Kurtz + Orci +Universal = $$$???

Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci are the best filmmakers you’ve neverheard of; notice I didn’t say your never seen. Their name has been associated with some of the best entertainment content of the past decade, from Mission Impossible III, Transformers, Star Trek, and The Amazing Spiderman. They started out producing television in the late 90s with shows such as Hercules and spin-off Xena: Warrior Princess, but their big break didn’t come until the show Alias, which after it aired was basically their license to print money.

Recently Universal Studios acquired Legendary Pictures as part of a 5-year co-financing and distribution deal, which is slated to help Universal recapture a lot of the film market which has been lost to them over the years. The first film slated to come from the collaboration will be a reboot of Dracula, a property that Universal owns the rights to. Kurtzman and Orci are also slated to produce the forthcoming Van Helsing and Mummy reboots as well. Although Orci and Kurtzman are some of the biggest heavy hitters in Hollywood they have yet to really hit heights of success that Disney and Marvel have with and Phase 1 of the Marvel Universe films (Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America). Those films were all tied together with an interweaving story that led up to The Avengers, which grossed $1.5 billion at the box office.

This power duo arriving at Universal can mark the beginning of the turnaround for the film studio. They are planning on using Universal’s library of movie monsters and apply them to a Marvel like universe to establish a running story line throughout the franchises. After the success of the Avengers every studio would be looking to cash in like that, the most obvious would be Warner Bros. and DC comics with their universe of superheroes most notably Batman and Superman, which their working on a film for as we speak.

What makes the duo unique and more likely for success in this endeavor is that they can basically have free reign of all the characters seeing the Universal owns the rights, not to mention their background with TV shows that naturally have overarching plot elements and currently their work on FOX with the new Sleepy Hollow series seems like fertile ground to hone their skills in the horror genre. If Universal is able to leverage their newfound partnerships with Kurtzman and Orci, as well as Legendary Pictures they can begin to be on track to returning to be a true powerhouse in the film industry once again and regain their title which they hold long ago.

Video games furthering in to film territory…

Due to the business reality of the gaming industry there are many different ways in which the gaming and film industry are blurring the lines. With both mediums having massive budgets of $200 Million and up it is easy to see the similarities. Like films, games are made by a studio; creative people lead the vision and large groups of workers go about creating it. There are even actors, directors, series’, and award shows. There are huge studios creating games while others are independent.

If you look at how big games are marketed today you see that like film, they are focused entirely around character and plot and not the differentiation factors such as gameplay and mechanics. This began when games became a real moneymaker in the 1990’s and studios began reaching out to ad agencies that started out working on campaigns for studio films, hence the similarity in the marketing style. Even today more and more studios are looking to up the marketing budget to reach the casual gamer by drawing them in with extras like a music video featuring a song done for the game by a popular artist. Eminem has a new video for his song “Survival” that is featured in the new Call of Duty: Ghost game. In the video he has never before seen footage of gameplay not only getting fans to watch his video for the song but for new gameplay footage of their favorite game, that’s a win-win situation.

In my opinion, the similarities should end there at the business aspect. We should look at the warning signs of merging the two industries. When a video game is adapted in to a film the general consensus is that it will most likely be a terrible experience. Cases in point Super Mario Bros. (1993), Street Fighter (1994), and Mortal Kombat (1995). All films that tanked at the box office because of how bad they were filmed and were panned by critics.

Vice-versa when a video game is based off a movie it does equally as bad if not worse consistently. Now here is a point where I believe that shows how the film industry sees the gaming industry as a cash-cow and not a legitimate storytelling medium, when a movie comes out a corresponding video game is created to be released along side it just to generate the film more money. The problem with these games is that they are given short time frames in which to create the game and end up generally with a sub par product released by a second rate-developing studio that just needed the money, instead of crafting a meaningful experience to tie in with the movie and are just dismal products.

Now, I have gone on and on about how games and films should be divided but there have really been some legitimate efforts to bend the rules for what a game can be. In 2011, Rockstar Games LA: Noire was the first game tobe screened at Tribeca Film festival. This marked a jump for games to be considered cinema because of the advanced techniques used in unique facial capture technology that filmed the actors faces using multiple cameras to create a life like image in the game. This year Tribeca Film Festival invited Quantic Dream Studios and director David Cage were to screen their game Beyond: Two Souls, which starred film actors Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe. It is a game that heavily focuses on plot and storytelling by jumping back and forth to different parts of the Ellen Page character’s life, becoming more of an interactive storytelling experience rather than a traditional game. 

If more games continue to follow the trend of push the technology to be able to tell a better story I’m all for it, but if the entertainment industry is just going to use this to throw a business model of movies are becoming unpopular and we need jump on video games, count me out. All that will accomplish is to destroy what made video games great in the first place by turning it into a money machine and destroy the art like they have with the film industry.

Legendary Pictures, Universal’s Savior???

Currently Universal Studios is a company that has undergone many different phases of management and ownership. In 2004 being bought out by General Electric and merged with parent company NBC, forming NBC Universal. Then in 2011 sold 51% of shares to Comcast; and in March of this year Comcast bought the remaining 49% for $16.7 Billion. Whew…apparently Universal is being tossed around like a hot potato for the last decade. Now the name of the company is NBC Universal. Universal still do release movies solely under their Universal Studios moniker.

Although they do release films, Universal is a company that has struggled on their entertainment side as of late. They just don’t have enough big budget; tent pole films release to sustain individual production. The only two franchises that Universal has that are highly popular are Despicable Me and Fast and Furious. Those two films alone can’t keep Universal afloat by themselves. For the last couple years Universal has done a lot of co-financing of their films with outside production companies with very few done in house. Universal had a multi-year financing deal with Elliot Management that expired in March 2013. In July it was announced that Universal will be entering in to a partner ship with Legendary Pictures.

                                   

Legendary Pictures is a production company owned by Thomas Tull, who used money from Wall Street to finance his films. They have had a deal with Warner Bros for co-financing since 2004. Out of that arrangement came some of the biggest movies of the last 10 years, including the Batman Trilogy, The Hangover Trilogy, and recently the Man of Steel. By partnering with Legendary Pictures, Universal has put itself in a great position to gain back a lot of their market share lost to its competitors. It will allow them to release films that generate tons of revenue and bring them back to the glory they once had. One of the first films slated to come out of the Universal/Legendary deal is Gareth Edward’s Godzilla. This film has a lot of potential to really help Universal solve a couple of their problems. 

                                     

Universal Studios theme parks, specifically the one here in Florida is currently hemorrhaging money due to the recent acquisition of Marvel properties by Disney. Currently the Islands of Adventure theme park has an entire section of Marvel characters, essentially meaning that a percentage of every ticket sold is kicked back to Disney and its competing theme park also in Florida Walt Disney World. Godzilla could give Universal the leverage it needs to be able to kill their dependence of Marvel for its parks and introduce a new big boy on the block that could make King Kong cringe. I believe this partnership is one that can push Universal to the top of the entertainment industry and reign supreme. The added bonus of that…who wouldn’t want to see a 50 story Godzilla ride at Universal Theme Parks, I know I would!!

Neil Blomkamp.....The next Christoper Nolan??

Neil Blomkamp born September 17, 1979 in Johannesburg, South Africa, is probably the best director you’ve never heard of before. He had been trusted to take the reigns for creating a marketing spectacle for one of the world’s biggest video game franchises, Halo. In 2007 created a set of short films entitled “Landfall” which centered on the Halo Universe. Within these short films he brought to life the best representation of Halo mythology even showcasing some cool futuristic tech such as the Warthog driving vehicle featured in the game to the screen. From that he was set to direct his first feature film, which would’ve been a full-length Halo movie, produced by Peter Jackson. The project collapsed after it couldn’t find funding for itself. http://goo.gl/eF65BO

The failed film left Blomkamp with a big hole to fill for himself, so he decided to make the film District 9. Set in his home country of South Africa, more specifically in the Johannesburg Township area, it featured aliens living among humans and being mistreated as if to parallels how blacks were treated during apartheid. This gained Neill huge recognition in the film industry and gained him 4 Academy Award Nominations including Best Picture. His new film Elysium is set to open to good box office numbers and is already at $30.4 million for the weekend.

Neill Blomkamp is a visionary director and is a real force to be reckoned with. He is also very outspoken with his stance on not wanting to direct DC and Marvel superhero characters along with Star Trek or Star Wars franchises. It seems that he doesn’t want to get trapped in to reigning in his artistic vision in order to fulfill the marketing and merchandising needs for a big studio. http://goo.gl/BbLWb7

He says that he is an artist and wants to be left alone. He is on track to becoming very much like another outstanding director namely Chris Nolan of Batman fame. Who also started out small and built his way up the ladder by creating stories that fascinated him and were visually captivating as well. Being able to work on a budget and still crank out a very good film that can make back its budget and more is a trait Hollywood studios look for in a director nowadays. Neill is one of those directors who can make just as big a splash creating his own stories just as if he were directing someone elses vision and that is very rare. They say lightning never strikes the same place twice but I think we are witnessing it now in  the movie theater.

Japan Game Industry Resurgence

Japanese video games have had an amazing run over the last 20 years. They were major contributors to the early 90s big boom of unforgettable video game characters. Mario, Sonic, Mega Man, Samus, Kirby, and Link top the list as some of the most beloved. Final Fantasy, Pokémon, Resident Evil, Metal Gear, and Kingdom Hearts were the biggest names in gaming towards the end of the 1990s. Japanese video games and its characters held our hearts and invaded Western shores with a brunt force that hasn’t been seen before. Recently there has been a decline in the development and sales of Japanese gaming products. http://goo.gl/VZh76E

This is in part has to do with the passing console generations. In 1994 Sony introduced the Playstation; a video game console that was the beginning of a revolution that occurred in the gaming industry. It was a console that enabled Japanese developers to move over from the dominated market of arcade games to reach the home consumer market. It had the advanced graphics and availability in enough homes to make it profitable to produce games for. Thus you saw a plethora of games that were only available on PSOne that were created by Japanese developers offering new and exciting gameplay experiences not available on other consoles at the time.

With the introduction of Playstation 2 Sony had solidified itself as a major player in the gaming market and continued to grow and expand its Japanese developer pool. By then the developers had begun making games localized and only releasing them in Japanese markets. This made the games even more exclusive and US consumers did whatever they had to do to get their hands on these games even resorting to buying Japanese PS2’s just to play those games.

By 2002 the Japanese the Japanese video game market made up 50% of the global market. Japan Firmly had the world in its palm then. By 2006 Sony released PS3, but they had a fairly poor launch. They released a year later than its competitor and had an expensive price point due to the technology inside. Basically a very rocky start and because of this the Xbox 360 had a strong foothold on the industry. Since the Xbox was created by and American company, Microsoft, you saw more and more western developers develop titles that didn’t appeal to a Japanese consumer base.

Today Japanese dev’s hold about 10% of the global market. With the release of the PS4 and Xbox One they are beginning to have faith in western consumers again because now they will be on an even playing field with their competitors in terms of technology in the consoles themselves and marketability of new IP. Japan game development has a bright future aheadhttp://goo.gl/lz3Zjx