How Hollywood Killed the Director So

7 min readDec 20, 2020

Now is not the time to tell people that a rare piece of good news is actually bad news, but allow me to be King Asshole for a moment, won’t you? Here is the good news in question: A few weeks ago, Deadline reported that Olivia Wilde was signing to direct a Marvel movie. Not just any Marvel movie, but a Spider-Woman movie. Marvel is happy. Wilde is happy. Even fanboys and fangirls, an impossibly prickly lot, are happy, or at least as happy as that strain of humanity gets. And why wouldn’t they be? Marvel makes good movies. Wilde made a movie last year in Booksmart that had such a clear voice to it — funny and almost painfully current — that it only makes sense to imbue Spider-Woman with that same voice. It’s a perfect match. Everyone wins.
And that’s the big fucking lie. Wilde just got assimilated into the new film industry Borg. It’s a good Borg, mind you. She’s gonna get paid bank and have an opportunity to put her imprimatur onto a big-shit comic book character. Some of that imprimatur, probably in the form of a few brilliant lines of dialogue and a flash of wholesome raunch. But it’s still gonna be a Marvel movie. Marvel makes these movies, with occasional input from Reddit. No one else really gets to. I was thinking about all this because Twitter user @mappewpwellps posted this scene from Spider-Man 2 at the end of July.

That scene went viral because it’s fucking awesome, but also because you will NOT see a scene that looks like this in any tentpole superhero movie going forward. Spider-Man 2 was a Spider-Man movie, but it was foremost the work of Sam Raimi, the beloved Evil Dead director who had the good sense — and more important, the PERMISSION — to lend that movie his own affectionate B-movie stylings. Once Spider-Man 3 got laughed out of theaters, Raimi was never allowed near the franchise again. After two Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movies that Sony made essentially to keep the character its intellectual property, Marvel repossessed Spider-Man and Marvelized it into two hit movies. I adored the first one. I cannot, for the life of me, tell you who directed it.
Wilde’s Spider-Woman movie is gonna be good. I have zero doubt about that. I also have zero doubt that Marvel will skillfully sand away most, if not all, of the edges in her voice so that it fits neatly into the Marvel brand. And the real crime is that everyone will be HAPPY about this shit. I saw Marvel fanboys rush to pile on Martin Scorsese last year when he took a dump on the company. And a lot of directors now are fanboys and fangirls themselves. It’s no challenge to get them to agree to come into the fold. Because what other kinds of movies does Hollywood even bother to make anymore? You either step up to their big leagues or you toil in the Indie Cinematic Universe until you’re dead and broke. So now we have a film industry system where promising directors voluntarily help the machine do its business and subsume their own independent visions to do so.
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I don’t want Wilde making a Marvel movie. Booksmart was my favorite movie of last year, and I wanted her next movie to be her own. If Wilde succeeds with Spider-Woman, and I have little doubt she will, MAYBE she’ll get to do the “one for them, one for me” thing that keeps your average A-list actor (which Wilde also happens to be) both wealthy AND creatively satisfied. But in order to do that deft bit of juggling, you still need movie studios that MAKE movies that fit into the “one for me” category, and most studios don’t. Disney sure as fuck doesn’t. Hell, the only reason Wilde probably got to make Booksmart to begin with was because of her already established success as an actress. Alfonso Cuaron was able to blaze his own trail after doing a (very good) Harry Potter movie, but Cuaron looks an awful lot like an exception to the rule. So, the more likely outcome is that Wilde gets to make Spider-Woman 2, and it earns more money and online accolades for helping add female voices to a tentpole process that remains a half-century behind where it needs to be.
The directors most likely to flourish right now are the ones whose personal aesthetics just happen to align with large-scale productions of existing IP. The prime example of this is Christopher Nolan, who used a brilliant independent movie in Memento to get himself the job on Batman Begins and has since been given free rein to make whatever lavish ideas come to his crisply dressed mind. That’s how Nolan ended up with not only the money to make Tenet but also the juice to insist that Tenet appear only in theaters in the middle of a global health crisis. Tenet made $20 million here in the United States over the weekend. I hope no one dies from seeing it.
No other director who occupies the non-Spielberg division of the studio system has this perfect alignment of taste and financial viability. (Sam Mendes, Lord & Miller, and Ryan Coogler, all men, come close.) The only other directors who can make whatever movies they want are guys who blew up back in more auteur-friendly times: the Coens, Quentin Tarantino, and, ironically, Martin Scorsese. No one else is welcome. The system won’t allow for them. Shit, Lucasfilm explicitly designed the last Star Wars movie as a transparent REJECTION of the Star Wars movie Rian Johnson tried to make prior to it. That’s how fucking hostile the terrain is.
The late producer Robert Evans once lamented the advent of the possessory credit. You’ll recognize this credit anytime you see the words “A Tommy Wiseau film” brandished across your screen. This is a credit that the Director’s Guild long ago fought to establish, and Evans noted that it diminishes the work of everyone else on the movie, most notably the producer. Was Evans bitching about this because HE himself was a producer? You know it, baby. Did he also happen to be right? Fuck yeah, he was. But Evans failed to see a future in which the likes of Kathleen Kennedy and Kevin Feige could create a tier of film possession ABOVE what directors had already established, thereby turning every gifted director into a hired gun. A well-respected hired gun, but a hired gun all the same.

So that’s why it sucks that Wilde got her ticket to The Show. I’m not gonna be able to see the movie she would have been able to make instead. And how many other directors am I missing out on? How many are YOU missing out on? You’ll never know, and the Marvel product is so well made that you won’t bother to ask. You’ll go back to a theater once the pandemic ends, you’ll sit in your seat, and you’ll notice a goddamn logo before you notice anything else.

How Hollywood Killed the Director So

Written by Shannon F. Genovese