Some more Iron Man geeking out

[trinityvixen]

I think Jon Favreau is a-dork-able. (Spoilers if you haven't seen the movie.) Loved this:

It's very difficult to keep these franchises from running out of gas after two [movies]. The high point seems to be the second one, judging by history: If you just look at the consensus in the reviews, you see that X-Men 2 and Spider-Man 2 are sort of seen by the fans as the sort of high point of both franchises, though I don't necessarily agree with that.

I don't necessarily agree with him (in fact, I agree with the consensus that the second film in both the X-Men and Spider-Man film franchises were the strongest), but I like that he's keeping in mind the attack of the fatal death that is the last film in a trilogy.

Why trilogies? Is it a beginning/middle/end thing? Have we just gotten used to the three-act structure inside of a work that we impose it anything that work would hope to achieve? That's fine when you're not making somethng that is, by its nature, serialized past the three-act thing. Serials live in a perpetual middle with minor climaxes and denouements throughout, but you're not supposed to get to an end. On a TV show or a comic book, you can lather, rinse, repeat the formula until you've got fabulous Pantene hair. (Just look at Stargate. That held on for ten years.)

Movies complicate the pattern. By their very nature, they impact upon us more forcibly, especially if you see it in the theater where the assualt on your senses is enhanced by a screen at least one story high, speakers that could vibrate the Earth itself, and the immersion factor that keeps us (ideally) isolated from the distractions elsewhere. Every movie is its own Best Story Ever, and serializing it takes a lot of work. You need archetypes instead of characters wherever you can get away with it. You need bad guys that are Really Bad People (at least they should be for most of the film). You need a theme that you can return to when all else fails. You need to know that while this time in this film, the girl/family/country/world/planet/universe is in danger, there will always be another time when it will be. Not that that should diminish this time, though. This time? It totally might all go kaput.

That's an impossibly hard thing to get right, and the penchant for sequels that come in threes makes it hard to visualize the risk to the hero(ine) as being something perpetual the way it should be in a proper serial. (Note: not proper sequels of three-act sorts like Lord of the Rings, but serialized, individualized franchises like James Bond, et al.) If we know that there will only be as much trouble as it takes to fill three movies, it's easy for us to get bored.

So announcing that there WILL be sequels to Iron Man but that some of the material that includes the title character might be contained in other movies is a pretty genius marketing (if not assuredly artistic) move to make. Even if Iron Man makes his three pictures, the possibility that he might be in an Avengers movie makes the third film seem less damnably terminal.

Of course, as bad as an Avengers movie might be could really put a nail in a coffin. It's a trade-off for the suspense of audiences not knowing that this outing to see the great red-and-gold one may not be the last.

Comments

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I would think that, in a town full of auteurs who do actually think the work they do is important that at least ONE of them would stumble into a position of authority such that they could make the need for interesting and new stuff! relevant to the bottom line. I guess not, huh?

[cbreakr.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how many auteurs there are in Hollywood anymore; that era ended in the late seventies. It's been more and more of a business since. Auteurs are also not the type to want to run production companies (they'd rather direct) and don't usually attach themselves to superheroes. Maybe if we could get David Kronenberg involved...

If anything were to change all of this it would have to be a new generation with lower production costs escaping from the orbit of large studios en-masse, which just might happen yet.

Even better would be skipping film and going straight to television al la Preacher pairing with HBO (I really hope that this will be good). Comics are meant to be serials, right? There's more time to build and always the question of another season.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Comics are meant to be serials.

Honestly? I want the British TV system to take over. I want people to get excited about limited projects and miniseries all over again. We need to recognize how insanely profitable and surprising the short series can be. That's not to say all British shows don't go on forever and ever like American counterparts, just that they're more supportive of limited run shows. It does mean you can't milk the money for forever, but I would think if you knew time was pressing and there'd only ever be this one chance at the show, it would be more suspenseful and addictive, not mention easier to re-run. (Then again, the rules about syndication are probably going to be a bitch if that was how it all went.)

I dunno, just talking out my ass, probably. No surprise there.

[cbreakr.livejournal.com]

I think the more widespread subscription to cable (partly due to its being coupled with high-speed internet) is driving television to be a better medium for many stories than film. The problem right now is ROI for TV vs film, but with the film industry doing nothing to boost its profits other than pressing theatres to charge more for tickets and the growing use of Netflix and bittorrent (regardless of the throttling ISPs want to try), we might be due for a sea change in the next five years or so as the entertainment industry as a whole tries to reorganize. If it works out this way, we'll probably have better quality films from big studios to compete with smaller ones (and ticket prices) and more non-reality TV not running on networks, all of them competing with internet-based entertainment for our attention.

Here's hoping for a cheap entertainment golden age... or at least something better than what we have now.