[COLUMN] Mr. & Mrs. Smith Makes an Argument for Adapting Mediocre IP | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Last week, Amazon released Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

The eight-episode streaming series, starring Donald Glover and Maya Erskine as married secret agents John and Joan Smith, updates the 2005 movie of the same name, starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, which just coincidentally shared a basic premise and core themes with the 1996 CBS series of the same name, starring Scott Bakula and Maria Bello. The latest addition to the Mr. & Mrs. Smith canon is surprisingly good, earning appreciably stronger reviews than the earlier film.

There are a couple of ways of looking at Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Narratively, like The Curse, Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a television show companion to the recent wave of post-pandemic prestige meditations on marriage. Indeed, the show inverts the dynamic of the film. In the film, each member of the married couple didn’t know that the other was a spy. However, in the show, both are introduced as espionage operatives, living undercover as a married couple, and navigating the complicated dynamic that creates.

In a broader sense, Mr. & Mrs. Smith can also be seen as a companion piece to the other big show of the moment, True Detective: Night Country, as a demonstration that this is truly “the IP era of TV.” It is interesting to contrast Mr. & Mrs. Smith with Glover’s last big television project, the Afro-surrealist Atlanta. While the two works share a broadly similar vibe, Mr. & Mrs. Smith is undeniably more populist in its sensibility, overtly drawing on nostalgia for an existing and established brand.

However, what is most interesting about Mr. & Mrs. Smith is the gulf in quality that exists between the streaming series and the film that directly inspired it. The 2005 film wasn’t necessarily hated, but it was hardly loved. Reviews conceded director Doug Liman had produced an “occasionally entertaining, if very overlong, action comedy” that was “alternately a goof and a drag.” The film wasn’t a disaster, but it was far from a masterpiece.

The 60% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes dropped to 46% among the top critics. On Metacritic, the film scored 55%, rating it “mixed or average.” The film got a “B+” CinemaScore from audiences, which was solid if not remarkable. The film performed well financially. It was the 9th highest-grossing movie of the year at the domestic box office, between Madagascar and Hitch, and ranked 7th at the global box office, between Madagascar and Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Indeed, Mr. & Mrs. Smith would have been largely forgettable if not for the gossip at its center. This was the film on which Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie met, beginning an affair that would end Pitt’s marriage to Jennifer Aniston. “Brangelina” was a tabloid phenomenon, and a reminder of the time when movie stars mattered. As Roger Ebert put it, Mr. & Mrs. Smith was more of a cultural event than an actual film, “a movie star romance in which the action picture serves as a location.”

Doug Liman’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith exists at an odd place in the larger culture. Audiences remember the film’s name and place in celebrity history, but the film itself has made no lasting impression. Nobody is dropping quotes from the movie into casual conversation. The film arrived at a point where the internet had asserted its importance to cinematic discourse, but Mr. & Mrs. Smith never inspired the same level of memetic enthusiasm as the Star Wars prequels or the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies.

If anything, Liman’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith feels like one of the last gasps of an older style of Hollywood production. Released three years before Iron Man changed the game, to revisit Mr. & Mrs. Smith today is to take a time machine back to an era when the stars were the actors and not the intellectual property. Audiences didn’t turn out to see John and Joan Smith. They showed up to watch Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, two of the hottest movie stars on the planet.

As such, Mr. & Mrs. Smith might initially seem like a strange piece of intellectual property to be reimagined as a polished and globe-trotting streaming series as the cornerstone of Amazon’s “eight-figure overall deal” with Glover. After all, Amazon is the studio that paid $250 million to secure the rights to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth and recently purchased half of the rights to the James Bond franchise as part of its mammoth $8.45 billion purchase of MGM.

“Who is this for?” is a very facile approach to criticism, one that often refuses to engage directly with the work in question by instead focusing on an imagined audience. However, it seems fair to concede that very few people were clamoring for an eight-episode streaming series based on a deeply mediocre movie that is indelibly tied to gossip around the private lives of its two stars. This isn’t a brand that has a large amount of consumer loyalty tied into it. It has name recognition, and that’s it.

This may not be a bad thing. After all, modern pop culture is dominated by mega-franchises to which large and vocal fan bases have very strong emotional attachments: Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. All of these projects come with a mass of expectations from an enthusiastic core audience, even childhood cartoons like Masters of the Universe. The projects all come aimed at audiences who know exactly what they want, and will be angry if they don’t get it.

This, in turn, can hem in creators. The weight of fandom expectations – and the fear of any potential melodramatic and overblown backlash – can lead these franchises to wallow in stale nostalgia. It can warp and distort the properties in question, turning an irreverent comedy like Ghostbusters into an object of near-religious veneration. It can prevent them from meaningfully moving forward in a way that is necessary for culture to advance and grow.

Of course, the obvious solution to this would be to stop harvesting intellectual property, to invest more enthusiastically in original ideas and to encourage audiences to embrace media to which they have no existing emotional attachment. This is a fine idea, but Hollywood has committed so completely to intellectual property that such a reversal is highly unlikely. In a world where streaming services desperately need to retain audiences, they are going to lean hard on brand recognition.

For all that it is fashionable to complain that the Avatar movies can collect billions of dollars at the box office despite having “no cultural footprint”, there is something oddly endearing about an intellectual property that audiences can enjoy without folding their love of it into their larger identity. Director James Cameron just gets to do his own thing, working to his own expectations. Audiences turn out, enjoy the movie, then go home and don’t obsess over it.

Amazon’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith, co-created by Glover and Francesca Sloane, benefits from this in a number of different ways. Most superficially, it simply helps that there are no real expectations going into the show. It doesn’t exist in the shadow of some beloved pop cultural institution. There’s no weight on it. There is no potential downside here. Doug Liman’s film is not so precious that a streaming adaptation runs the risk of “ruining” anybody’s childhood. Unlike the work John and Joan do, this isn’t an especially high-risk assignment.

If Glover and Sloane’s show had been bad, it wouldn’t have sullied the good name of Mr. & Mrs. Smith. The absolute worst-case scenario for this series would be that it was quickly consigned to the collective memory hole, alongside the film it is adapting. However, if the show is actively good – and it is – that praise isn’t tempered by comparison to the classic Mr. & Mrs. Smith. It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece that elevates television as an artform to surpass the film on which it is based.

That said, it isn’t just about how the show is received. It’s also about how it is made. The streaming show is actively better because it isn’t spinning out of something it has to worship. The show isn’t saturated with references and callbacks. There are relatively few easter eggs. The drama rarely stops to make sure that the hardcore fans of the nearly-twenty-year-old film are feeling properly validated and serviced. Instead, Mr. & Mrs. Smith has the space to go about telling its own story.

To be fair, there are a handful of obvious references and allusions. Sloane has talked about how, “in a very loose, very loose way, [the series] does live in that universe” with the earlier film. The show even borrows certain elements and ideas from the movie. It’s possible to draw a connection between the marriage counsellor (William Fichtner) who provides the framing device for the film with marriage counsellor (Sarah Paulson) who appears in the antepenultimate episode of the season.

However, none of these elements serve to distract from the show’s focus on the relationship between John and Joan. There never a sense that the writing staff were ever asked if they could include a legacy cameo from Angela Bassett, who had played John’s (Pitt) boss in the film, or build an episode around the return of John’s best friend and co-worker, Eddie (Vince Vaughn). Instead, the show builds its own world, with its own logic and its own characters.

Glover and Sloane’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith is stronger for that. It’s hardly a masterpiece, but it is a fun and playful high-concept series that owes remarkably little to its source material beyond the basic premise. Indeed, it tackles that premise appreciably better than the film that it is adapting, exploiting the freedom that it enjoys to find a new angle on the core conceit. It feels like it extends the film without being beholden to it. That’s a sweet spot.

If the future of streaming is going to be built around these sorts of adaptations, Mr. & Mrs. Smith makes an argument for adapting mediocre intellectual property.