Pop culture at breaking point: Is the multibillion-dollar fan machine about to overheat?
How deeply that absence is felt by the fandom is as simple and complicated a question as, how long is a piece of string? You wouldn't think it's a thing, as this year's Comic-Con is making all the right commercial noises.
In real terms, it's about the source of all that noise: the content. Peak TV sold us fewer channels and more streaming platforms – and now there's more content than ever, and we're scrambling to keep up.
House of Cards, Stranger Things, Barbie, Strange New Worlds, Andor, Baby Reindeer, The Bear, Adolescence, Euphoria. We loved Sex and the City. We hate And Just Like That. We were tired of DC Studios, but baby we're back with Superman. We were tired of Marvel, but oh, baby we're so back with The Fantastic Four.
This appetite has split open the seams of all the silos and social content, TV content and movie content, and an army of YouTubers are now just living in one giant noise machine, in the palm of your hand, and perpetually stuck, it often seems, one iOS update behind everyone else's.
But there is an upside. 'Trash has given us an appetite for art,' wrote the legendary American film critic Pauline Kael, whose genius was confirmed when she was the first to acknowledge that The Empire Strikes Back was indeed the best film, cinematically, of the three original Star Wars films.
In an essay for Harper's Bazaar, provocatively titled Trash, Art and the Movies, Kael offered this as an explanation for the power of pop culture: 'Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn't all corruption.'
Kael, who died in 2001, did not live through the era of reality TV, of the Kardashians, of the Real Housewives, or a landscape that sometimes places a billion-dollar motion picture and a scrappy YouTube home movie next to each other and, algorithmically speaking, chooses to elevate the latter.
But she understood people, and pop culture. And that understanding gave her a rare insight into why we are all, underneath our hesitation, confidence and I'm-asking-for-a-friend dismissiveness, just a bunch of big fat superfans. That's what keeps the TV channels transmitting, and the movie theatres open, and Comic-Con in business.
But the problem with our content-powered escape room is that the seams are beginning to split under the strain. In space, you may not be able to hear anyone scream, but sometimes the roar is so loud you can't hear yourself think.
To some extent, that explains the rise of digital detoxes, and phrases such as 'conscious unplugging'. That's why some people are drifting into slow living, and shopping for 'dumb phones', which don't have apps, or easy texting capabilities, but rather depend on you dialling a number and having a real conversation.
So, what does all of this mean for the world's trillion-dollar fan business? Nobody is going to stop buying Funko Pops tomorrow, and The Big Switch-Off is never going to be a real thing. But it does mean that the system, overheated by both money, marketing and brand exhaustion, can run too hot, and when it needs to, let off steam.
But there is also a natural upside. With Superman and The Fantastic Four not stopping at Comic-Con's Hall H on their global whistle-stop PR tours, space has opened up for all manner of things, from the indefatigable enfant terrible of animation, South Park, to the appropriately titled Dexter: Resurrection.
And at the weekend, the granddaddy of it all, filmmaker George Lucas, is coming to Comic-Con, not to sell a Star Wars movie, or indeed to sell an action figure, Death Star play set or poster. He's coming to talk about a museum: the Lucas Museum of Narrative Arts.
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The Age
26 minutes ago
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The Advertiser
an hour ago
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Ryan Gosling and faceless alien wow crowd at Comic-Con
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(Spoilers for that section follow). It included an extended glimpse at Rocky, the stone-shaped and faceless alien who becomes Gosling's mission partner as they attempt to save the universe from ecological disaster. Phil Lord, who co-directed the film with Chris Miller, said the relationship between the two beings stuck alone together in space represents the central theme. "If the universe depended on it," Miller said, "can adult men make friends?" Rocky is already a cult favourite for readers of Andy Weir's novel, and is sure to be a future staple of Comic-Con cosplay. Gosling said he got on board immediately after reading Project Hail Mary in manuscript form, and was only partly kidding when he called Weir, who was sitting next to him, "the greatest sci-fi mind of our time". "I knew it would be brilliant, because it's Andy, but nothing could prepare me," Gosling said. "It took me places I'd never been, it showed me things I'd never seen, it was as heartbreaking as it was funny." Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a middle school teacher and underachiever drafted for the mission. The opening five minutes show a gloppy, long-bearded, amnesiac Gosling as he awakes in a pod. He climbs out, confused. He finds other people in pods who are clearly dead. Then he finds a window and learns he's in space. He gives a mealy-mouthed scream of "Where am ?!" The movie represents the return to directing, and return to space, of Lord and Miller for the first time since they were fired and replaced by Ron Howard by Disney and Lucasfilm from 2018's Solo. Like The Martian, the movie goes heavy on the science but takes the messy, kitchen-sink, everything-is-comedy approach Lord and Miller used in films like The Lego Movie. "This movie is not a Mac, it's a PC," Lord said. "It can be beautiful, it just can't be pretty." Comic-Con got a lot of Ryan and a little bit of Rocky at a panel on Project Hail Mary, the forthcoming film that's equal parts space adventure, real-science deep-dive, broad comedy and relationship drama. "What's up Hall H!" a giddy Ryan Gosling in a trucker hat and flannel shirt shouted to the crowd of more than 6000 at Comic-Con's biggest venue. Amazon MGM Studios showed the opening five minutes and several other slightly unfinished scenes from the first third of the film, seven months before its planned release. (Spoilers for that section follow). It included an extended glimpse at Rocky, the stone-shaped and faceless alien who becomes Gosling's mission partner as they attempt to save the universe from ecological disaster. Phil Lord, who co-directed the film with Chris Miller, said the relationship between the two beings stuck alone together in space represents the central theme. "If the universe depended on it," Miller said, "can adult men make friends?" Rocky is already a cult favourite for readers of Andy Weir's novel, and is sure to be a future staple of Comic-Con cosplay. Gosling said he got on board immediately after reading Project Hail Mary in manuscript form, and was only partly kidding when he called Weir, who was sitting next to him, "the greatest sci-fi mind of our time". "I knew it would be brilliant, because it's Andy, but nothing could prepare me," Gosling said. "It took me places I'd never been, it showed me things I'd never seen, it was as heartbreaking as it was funny." Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a middle school teacher and underachiever drafted for the mission. The opening five minutes show a gloppy, long-bearded, amnesiac Gosling as he awakes in a pod. He climbs out, confused. He finds other people in pods who are clearly dead. Then he finds a window and learns he's in space. He gives a mealy-mouthed scream of "Where am ?!" The movie represents the return to directing, and return to space, of Lord and Miller for the first time since they were fired and replaced by Ron Howard by Disney and Lucasfilm from 2018's Solo. Like The Martian, the movie goes heavy on the science but takes the messy, kitchen-sink, everything-is-comedy approach Lord and Miller used in films like The Lego Movie. "This movie is not a Mac, it's a PC," Lord said. "It can be beautiful, it just can't be pretty."
