Bad movies prove profit can be a force for good in film
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Alien is, at its core, a story of corporate greed run amok. The faceless Weyland-Yutani corporation’s desire to study the unknown creatures means it lies to its own crew and as a result, all but one (or, depending on how you count, two) die horribly.
There’s an easy joke — indeed, one I’ve made myself — that the struggles of many Hollywood studios are contained within the film. Hardworking directors, writers and actors are led astray by corporate greed. The results, while not quite as grisly as what happens to the crew of the Nostromo, are still pretty bad.
But the latest film in the franchise, Alien: Romulus, is the story of what happens when you don’t have enough corporate greed. An ugly and expensive bit of CGI trickery resurrects a dead actor at great expense, while the film’s final act, also lousy with expensive special effects, lacks meaningful scares.
The profitmaking urge may have been in the room when the studio agreed to make another Alien film, but it doesn’t seem to have stuck around long enough to prompt any searching questions, like “you want to spend how much to do what?”. Nor is the film alone in this. While watching The Marvels last summer, a film which imagined that I would have a photographic recall for the plot of a disposable blockbuster some four years ago, I found myself wondering what Disney’s notoriously hands-on management had actually been doing.
The excessive spending and poor scripts on their various projects are downstream of well-aired difficulties at the top. From parks to pictures, no part of Disney is as well-run as it once was. It’s not surprising that a business that has been unable to manage its leadership succession also overspends on everything from CGI necromancy to made-for-streaming shows. Disney is not, at the moment, a company that does much well. But the problem is not confined to the House of Mouse.
Moneymaking has always been central to the TV business. The only reason there was a Star Trek: The Next Generation is because, in the decades since its cancellation, the original series made a pretty packet on syndication. The very shape of these shows owes itself to the profit motive. They have neat three act structures so that TV channels can break for commercials.
Compare that with Disney+’s latest Star Wars show, The Acolyte. Like The Next Generation, it was commissioned on the back of previous success stories. Unlike the Next Generation, episodes ranged in length from 28 minutes to around three quarters of an hour, generally lacked anything resembling a structure and were often dull. Its budget came in at $180mn and it was cancelled after one season. Disney’s streaming business has only just begun to report positive operating profit.
TV programmes and films made these days badly miss the voice of someone trying to keep costs low and episodes to time. This may well be why Friends continues to be so successful on streaming services two decades after going off the air.
We should all therefore welcome the arrival of advertising tiers to the streamers, provided they make shows with proper act breaks, rather than going for the ITVX approach of treating an advert break like a terror attack that strikes without warning or regard for the plot.
The age of costly film and TV also has lessons for the rest of the corporate world. It’s a parable about the lack of cost control prompted by the era of ultra-low interest rates. More importantly, it is a reminder to remember your values.
I don’t mean in the sense of looking after your staff, though this is important too. I mean in the sense of remembering what it is that your business actually does and how it makes money. Yes, for studios part of this is commissioning high-profile films and TV shows. But a key aspect of making money is focusing on costs and quality.
You can enjoy occasional success by doing the former and not the latter: just look at Alien: Romulus’s box office performance. But you can’t succeed consistently by neglecting it: that’s the broader story of Disney’s recent struggles, particularly in streaming.
Someone at Weyland-Yutani should have asked, how, exactly, the plan to make money from a nigh-invincible and hostile lifeform would have helped the crew of the Nostromo. In the same way, the person who sweats the costs and the profits of a film can result in a tighter, better product than the executive who signs off a project attached to a big name and then forgets about it. That is a more enduring, and useful, lesson for the business world than anything in the original Alien movie. It is also perhaps the only metric on which Alien: Romulus is the better film.