Second Wind The Backdrop If you're even casually familiar with film or television, you're familiar
with the phrase "saved in the edit." Ending is something of
a miserable art form, and it's rarely given the
attention or credit that it deserves. This is perhaps
because it comes towards the end of the creative process
and relies on existing material. In order to edit a film, writer has to have
written a script, the actors have to perform their scenes, and the director has to have shot it all. However, the edit of a film or
television episode is transformative. Television director Darren Morgan has
described the edit as "the final rewrite." Editing is an art form. It's also,
when used well, a scalpel and not a chainsaw. In the edit, directors
can delete entire characters or subplots that were
considered vital to the production. Terrence Malick has
famously cut down actors who thought they were the leads of his movies
into extras with a handful of lines. I was in that film. I
was cut out too. I was happy. It's possible to alter the
mood and tone of a film by altering the rhythms of individual
scenes or sequences by juxtaposing images, or even by cutting a single line that shifts the entire meaning of a
scene or motivation of a character. Hollywood history is full of
films that were saved in the edit. Famously, Ender Marsha Lucas deserves
a lot of the credit for salvaging Star Wars. Men in Black was dramatically reworked
just two weeks away from its original release. Its entire plot changed in the edit. When the footage of the shark model in Jaws
looked unconvincing on screen, editor Verna Fields used what footage she had to create a film where
the creature's absence was the most effective beat. However, because good storytelling
involves setting things up to pay them off later, it's worth finding that saving a movie in
the edit doesn't always mean making it shorter. When Francis Ford
Coppola turned in his cut of The Godfather, producer Robert
Evans lamented that it was too short. "You shot a saga, but you turned
in a trailer. Go back and make a picture." If you've been paying any
attention to modern pop culture, you know that superhero movies are in a bit
of an existential crisis at the moment. We're not going to argue about why
that is, because that'd be a whole other video. What's important, though, is that it seems
like the companies producing these movies have realized this and are making the clumsiest and most
panicked attempts imaginable to deal with this. They're trying to solve it all in the edit. If you'll allow me to get on a soapbox for a
moment, there's a particularly pernicious piece of modern cultural
discourse that really grinds my gears. It's the argument that
modern movies are too long. It often involves pointing to
a specific bladder-busting behemoth like Oppenheimer or Colors of the
Flower Moon or Avatar The Way of Water, or even something populous
like The Hunger Games, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and
complaining that movies are getting longer. This is not true. Movies are not getting longer. The data demonstrates that the average
movie length has been consistent since the 1960s. There was a minor dip in
the 1980s, perhaps due to the formal limitations of VHS, but that
was the exception that proved the rule. Now, there is an argument to be made that
higher-grossing movies have generally gotten longer, but that's a trend dictated
by audiences rather than studios. Studios are still making the same movies,
but audiences are choosing to see the longer ones. It's also worth acknowledging that a
movie's length has no relationship to its quality. Roger Ebert famously argued that no good
movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough. Both Duck Amuk and The
Godfather Part II are the perfect length. Okay, have it your way. I've somehow watched Oppenheimer
eight times in the year since it was released, and that combined
viewing time still feels shorter than the 88 minutes that
I spent watching Thunder Force. I think part of me is
still watching Thunder Force. Son of a bitch. God damn it! It's worth stressing this because it gets at
one of the big issues with how the studios have been editing to try to
salvage their superheroes slate. Most of these releases
have been cut down dramatically. Just look at how short these movies are
compared to the movies they are sequelizing. 2018's Aquaman ran two hours and 23 minutes,
but its sequel is cut down to an hour fifty-five. In 2019, the billion dollar gross in
Captain Marvel ran two hours and four minutes, but its sequel was cut
down to one hour and forty-five minutes, making it the shortest
movie in the fifteen years of the MCU. Is that like a personal attack or something? There are reasons to do this, but they
have nothing to do with making the movie better. The goal is to increase the number of
the actual showtimes over its opening weekend, and therefore goose the movie's
box office over that opening weekend. And in both cases, it didn't work. The Marvels went on to have
the lowest opening weekend in the MCU, while Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom had one
of the lowest starts in the history of the DCEU, and that's a pretty competitive race. In contrast, the two
highest grossing superhero movies of the year, Guardians
Vol. 3 and Across the Spider-Verse, both ran over two hours and twenty minutes. This editing philosophy is also
evident in the superhero's streaming options. Echo, Marvel's most recent streaming show, was initially rumoured as eight
episodes and then announced as six, and then finally released as five. It was also released simultaneously, the only live-action Marvel show not to
get the classic weekly release mode. Although Netflix pioneered
that binge model with House of Cards, recent years of seen streaming
services like Disney, Amazon, Apple and others spread their high-profile releases weekly
in order to retain viewers and grow their audience. Even Netflix now splits seasons
of shows like You and Stranger Things in order to retain
viewership across financial quarters. Every live-action Marvel and
Star Wars show has had a weekly release, but Echo was just dumped in one go,
reflecting the studio's lack of faith in it. We thought it'd be
really cool and, like, unexpected. You know, like fun and kind of a twist. As with the decision to cut down
the Marvels, there are reasons to do this, but they have nothing to do with quality. Releasing all the episodes at once gives
the show a chance of hitting the streaming charts, which are based on the
total number of minutes watched. Disney also moved Echo out
of its original Thanksgiving slot to a less competitive January
release, because it's easier for a show like this to stand out during the dumped months. The shorter season makes it more likely that
those binging will actually reach the finish line, thus gaming the completion rate, an important streaming metric that would
allow the company to frame the show as a success. To be clear, these are not good reasons
to heavily retool a project in post-production, and they do not result in better films and shows. There's a real "let's get this
over with" energy to both projects, where the priority isn't to make
them better, but instead to make them quicker. Watching both the Marvels and Echo, it's
possible to get a sense of a more interesting project buried beneath these cynical decisions. While the best film and television
ending reveals more of the story being told, these efforts bury the heart and the narrative. The Marvels is a story about the
consequences of disastrous foreign intervention, the aftermath of Carol Danvers'
war against the Kree Supreme Intelligence. After the events of the
first film, Carol went to Halle, toppled the government, made enemies
with the movie's primary antagonist, Dar Ben. - How goes is it out there?
- Thriving. Carol is ashamed of this and has
chosen to go into exile away from Earth. However, perhaps because the movie's
afraid of being seen as too dark or too serious, this vitally important
piece of backstory is buried in a voiceover-laden
flashback an hour into the runtime. As a result, the audience spends the
first half of the movie with no idea who Dar Ben is and why Carol, the nominal
protagonist of the film, is being such a buzzkill. - Is that like a personal attack or something? Carol's attack on Halle should have
been the movie's five-minute cold opening, and the Marvels is
fundamentally broken by the fact that it's not. This approach also breaks the
movie on a smaller scene-by-scene basis. There are two sequences in the
Marvels where the heroes leave entire worlds and presumably millions of people to die. These should be big dramatic moments. There's a shot of our heroes
looking a little sad, then there's a wide shot, and then there's a cutaway with
no sense of the scale, scope, or drama that a superhero movie should have. The movie seems oddly small for a
film where millions of people have just died. These themes are admittedly
pretty heavy for a superhero film, but they're also so fundamental
that they can't be entirely cut out, and the movie would require a more
fundamental rework to completely remove them. So the compromise is
to just bury them in the movie and get them over with as quickly as possible, and the results are tonally jarring. Similarly, it's obvious that
Echo has been thrown into a blender. Just take a look at the show's writing credits, which suggest that significant bits
and pieces have been chopped and changed. Echo was supposed to be
the first Marvel spotlight series, a continuity-light accessible
show that casual fans could enjoy. However, because the show insists on laying
out the character's life largely chronologically, it takes the first
episode about half an hour to catch up with where Maya Lopez was at the end of Hawkeye. It would make more sense to
interspace a lot of these flashback scenes with other episodes to provide
context for specific relationships or events. Indeed, it seems likely that
the Daredevil cameo from the premiere would be intended to slot into the start
of what is now the fourth episode of the show, but the studio just couldn't wait. After all, that's one reason why the
first episode of She-Hulk was heavily retooled from what was supposed to be the eighth, allowing the premiere to
feature Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner. The opening episode of Echo even
recycles footage of Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye. The edit here prioritizes the fans
being serviced over the story being told. It's obvious that Echo was
supposed to spend more time in Tamaha, and that Maya's childhood best friend
Bonnie was meant to be a more central character. There's an interesting
show buried somewhere in Echo, one that uses an indigenous character to
craft a subversive revisionist superhero western about a drifter just
passing through town, robbing trains, and being hunted by sinister outsiders, reframing the pulp
history of American pop culture from the cowboy to the outlaw to the
superhero from a Native American perspective. You can see that in the cold opens, which evoke Thanksgiving
football and western serials, but with indigenous protagonists. However, the edit has no
faith in that story or those themes, simply so we can get to
kingpin a little bit quicker. [thud] These choices are all
defensively and cynically made in the hopes of stopping the bleeding and concealing the wounds
that have been done to the brand. However, they betray a complete lack of
faith in the creatives telling these stories and in the material itself. There's no attempt to make these projects better, just to milk what little
shareholder value they can from them. [screaming] Watching The Marvels and Echo, it always feels like
the studio's promising viewers that at least this'll all be over soon. It's the unkindest cut of all. I've been Darren Mooney
and this was The Backdrop.
