Trying to get back into the swing of things in terms of writing. It is a muscle I need to exercise and all that. Start easy by just posting a movie review.
I think Hellboy (2019) is the second most frenetic movie I have ever seen (First goes to Crank 2 High Voltage). It is the most "Russian Doll"'ed plot in my recollection; felt like one backstory introduced every 15 minutes. Lots of exposition. Fair share of flashbacks. Narratively, it was a mess.
I could spend time ripping it appart on the above, but why waste both our time? You should know that it has a awful review on rotten; if you are looking for fodder to critique the film, it is available. Let's see if there is anything interesting here.
Animate it?
Watching a movie sourced from comic book material, one of the biggest questions I have is "Why don't they do animation instead?" Budget on this was ~50 million dollars. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was excellent with a budget of 90 million. How good can an animated movie be with a budget of 50 million? I don't honestly know.
But here is the interesting thing. I suspect that the art assets and know how from doing one animated film also transfer to its sequels. This is of course also true for live action film. But live action films have significant cost that animated films do not. Beyond the cost of getting actors, building sets, equipment, post processing, etc, you have the simple fact that most artifacts built for the film will not be used in subsequent films.
Animation is different. Once you have worked out the software to do character kinematics, once you have the right textures, once you have figured out the proper lighting, you just keep using it. The cost to store the know-how you have accumulated over previous films is negligible. You need to save your software (and yes, even 2d animation is made with extensive software these days) and you documentation. Maybe the first film in a series cost 100 million because of novel development in your tech stack. But the next film can be made for substantially less because you are just going to use the same software and tweak it for every release to use newer (and cheaper) hardware.
In favor of animation
I suspect one reason animation is ignored is that animated movies have a low return of a few hundred millions. They rarely generate billion dollar returns. It feels like Hollywood is more interested in making 300M movies that have a 20% chance of making billion than a 50M movies that has a almost 100% chance of making 60M.
In favor of "malleable" material
It is also the case that Hollywood seems to be obsessed about making franchises these days. I get it, you need something that won't just pay the bills today, but might also keep the lights on tomorrow. Comic book material is perfect for franchises. The material is already so malleable and the constraints of the world are so soft that it is easily and endlessly re-mixable for all of eternity.
What's your point?
Animation & comic book source material are a match made in heaven for diversified risk. When you can make 6 to 10 NEW animated movies for the cost of a single live action movie, you can take a lot more risk.
It is a pretty simple program:
- Make an animated movie of a comic book property at a low enough cost that you almost certainly will recoup expenses.
- If your movie is franchisable, then go to 3, else go to 4
- Release a new film in the franchise. Ruthlessly focus on being profitable AND cutting cost for future releases. Rely on the fact that you can re-use assets and depend on the loyalty of die hard fans to generate a certain amount of revenue. Before every cycle, ask "Is expected return greater than expected cost?", if "yes" go to 3, otherwise go to 4.
- Pick another comic property and go back to Step 1.
