You’re at the movies, watching a film — oversaturated in pink — that is a winking skewering of consumer culture via a cast of corporate-owned characters familiar from childhood. Every few minutes, as the film approaches its climax, the beautiful, skinny, white protagonist-avatar pauses as if to ask, “Is everything… okay?” Things seem uncanny valley, off, even amid her girl-boss success. She continues on, advancing toward what she’s been told is success, until the veneer is wiped clean and she has no choice but to acknowledge that the crumbling, toxic world around her is, as Fiona Apple put it, bullsh*t. Life in plastic — even if it's fantastic — cannot support living, breathing people.
The film in question is 2001’s Josie and the Pussycats, starring Rachael Leigh Cook, Rosario Dawson, and Tara Reid. (I recently rewatched the film at an indie theater, but I was a fan when it came out too, dressing as Josie for Halloween in elementary school.) This campy, satirical, cult classic, a critical and box office bomb during its original release, exists in the same universe as the CW’s Riverdale. And both projects were born of the same intellectual property (IP): Archie comics (the Archie Cinematic Universe…?). Two decades later, few films feel as prescient amid this era of endless reboots and remakes produced for endless profit and not much else, spawned from familiar IP by anxious execs making conservative story decisions.
The Pussycats, a small-town band, get offered a record deal to become the next big thing, after boy band DuJour — literally, band of the day — question how their own music is being used to market consumerism to their teen fanbase. Rather than answer to the band members, DuJour's record-label execs leave them for dead in a plane crash. The smack-you-over-the-head literalism of DuJour’s perceived disposability is a perfect allegory for the modern film and TV industry, which will throw millions at projects that have a hint of profitability, then erase these projects from platforms without warning, netting tax write-offs.
IP has become shorthand for continuous remakes of existing universes. Not every example of this practice is bad: Some of my favorite movies are based on or derive from existing IP, like Josie or 2015’s Mad Max Fury Road. Although there was a steady drumbeat of IP-based film and TV before the mid-2010s, the infamous pivot to streaming has made that even more appealing given the demand audiences have shown for something branded and familiar, such as the (US military propaganda of) the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).
In the race to streaming, the old, white, wealthy CEOs of these companies have bet big on continuous reboots and remakes, with the popularity of the MCU providing encouragement. But these CEOs and their studios, products of conglomerate mergers, aren’t just impacting movie screens (or streamer apps); the IP glut is an attempted opiate for the masses that overwrites possibilities for films that could serve a purpose beyond the creation and sale of more toys and merchandise. Whether or not these CEO's believe audiences want extended universes and multiverses, the real motivation seems to be that they can parlay infinitely expanding IP into infinitely expanding moneymaking opportunities.
Warner Brothers-Discovery CEO David Zaslav has become a kind of poster boy for contemporary media. You may have seen Zaslav’s name pop up in some of the biggest stories of 2023. CNN’s disaster of a Trump Town Hall? That was the brainchild of Zaslav’s handpicked CNN CEO, Chris Licht, who was fired last month soon after the publication of an unflattering Atlantic profile. Did you watch Amazon Prime’s Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets, about the family and their sect of Christian fundamentalism, as promoted by TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting? Shiny Happy People argues that TLC, owned by Discovery, is responsible for the Duggars’ popularity by portraying the family as wholesome, run-of-the-mill Christians, when in fact the family was part of a patriarchal Christian fundamentalist sect that actively pushed its members to run for political office.
The TLC show about the Duggars was canceled after it came out that son Josh, who was found guilty for receiving child pornography in 2022, had abused some of his sisters decades before (the family hid this information for years). During that time, the Discovery network was run by Zaslav, and it reportedly made him the best-paid CEO in the industry. (Teen Vogue has reached out to Warner Bros. Discovery for comment.)
Zaslav’s reported bullishness is why The Flash, starring Ezra Miller and reportedly costing $220 million, went forward in June, despite widespread coverage of Miller's erratic behavior, which resulted in various charges (some of which were dismissed, some for which the actor was fined) and multiple protection orders. (Miller issued an apology last August, citing “complex mental health issues,” and pledged to work on themself.) There was reportedly talk of scrapping the film, but it went forward anyway, and Miller began an apology tour soon after the reports reached a fever pitch.
There were attempts to build hype for The Flash beyond the controversy surrounding Miller, wrote Charles Holmes of The Ringer in a review, but they didn’t save the film from being garbage: “Corporate machinations and cultural gluttony sired something utterly soulless and then desperately tried to pull enough levers to fool the masses into regarding it with awe.”
But it’s not all bad news for Zaslav, because he has Barbie, coproduced by Warner Bros. and Mattel. During the film’s first weekend in wide release, the media frenzy of Barbie and Oppenheimer opening at the same time, a.k.a. Barbenheimer, broke a combined $300 million at the box office, surpassing already high expectations for both films. Barbie also achieved the milestone of best stateside opening for a film directed by a woman.
Viral reporting in The New Yorker clarified exactly what was at stake in a business deal like the Barbie movie (with an advertising blitz that has been making me feel like I'm in The Truman Show): power, influence, wealth. You might know the basics: Actor and producer Margot Robbie convinced toy company Mattel to hire auteur Greta Gerwig, who co-wrote the film with her partner Noah Baumbach. And Mattel, under its current CEO, is driving its own new internal film-development office to produce films based on its IP, including a Barney film, with Daniel Kaluuya, and a Hot Wheels movie. In the pipeline is a Polly Pocket film from Lena Dunham, to star Lily Collins.
To put a positive spin on it, we get to have the maker of films like Lady Bird and 2019’s Little Women create a better version of the IP schlock we’d be stuck with anyway. But from a less sunny perspective, we can wonder what Gerwig might create if she wasn’t roped into the IP schlock market.
Gerwig and Baumbach’s agent, Jeremy Barber, brought up this tension in The New Yorker: “Is it a great thing that our great creative actors and filmmakers live in a world where you can only take giant swings around consumer content and mass-produced products? I don’t know. But it is the business.”
And business it has surely been. It’s easier to think of brands and stores that haven’t taken advantage of “Barbiecore” this summer, as so many other brands — among them, Airbnb, Burger King, and Crocs — have gotten in on the action.
Barber called the conflict between auteurism and the demands of modern capitalism “an argument that we’ve lost already,” but the ascendant, fiery labor movement in Hollywood’s rank-and-file says otherwise. Gerwig’s Barbie arrives amid a summer of strikes; the film concluded its star-fronted press cycle in advance of the Screen Actors Guild strike, which precludes its cast from promoting it. The SAG strike follows the writer’s strike that was initiated earlier this spring.
At stake in these strikes are myriad serious issues: the end of cable and pivot to streaming leaves no financially viable path forward for workers in a set-up where corporations always profit first, last, and most; a tentative plan from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents the studios, that raised concerns they were looking to buy the likenesses of background actors to repurpose via AI; the outsize influence of tech companies, whose “disruption” again appears only to be ruination. Recent reporting from Deadline quotes an anonymous studio executive as saying, “The endgame [of waiting out the strike] is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”
For the workers, things are grinding to a halt because they can’t go any further. As the Barbie situation highlights, what’s at stake is no less than the future of film and TV as a creative outlet instead of merely a cash cow — one that keeps rich execs rich and everyone else poor.
And where were company execs like Zaslav, Disney’s Bob Iger, and Netflix’s Ted Sarandos while striking workers picketed in the unforgiving Hollywood sun, where the few trees that provided shade were suddenly pruned by Universal Studios? They were arriving at “billionaire summer camp” in Sun Valley, Idaho, of course. (The Los Angeles city controller’s office said the city would issue a fine for the tree-pruning, which Universal claims happens every summer and was unrelated to the strikes.) In an interview with CNBC from Sun Valley, Iger called the strike and WGA and SAG demands “disturbing” and “not realistic.”
“[Iger] stuck his foot in it so bad that you notice they’re not letting any of the other CEOs open their mouth," scoffed SAG's president Fran Drescher while discussing the strikes with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). “There he is, sitting in his designer clothes, just got off his private jet at the billionaires’ camp, telling us that we’re unrealistic, when he’s making $78,000 a day.”
In a recent episode of the podcast Into It With Sam Sanders, host Sanders (no relation to the senator, AFAIK) posed the question: Couldn’t Zaslav’s tens of millions in compensation help to compensate some of those writers and actors, and wouldn’t sharing it up front preclude the need for work stoppages? Reporting puts Zaslav's compensation at $39 million; but whatever the total, he has made headlines this year for being called among the most “overpaid CEOs.” Meanwhile, actors have taken to social media to share photos of their streaming-era residual checks, a previously stable source of income that has now been reduced to pennies on the dollar.
Zaslav and his ilk are all in on IP, despite several red flags that show people did not actually ask for a millionth Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot. As the example of The Flash underscores, this practice also creates work that’s just not good. There’s a lot of digging for treasure in yesterday’s trash going on.
In April, Zaslav told the press that there will be a Harry Potter TV show on Max — née HBO Max — with transphobe J.K. Rowling set to executive produce. According to the aforementioned New Yorker report on Barbie and Mattel’s IP enterprise, during an earnings call in November, Zaslav claimed there’d been no Potter film in 15 years; the writer pointed out that there have been six, including the last three original series films. (The other three featured Ezra Miller.) Company exec Casey Bloys sidestepped commenting on Rowling’s political views, saying instead, “The Harry Potter story is incredibly affirmative and positive about love and acceptance, and that’s our priority, what’s on the screen.”
The cannibalism of a universe that has held so much significance for marginalized readers, ultimately lining the pockets of an incredibly wealthy transphobe, is a symbol of the depths of IP-focused conservative cravenness. As Gita Jackson observed in their review of the Hogwarts Legacy video game, released in February, also, of course, from Warner Bros., “Like with Star Wars after it became a Disney property, Warner Bros. seems to see a great opportunity here to tell new stories and make boatloads of money doing it.” But, Jackson warned, to try and “contort” Harry Potter into something “affirmative” (in Bloys’s phrasing) washes away Rowling’s proud neoliberalism — “her resistance to change, her lack of interest in cultures other than her own, her classism,” all of which come across in a magical universe built around upper-crust British private boarding schools.
Studios are so lacking in creativity that their actual attempts to foster creativity just create a bunch of repeats. Bong Joon Ho’s Oscar-winning Parasite and Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, class-conscious satires, begat a whole slew of films: Johnson’s Knives Out sequel, Glass Onion, The Menu, others I’m forgetting because they’re forgettable. Patrick Sproull argued in The Face that these attempted copy-and-paste films deaden any real anticapitalist critique.
Gerwig, a member of WGA, SAG, and the Directors Guild, summed it up herself in a recent interview with Rolling Stone: “We have to set some very firm ground rules moving forward,” she said of the strikes. “Because otherwise, we’re looking at a world that becomes a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.”
So what to do about art, when the conditions under which we can make it are so inhospitable?
I feel for creatives like Gerwig who are experiencing this tension, but the credulous acceptance, or even celebration, of filmmakers collecting the bag in the IP shuffle seems to take “no ethical consumption under late-stage capitalism” to mean no possibility of ethical production, either. As pointed out by Caspar Salmon in The Guardian regarding Barbie — and observed two years ago by writer Haley Nahman on influencer culture — personal responsibility still exists, and only really means anything coming from people with power and leverage.
For those of us without power over industry, small choices may lead to bigger shifts. I don’t have an Amazon account, even though it’s a net negligible impact on the company's global power, because I have so few ways of doing anything, and to do nothing hurts me more than it hurts them. F*ck that. Some deals with the devil burn more than I’m willing to tolerate. There’s not much we can do, but what’s the harm in trying anyway?
Whether or not the film is good, Barbie (I saw it and liked it, for what that’s worth) is the Helen of Troy of Warner Bros. Discovery, Trojan horse-ing positive vibes and “affirmative” aesthetics to overcompensate for or obscure the company’s dogged commitment to moneymaking at any cost. If the film had flopped, it could’ve been justification for studios watching Barbie closely as an industry bellwether to deem diversity unprofitable — an argument TV and film creators say the studios are quietly making, with workers and audiences bearing the consequences. But its success may be justification for continuing the IP slog.
In the meantime, there’s still hope in the intention behind the film, a longtime form of resistance by filmmakers: Take the check and make the art how you want, using their tools. We’ll keep seeing films like Bottoms, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, and Pearl, all examples of genre cinema that can be produced relatively cheaply (in comparison to the millions blown on cinematic universes) while giving marginalized writers, directors, and actors the reins.
Josie and the Pussycats is a piece of IP, but one that skewers corporate power funding the operation. As How To director Daniel Goldfaber explored in an interview about the film’s politics, can we live in the contradiction of our times with bigger imaginations than they want for us?
What power does art have to change the world? A lot. That’s why we can’t let it die by elite capture. Art helps us find pleasure in the distance between where we are and where we could be, in spite of the trials we can’t even predict yet. And if we can’t imagine other worlds, how can we possibly make them?
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