“We all felt it [the failure of Joker 2]… We didn’t want to fail David. We think we’re turning a corner with Minecraft and we’ll have wind in the sails for our diversified slate strategy.” That’s Michael DeLuca with a grim summation of the current state of affairs in American cinema: “We think we’re turning a corner with Minecraft.” The article is aimed at exactly two people: David Zaslav, head of Warner Brothers, and Paul Thomas Anderson, director of One Battle After Another. Variety makes it clear that, “One Battle will need to make $260 million globally, at least, to justify its means. For context: DiCaprio’s Once Upon a Time [in Hollywood] earned $392.1 million at the box office, but it also co-starred Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie.”
“It also co-starred Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie.” You can’t add up movie stars like points in Pong, otherwise Rian Johnson would be the richest director of his generation. That kind of semi-measurable “star wattage” hasn’t really existed since the end of celluloid film production in 2012; while many filmmakers still shoot on 35mm and 16mm, DCP’s and digital cinema cameras are the standard now, just as forecasted. Whatever star power existed in the 20th century came out of the photochemical process, production and projection. The ideal situation, I think, would be bringing back celluloid production on a mass level, near universal except for independent and amateur filmmakers and stray experiments; DCP’s would still be used for projection, but filmmakers would be forced to light their movies properly again. You can only bring so much out of a frame of celluloid. Limitations made movie stars, because they need to be lit properly.
Why was the push on Anderson? Warner Brothers gave him $140 million to make a loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, set in present day America, and… brace yourself… political. According to test screenings, Sean Penn plays a white supremacist (the only character who, Variety notes, has tested as “likable”) and Leonardo DiCaprio is our hero, Teyana Taylor his wife and sidekick—lots of car chases, shootouts, action sequences. Anderson has never shot a film on this scale before, and it could very well be his masterpiece—why doesn’t Warner Brothers think it’ll match Once Upon a Time in Hollywood? There’s nothing in theaters right now. There are no movies. It doesn’t matter One Battle After Another is two and a half hours long, if it’s good people will go and tell their friends about it, just like every other successful movie in the history of the medium. Who exactly is beguiled by the movie? Is there a RED STATE/BLUE STATE angle that’s become “difficult” during these test screenings in Dallas, Phoenix, and Las Vegas? I doubt it’s anything as phoned in as the ending of Mickey 17, I mean I hope it’s not.
Anderson could and should join Christopher Nolan and Wes Anderson among working American directors who work with a blank check. Licorice Pizza would’ve been his first hit if it hadn’t come out during the pandemic. But then we’re talking about money again, a problem since the 1980s when the entertainment press started reporting box office grosses. Albert Brooks complained about this sort of thinking infecting the audience in 1993, overhearing people in line talk about what to see: “Oh, this one made $40 million this weekend!” If this stuff was kept within the company, you’d probably get more people going to see it on opening weekend, because then they haven’t been poisoned by this moronic accountant logic. Just go see the movie. Studios need to keep their movies in theaters longer, anyway; 90 days, as Sean Baker said at the Oscar’s, should be the bare minimum. Because after those 90 days, some of these films will endure in the public imagination and make even more money in the long run as “existing IP.” Are you receiving me, Mr. Zaslav?
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits