Earlier this week Warner Brothers announced that it is set to bring a film adaptation of Lego to the big screen in 2014. The Lego film will, excuse the pun, build on Hollywood’s proven track record of making films based on children’s toys. Michael Bay’s Transformers trilogy has grossed a staggering $2.6 billion since the first film was released in 2007. While toy manufacturer Hasbro and Spyglass Entertainment studio will be hoping that next year’s follow-up to the 2009 G.I. Joe film can match the $300 million box office takings of the first.
Though it would do both the film-makers and marketeers a disservice to assume that making money from films based on toys is child’s play, Hollywood is certainly enthusiastically tapping a fruitful resource.
Next year will see the release of perhaps the strangest of these toy adaptations to date with Battleships. Liam Neeson may have “acquired a certain set of skills” throughout his acting career , but it is questionable quite how many of them he will need to draw on when he stars alongside Rihanna in John Berg’s interpretation of a game many of us associate with long car journeys.
With a budget of $250 million dollars, headline writers may already be perfecting their variations on a box office sinking pun, but Hollywood’s major studios seem to think they are onto a winner with the boardgames on the big screen formula. So much so in fact that a strategic partnership between Hasbro and Universal has put film versions of Risk, Candy land and Monopoly purportedly in the pipeline. Indeed the latter has even managed to get Ridley Scott on board as director.
Dorothy Parker is once thought to have said “the only ‘ism’ Hollywood believes in is plagiarism”. It is certainly true that Hollywood has a voracious appetite for adapting certain genres to cinema and it is also true that over time the source of Hollywood’s inspirations regularly changes. Books (Lord of the Rings, The Godfather), plays (Driving Ms Daisy, Romeo and Juliet), TV programmes (Star Trek, Naked Gun), comics (Batman, Superman, Spiderman), video-games (Tomb Raider, Resident Evil) even theme park rides (Pirates of the Caribbean) have all at one time or another been the stimulus du jour, and now it seems, it’s children’s toys and boardgames.
But isn’t this latest development slightly different? Isn’t Hollywood now fishing for ideas in such shallow waters, not because of their artistic merit, but because of their potential for commercial gains?
Professor Thomas Leitch, Director of Film Studies at the University of Delaware and author of Film Adaptation and its Discontents, believes this was always the case.
“I’d question the assumption that Hollywood used to be abrim with creative energy but has lately run dry, since it seems to me that Hollywood has always quite deliberately chosen to be in the business of manufacturing reliably reproducible mass entertainment, an enterprise in which originality is neither sought nor welcomed except insofar as original concepts can be readily replicated.”
If Hollywood’s methods haven’t changed, what of its purpose? The overt messages in films like G.I Joe or Transformers seems more mass marketing than mass entertainment. What was once an ancillary function, even a necessary evil to fund a project – the merchandising – now seems to be the sole intention of some films.
This Leitch concedes to be true in some cases, but notes that it is not as recent a phenomenon as we might suspect.
“I think the pivotal figure here is Walt Disney and the crucial period the mid-1950s, when Disney was launching both his television program and Disneyland, the first of his theme parks. Each of these endeavours was clearly designed to promote the others, and to showcase both Disney’s forthcoming projects and his impressive back list as well.”
In 1995, another American professor, Janet Wasko, wrote:
“It is not inconceivable that in the future…manufacturers and joint promoters will demand more knowledge of the film and may even try to influence the production in order to maximise the benefits accruing to them.”
Writing at a time when films sold commemorative toys and weren’t based on them, Wasko’s comments seem almost innocent now. Although avarice has probably always trumped art in mainstream cinema, it has never done so in a more apparent way than now, leaving the marketing tail well and truly wagging the Hollywood dog.
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