How Hollywood’s Hit Formula Flopped—and What Could Come Next

Today, we’re talking about movies, the philosophy of hits in Hollywood, and why we might be at a fascinating inflection point in how the entertainment industry thinks about popularity and prestige.

We start by thinking about the big Oscar win for Oppenheimer in the historical context. For much of the past 10 or 15 years, popularity and prestige have come apart in Hollywood. The biggest movies have almost exclusively been comic book franchises, sequels, and adaptations, while the Best Picture winners have often been small films, like CODA or Moonlight. But in the past 18 months, two things have changed. First, the old franchise model is showing some wear and tear, as Marvel movies consistently underperform their expectations. Second, original and often daring films—Barbie, Oppenheimer, Dune: Part Two—are dominating at the box office. Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw joins to explain how the franchise formula was born, why it’s showing its age, and what might come next.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

In the following excerpt, Derek and Lucas Shaw talk about the evolution of the Hollywood formula, including the rise and (potential) fall of the franchise era.

Derek Thompson: So one thing that you do really well, Lucas, in your Bloomberg newsletter and The Town with Matt Belloni, is you track paradigm shifts in Hollywood. You had a great newsletter recently, for example, about how major Hollywood studios are at a fork in the road when it comes to their business models, and I think we’re actually going to save that for the end. But I wanted to talk to you about another paradigm shift that I have been really fascinated by when it comes to Hollywood blockbusters. In the 1990s, as I just talked about in my open, I think a lot of people would be surprised to go back and see how little sequels dominated the box office. But sometime around the year 2000, and for much of the last 20 years, this has been the age of the cinematic universe and the multi-sequel factory. If you look at the box office of 2019, for example, last year before the pandemic, there are two Marvel films, Frozen 2, Toy Story 4, Star Wars: Episode IX.

It’s all Disney and numbers. And for a while, it really seemed like that just might go on, if not forever, because nothing goes on forever, then something close to forever. But now you look at Disney’s struggles, you look at Marvel’s struggles, you look at the fact that last year was the year of Barbenheimer (two original films), that in 2024, [one of] the biggest films [is] Dune 2, which is a sequel. It has a number in it, but it’s also like a prestige film. It’s a Denis Villeneuve film. It’s more like The Godfather 2 for science fiction. The other biggest films of the year are Wonka, Bob Marley: One Love, Mean Girls the musical, Migration, The Beekeeper, Anyone but You. And so it feels to me like something has changed. That’s my big windup. Before I throw it to you and ask you to tell the story of how we got here, how would you characterize this thing that I’m talking about, this moment? What would you call the last 20 years of the Hollywood formula?

Lucas Shaw: The age of the franchise, I think. You probably used the proper terminology, which is cinematic universe. You go back, and there have been sequels as long as there’s been Hollywood. You make something, and it works, and any sound capitalist wants to make it again. But it used to be that you reserved sequels for truly huge movies, and you didn’t make too much of them. There were sequels to Jaws or Star Wars or Indiana Jones or any of these movies. But you’re right that throughout the ’80s and ’90s, most of the biggest movies, a lot of them were based on books, but you didn’t see a parade of sequels.

I don’t know if we’re at the end of that era. It feels like we’re in a transitional moment, but I think it’s important to recognize that we’re in March, and so most of the biggest movies of the year, Dune 2 is the first truly big one. The Marley biopic, unless the movie business has a really terrible year, the Marley biopic is not going to be a top-10 movie this year. And the expected biggest movies of the year are still primarily sequels, comic books. You’ve got a Despicable Me 4. You brought up The Town. OK, so let’s go over the top 10 picks in the box office draft. I won’t do all of them. I went first. I picked Despicable Me 4. It’s got a four. I think Matt then picked Deadpool 2. That’s got a two. I picked the sequel to Joker.

He picked Wicked, which is a little bit of a curveball, but you still have these sequels and these comic book movies there. But you’re right that this age in which comic books seem to be the dominant form of cinematic pop culture is ending. It doesn’t mean comic book movies can’t work, and it doesn’t mean that they still won’t be among the biggest movies, but they are not nearly as monolithic as they used to be. And I gotta admit, I’m not entirely sure why that is other than just tastes are cyclical. And you can see that some of the really popular new comic book movies of the last five years were counters to the traditional comic book movie. You had Deadpool, which was the satirical, wry take on a send-up of the Disney movies. You had Joker, which is as dark a comic book movie as you can imagine.

Thompson: Yeah. It’s a little bit reminiscent of the fact that I remember when the superhero era was really taking off, some people analogized it to the era of Westerns. And if you think about Westerns, there are some Westerns, High Noon or The Searchers, which are classic John Wayne–style films, but there are others like Blazing Saddles, which are not classic Westerns at all. They’re a send-up of the genre. And so once a genre becomes mainstream, as mainstream as superheroes have become, you are playing against type. You are using the fact that people have certain expectations of the genre and then playing against it. If you are still undecided that the age of franchise is ending, I think you would agree that the age of franchise, at least as we’re discussing it, began. It did not exist in 1996. It did not exist in 1998. Something happened around the turn of the century. So I would love for you to help me tell this story. If we were going to tell the story of the rise of total sequel-ification in Hollywood, where would you start?

Shaw: I thought about this, and my initial instinct was to pick 2008, because 2008 is the year that the first Iron Man movie came out, which really launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe as we know it. It was one of the 10 biggest movies of the year: not one or two, but really, really popular and forms the blueprint for Marvel’s takeover of pop culture over the next 15 years. You have a pithy, wisecracking superhero who makes some jokes but is ultimately trying to save the world, and it’s just a lighter form of a comic book movie. And it stood in very stark contrast to the biggest movie of 2008, which was The Dark Knight, which I think ushered in its own wave of the DC cinematic universe, [which] was this never-ending quest to replicate the Christopher Nolan Batman movies, and Zack Snyder and other directors failed to do so as successfully as Chris Nolan.

Those movies still did well, but it created these parallel lines of the Marvel movies and the DC movies, and I’d have to double-check, but I’d imagine every year from 2010 to 2020, you had at least three or four Marvel and DC movies among the five or six or seven highest-grossing movies in the world. You could, in theory, go back further. I was looking, and in 2003—which is the year that The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won the Oscar for Best Picture; it was also, I believe, the highest-grossing movie of the year—most of the big movies of that year were sequels. … You had the start of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. You had a sequel to The Matrix, you had a sequel to Terminator, and you had a sequel to X-Men. Just had a lot of sequels.

They were still smaller. Not as many of them were comic books, but you saw this shift toward franchises. But I think 2008 is probably the fulcrum just because when you’re thinking about the modern movie era, it’s really all about comic books.

This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Lucas Shaw
Producer: Devon Baroldi

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