#the hobbit the battle of the five armies

While there are still some studios that focus on making quality stand alone films, the obsession in Hollywood in recent decades has been building successful and insanely profitable movie franchises.  However, finding or building the next great movie franchise has reached a peak in the last few years and it’s what many studios seem to prioritize when it comes to deciding what movies get made.  

Sometimes it works out and they have a huge new franchise that makes the studio millions for years to come. Sometimes it fails miserably and the studio loses a ton of money and is stuck with the rights to a series that they can’t do anything with.

Franchises have become the driving force in a lot of major movie studios, but it’s not a new phenomenon.  James Bond, Rocky, Star Wars, Star Trek, Indiana Jones, Superman, Planet of the Apes, and a host of horror movie franchises all started more than 30 years ago and almost all of them are great.  Movie studios used to take great movies and use their success and popularity to turn them into franchises.  Now the studios are trying to manufacture a franchise before the first film has even been released.

When everything works out, it’s great and we as the viewer get to enjoy a great series like Harry Potter or The Hunger Games.  But for every hit there is at least one franchise that never seems to get off the ground or drag on too long with stories that amount to “we’ll do the same thing we did in the last movie but in a different place.”

What got me thinking about this was the most recent film in the Hobbit series unimaginatively titled “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.”  (Spoiler alert: there are five armies in it.)  I am a huge Lord of the Rings fan, both of the books and the movies, and I was excited to hear that first Guillermo Del Toro and then Peter Jackson were attached to direct.

The Hobbit is a relatively short book and I thought it was going to be interesting when they announced that the film was going to be split into two movies.  Then after they were well into production it was announced that the story would be split into three movies and additional material not in the book would be added to “enhance” the story.

I enjoyed the first two Hobbit movies, although they were not as good as the Lord of the Rings films.  In fairness, that’s a very high bar to reach so it’s understandable.  The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies was pretty good and entertaining, but there is very little story to go along with a lot of action.  Instead of making two really good films, they decided to stretch the story into three pretty average films just because people like me were pretty much guaranteed to show up and buy tickets for anything they put out.

My point in writing all of this is not to decry the idea of franchises, but rather to express a hope that they will get better.  As I said earlier, the way franchises should be built is by focusing on making great movies and then capitalizing when those movies are successful.  With movie ticket sales at their lowest level since 1995 and a plethora of other options for entertainment, it may be time for studios to start focusing on the quality of their individual films rather than the potential to turn one film into a dozen.  

If the movies get better, people will go to see them and the studios will be successful financially.  That’s a win/win situation for moviegoers and filmmakers.  Hopefully the lessons of recent years will encourage Hollywood to focus on quality and not double down on trying to squeeze even more dollars out of a few more Transformers or Fast and Furious sequels.  Time will tell.

-Phil