The Perfect Movie

Dr. Mabuse, the subject of the very first film franchise.
Fritz Lang created this series and had a hand in them
from 1922 to 1960!

Hollywood is a loose term for an industry that combines the artistic and the financial. Actors and filmmakers are organized into a cohesive production unit by producers, who are able to underwrite this production by controlling investment money. If the choices made are good, the artistry produced is competent or even masterful, the result is a film: a cinematic statement that is then offered in an open market where the audience will vote with their pocketbooks as to this work's merit.

This is, and has always been, insane.

Taking products (movies), remaking them from scratch by re-arranging casts and crews and stories, and presenting them to the public several hundred times a year is no way for studios to maintain a decent return on investment. It's even crazier if you consider that a producer can make every apparently correct decision-- and still lose.

Here comes the Crimson Permanent Assurance Company!

Two bombs from last holiday season nicely illustrate this weirdness. Mortal Engines was produced by Peter Jackson (of Lord of the Rings fame), based on an award-winning novel, and featured some eye-popping effects. It died at the box office, $16M domestic take against a budget of over $100M (worldwide it took in $103M, which is still a loss considering publicity costs). Welcome to Marwen was the same formula (great director, great source, wild effects, and this one had actual stars in it) and it bombed even bigger, relatively speaking: Worldwide gross of just over $12M against a $40M budget.

Of course there are many other stories that are the reverse: Highly profitable against investment. Green Book, this year's unlikely Best Picture winner, made $70M against a modest $23M budget-- and it will do a lot more now with that award. Black Panther was also a runway hit, making $700M against a $200M budget. In fact, the top of the list of most profitable film releases* are franchise entries, the majority from one studio: Marvel.

Marvel Studios may have found that elusive formula for making the Perfect Movie.

The last big one-- Avengers: Infinity War-- made a mind-blowing $2 billion dollars in worldwide ticket sales, $700 million in domestic box-office against a budget of just over $300 million. The entire slate of 20 MCU movies have grossed $17.5 billion dollars as of January 2019.

I'm not talking about artistic perfection or narrative perfection: this is about the studio system discovering a type of general-release movie that will consistently generate a healthy return on investment. The elements of this formula seem to be:

A sample of the dizzying number of characters in the MCU.

A long, long tail. Comic book movies draw on a core audience who know the characters and plots from childhood or adolescence. They started with this core, and as more movies were released, the wide appeal and cultural impact of these films overshadowed this core fan base and began to include people who did not grow up knowing who Carol Danvers or Groot or Pepper Potts were.

A wide universe. 20 core MCU movies have been released, and the narratives of each film interconnect like jigsaw puzzle pieces. In terms of narrative breadth, this has not really been done on this scale before. Franchise films tend be linear: Original, sequel, sequel, etc. The MCU has simultaneous narrative threads. “Captain America” films and “Avenger” films are deeply interconnected. The “Guardians of the Galaxy” films seemed to be an independent series-- until they steered right into Avengers: Infinity War. The universe woven from these films is unrealistic in detail, full of magic and superheroes, but the sense of a peripheral reality in the MCU is uncannily similar to how we experience intrinsic reality.

Producer-driven consistency. Kevin Feige is the guy in charge of the MCU, and he makes sure every film hews close to each other in look, feel and narrative. There are exceptions, but these are flagged (Spiderman Across the Spiderverse with insane animation, Deadpool by lotsa swears) and don't really cross over into the main MCU in any meaningful sense.

“Producer-driven” is the key here. Over in the DC universe they haven't quite figured this out yet. DC films are still director-driven, which leads to a lot of do-overs. Pick your favorite version of Batman: Tim Burton, Joel Shumacher, Christopher Nolan or Bryan Singer? Meanwhile, Iron Man has been Robert Downey Jr. from the very beginning.

Spectacle. Marvel Studios single-handedly saved the Visual Effects industry. Every Marvel movie -- even grittier ones like Deadpool -- are laden with effects sequences. This makes MCU movies very expensive to make, but as every single one of them has at least doubled their budgets in ticket sales, hiring hundreds of pixel-pushers to add mesh textures to Doctor Strange's magic cape is money well spent.

We're in Peak Comic Book Movie mode right now. This
was seen in the lobby of the local multiplex.
Left: Captain Marvel, MCU. Right: Captain Marvel, DCEU.

Humor. This is another thing DC doesn't do too well. Marvel had the good luck to hire Joss Whedon to direct the first two Avengers movies, and he injected a steady stream of comedic lines through both of them. This has the effect of humanizing these impossibly heroic characters, widening their appeal. Now this director's quirk is a feature. The Ant-Man and Deadpool films are very close to comedies.

A long lead time. Marvel, back when they partnered with many studios before being subsumed by Disney, worked out the kinks with several franchises, such as the "X-Men" and early "Hulk" movies. Iron Man (2008) was the first entry into the profit machine that was the MCU. These one-off efforts resulted in the one consistent failure: the Fantastic Four movies. The first iteration was mediocre, and the 2015 re-boot was a notorious failure.

Interestingly, this Perfect Movie formula has one flaw to it: an expiration date. It's hard to re-invent and re-boot when your bigger-than-life characters are strongly associated with one actor. Iron Man is about to age out of his suit. Chris Evans' multi-picture deal is done and he will turn in his last performance as Steve Rogers in Avengers: Endgame. (Good luck not being associated with Captain America for the rest of your life, Chris: you were just too good in that role.) We've got two more entries into the MCU-- Captain Marvel and Endgame-- then this universe will essentially come to an end, broken up into individual sequel storylines.

So take note, movie producers: You can absolutely create a Perfect Movie, a film with guaranteed profits and no risk. All you need are characters beloved for generations, hundreds of millions of dollars for production, and the backing of the biggest studio in the world. It can be done!

*The most profitable film of all time is Paranormal Activity (2007), a “found-footage” horror film starring nobody they spent $450,000 to make. It took in $89,300,000 in box-office, a ROI of nearly 20,000%. It also spawned six sequels. But know that for this film there are a hundred that didn't do anything or even failed to find distribution. Risky.