The Hollywood Biopic Is Dead – Welcome To The Age Of The Brand Movie
Film festivals tend to have at least one trend. Cannes 2021 was the year of ... well, cunnilingus ("Benedetta, "Annette," "Titane," and so many more), while TIFF 2018 was the year of movies about troubled musicians ("A Star Is Born," "Vox Lux," "Her Smell," "Teen Spirit"). In 2023, South by Southwest was the year of the brand movie or product biopic (the prodpic?). Finally, Hollywood has realized that people are tired of the same old biopics that distill someone's entire life into a truncated narrative full of cliches and tropes, reducing moments of genuine innovation into contrived deus ex machinas.
Besides, who cares about people anyway? Not Hollywood, apparently, because they have finally recognized that audience's huge interest in recognizable IP and nostalgia means they don't care about people or characters, they care about products. And so, this year's SXSW saw movie writers and producers realize that they could just cut the middlemen and deliver what the people want right to them — movies about products!
That's right. This was the year when we forewent stories of extraordinary people and instead saw movies explore the (sometimes) extraordinary stories behind some of your favorite products and brands. How about a Michael Jordan biopic? Screw that! Give me the story of the partnership between a rising star and the juggernaut sports clothing company Nike that resulted in the Air Jordan!
How about a movie about the touching and thrilling story of the game developer who created "Tetris" and changed gaming forever? Who cares!? Just give us the tale of the guy who got the rights to put "Tetris" on every new GameBoy and make the richest video game company out there — Nintendo — even richer! We love consumer products!
Brands are the new rock stars
All kidding aside, it is kind of baffling to see some of the highest profile movies of SXSW making heroes out of executives and giant corporations. In "Tetris," the creator of the titular game is sidelined for most of the film, with the story focusing instead on Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton), a former game designer turned freelance licensor who works with Nintendo to acquire the handheld rights to "Tetris" for the Game Boy.
The story frames his quest as a heroic one (with a cover of Bonnie Tyler's "Holding Out for a Hero" to boot), as we follow a man rescuing a work of art from greedy Soviets — rather than an executive just trying to avoid bankruptcy and make the already rich Nintendo a whole lot richer. Sure, "Tetris" is actually quite thrilling, and its use of video game levels as a framing device is very fun, but still, Henk doesn't come across as the hero the movie seems to think he is.
Likewise, Ben Affleck's latest directorial effort, "Air" tells a story adjacent to a big pop culture achievement, yet focuses on the men in suits that paid for it to happen. In this case, it's the story of the men in suits who sat on the phone to make a big deal happen and create the Air Jordan. Michael Jordan is in the film, sure, but he looms over the plot rather than playing an active role in it. Instead, we focus on how one brave executive took a chance on this untested basketball player to launch an entire shoe line around him ... while also making a whole lot of money for himself and Nike.
It's all about the people
It would be very easy to be cynical about brand movies like "Tetris," "Air," "Flamin' Hot" or "Blackberry," but there's a reason all of these were praised by critics at SXSW (except "Flamin' Hot," which our own Jacob Hall liked less than the taste of a stale Cheeto). Namely, they're more than just stories about products.
Take "Blackberry," a movie about the making of a hugely popular product that plays like Mike Judge's take on "The Social Network." It's an often hilarious drama about the development of the titular line of smartphones, and the buffoons who created a company that once held almost 50% of the phone market before losing it all. The movie very wisely looks away from the titular phone — except to highlight how groundbreaking and better it was than the iPhone — to instead tell a familiar yet still entertaining rise and fall story, as seen through the eyes of a "Silicon Valley"-styled comedy that's more about the people than the tech.
Even "Flamin' Hot" avoids making its movie about the Frito-Lay line of products and instead focuses on delivering a crowd-pleasing, feel-good underdog story that celebrates Chicano culture. It's not for everyone, and it does fall into the unfortunate side effect of telling a story based on a lie, but it is still a very entertaining film that also happens to feature the creation of a beloved product.
No, we do not need films about the making of famous products to become a trend — we already have "Drunk History" for that — but these films nevertheless prove that you can do more with the biopic formula than we've seen so far. Turns out, you can still deliver entertaining stories, even when they center on people in suits talking on their phones.