Brandscape blockbusters are financialized portfolios that materially embody speculation, not mere allegory

Evidence

For our purposes, Who Framed Roger Rabbit can also be credited with starting a cycle of films we might call the brandscape blockbuster—or, if you prefer, the intellectual property management film or the metaverse movie. It contains all of the necessary components in nascent form: a world that parallels our own, heavily populated by licensed, branded characters and stories, which are explored for the viewer as if in a nostalgic travelog. Disney and Warner Bros., with the deepest of catalogs, are the main purveyors of these stories. With a mix of live action and animation (traditional, computer-generated, or both), the brandscape blockbuster often depicts two distinctive worlds, one simulated and happier, in contrast to a darker, real world. The conflict often involves a populist rebellion against a tyrannical villain who aims to homogenize the world for their benefit, an intergenerational struggle over values, or both. It is a “four-quadrant movie,” designed to appeal to all four major demographic “quadrants” as defined by ­Hollywood—men/women, over/under twenty-five—by offering action, adventure, romance, wit, nostalgia, and reflexivity. Though otherworldly and spectacular in their aural-visual representation, these films are arguably more “realistic” than any other cultural form operating today. The average American sees roughly five thousand brand names and advertisements in a single day, maybe even as many as ten thousand. With strategic licensing agreements and merchandising deals, these brandscape blockbusters seek to develop a fantasyland made in the image of the financialized marketplace, reflecting our dystopian reality back to us as a playful fantasy. It’s a dreamworld that comes with a heavy price, literally and figuratively. Table 7.1 depicts this series of brandscape blockbuster films, most with much denser referential economies than their originators. We can read these films as industrial allegories—“Hollywood thinks about capitalism by telling stories about money,” as J. D. Connor says7—but also as wide-ranging, diversified portfolios of brands, properties, licenses, and merchandising tie-ins. Nearly all are huge successes just in terms of box office, let alone brand value. These films demonstrate our descent into a financialized popular culture—not just as a symbolic representation of such, but as a material embodiment of vast speculation. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 402

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the brandscape blockbuster genre and its components — central to the reader’s project of tracing financial structure to aesthetic form.
• XREF: The ‘material embodiment of vast speculation’ claim ties directly into Scott Galloway’s thesis and could connect with the ADDENDUM article on trees as infrastructure re: how material form encodes economic logic.
• SEED: Angle: ‘reflecting our dystopian reality back to us as a playful fantasy’ — a piece on how postmodern media neutralizes critique by repackaging financialized alienation as family-friendly nostalgia.