When the Israeli-born businessman Ynon Kreiz became the head of Mattel, in 2018, he was its fourth C.E.O. in four years. Toys R Us had recently gone bankrupt, causing a slump in sales; Kreizs predecessor had resigned after Mattel suffered a loss of three hundred million dollars. Kreiz, whose rsum includes a stint at Fox Kids Europe, saw an opportunity for growth. Mattel, he argued, had a childrens-entertainment catalogue second only to Disney. Just as Marvel had gone from ailing comic-book publisher to Hollywood behemoth, the toymaker could leverage its intellectual property at the multiplex. Kreiz told me, My thesis was that we needed to transition from being a toy-manufacturing company, making items, to an I.P. company, managing franchises. ... Meanwhile, Mattel has amassed a long slate of other projects. Daniel Kaluuya, for example, has agreed to produce a feature about Barney, the purple dinosaur. Thirteen more films have been publicly announced, including movies about He-Man and Polly Pocket; forty-five are in development. (Some of the projects have an ouroboros quality. Tom Hanks is supposed to star in Major Matt Mason, which will be based on an astronaut action figure that has been largely forgotten, except for the fact that it helped inspire Buzz Lightyearone of the protagonists of Pixars Toy Story franchise.) ... More important, in the intervening years, the opportunities available to ambitious directors have narrowed further. The notion of a starry, C.G.I. Bambi reboot has gone from a joke on the HBO Max industry satire The Other Two to an actual movie that Sarah Polley is making in the wake of her Oscar-winning film Women Talking. During the pandemic, multiplexes collapsed. The future of moviegoing now seems increasingly tenuous, and studios have leaned on pre-awareness as a means of drawing people to theatres: a nostalgia play like Hot Wheels is seen as a safer bet than an original concept. The box office has borne this out: the ten highest-grossing films of 2022 were all reboots or sequels. Disneys much derided strategy of remaking Aladdin and other animated classics as live-action spectacles has largely paid off; by contrast, Pixars recent attempt at an original story, Elemental, bombed. On an earnings call last November, David Zaslav, the head of Warner Bros. Discovery, emphasized that a real focus of his was to revive the conglomerates most popular franchises. We havent done a Harry Potter movie in fifteen years, he said. (In fact, there have been six.) The mandate for audience recognition has pushed artists to take increasingly desperate measuresincluding scrounging up plotlines from popular snacks. Eva Longoria recently directed the Cheetos dramedy Flamin Hot; Jerry Seinfeld is at work on Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story. ... When Kreiz became C.E.O., Masters of the Universe had lain dormant for more than a decade, and reviving it had been among his top priorities. Its as big as Marvel and DC, he told me, citing an official encyclopedia of He-Man lore, which, he believes, contains seeds for sequel after sequel. Its hundreds of pages of characters and sorcerers and vehicles and weaponryyou name it. And then you flip through the pages, and heres a movie, and heres a movie, and heres a TV show. . . . Its endless!
The industry is creatively bankrupt and should be foreclosed upon