What has happened to all the Hollywood films?

Between 2006 and 2013, there was a 40 per cent drop in the number of films released by the major Hollywood studios. David Gritten investigates a worrying trend

But the upsurge of cable TV (with HBO its aggressive creative spearhead) has diluted the networks’ power base, offering a greater diversity of programming for grown-ups. And in the past decade, DVD sales (which once helped many a box-office flop out of the red and into the black) have waned dramatically. Relatively cheap viewing options such as Netflix have rushed in to fill the gap.

We’ve seen a comparable pattern in this country, exemplified by the rise of TV series like Breaking Bad, Borgen and The Wire. Here, too, DVDs have begun to feel like cultural artefacts from another century.

So where does that leave the studios? Repurposing themselves, effectively – diverting their attentions to younger audiences while marginalising grown-ups. The result? Much of the adult population here and in the States now tends to shy away from studio-made films. The anomaly here is Disney, with its animation division, overseen by Pixar’s John Lasseter, currently in excellent form. Parents take their kids along to Disney movies; weirdly, it feels as if, in comparison with its rivals, Disney is performing a kind of all-the-family public service.

The phrase "public service" isn’t one you’ll hear on Hollywood studio lots, except as a term of derision. Yet indirectly that was what major studios used to provide, making wildly varied films for a broad range of audiences and demographic groups.

Well, we can kiss that era goodbye. Now it’s all about brand-name franchises, toys, superheroes, comic-book adaptations – anything, in other words, that’s kid-friendly and has built-in pre-recognition: even the success of the previous film in a series.

Some of these matters are currently hot topics in Hollywood because of a report in the trade publication Variety that highlighted the decline of super-producers, who enjoyed lucrative "on the lot" agreements that tied them to a studio by means of "first refusal" rights on any project they generated.

Super-producer names who have fallen by the wayside include Joel Silver (Sherlock Holmes, Lethal Weapon), who had a long-standing deal with Warners, and Jerry Bruckheimer (Bad Boys, Black Hawk Down, Pearl Harbor), a favourite son at Disney for 20 years, who in recent years has been producing more for TV.

The tendency now is for studio executives to act as de facto producers on these mega-budget films. The only producer credited with last year’s Marvel Studios offerings Iron Man 3 and Thor: The Dark World is Kevin Feige – who happens to be president of Marvel Studios, now a subsidiary of Disney.

Of course, one need not shed too many tears for the super-producers, all of whom are vastly wealthy and never need work again. Yet their passing marks another step towards the supremacy of corporate thinking in Hollywood. I wouldn’t call myself a fan of Silver’s or Bruckheimer’s work (and the latter, remember, came to produce the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, which, based as it is on a Disney theme-park ride, feels like a very in-house idea).

But there’s something about a super-producer – an arrogant, temperamental shouty type who wins studio bosses over with his crazed passion for a film idea – that feels preferable to calm, calculating decisions made by in-house studio executives poring over algorithms, spread sheets and feedback surveys.

Joel Silver, remember, first earned his super-producer stripes with the Lethal Weapon franchise, which extended over four films. It began 25 years ago, and we take it for granted now: but back then that first movie didn’t seem automatic box-office gold. Pairing a black cop with a suicidal white cop (Danny Glover and Mel Gibson) felt like a risky proposition for a potential blockbuster. It certainly wouldn’t pass muster in today’s corporate Hollywood. (For a start, those suicidal tendencies would simply have to go.) Yet Silver (who is often politely described as "flamboyant") bullied and cajoled Warners into getting it made exactly as he envisaged it. Passion prevailed.

It’s not as if the studios’ policy of betting the farm on a few, hideously expensive movies for teens is exactly a foolproof one. We all know the names of the casualties, the titles that ran up stratospheric nine-digit losses: John Carter, Battleship, After Earth, RIPD, Green Lantern. And they were all awful. (The Lone Ranger, produced by yes, Bruckheimer, ran up the biggest losses of the lot. Yet in its way, it’s a glorious folly, a renegade movie that doesn’t care about hitting its target audiences, and I’m not alone in thinking history will treat it kindly.)

Is this a surprise? How can it be? Consider that some 20 movies of this kind, with budgets exceeding $100 million, opened in the States last year. Logic dictates that all of them cannot be hits – and with this level of outlay, huge losses were inevitable for some.

But even supposing the studios are right: that fewer films are better, bigger films make more sense, that commercially tested and tried material is the prudent way to go, that teenagers will always be the most pliable audiences – where’s the victory in that?

Even if current studio thinking is proved right and in the long term, blockbusters enable them to rake in revenue and look Wall Street squarely in the eye, consider what’s been lost. Hollywood will be churning out a predictable series of dull, monotonous, special-effects heavy, dramatically incoherent movies for a relatively small segment of the cinema-going audience. The studios may survive: but what a diminished industry they’ll be presiding over.