[COLUMN] This Isn't Mining Intellectual Property, It's Cultural Fracking | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Last month, Disney CEO Bob Iger announced that the company would be scaling down the production of Marvel films and television shows, so that they would be producing no more than three movies and two television shows a year. This garnered considerable news coverage, even though it wasn’t really news.

Marvel Studios consistently released three movies a year: Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2, Spider-Man: Homecoming and Thor: Ragnarok in 2017; Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War and Ant-Man and the Wasp in 2018; Captain Marvel, Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far From Home in 2019; Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in 2022; Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 and The Marvels in 2023.

The only recent years to deviate from that template were due to the coronavirus. The studio released no films in 2020, and four films in 2021. The writers’ strike will have a similar effect. Deadpool and Wolverine is the studio’s only release this year, but next year will feature Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts, Fantastic Four and (maybe) Blade. As such, Iger’s announcement was a nothingburger, likely an effort to reassure shareholders in the wake of a recent leadership challenge.

Still, the comments were interesting because they articulated something that often lurks unspoken beneath modern film production. Restating his belief in the quality of the Disney brand, Iger boasted that “the IP that we’re mining, including all the sequels that we’re doing, is second to none.” It’s a very direct way of discussing the studio’s approach to its library of intellectual property, treating it as a natural resource from which the studio aims to extract maximum financial value.

To be clear, the metaphor of “mining” intellectual property is not a new one. It’s often used in discussions of modern franchise production. Journalists write about creators being sent to work “in the IP mines”, tasked with extracting shareholder value from exploitable properties. Reports on shareholder presentations summarize executives’ plans to profit by shrewdly “exploiting IP.” Established brands are licensed out “to let others mine” them.

It is important not to clutch pearls about this. Hollywood has always been a capitalist industry, driven by the pursuit of profit. To quote Warner Discovery CEO David Zaslav quoting Jerry Maguire, “It’s not show friends – it’s show business.” The industry has always been built around the promise of maximizing return on investment. Making entertainment is tough. It’s a miracle any films get made at all, let alone that any of them turn out to be good.

Hollywood has always been a shifting and changing industry. The studios have always been beholden to larger market forces. Gulf & Western bought Paramount in 1966. Sony bought Columbia in 1989. In many ways, this is what director David Fincher was getting at with Mank, a film set in the 1930s but very much engaged with contemporary filmmaking and politics. It has always been like this, to some extent or another. There never was a golden age.

At the same time, it does feel like there has been a sharp acceleration in trends over the past few decades building to the crassness of this sort of worldview. Without romanticizing the past, there was a sense that the people who decided what movies got made used to actually love movies. Former Paramount head Robert Evans was a deeply flawed and complicated human being, but did he love movies? You bet your ass he did.

“We have no obligation to make art,” former Disney CEO Michael Eisner famously stated. “We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make a statement.” However, while that quote has become shorthand for the cynicism of the industry, it’s worth remembering how he ended it: “But to make money, it is often important to make history, to make art, or to make some significant statement.” Executives may never have valued art over money, but they understood art’s value.

In contrast, the past couple of decades have seen Hollywood drift away from that understanding. “Creators lost sight of what their number one objective needed to be,” Bob Iger boasted last year. “We have to entertain first. It’s not about messages.” This arguably sits in the context of a broader contempt for the creative process. Iger spent the writers’ and actors’ strikes complaining that creatives were not being “realistic” in their demands.

Of course, creative projects are risky. There is no way to know how critics or audiences will react to a new project. This may explain why studio executives have become increasingly reluctant to champion bold and creative projects in the way that they used to. In recent years, executives have sought to outsource that responsibility, the value of their own taste, to some external and inhuman metric: feeding pitches into algorithms or hiring based on Rotten Tomatoes scores.

There’s an understandable desire to minimize risk within the industry, but that comes at the cost of stripping out any humanity. As early as 2007, critic David Denby noted how hard it was to sell studios on original concepts or ideas. “In the jargon of the trade, such movies are ‘execution dependent’ (they have to be good to succeed), rather than ‘audience dependent’ (the audience will show up regardless of the quality),” Denby wrote.

“It has come to this: a movie studio can no longer risk making good movies,” Denby later argued. “Their business model depends on the assured audience and the blockbuster. It has done so for years and will continue to do so for years more. Nothing is going to stop the success of The Avengers from laying waste to the movies as an art form. The big revenues from such pictures rarely get siphoned into more adventurous projects; they get poured into the next sequel or a new franchise.”

This was around the time that studios really discovered the power of brands and franchises. There had always been franchises and sequels, but those were built on an understanding that they could only be sustained for so long before actors aged out or audiences grew tired. Even allowing for the appeal of sequels, time and money had to be invested in original movies to become franchises. It was like ancient agriculture. For a healthy harvest, occasionally a field had to be left fallow.

Over the past two decades, driven by greed and profit, the studios disregarded the logic of long-term sustainability and went all-in on ‘audience dependent’ properties, movies that could attract audiences by virtue of nostalgic brand loyalty rather than on their own quality. To be fair, some (even many) of these movies were good. However, it was not essential that they be good. It was only essential that they exist at all. Turn up the pump. Flood the zone. If you film it, they will come.

This approach was hugely profitable in the short- and medium-term. Disney had a record-breaking 2019, in which they earned more in the first seven months than any studio had in any previous year. It did this by merciless exploiting its existing brands: Marvel (Captain Marvel, Endgame), Disney animation (Frozen II), Pixar (Toy Story 4), live-action Disney remakes (The Lion King, Aladdin, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil) and Star Wars (The Rise of Skywalker).

What followed was inevitable. Sowing is fun. Reaping is not. The past couple of years have been rough for these studios that spent decades printing money off brands with little regard for quality. Sending Pixar movies to Disney+ to boost subscribers conditioned audiences to wait at home for them. Flooding the market with superhero films led to the failure of Quantumania and The Marvels. Even the live action remakes seem to be underperforming, if The Little Mermaid is any indication.

To extend the ecological metaphor, this is the inevitable outcome of unsustainable attempts to extract profit from the raw resource that is intellectual property. It’s a disastrous collapse. It’s not mining IP, it’s “cultural fracking”, a term seemingly coined by Jay Springlett and defined by Andrew Dana Hudson, “the capitalist process of endlessly extracting new value out of the sedimentary layers of meaning that comprise mass culture from the past.”

It's a process that is brutal and ruthless in its efficiency, a shameless desire to wring any possible value from familiar imagery and iconography with little regard for concepts like long-term sustainability. It doesn’t just damage the property in general, it damages the larger cultural landscape. The entertainment industry used to be a lot more diverse in terms of the kinds of films that could get made and the budgets at which they could be produced. A lot of that is gone now.

It also affects the movies themselves, as these films become increasingly abstracted and meaningless, reduced to two-hour-long memetic showreels. If Ghostbusters made busting feel good, then Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire makes audiences feel nothing at all. These movies rarely evoke genuine emotions any longer, but instead faded photocopies of memories of watching earlier and better films. Many of these movies are about nothing but the furtherance of the brand.

It's an approach that alienates younger audiences, and makes it harder to pass pop culture down from one generation to another. Younger cinemagoers are offered nothing but the detritus of their parents’ childhood, so why should they embrace movie-going? It’s no wonder that studies suggest that “three-quarters (74%) of Gen Z and millennials prefer originals to remakes.” However, the studios have refused to invest the time or the energy in training these audiences to watch movies.

Iger was correct. Disney – and many of its contemporaries – have been ruthlessly efficient at mining intellectual property. The studios are now so deep underground that no light can reach them. As the cave walls crumble around them, the only question remains whether there’s still time to dig themselves out.