The Paramount/Activision Deal Is Misguided
I've been wrong before, but I don't think I'm wrong about this. Almost for as long as Thirty Minute Reviews has existed (over a decade now), we have been talking about the prospect of a Call of Duty movie in development and how this is likely a bad idea. The appeal of Call of Duty as a franchise is not the narrative or the characters; it's the immersive experience and multiplayer aspect. Call of Duty is more than a video game. It is a social venue, and no amount of memes will make this a good decision for the longevity of the film industry.
It's hard not to look at this through the lens of the Variety article talking about Disney seeking out new established IP to court Gen Z boys to movie theaters. I've seen several articles talking about the "Gentleminions" and the memes that came out of The Minecraft Movie as something that the studios want to emulate and try to force a certain demographic back to theaters. We've also seen virality lead to additional money for Morbius (not much but Sony did re-run the movie based on social media influence) and the box office success of both Oppenheimer and Barbie caused by the prevalence of "Barbenheimer" on social media.
What the studios do not understand is that these moments cannot happen if they are forced. Maybe some of the decisions in The Minecraft Movie and its marketing were made with a desire to go viral in mind, but every movie has that. There was no way that Universal knew that people would dress up in suits to go watch the new Minions movie, these things just happen. There's an inherent counter-culture aspect of this viral marketing that will inherently not work if directed by the studio to do it.
Buying the rights to Call of Duty reeks of trend-chasing. It's a big studio spending a ton of money after seeing The Minecraft Movie make almost a billion dollars. It's a tentpole video game IP, targeted at the right audience, and now they just need to either astroturf a marketing ploy to get people to freak out over a line delivery, ironically go to see a bad movie, or make the best war movie since Saving Private Ryan.
To that last point (and not to be dramatic), I think we are looking at kind of an existential threat to the film industry as a whole if this goes through and comes out. We've seen a trend of movies getting more bland and designed to be a second-screen experience, but what happens when the only movies released in theaters are big budget films some studio exec thinks can be memed to $500 million at the box office?
If I were in Gen Z, I'd probably be offended at this whole situation. Disney is saying that they alienated Gen Z boys by not making them front and center and now Paramount is saying they'll only come out to a theater if they produce feature-length brain-rotted content based on whatever jangling keys they can buy the rights to. Congratulations gents, you complained about black people in your movies so much that big-budget movies are being made with tenor's gif library as one of the most important deciding factors in what gets released.
