quoms:
quoms:
“Obviously, the ‘Twilight’ IP was the star there,” said director-producer Aaron Kaufman, who has worked with a number of alums from the vampire-human love story. “The shift to promoting IP over stars may have sounded like a good idea because IP doesn’t overdose or tweet about Nazis. However, this shift has left the cupboard bare when it comes to next-generation stars. This is an issue now that the IP stores have been cleaned out and all that’s left is Tube-Sock Man or whatever Marvel has yet to make.”
This article points to the DVD → streaming transition as a pivotal moment in the decline of the star system for producing and marketing movies, but treats this as a purely technological shift (streaming = greater market segmentation and less marketing for a given release largely due to the nature of the medium) instead of also a shift in property relations. If a star is a leading actor who audiences have a relationship with over an extended period of time, it’s worth thinking about the role that ownership of home video might play in maintaining an actor’s relevance outside the release window of any given film… ‘90s Kids Will Remember™ when watching a movie at home meant picking something off your shelf of VHS tapes or DVDs, and as a result there were movies you watched over and over again years after they came out, not just because they were good but also because they were what was there. Do you know how many times I’ve seen Troy or The Chronicles of Riddick? Not even stone cold classics, just good mid-tier action films that will hold up to a bunch of rewatches. Would I think about Brad Pitt or Vin Diesel in the same way if I only saw their movies in the month or two after release?
The wider selection of streaming isn’t a bad thing in principle, but it means so many movies and TV shows just vanish into the ether after release and are never given the chance to develop that kind of long-term following. They don’t even have to be removed from the service, just buried under the endless deluge of new content. Merchandising 101: if you never see something with your eyeballs, you won’t think about it, and you won’t watch it. If you do happen to remember a movie from a few years ago you’d like to watch, in principle it’s probably available, but there’s no guarantee it’s on the streaming service you subscribe to, and those things rotate every few months. It’s never going to be ready at hand in the way a DVD (or a file on your external hard drive!!!!!!!) would be.
This too damages the long-term star-building potential of movies, on top of the lower marketing budgets and the subordination of actors to IP and the fact that frankly studios know you’re not going to rewatch anything so things aren’t made to hold up to a rewatch. (Just look at “no spoilers” fandom culture and the plummeting multipliers for theatrical blockbusters for confirmation of this strategy and its effects.)
Shortly after leaving Hollywood I remember the thing was “packaging”, agencies would assemble actors, directors, and scripts from among their clients, thus claiming territory (and capturing money and influence away) from studios and producers, how’d that go?
