Hollywood Tastes

I’m not an economist or anything like that, so this is more of an inference than anything concrete, but the “Dueling Media” trope probably takes a lot after capitalism-style competition. EA has the Battlefield series, Activision Blizzard has Call of Duty and ne’er the twain shall meet, or something like that. I say “probably,” though, because recently in the film world this has gotten a little weird? Like, Disney and Marvel have their Extended Universe and Warner Brothers/DC have theirs and I get that, but recently, well, let’s just go through some examples.

I first noticed this right around when the Fred Rogers documentary, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? was presumably filming/in post-production and an untitled biopic about the same man starring Tom Hanks was announced. A similar situation happened with RBG and what eventually became On the Basis of Sex starring Felicity Jones. But these are understandable. There are people who don’t like one of these two genres, which allows the other film to make a grab at those movie dollars.

But there also have been dueling biopics about the same person. Loving Vincent and At Eternity’s Gate are both about the same time period in Vincent Van Gogh’s life, with the latter coming out while the former was still fresh enough in my memory to know what was going to happen. Even then, though, Loving Vincent, being completely comprised of oil paintings, is impressive on a technical level while At Eternity’s Gate has Willem Dafoe and an arthouse aesthetic. It’s plausible that someone could be so against animation as a medium that they would completely ignore Loving Vincent (though I suppose the reverse isn’t really true; people who watch arthouse films generally have more inclusive ideas about animation).

What inspired this piece was a pair of films, Polar and Arctic. They both came out in the same month, both have one-word-cold-place titles, and, amazingly, both star Mads Mikkelsen. But one was critically panned while the other premiered at Cannes, and it struck me as I was looking at reviews for both of them -- many of them insisting that, no, this wasn’t the other movie, that I started piecing these trends together.

For the record, you can draw patterns between anything if you try hard enough. For example, I wanted to draw the creation of the two Van Gogh movies to the Doctor Who episode, Vincent and The Doctor, but realized it’s been nine years between that and the other two movies, so decided against it. I did try to at least keep a consistent time scale between the movies I mentioned.

I don’t have any big revelations as to why all these are so close together, What I can offer, though, is the moral to be as educated as possible when deciding on films. All of these movies are marketed to different tastes, and you don’t want to be caught seeing Mads Mikkelsen survive in an arctic wasteland when you wanted to be seeing him fend off would-be assassins. That’d probably negatively affect your viewing experience.

-F