In the seven years I’ve been writing about film for a living, I can’t recall a summer where I dreaded going to the cinema more.
Spring didn’t indicate that would be the case. In February, Deadpool upended virtually every superhero movie cliche to prove there’s still some life left in the genre. Disney matched that film’s ingenuity with Zootopia, a gorgeously animated cartoon about a bunny befriending a fox, that also somehow managed to tackle a litany of social justice issues while coyly addressing race relations in America and police brutality.
All that goodwill that Hollywood built up in those early months came to an earth-shattering thud with the arrival of Zack Snyder’s superhero mashup Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which failed to deliver either a plausible storyline to account for the titular brawl or much in the way of good time.
From there on in, the dominoes kept falling. Warcraft: The Beginning didn’t bother to make a lick of sense. Alice Through the Looking Glass squandered the wonder that characterized Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, burdening itself with a lame time-travelling plot. X-Men: Apocalypse trotted out a bored-looking Jennifer Lawrence for another superhero movie in which most of the world gets destroyed with glaringly little consequence.
The overwhelmingly dire output of late has suggested that the Hollywood honchos have fallen asleep at the wheel in rather spectacular fashion. When a film as deafeningly hyped as Batman v Superman fails to crack $1bn worldwide, you know something’s amiss.
Given the sludge thrown our way this season, it almost didn’t come as a surprise that last week’s two big releases were just as bad. DC’s second big film of the year, Suicide Squad, was a hodgepodge of a blockbuster, assembling a bunch of underdeveloped villains to fight a villain even hokier than Oscar Isaac’s titular purple god in X-Men: Apocalypse. Nine Lives, Barry Sonnenfeld’s kiddie flick about a cat voiced by Kevin Spacey, shouldn’t have been granted life at all. A third Garfield film would have been more welcome than this drivel.
But all is not lost for summer 2016. By industry standards, Sony’s Sausage Party and Disney’s Pete’s Dragon couldn’t differ more.
Produced, written by and featuring the voice of Seth Rogen, Sausage Party is a hard-R animated film, the likes of which people haven’t seen since Trey Parker and Matt Stone tested the MPAA’s boundaries with South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut and Team America: World Police. Despite the plot’s core similarities to Toy Story (it imagines the secret lives of food, instead of toys), Sausage Party is distinctly non-Pixar, by gorging on racial and cultural stereotypes (Edward Norton does a killer Woody Allen impression to play a Jewish bagel who butts heads with an Arabic flatbread; Salma Hayek voices a lesbian taco), meanwhile engaging in a radical thread that questions the existence of God – and the destructive harm organized religion can breed. It’s also very, very funny.
Pete’s Dragon caters to a much younger demographic: like the 1977 partially animated original, it tells a sugary sweet tale about a young boy raised by a big, cuddly dragon. The latest in Disney’s fruitful bid to remake all of its animated classics comes from indie darling David Lowery, a young film-maker who showed great promise at the Sundance film festival in 2013 with his artful and subtly devastating romance Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. Pete’s Dragon, his first studio gamble, retains the homespun quality that made his last picture so endearing, despite its boasting a blockbuster-sized budget and visual effects galore. It bests The Jungle Book, until now the best-received of the Disney live-action revamps, by bearing the stamp of its formally rigorous maker so strongly.
According to Rogen, every studio except Sony passed on Sausage Party because nobody had seen anything like it before – a reveal that should surprise no one. In today’s marketplace, which seems to value “cinematic universe”-building over gutsy innovation, the fact that Sausage Party was even made is a miracle unto itself. Its low budget, reported to be around $30m (this year’s biggest animated hit, Finding Dory, cost a whopping $200m), no doubt played a part in its creation.
Lowery, meanwhile, claims that Disney was adamant that he retain his directorial voice on Pete’s Dragon. “They never referred to it as a Disney movie,” he told Indiewire. “They referred to it as a David Lowery movie. It was weird to hear those words uttered on the Disney lot.”
The project’s creative success is no doubt attributed to the creative control granted to Lowery. Conversely, respected directors Ava DuVernay and Edgar Wright weren’t afforded that freedom by Marvel, and abandoned ship as a result, citing “creative differences”. Meanwhile, it’s become routine for studios to interfere with potential moneymakers. Warner Bros is said to have ordered reshoots on Suicide Squad to “add more action” – and look how that turned out. Given the way blockbusters seem to be completed nowadays, Disney’s handling of Pete’s Dragon can be viewed as downright rebellious.
Combined, both Sausage Party and Pete’s Dragon show that studios are still evidently capable of delivering strong commercial product that’s both creative and confidently mounted. Should the films win over audiences, their popularity can hopefully inspire Hollywood execs to think outside the box more, and take needed risks to keep the medium alive and thriving. They owe it to us after this summer.
