t have the establishing shot as we know it without Impressionism. Even as a viewer, you never know when that knowledge is going to enhance a movie. Hieronymus Bosch’s carnally oppressive, otherworldly madhouses pop up in thankfully brief, soul-scathing moments of Noah. The first Hunger Games owes its incredibly immediate sense of place to the Depression-era photography of Dorothea Lange.

War photography – especially from failed wars like Vietnam – has heavily influenced the Mexican-Spanish pulp resurgence. I suspect it reflects the lost wars that led to decades of Fascist rule under the PRI in Mexico and under Franco (after the Spanish Civil War) in Spain. Everything from Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men to Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim has found glum, terrifying moments to reflect on their personal ideas of loss, ones that never fail to horrify more than any battle or monster can.

Perhaps no single painter has influenced filmmaking more than Caravaggio: the stark close-ups of Carl Dreyer’s formative 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc; the matter-of-fact, sometimes uncomfortably foregrounded violence of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai epics; the precise arrangement of players and light in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather; all the way through to the striking use of color and composition of Zack Snyder’s 300. Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth, Tarsem Singh’s Immortals, Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, the list goes on and on.

Martin Scorsese might be the filmmaker who, early in his career, embraced him the most. Caravaggio seeped through the seediest moments of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. The painter was, as Scorsese once told Caravaggio biographer Andrew Graham-Dixon, the entire reason for doing The Last Temptation of Christ.

Caravaggio himself had an interesting life. Not unlike a Scorsese character, Caravaggio had been formed by a violent, hardscrabble upbringing that was both key to his many successes and his strange, historical mystery of a downfall. He found more comfort with gangs, beggars, and prostitutes than he did with high society, and he was exceptionally clever at revealing – both in life and in his paintings – that high society played at that very same, cutthroat level.

Thanks to Chris Braak over at Threat Quality Press for pointing this article out.

What is Poverty Porn?
Tom Roston

Don’t worry, it’s safe for work. I’ve talked a lot about the ‘genre of excess’ that Izzy Black proposed a few months ago. It seeks to make an accounting of at-any-cost stories of social and financial success, but it refuses to judge the characters therein (think The Wolf of Wall Street, Spring Breakers, The Bling Ring).

The inevitable corollary of that is “poverty porn.” As Roston writes, it’s used to describe an image of the poor “that takes on an almost fetishistic quality, wherein the audience savors how miserable people can get. This can happen even with the best intentions, like those extended commercials for charities in which barefoot children from a third world country stare into the camera.” It takes shape in large part when documentary filmmakers each seek to out-bleak each other in the pursuit of funding.

Roston suggests a “poverty porn clean-up crew,” and has an interesting proposition to form it.

Work It, Superman
Lauren Davis

That’s quite a get-up Superman has there. You wouldn’t take him seriously. I wouldn’t take him seriously. Yet it’s pretty standard for women in superhero comics. Why does what superheroes wear matter? What does it tell the youth being brought up on them?

I’m thankful Marvel’s had the sense to mostly skip this sort of fetishism in their film adaptations. For Black Widow’s co-leading role in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, she’s mostly portrayed wearing something sensible with a leather jacket. As I’ve said before, her most notable accessory is an assault rifle with an underslung grenade launcher. It’s Captain America who appears in various states of undress and just has to break into the Smithsonian when every federal agency is looking for him. Why? To get the right piece of fashion for saving the world. It’s a refreshing and humorous twist.

What Captain America, RoboCop, and Her Say About Surveillance
Willie Osterweil

I don’t entirely agree with this piece. First of all, never ever start an article off by insulting a large group of people (in this case, liberals) – it signals you’re either playing to a base, or you’re too narrow-minded to consider your opponent as anything other than a hive-mind. Both mean that anyone sitting on the fence, as well as many sensible people who are already on your side, will consider you shrill and discount both your opinion and your effectiveness as someone who can influence others.

Secondly, I don’t agree with many of Osterweil’s points. But that’s no reason not to highlight someone else’s work if he makes those points intelligently.

Osterweil ultimately presents a challenging article about the use and interplay of surveillance and gender dynamics in Captain America, the RoboCop remake, and the Oscar-winning Her.

As an aside that this article touches on, I myself have become increasingly on-the-fence about Spike Jonze as a director. Critical kryptonite, I know. It’s not because of any fault in his abilities – if anything, he might be the best American director when it comes to marrying the various technical elements of film (visual structure, production design, costume, cinematography, editing) to pure artistic flair. More than anything else, perhaps no director has ever used sound as expertly and emotionally as he has. But man, his films’ views of women as creatures too erratic to think of others and as the cause and solution of every problem in a man’s life, no matter how young or old…it grates.

Throw onto that his production and story roles in the Jackass films, which increasingly think hidden camera is meant to be an excuse to sexually harass and abuse women without repercussions, and I have some serious reservations about many of Jonze’s values as a storyteller.

The Price of Rebooting a Successful Franchise
Scott Mendelson

Forbes is a terrible magazine when it comes to knowing what the real world is like. It’s also not often very good at analyzing economic policy, but when it comes to analyzing individual industries, it can actually be quite on-the-money (in this way, it’s the exact inversion of The Economist).

Here’s a rather good article on how Sony originally planned to reboot Spider-Man as a smaller, more personal story focusing on secret identity Peter Parker’s school life, with the action being less extravagant and more intimate. Now, I quite liked The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which could deliver fantastic individual scenes but not an entire, cogent story. The best moments undeniably involved Andrew Garfield’s interplay with Emma Stone and Dane DeHaan, when their characters were just bumming around New York and working out their personal issues. A Spider-Man focused on that? Brave, but with this group I have no doubts they could have made it special.

Instead, Sony (just like Warner Bros. is) got jealous of Marvel’s Avengers canon and – instead of blazing their own path – decided the best financial option would be to copy Marvel wholesale and go as big and multiple as possible. The result is…well, it’s certainly not the windfall Sony imagined, and the franchise may not even have the financial success it could’ve if they’d just stuck with Sam Raimi at the helm and Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man another few films.

On a personal note, Spider-Man got rebooted after five years. It’s been 10 years since the last Blade movie. Get on it, New Line.

Screw the Movie, We’re Making a Production

One of the most successful movies of last year was the critically reviled The Canyons. Now, this takes some explaining. The Canyons was not a good movie. Written by Bret Easton Ellis, directed by Paul Schrader, and promised a film about the future of movies, we imagined the possibility of a searing assault on the conscience similar to Ellis’s previous American Psycho. Instead, The Canyons was a wooden collection of uninteresting psycho-drama, soap opera filmmaking, and borderline soft-core. It cast Lindsay Lohan opposite adult film star James Deen.

One of the most intriguing – and accurate – theories about the film is that the entire production was a piece of performance art by Ellis, that the process of putting the movie together – recorded in painstaking detail by journalists and tabloid reporters alike – was the real commentary. The performance lies in those details and in our obsession and reaction to them, not in anything put on-screen. That a movie was made was just an unavoidable side effect. In that way, The Canyons may be one of the most important efforts in filmmaking we’ve seen in years. It’s just not one of the most important films.

John Patterson at The Guardian writes about The Canyons‘ contemplation on the wreckage of cinema.

Adam Batty at the beautifully titled Hope Lies at 24 Frames a Second writes about Schrader’s transcendental style.

And, of course, here’s Lili Anolik’s brilliant original article, Post-Empire Strikes Back, which lays out the argument for Ellis’s the-production-is-art, screw-the-movie approach to what he wants to say. This article in particular is for mature audiences only.

Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned That the Most Outlandish Ideas in That Film Were True
Erich Schlosser

Dr. Strangelove is Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy about the dangers of nuclear war. It posited a number of ridiculous contrivances – that a general who up and lost it one day could single-handedly launch a nuclear attack with no authorization. That the Soviets had built a “dead hand” system wherein nuclear weapons would be launched automatically if the Kremlin couldn’t be reached.

These were all insane and ribald concepts as to how the military of both countries really worked. Right? They were exaggerations Kubrick and crew made to make a point. Right? Turns out not so much – the reality was far riskier than the insanity Dr. Strangelove proposed.

Earning its Name — “The Amazing Spider-Man 2”

There’s an early scene in “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” in which Electro, still discovering his electrical superpowers, accidentally causes a disaster in Times Square. Web slinging superhero Spider-Man tries to defuse the situation by talking to Electro, who explains that he doesn’t understand what’s happening to himself, that he needs help. Both of these dynamic super-powers are on the same side.

The nervous Electro suddenly twitches at a surge of energy, and a police sniper takes the shot. It’s a cavalcade of misunderstandings that – at a moment’s notice – turn a good person into a villain. Electro reacts to protect himself, and Spider-Man has to save bystanders who are in the way. Suddenly those Times Square billboards that were zooming in on Electro’s face are zooming in on Spider-Man’s. Electro sees them. Where there wasn’t a fight before, where Spider-Man and Electro were on the same page in a tense situation, suddenly they’re presented in the media capital of the world as opponents. A serious event where lives are at stake has suddenly become a carnival, a conflict imagined from thin air. It’s no mistake that the African-American actor who plays Electro, Academy Award winner Jamie Foxx, is dressed in a hoodie for this scene.

Spider-Man still tries to talk with Electro, to calm the situation down before more people get hurt, but when you tell two people they’re in a fight for their lives, the one with less power is likely to believe you. Very few movies can so elegantly teach how national news media gets us to tune in, click links, and get angry about imagined conflicts – between race, religion, and even entire countries. Enough public pressure, and sometimes those imagined conflicts even become real.

It’s a powerful statement in a surprisingly sophisticated superhero movie, and it works because the film is always finding new ways to capture your attention. Spidey’s crime-fighting antics and soaring journeys through the New York City skyline are realized as beautifully as they’ve ever been. The fights are pumped up to cartoonish levels of color and acrobatics, yet they’re always anchored by a sense of what’s at stake.

While “Amazing Spider-Man” can deliver stupendous action and smart social metaphors, it doesn’t seem interested in a complex overall story – evil characters become evil because you know they’re going to, not because they’ve taken every step on the path to get there. While the movie’s capable of delivering captivating and emotional individual scenes, you could take those scenes and rearrange them and it wouldn’t make much difference to the plot. This would be far more glaring a flaw if it weren’t for the movie’s beating heart – the complicated relationship between Spider-Man and Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone.)

That relationship works because actor Andrew Garfield’s superhero is so different from Tobey Maguire’s reserved, socially awkward Spider-Man of a decade ago. Garfield’s Spidey is a class clown. He’s more emotionally raw, and his quick wit is only abrasive until you realize what a defense mechanism it is. Gwen is much more central to the plot than most superhero girlfriends get to be. In a twist on conventional superhero roles, it’s Spider-Man who’s faced with uprooting his life and following Gwen as she pursues her career. It’s nice to see a superhero plot that acknowledges this modern reality.

In the end, this entry is a structural mess, disjointed and uneven. It’s also a stylistic success, brimming with color and ideas and barreling ahead with tremendous energy. There’s one more lesson here, most consistently voiced by Spider-Man’s Aunt May, who raised him. She’s played by Sally Field, who can make any character feel so real you think you’ll see them leaving the theater afterward. The message is that, in difficult times, it’s not enough to just keep up hope. We need to exemplify that hope through action, by helping the smallest and weakest among us, by giving them hope. Spider-Man, Electro, and Green Goblin are all disowned, bullied, and betrayed both by loved ones and the world around them. The difference is that one of them has an Aunt May. She’s the real hero of the piece, although “The Amazing Aunt May” probably wouldn’t draw so many crowds. We all get a chance to play that role for someone, though, to help create a hero for tomorrow instead of a villain, so we can have a world that talks before shots are fired, and that doesn’t make a carnival out of conflict.

“The Amazing Spider-Man 2” is rated PG-13 for sci-fi action.