Reading The Weather - Making Lightning Strike
F9, The Super Bowl, Pee-Wee Herman, and the Hami-Film
There’s a science to the way hype works now, and when everything comes together, it can be undeniable. The studios depend on the sheer scale of their blitz to overwhelm you and remove all choice from the question of whether or not you’re going to see their film. Of course you are. What kind of asshole wouldn’t see their film? You don’t want to miss out, do you? Everyone else will see it. Hell, everyone else will love it. You might as well just be a fan right now, because you will be eventually, and you’re just wasting everyone’s time by holding out.
They have to use that kind of brute force because they are trying to generate spontaneous pop-cultural phenomenons every single time. They are trying to make lightning strike in a specific time and place, and they’re going to do whatever they have to do to make that happen.
This column is meant to simply cut through some of the “Great and Terrible Oz” aspect of how we’re sold this stuff. I’ve done it long enough now that it’s like looking at the actual code of the Matrix, or it’s like I’m sitting in the wrong spot for the magic trick so I can see how it’s done. Hype and marketing and advertising are backed into the DNA of the business, and I’m not going to change that. But I can change how we talk about it.
There’s one film that got a big boost last week, a big boost that was carefully coordinated and that the press played along with beautifully, so let’s start there.
F9: The Fast Saga
Prepare to bend the knee to F9, the function key that’s now also a summer blockbuster! This is the title that Universal has settled on for the improbable eighth sequel to Rob Cohen’s movie about street racers who also sell stolen VHS/DVD combo players. I’m not sure if The Fast Saga is part of the official title or not, but part of what makes me laugh about these movies is the way none of the films follow any rhyme or reason for the way they’re titled. It must drive OCD film nerds completely insane. Part of what makes me laugh is how brutally self-important all of the marketing materials are so far. These are ridiculous films. That’s the charm. They are telenovelas with flying cars. Playing everything in them as life-or-death with a totally straight face is the reason they’re so funny. Camp isn’t camp when it winks, and any series that is going to trot Han out of the shadows in the same film they introduce Dom’s long-lost brother while still pretending it’s serious is capital C-A-M-P, and people can’t get enough.
This one’s significant for Universal. They have to get this right. There’s no halfway with it. Yes, they’ve got 1917 in the race for Best Picture, and they might actually take it at this point, but they are also reeling from the back-to-back body blows of Cats and Dolittle, the sorts of bombs that don’t just lose money but that become cultural punchlines. They’ve got some challenges in selling this one, but it largely sells itself. It’s more a matter now of how they frame the conversation. Paul Walker’s real-life death cast a weird permanent shadow over the “family” storyline and the trailer teaser they’ve released to lead up to the real teaser trailer makes it clear that they’re going to remind you that Paul Walker died EVERY SINGLE OPPORTUNITY THEY GET (hey, the baby is named Brian, did you notice that? Because Brian was Paul Walker, and Paul Walker died, in case you didn’t know that) and lean on that to give these films a weight that I’m not sure they deserve or that they can really support.
I like John Cena. I think he’s been good in a number of films. But I’m not sure he’s the firepower you add to a franchise to make the ninth edition of the film the biggest entry in the series yet. And, yes, I know that fans of the series are wigging out over the return of Han, but for someone who hasn’t been paying attention, the way they handle his return in the trailer is baffling, not enticing. Last week, they spent the entire week blasting out bits and pieces of the campaign reveal. Character posters one day. A trailer teaser for the teaser trailer another day. Motion posters after that. All of it counting down to a concert event in Miami on the Friday before the Super Bowl, as well as the reveal of the full teaser trailer. I’m already exhausted, and this is just the kick-off to their campaign.
Here’s where you don’t have to openly collude with the press if you’re a studio. All you have to do is figure out who your biggest fans are and then play to them directly. I’m going to use an example here, and please be clear… Jen Yamato from The LA Times is good people. I am a Jen Yamato fan. I think Jen Yamato would agree that she is a raving Fast Saga fan, and sure enough, when Universal wanted to place the story about Han’s return and how it happened, they did so with Jen and with the Times. It’s smart. They’re getting genuine enthusiasm from Jen, and anyone who picks up anything she reports is going to be linking back to her glowing coverage. It’s a win-win, because I know how it feels to be invited into the narrative when you are 100% an organic fan of something. When Mad Max: Fury Road came out, I ended up doing Q&As and live events and on-camera interviews with George Miller over and over, and by the end of it, he was requesting that I be the one to moderate events with him, and it was terrific. I could have had 50 more conversations with him, happily, and would have if awards season hadn’t eventually ended. I can’t fault any of the reporters who work in the system for the ways the system itself works and exploits those things about us. But every time we roadblock our publications with a week of advertising for a movie, in a coordinated effort with every other publication out there, we are doing their work for them. It’s the execution of their plan, and we are their machine.
I’m not even sure there’s an answer or a way to fix it. That’s just the way it works. The studios are never going to get less mercilessly efficient at selling their product, and they will never not see it as product. There was a radical restructuring of the city that happened in the ’60s and the ‘70s, a rebuilding of the business itself, and it stopped being the Hollywood that we’ve always been sold at that point. We just didn’t know it yet, and neither did Hollywood, so they kept acting like they were still the same studios they always were. But the rot was there, and it just got more pronounced through the ‘80s, the ‘90s, and then the new century. There is a promise that comes with “making a movie” that is incredibly powerful, and people spend their whole lives chasing that dream, trying to tell personal stories that matter to them, and many of them succeed. Sometimes once, or twice, or only a handful of times. Sometimes they have long careers of it. Those people aren’t the people running everything, though. The people who actually run the studios and the distributors who actually put movies in theaters are very different, and they have to be. They’re answering to totally different masters than the people trying to tell their stories, and no matter what they say in carefully crafted press releases, they don’t care about legacy or story or characters in the same way. It’s not sentimental to them. There’s nothing romantic about it to them. It’s just selling hamburgers, and for Universal, F9 is a whole lot of hamburgers they have to sell for this summer.
The longer this series runs, the denser the mythology gets, and that risks losing new viewers at some point. My kids, for example, find the whole thing mystifying. They were not raised on the movies, and when we watched Hobbes & Shaw last year, they thought it was fine but totally disposable. They haven’t expressed any particular interest in catching up or tuning in, and I’m curious to see if the hype machine reaches them as it revs up. They digest media in a very different way than I do when they’re not here in my house, and it always fascinates me to see what does or doesn’t get to them.
For example… since we’re talking about last week’s big hype cavalcade, it’s only fair that we talk about…
The Super Bowl
Hey, guess what means absolutely nothing when it comes to a film’s ultimate success or a studio’s confidence in that film?
A Super Bowl spot. That’s right. You might be confused about that, though, and social media and movie websites would be partially to blame. Every year, there is as much conversation about what does or doesn’t “get” a Super Bowl spot (like it’s a Nobel Prize that is awarded to the chosen few instead of commercial real estate anyone can pay to purchase) as there is conversation about the ads themselves. Every year, you can read the story about how the Super Bowl is finally starting to become irrelevant to marketing. You can also read the story of how the Super Bowl is back and more relevant than ever. You can read about how some film “owned” the Super Bowl. You can read listicles about all of the marketing materials you’re shown, ranked from best to worst. You can find breakdowns of every one of the commercials, shot-by-shot, with insistent headlines about “what we learned.”
And it ultimately doesn’t move the needle at all. I used to buy into it, but when you see the same headlines every year, the same reactions every year, the same exact sound that it all makes, you realize that it’s become a hollow ritual, a flex, and an expensive one. Studios do it because they can. They can afford that spot, and they decide they want to show something off. I enjoyed getting a glimpse at WandaVision, sure. I thought they cut the new spots for Black Widow and No Time To Die well. I don’t think either one radically changed my feelings about the film or whether or not I’ll see them theatrically. If anyone made a strong impression, it was Disney with the Mulan spot, but by the time that film comes out, we’ll see variations on that spot a thousand more times. Disney’s going to carpet-bomb us with Mulan this year. That’s Disney. That’s what they do. And it’s not like that was the first glimpse we’ve had of the film, so it didn’t feel like it was something brand-new.
In the end, people spent the day talking about the Jeep ad featuring Bill Murray returning to Groundhog Day. Right now, if you surprise-released a Groundhog Day 2 in March, it would clean up and people could reasonably argue that it was because of the Super Bowl ad. That would be a case where, yes, the Super Bowl made a noticeable difference in the ultimate fate of something. But that’s a ridiculous extreme, and that’s what you would have to do to somehow justify the cost that people lay out for a Super Bowl spot as anything but ego. It’s showing off more than it’s about making any kind of real impact on the fate of the films that get advertised. It’s that extra ladle-full of gravy that you get when you’re spending at the blockbuster level, and it’s the most expensive and empty calorie kind of hype.
But it’s not the only kind…
The Pee-Wee Herman Story
So what happened last week?
That story was everywhere, instantly, when Paul Reubens mentioned that the Safdies were “considering” directing The Pee-Wee Herman Story. The Safdies PR team then quickly put out a clarification that they had met about it but that they weren’t moving forward. What are those moments, and why do they happen over and over in the press? And why do stories that turn out to be this intangible spread so far and so fast?
Simple. We want them to be true. And we know what you want them to be true.
Paul Reubens is on the road right now to share his memories about the making of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, and as I wrote on Friday, it’s a delightful evening out. He’s in a reflective place in his life, and he seems very open and vulnerable as he talks about his history with this character. He’s been trying to make The Pee-Wee Herman Story for 20 years now, and the script he wrote with Valerie Curtin is very much a Pee-Wee Herman script. It’s slightly naughtier than what we’ve seen from him on film before, but it makes me think of The Pee-Wee Herman Show, the original HBO recording of his long-running Groundlings show, and I think there’s something beautiful about the full-circle nature of him finally making something for the bigscreen that hews so closely to his roots.
He’s been looking for a director for a while now, and I hope he finds the right one, a filmmaker who understands the world of Pee-Wee Herman as instinctually as Tim Burton did back in 1985. That’s a hard thing to make happen twice in a lifetime, though, and I suspect that one of the reasons Reubens is so forthcoming about filmmakers names over and over again over the years is because he’s willing the project to happen. He’s trying to use the press as one of the many ways he pushes the rock up the hill, and that’s a tactic that has a long and proven history of working in the past. He’s not lying when he says the Safdies are interested. There was a moment that was true. And maybe they hadn’t officially passed yet. Paul’s making it clear in public that he’s excited about them as a possibility. That’s flattering. That’s a way of wishing the thing into happening.
Now it sounds like that’s not going to be the case, and that’s fine. It’ll be someone else. Or maybe it won’t. There’s a chance Paul will age out of playing the part and we’ll never get to see that final Pee-Wee Herman film. It’s been a long and complicated pre-production so far, and there are no guarantees here.
Well… one guarantee. I guarantee that as Paul Reuben tours, he’ll keep talking about the possibility of this film and people will keep asking him about it and he’ll keep wishing out loud. And that’s perfectly fine with me. I just hope people keep things in perspective as they report each shift in the wind. It’s just like the remake of The Crow or the new Spawn film or any other project that you hear about like clockwork every three-to-six months but that never seems to move forward. Realize why you’re hearing what you’re hearing.
It’s funny how fast things spread. Like a single tweet, let’s say…
Hamilton
All Lin-Manuel Miranda did was tweet three words…
… and everyone lost their damn fool minds. Turns out, there was good reason, and the announcement that Disney has dated Hamilton for 2021 is cause to celebrate. By all accounts, the film that will be released was shot on the original stage, with the original cast, but it’s not just a simple “live recording” of the musical. I’m excited to see it, and to see it with that cast. But, man, talk about an audience that is super-attuned to an artist’s every word. As soon as he put those three words up, the super-fans were on the case. They all already knew that the original cast had been shot for eventual release, and they immediately went into overdrive speculating that this was finally the announcement.
This is an audience that is going to do much of the work for Disney between now and the end of 2021, generating their own content, generating their own ongoing hype. It’s an active and engaged audience that has been chugging along since the show premiered on Broadway, and this announcement simply energized them anew. This is when Disney’s marketing team does their best work, when they have an audience that is already out there just waiting to be approached. They will bring the biggest and most prominent Hamilton fans into the fold and make sure that they’re in the know and at every event, and it will pay off for them spectacularly. I wouldn’t underestimate just how big Hamilton could be, and how it could change the business of Broadway and how they record and release those shows as films eventually. It could easily turn into a landmark event, and it’s the right company to keep stoking those fires for the next year and a half.
No one is more confident about hyping something than Disney, and when they actually have the right thing to sell, they are truly unstoppable.
Image courtesy Universal Pictures