Video Games, Violence, Context and Choice

[Lys]

Yes, it's like when Sahara also lost about a hundred million dollars several years ago we never saw an action-comedy adventure ever again. Also the losses to the tune of $150 million on 47 Ronin mean that's the last we'll ever again see of historical films, fantasy films, samurai films, or any combination thereof.

Sarcasm aside, were you seriously expecting any major film studio to have acted in a substantially different manner? Principled stands are for those who have to answer to their own conscience, but joint-stock companies answer only to their stockholders. When something like this happens to a company they go into damage control mode, with their chief and only focus being to protect their public image, because public perception is damn near everything. The safest way to do so is to get the story out of the news, and while Sony has been amusingly incompetent at it, their actions are in principle exactly what I would expect out of them.

[rhoenix]

I'm glad everyone else finds this situation funny. I do not. This is the end of an entire range of films on any number of subjects. Everything from Casablanca to 12 Years a Slave to Red Dawn to the Manchurian Candidate to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to a thousand other films of greater or lesser quality. Sony has just lost a hundred million dollars on a film that was critical of a contentious figure, and film studios are staffed by errant cowards. In consequence, you will never again see a movie akin to any of the ones I have just cited above made by a major studio anywhere in the world for the rest of your natural lives. No thinking studio head will ever put any amount of money again into any film that runs the risk of some fringe group on the internet making threats to kill somebody, and now that this is an open license to control the distribution lists of major film producers, every film that is critical of any ideology ever will have such fringe elements. Sony just killed the most important and interesting third-to-half of the medium of film. For the rest of the 21st century or as long as the medium itself lasts.

If this is the case, then bluntly speaking, they'll be replaced by studios who will. I don't think very many people would be willing to put up with nothing but trite, nonsensical, saccharine bullshit from movies for very long, especially if all the "hackers" actually do is release embarrassing and sensitive information about a given studio, and make badly-worded vague threats of terrible disasters of mystical power.

Besides - by how Sony has acted (and reacted) about this whole thing, I would imagine public trust of the Sony brand has fallen south at very high rates of speed, and shows no sign of decelerating.

[General Havoc]

Yes, it's like when Sahara also lost about a hundred million dollars several years ago we never saw an action-comedy adventure ever again. Also the losses to the tune of $150 million on 47 Ronin mean that's the last we'll ever again see of historical films, fantasy films, samurai films, or any combination thereof.

Sarcasm aside, were you seriously expecting any major film studio to have acted in a substantially different manner? Principled stands are for those who have to answer to their own conscience, but joint-stock companies answer only to their stockholders. When something like this happens to a company they go into damage control mode, with their chief and only focus being to protect their public image, because public perception is damn near everything. The safest way to do so is to get the story out of the news, and while Sony has been amusingly incompetent at it, their actions are in principle exactly what I would expect out of them.

Sahara and 47 Ronin, or to use more telling examples, Heaven's Gate and Cutthroat Island, were great box office failures that cost vast amounts of money, yes, and some of them did kill their respective genres for a time, but this is a different thing entirely. A bad movie that loses money may scare people away or even kill the studio, but it leaves the possibility for a creative director or producer to go to a different studio and argue that that movie bombed because it sucked, and that they will make a movie which does not. Thus, Cutthroat Island bombed horribly, blew up its studio, and killed pirate movies for a decade or more, until Gore Verbinski convinced Disney that he could make one better (which in all fairness, he did).

This is a different situation entirely. The movie in question did not lose Sony a hundred million dollars because it sucked (though I'm sure it did suck), but because it addressed a topic that fringe elements found objectionable. I could potentially go to another studio and argue that I could make a better North Korean film than Sony did, but not that I could make a North Korean film that would not offend North Koreans (not unless I wished to make a propaganda piece). There is no place for an enterprising director to go here to argue that a film should be made on a contentious subject, because the subject, not the quality, is what will cause the studio to lose money. The lesson here is not that bad films lose money, but that all films about a given subject lose money, because the hackers could legitimately have targeted anything they didn't like, and hackers from other sources now are encouraged to do so. I used Gore Verbinski above as an example for a reason. His upcoming film, an adaptation of the graphic novel Pyongyang, starring Steve Carrel (in a dramatic role), was canceled by Paramount while in post-production not twelve hours after Sony pulled The Interview. Not because it was bad. Not because it would bomb. But because it was about North Korea, and the hackers would not like it. That is not the calculus that I am guessing studios will start to use. That is the calculus they have already started using. I lost four movies off my "films to watch out for" list in the first day of this announcement, including documentaries abruptly pulled from theater schedules by Fox Searchlight and Warner Brothers, because the docs were about the ills of the North Korean government.

And no, I certainly didn't expect displays of bravery from studio executives, but I did expect them to perhaps consult with a few people before making a decision this seismic for the industry in general. How they can not see that they just delivered the editorial rights to their films out of their own hands and into a band of terroristic thugs is beyond me. Perhaps they didn't think it through or perhaps they simply wanted to get it over with, but the result has been a staggering blow to the film industry in general, one that will not simply fade in a month. There's already rumors that Paramount is thinking of pulling the plug on the release for their upcoming MLK biopic, Selma, out of concerns that KKK-aligned psychos will make threats to bomb their theaters. That's a movie with four golden globe nominations. If Paramount does pull it, I give you an iron-clad guarantee it's the last civil-rights-related film you will see from a major studio for a generation.

If this is the case, then bluntly speaking, they'll be replaced by studios who will. I don't think very many people would be willing to put up with nothing but trite, nonsensical, saccharine bullshit from movies for very long, especially if all the "hackers" actually do is release embarrassing and sensitive information about a given studio, and make badly-worded vague threats of terrible disasters of mystical power.

Besides - by how Sony has acted (and reacted) about this whole thing, I would imagine public trust of the Sony brand has fallen south at very high rates of speed, and shows no sign of decelerating.

Indie filmmakers will continue to make what they make, but the production and distribution of large-scale films in wide release is not an affair that can be managed by six maverick filmmakers unafraid to defy the haters. The studios will look at their balance sheets and quite logically greenlight movies that are not going to get them sued for wrongful death if a terrorist blows up a theater. The Aurora shooting was survivable as far as the studios were concerned because they could credibly claim that nobody could have foreseen that a nut would show up at a Batman premier with an assault rifle. They will not have that defense when it's a movie that people have been threatening the studio over. And now that such threats have been shown to be an excellent way to halt the release of films you don't like, every fringe group in existence will start making them.

And it's not like this will leave the studios with nothing but nonsensical crap. Disney and Pixar will be able to continue making their animated movies. Marvel will continue with its cinematic universe. Action films about confronting nameless bad guys explicitly not identifiable as any actual organization will continue to come in full force. Comedies, horror movies, grand fantasy epics and what little sci-fi we see these days, none of these will be affected, and these things are the studios' bread and butter nowadays anyway. Anyone who doesn't see films as often as I do will barely notice, particularly since many of the remaining films, as they were this year, will be of very high quality.

I just hope that you all liked 12 Years a Slave though, because as I see it, it is the last such movie you are ever going to see.

[Lys]

Okay, I grant that I wasn't defending good ground here, but that was still an excellently executed attack. You just dissected my position like it was dead on a table, and left me with nothing but bloody bits. I'm quite impressed, and I concede the argument.

[Josh]

Havoc, I'm just glad you weren't there when Washington pulled out of NYC.

"Well pack it in, folks. I hope you never wanted to eat a garlic bagel ever again. Cornwallis is just going to run our asses all over the countryside. The ones that don't freeze to death in this stupid valley, anyway."

[General Havoc]

Washington retreated. He didn't surrender. Had he done so, we'd all be drinking tea right now. If Sony had shut down operations because the hackers beat the crap out of them, that would be one thing. Instead they rolled over and capitulated to every lunatic fringe movement in existence. This isn't a retreat. This is unconditional surrender.

[Josh]

Yeah, I get why you don't approve. But it must be exhausting to be so damned dramatic all the time.

Bad shit happens. We deal with it and move on. A historian such as yourself should be well aware that events are rarely what they appear to be in the heat of the moment, and they rarely play out how anyone predicts they will afterward, too.

You want to fight the good fight? Go for it. But don't wear yourself out soapboxing on it because you just end up exhausted and looking silly.

[Josh]

Also frankly I need a shoulder to cry on for how the Niners foundered this year and you're what I've got, bitch.

[General Havoc]

Well heaven forbid, Josh, that I should ever do anything you think might be silly...

[Josh]

Well heaven forbid, Josh, that I should ever do anything you think might be silly...

I'm glad you finally appreciate how much my approval means to your life. It's taken long e-damn-nough.

[Josh]

Also this is now our emoticon, baby.

[General Havoc]

Also this is now our emoticon, baby.

You don't know this, Josh, but that emoticon is deeply ironic...

[Josh]

Some day you'll tell me the story.

[Hotfoot]