A Minecraft Movie is a massive hit, with reports of teenaged boys raucously turning screenings into a Rocky Horror-like experience. No one rhapsodizes about the power of a hit more than me, but one movie based on one of the most popular video games ever won’t turn the entire ship of moviegoing.
Film’s great test right now is to stay relevant, central to the great cultural story of our times, when the competition for that space is intense. A decade of aggressively bland and homogenized studio filmmaking has accelerated its marginalization.
The studios, 100-year-old companies, are old enough to be among the top 10 percent of the most elderly corporations in the Fortune 500. And much of what they do hasn’t changed appreciably in that time.
In that century, they’ve had plenty of time to build up layers of bureaucracy, contracts, supply chains and systems loaded down with waste and expenses that now make it fiscally impossible for them to make anything other than giant tentpole movies, all at a time when many more films — for different identity groups, ages, genders, classes and geographies — is exactly what is needed.
All this comes at a moment when doing things differently has never been easier and more accessible — the benefit of the digital age.
All they have to do is change how they produce, market and distribute movies and everything will be fine. That’s it! I’m sure our lumbering conglomerates are going to get right on that.
Our best hope then is that others along the peripheries of the cinema world find the new way and studios adapt to embrace or follow them.
Lately, I’ve seen faint stirrings in my travels on the edges that suggest that novel ideas to enliven moviegoing may be about to come from outside the system, as they always do. The indie film world is what has historically refreshed cinema, and there is hope it might do so again.
I don’t like to throw around terms like “rays of hope” lightly — lest an impressionable young reader thinks that maybe things will be just fine. Just fine is not our current trajectory, for studio or indie filmmaking.
But the demand, the opening and the technology are there to make it happen easily and cheaply.
With that in mind, here are four companies operating in that space of opportunity. Whether any or all of these will make it is beyond my ability to predict. But the fact that more companies are moving into this space of independent film gives a hint of possible green shoots that in the years ahead, might help us create a new world.
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