It’s hard to envision a time wherein enlisting the talents of genre icon Sam Raimi to helm nerd tentpole Spider-Man was seen as an intrepid move on behalf of Sony. When it came to properties with financial clout, studios played it safe by hiring competently vacuous yes-men like Bryan Singer or Roland Emmerich to do their pandering dirty work. A flawless practice: Get the nerds in with the brand, get the repeat business by trimming all the convoluted comic-booky garbage that might turn people off.
Alot has changed since then, in large part due to Raimi’s masterful work on the aforementioned Spider-Man trilogy. The big budget blockbuster is now the requisite next step for the modern film auteur. This, in principle, sounds like progress and maybe it is in some smaller negligible sense – blockbusters are on average better than they used to be, but despite and at the expense of visionary filmmakers, not because of them.
The massive success of Tim Burton’s Batman and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man taught studios the wrong lessons. Those two films were “adaptations.” Not big budget fan films. The stories and characters they portrayed were just as unmistakable as the imprint of the filmmakers behind them. Batman 89 is the literal answering of the question: What if Tim Burton informed the Batman mythos as opposed to Bill Finger or Alan Moore? Well, Gotham might be a little zanier than we’ve seen it, Batman might kill with less compunction and the themes of being an outcast might trump the themes of heroism and grief. Raimi’s Spider-Man differs only in that he was a diehard fan, so that he didn’t completely relinquish his artistic touch but was willing to give a lot more ground in service of a world that owed a lot to Lee and Ditko.
Ironically, the massive impact left by these two film series’ catapulted the genre to heights never before achieved, effectively augmenting the role of the directors that make them. Nerd culture is the primary force driving the film industry machine. There’s a big picture at play that wasn't at play before. FIlmmakers have to simultaneously make good movies and set the stage for whatever gimmicky end-of-the-world plot their universe is building towards. Everything has to coalesce, and ultimately feed the franchise. It’s all very corporate and nerds hate corporate. How does a studio maintain goodwill? They hire Jo Schmo, who just directed the indie sci-fi hit of the year. Ant-Man directed by Edgar Wright?! Fantastic Four directed by Josh Trank?! James Gunn directing Guardians of the Galaxy (except that one actually worked out beautifully).
The point is, the cases where it didn’t work all didn’t work for the same reason “creative differences” which is executive speak for: This no-name kid didn’t realize Han Solo “film” meant “feature-length commercial” for “future commercials.” That isn’t me taking a shot at Kathleen Kennedy or Disney for that matter; all indications suggest they made the right move by letting Phil Lord and Chris Miller go just as all indications also suggest they made the wrong move by hiring them in the first place.
A perfect actuation of the filmmaker-studio unifying can be found in director Matt Reeves and his role in the new Planet of the Apes epics. His presence comes through without undermining the overarching story. There’s no tonal clash, his finesse is retrained and tempered by the massive brand that is 20th Century Fox. He’s a filmmaker who understands his place in the larger scheme of things, a mindset I’m sure he’s going to carry into the upcoming Batman standalone film.
I love genre movies, even the bad ones. I also love offbeat filmmakers and feel that lately the two are starting to do a lot more bad for each other than good. When you give John Bender a data entry position at your firm, don’t act surprised when he plops his Doc Martens on your desk and starts waxing poetic about individualism. If you’re gonna hire filmmakers, let them make films. If that’s not the sorta thing you're after, call up Abrams.
