We are running out of ways to run out of ideas
It doesn't have to be this way, you know. We can have new and good stuff.
This week Nintendo dropped its long-anticipated trailer for the new Super Mario Bros. Movie, the barn-burning media sensation we’ve all been waiting for:
Ha ha, of course we haven’t actually been waiting for this. Why would we? Mario is one of the most densely produced franchises in the history of the world. They’ve been releasing major Mario media on a relatively consistent annual basis for about forty years; Mario himself has been a permanent feature of our pop-culture landscape since the very early 1980s; there is no aspect of this character and this series that we haven’t already seen dozens of times before in games, in movies, in television. It’s all been done. We did not need this movie to know or experience Mario in pretty much every way he can possibly be known and experienced. It adds nothing at all to any canon of any kind.
And yet still they made it, dropping reportedly close to $100 million on the production. I would guess they will recoup and overtake that investment to a considerable degree, because people seem very eager to pay for tired, overworked, uninteresting stuff like this these days. A huge portion of our cinematic landscape is now just an endless string of old, worn-out franchise installments—you can barely even call these productions movies, it would be better to call them “content,” just filler stuff from corporate creators, unexciting and useless and deadening.
I will complain about this dearth of artistic creativity as long as I live, or as long as it lasts, whichever comes first. But it’s not wrong of readers to ask what, exactly, I might propose to replace this awful paradigm. The ostensible answer is that I’m not really sure; the more important answer is that it’s not really my job to know, nor is it yours. It never was: In the past it wasn’t up to moviegoers to come up with new and captivating ideas for the box office, it was the responsibility of filmmakers to do that. And they generally did it. These days they do not. Consider the top results that Google wants you to see when you search for “upcoming movies:”
Just amazing: A bunch of sequels, a bunch of entries in the garbage unwatchable comic book movie canon, some adaptations of nearly-ancient media. Hey look, another Halloween movie! That series is nearly 50 years old, they’ve made 13 of those movies, but who cares, right? The one in the upper-right featuring Jason Momoa as some sort of goat—that’s a movie based on Little Nemo in Slumberland, a comic strip which, it should be stressed, is about 120 years old. Even James Cameron, one of the all-time great directors in cinema history, has been relegated to making a sequel to one of his earlier works, Avatar; he is scheduled to direct another Avatar movie in 2024, then another one in 2026. The last major motion picture with which he was involved before this was 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate, the seventh installment in a decades-old franchise. Absolutely reprehensible.
(The lone truly original movie on the list above, “100 Years,” isn’t set to be released until 2115; it’s being billed as “the movie you will never see” and appears to be little more than a gag stunt to sell 100-year-old cognac.)
Heck, in the past, even when they were mining established franchises for quick-and-easy theater bait, filmmakers were a bit more creative about it. The new Mario Bros. movie looks basically like the last 12 Mario video games made by Nintendo; when they made the first live-action Mario movie in 1993, on the other hand, they took the unorthodox approach of turning a lithe, hyper-athletic video game character into a fat, cumbersome curmudgeon who more or less resembled a high school janitor in both temperament and ability:
Now that’s creativity: If they got this movie completely wrong, at least they went about it right. Can you imagine a film studio exhibiting 1/10th the weird originality today? Nobody would underwrite it, the shareholders would reject it, it would be dead before the first draft was completed. And yet 1993’s Super Mario Bros. was at least still more compelling, and more artistically interesting, than whatever that thing is that’s coming out next year.
In a sense you cannot blame filmmakers today for being so creatively useless. This style of filmmaking is just raking in the dough. Whereas before studios were taking considerable gambles in producing films of unknown provenance and uncertain reception, now they can just crank out an Avatar sequel every two years and make fistfuls of cash without trying. Our culture is artistically dead but the people who make our culture have never been richer.
Yet something’s got to give. Because we’re running out of ways to run out of ideas; even the modern approach to filmmaking is unwinding, eating itself, to the point that we’re starting to see movies that quite literally might as well be video games, just computer-animated slop that you could easily be playing on your Nintendo Switch for probably about the same amount of money. A culture this dead is not a culture you want any part of. And I think we’re running out of time—at a certain point all of the good old creators are going to die and we’ll be left with only those artists who were reared in this deadened environment and who know of no other way of making art. At that point a video game movie will seem Kubrickian by comparison.
I was so disappointed when I realized the only movie that looked interesting on your list, 100 years, was an advertising gag! My reaction to the possibility of a decent movie highlights the validity of your essay. I have been lamenting for quite some time that the art of cinema is dead. But it’s not just cinema—it’s books, music, paintings, poetry, plays, etc. Except for new technology, it seems like we are headed into an intellectual wasteland. It feels lonelier now somehow. We’ve already been in a political wasteland. I guess art was the next logical piece of humanity to go. I wonder if technology won’t be far behind.