THE NEW YORKER, MAY 28, 2018 71
A business once ruled by star power is now dominated by intellectual property.
BOOKS
CLOBBERING TIME
How superheroes killed the movie star.
BY STEPHEN METCALF
ILLUSTRATION BY NISHANT CHOKSI
L
ate in the fall of 2014, an entity call-
ing itself Guardians of Peace began
leaking e-mails and other private mate-
rial belonging to Sony Pictures. Sensa-
tional headlines quickly followed. The
hack was reportedly the work of the
North Korean government, possibly in
retaliation for the portrayal of Kim Jong
Un in the as yet unreleased Sony com-
edy “The Interview.” (North Korea de-
nied this.) Among other things, the
e-mails revealed that Jennifer Lawrence
was paid significantly less than men
whose stardom didn’t equal hers and
that, before attending a Democratic fund-
raiser featuring Barack Obama, Amy
Pascal, the co-chair of Sony Pictures,
had joked with the producer Scott Rudin
about which recent movies starring black
people the President might have liked.
On the heels of these and other reports
came opinion pieces arguing that jour-
nalists were abetting the hackers by pub-
lishing the stolen information.
Another story was getting lost. Sony,
which from 2002 to 2012 had generally
been one of the top earners at the box
oice, was failing as a studio. Under
Pascal’s leadership, Sony released a mix
of tentpole films—the latest James
Bonds, “Da Vinci Code” sequels—and
star-driven vehicles often featuring Will
Smith or Adam Sandler. (“Will and
Adam bought our houses,” Sony execs
liked to say.) Sprinkled among these
were mid-budget, low-concept movies
aimed at adults. Pascal had taken pride
in Sony’s reputation as a “relationship
studio,” built on its connections with
talent. She was literate and smart, and
alive to what makes a story click. Sony
owned the rights to Spider-Man, and
Pascal made intelligent use of them—
her choices for director (Sam Raimi, of
“Evil Dead” fame) and star (dewy-eyed
Tobey Maguire) were unexpected, and
together they made a movie that hon-
ored fans and non-fans alike. (“Spider-
Man 2” was good, too.)
In the long run, it didn’t matter. Sony
did not own the intellectual property,
or “I.P.,” necessary to build out Spider-
Man into a “cinematic universe”—that
is, a fictional world that transfers from
picture to picture, so that, instead of a
single story line with a new installment
every few years, a studio can release two
or three “quasi-sequels,” as one Marvel
executive has put it, in the span of a sin-
gle year. Marvel pioneered the cinematic
universe, hatching a plan in 2005 that
it launched with the release of “Iron
Man,” three years later. Without the
requisite I.P., Sony couldn’t compete. “I
only have the spider universe not the
marvel universe,” Pascal explained to a
colleague, in a 2014 e-mail. (The studio
had had a chance to buy nearly all Mar-
vel’s big characters, on the cheap, in the
late nineties, but declined.) In another
e-mail, Pascal suggested that she was
trying to create an “un-marvel marvel
world that is rooted in humanity.”
As Sony faltered, its rival, Disney,
was enjoying an embarrassment of I.P.
riches. First, it began remaking its an-
imated classics as live-action features;
then, in 2009, Disney bought Marvel,
for four billion dollars. In 2012, it ac-
quired Lucasfilm, the parent company
of “Star Wars,” for another four billion.
By 2015, Disney was releasing one new
movie from the “Star Wars” universe
and two or more movies from the Mar-
vel universe every year.
Located nowhere in actual history
or geography (or, maybe, human expe-
rience), a cinematic universe need not
be limited by cultural specificity or nu-
ance. What plays in Sioux City plays
in Bayonne will play in Chongqing.
The rise of the cinematic universe is
inseparable from the rise of a truly global