The New Yorker - May 28, 2018

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