#23 Interstellar, Rob Lowe, and How To Build A Franchise
Hello again. I know. It’s been a minute. Then again maybe it hasn’t. The year 2020 is #TimeSoup. It both feels like forever and at the same time it is also somehow Fall.
I don’t know about where you are, but here in Tacoma, the last few days have been full of smoke from fires in Eastern Washington and closer. My son started a construction job yesterday. He and his new coworkers had to abandon the construction site in the afternoon when a nearby fire surrounded them within minutes. They were barely able to evacuate and drive out to safety. This marks the second time my son has called me in 2020 in fear for his life. The earlier incident was when he attended protests in Seattle which was impossibly only a couple of months ago.
It looks like I’m getting about one of these out a month, but I may be able to get another one out before October hits us. Hopefully, when things get back to normal, I’ll have more time for this newsletter.
What I’m Listening To: Rob Lowe Literally
The pandemic has made us all behave differently. For many celebrities, they’ve found themselves with a lot of time on their hands. Actor Rob Lowe has chosen to take this time to start a podcast called Literally and it may be just the thing to get you through the pandemic. Rob talks to people like Magic Johnson and Mike Meyers and Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Pratt. They tell stories to each other and have a good time. It’s fun and funny exactly the sort of escape from the frightening reality so much of life has become these days.
I first saw Rob Lowe in movies like Bad Influence and St. Elmo’s Fire in the 1980s, but really got to be a fan of his during his time on the West Wing. It wasn’t until I read his book, Love Life, that I got to know the more personal side of him. He seems like a genuinely good guy. And his kids have a great time making fun of him online.
What I’m Watching: Interstellar
I’m continuing to look at Christopher Nolan movies. Originally I was doing this in anticipation of Nolan’s latest, Tenet, but I honestly don’t know when I’m going to get to see it. The local theaters around here haven’t reopened and when they do, I’m not sure I want to expose myself to potential Coronavirus carriers simply to see a movie. I’m also not all that interested in sitting in a chair and wearing a mask for two and a half hours. For the time being, I’ll have to experience Nolan on the television screen.
Interstellar is Christopher Nolan trying to make 2001: A Space Odyssey for modern audiences. It is epic in scope. It uses cutting edge special effects. It adheres as well as it can to modern understandings of science and astronomy. It is moody, transcendent, and ethereal at times.
Interstellar takes place on a near-future Earth where crops are failing, the climate is changing, and humanity is on the verge of dying. Made only six years ago in 2014, the movie feels eerily prescient. When a dust storm approaches, Matthew McConaughey’s character tells his kids to ‘mask up’ and though it’s not because of a pandemic, that line still had a larger impact than the last time I watched it.
McConaughey plays Cooper, a former NASA pilot turned farmer who is trying to raise his two kids in a world that’s dying. When Nolan regular, Michael Caine offers him an opportunity to not only command a new space mission but travel to another solar system entirely in order to save humanity, McConaughey jumps at the chance even though it means leaving his children behind.
Like almost all of Nolan’s movies, Interstellar plays with time and perception. Thanks to the relationship between gravity and time, there is a planet they land on in which every few minutes on the planet equals years on Earth. I’ve probably seen Interstellar a dozen times, but I cry every time I see the scene where they return from the planet and see all they’ve missed.
Interstellar isn’t a perfect movie, but it doesn’t need to be because when it works, it’s among the best science fiction movies ever made. Interstellar showed that Nolan is a filmmaker capable of making an emotionally resonant high-budget blockbuster. It is Nolan swinging for the fences and clearing them easily. I have a hard time picking favorite Nolan movies, but I think Memento, Inception, and Interstellar are my top three and who is on top depends on my mood. That said, I’ve only Dunkirk (the movie Nolan made after Interstellar) once. It may find its way near the top spot when I review it in the next newsletter.
What I’m Thinking About: How To Build A Franchise
“How can we make something as popular as the Marvel Cinematic Universe?”
This is a question being asked anywhere entertainment is made. The MCU is the most popular movie franchise of all time. It spans 23 movies in the last 12 years and shows no sign of stopping anytime soon. And so far, no other franchise seems to have the first clue how to replicate their success.
DC famously tried and failed to follow in Marvel’s footsteps, but they botched it (and continue to botch it). Before being sold to Disney, Fox tried to match the MCU’s success with the X-Men movies but fizzled with increasingly worse movies after the strong reboot, X-Men: First Class. Both of these franchises made the same mistake that Marvel managed to avoid.
In order to understand why the MCU was successful it is worth looking at how the MCU started. It started in 2008 with Iron Man. At the time, most people didn’t have the first clue who Iron Man was. He wasn’t as popular as Spider-Man or Superman or Batman. The first Iron Man movie on its own does not seem like the beginning of the largest, most profitable franchise of all time. In fact, with the exception of the after-credits scene, there is almost no narrative connective tissue in the entire movie. No Infinity Stones. No Avengers. No other heroes. The MCU started by taking a B-List hero and introducing him through his origin story. That was about it.
Next came the Hulk movie with Ed Norton, which again, spent very little time planting seeds for other movies. Then Iron Man 2, which was basically just a continuation of the first Iron Man with an introduction to Black Widow. Then Thor, with a cameo by Hawkeye. Then Captain America. Then after five mostly successful movies, Marvel did the first Avengers movie and it worked.
By comparison, let’s look at the DCU. They start off with their flagship character, Superman in Man of Steel. Then they follow this up with Superman vs. Batman pitting their two most popular characters against each other. Then Wonder Woman, which does an admittedly solid job of introducing her character. And then Justice League which I think we can all admit is a disaster, but why?
The DCU fails because they’re too eager to get to the end. Like DC, Marvel had a movie in which their two most popular characters fought. That was Captain America: Civil War. By the time that came out we had seen Iron Man in five movies and Cap in four. DC literally introduces us to Batman by having him fight a Superman we’ve known for exactly one movie. Oh, and that same movie has the first appearances of Flash and Wonder Woman because apparently it wasn’t busy enough.
Fox made similar mistakes with the X-Men franchise. The X-Men films have tried to tell the most famous X-Men storyline, Dark Phoenix twice now. First in X-Men: The Last Stand and more recently in X-Men: Dark Phoenix. They manage to make the same mistake twice and it’s the same mistake that DC made. For X-Men, it is worth looking at the source material. Jean Grey emerged as the Phoenix in Uncanny X-Men #101 published in October of 1976. She was incredibly powerful from the start, but she notably was not evil. In fact, she was a hero who literally saved the universe. Phoenix remained a hero with barely a hint of her potential corruption until Uncanny X-Men #129 published in January of 1980. In other words, Jean Grey as Phoenix was a hero for over three years before she even started to become a threat. And yet, despite seven X-Men movies, there has yet to be one full movie where Phoenix was a hero.
This problem isn’t just seen in movies. This past week a new Avengers video game has come out. And while I haven’t played it, from what I hear it’s a button mashing, glitch game that doesn’t come close to its potential. It would have benefited from a solid Iron Man game, followed by a solid Hulk game, and following a slow build up like its movie counterparts.
If you look for it, you can see people making this mistake all the time. We see it in politics when some third party runs a presidential candidate while failing to have one any significant congressional seats or even local elections. We see it in political movements where they want giant, sweeping changes that aren’t possible without incremental ones. We see it in relationships when people meet and suddenly move in or get married.
And to be clear, sometimes people make this mistake and it manages to work out anyway, but those are outliers. History is littered with franchises and projects that could have been successful if people simply put the time in and built a solid foundation first.
It’s good to have large goals and to shoot for the stars, but look at Christopher Nolan. His first movie was shot in black and white for $6,000. He didn’t follow that up with Interstellar. Interstellar wasn’t his third movie either. It was his NINTH film. You don’t start at the end. You start at the beginning. If you want to have a franchise as successful as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you’ve got to earn it. You earn it by putting in the groundwork and building a solid foundation. Otherwise your dreams of success will eventually (and sometimes immediately) fall apart.
Jack Cameron