The Big Picture

by Ben Fritz

  Though the animation work is completed in Australia, directors and artists here do the conceptual and design work on films like The Lego Batman Movie, Lego Ninjago, and The Lego Movie 2, part of what Lin and Warner Bros. hope will be a never-ending series of new movies. A cinematic universe, that is, made out of tiny plastic bricks. Bizarre as it is to see a franchise-focused digital animation studio grafted onto an old-fashioned production company—or is it the other way around?—the Bricksburg Chamber of Commerce shows what it will take to succeed as a moviemaker in the Hollywood of the future.

  From a purely artistic standpoint, directors still rule moviemaking. They are in charge of the creative process on a set, and by guiding the cast and crew and deciding how each scene is shot, they leave a signature clearly evident in the final product. Nonetheless, directors’ overall power in Hollywood has diminished considerably as the industry has shifted to a franchise model, in which the cinematic series is more important than any single movie within it.

  There used to be well over a dozen A-list directors working in Hollywood at any given time who could get most any movie they wanted greenlit at any studio where they chose to work. Today there are only three: Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, and Christopher Nolan. In the franchise age, directors increasingly resemble hired hands who are brought in to helm a single sequel or spinoff but aren’t integral to the brand. The fourteen Marvel Studios films released through 2016, for instance, had eleven different directors.

  The model is similar to that of a television series. Directors come and go for different episodes and are valued largely for their ability to maintain the tone of the series and bring their installment in on time and on budget. In TV, the power has traditionally lain with writers and producers—many of whom serve both roles—who work on every episode, maintaining long-running story arcs and the consistency and coherence of story lines and characters.

  As more and more films are created as part of a cinematic universe, moviemakers are adopting a similar model. It’s the producers, or writer-producers, who create and manage cinematic universes. Directors work in partnership with them and are expected to exercise their creativity within a predetermined set of parameters. A groundbreaking director’s bold new creative vision is not what anyone is looking for in the ninth Fast & Furious movie or the sixth Mission: Impossible.

  To understand how filmmaking really works in Hollywood today and what hope there is for creativity and originality within the franchise-driven model, we have to meet the new A-list: producers and writer-producers who are managing and creating cinematic universes.

  In some ways they are like corporate brand managers, tasked with keeping a product line running smoothly. But none came to Hollywood to become the show-biz equivalent of the vice president in charge of Pampers for Procter & Gamble. They love movies and they profess to be as tired as anyone of the sameness of so much that Hollywood offers. They see themselves as creatives within a corporate system, trying to inject original ideas and personal vision into the franchise films that studios want them to keep pumping out for audiences. Once you know the people behind Lego, X-Men, and an upcoming series of films based on Hasbro toys, it becomes a little tougher to dismiss their work as the cynical, derivative corporate ploys they often look like from the outside.

  This chapter goes behind the scenes of those three franchises to look at how they’re made and how the producers and writers behind them try to do their jobs while keeping their creative souls intact. The work of people like Dan Lin, Simon Kinberg, and a room full of writers led by Akiva Goldsman is helping define what kind of films we get in the coming years and whether the franchise age can, despite so many forces pushing in the opposite direction, be a creatively vibrant one.

  The MBA

  Before he became the mayor of Bricksburg, Dan Lin was on a very traditional Hollywood career path. Lin immigrated to the United States from Taiwan at age five, and though he learned about America from watching TV and movies and had a particular love for John Hughes films like The Breakfast Club, he wasn’t thinking about a career in Hollywood. Like so many immigrants and middle-class kids, he didn’t even know such a thing was possible.

  In his senior year at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business in 1993, however, Lin heard the alumnus Chris Lee give a speech, and it changed his life. Lee was a top production executive at Columbia Pictures and one of the very few Chinese Americans in the upper echelons of Hollywood. That was the first time Lin learned about jobs that melded business and creative skills.

  After working as a consultant, Lin started on an MBA at Harvard and spent the summer after his first year interning at Warner Bros., for the president of production, Lorenzo di Bonaventura. In addition to performing menial tasks like packing picnic baskets for concerts his boss attended at the outdoor Hollywood Bowl, Lin served as a translator during meetings with the Chinese action star Jet Li, who was in the studio’s Lethal Weapon 4. Those meetings also allowed him to interact with the movie’s producer, Joel Silver, and gave him enough experience and exposure that di Bonaventura invited him to come back, once he finished his MBA, as a “creative executive,” the lowest rung on the studio ladder, just above assistant.

  It was not an obvious move for someone graduating from Harvard Business School. A career counselor warned Lin, who would be making less than $50,000 in his new job, that he would be the lowest-paid member of his graduating class by a long shot. Lin gave himself three years to succeed in Hollywood, after which he would return to a more boring business career if things didn’t work out.

  But he never had to. The baby-faced Lin, who with his full head of hair and penchant for hoodies and T-shirts barely looked thirty even well into his forties, rose to become a senior vice president of production. He worked on a number of movies but made his biggest mark with The Departed, Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning film of 2006, which Lin helped to adapt from a Hong Kong film released in 2002.

  During Lin’s time at Warner, the entertainment business was already becoming more corporate, and he concluded that the job he was heading toward, president of production, was not nearly as fun as it used to be. The pressure to produce globally successful franchises was starting to mount, and the more freewheeling, risk-taking culture of studios like Warner Bros. was fading. Perhaps counterintuitively for a Harvard MBA, Lin wanted some degree of creativity and unpredictability in his career. It was why he had gone to Hollywood rather than sticking with management consulting. So he opted out of the executive path to become a producer. And it seemed he had a key to stability in his pocket: he was going to produce a new slate of superhero movies featuring the characters from Warner-owned DC Comics.

  The studio’s Superman Returns had been a dud in 2006. Chris Nolan had successfully revived Batman with 2005’s Batman Begins but had not yet made his blockbuster sequel, The Dark Knight. Warner wanted to refresh Superman and bring its other prominent superheroes, like Wonder Woman, Flash, and Aquaman, to the big screen for the first time. Lin’s plan, which he presented to the studio management in a PowerPoint deck, was to kick off a series of DC movies by presenting all of the characters together in a Justice League film. Then, once audiences were familiar with them, each would each get an individual movie.

  Warner signed off on the idea, giving Lin the first movie for his newly formed company, Lin Pictures, to produce: Justice League: Mortal. George Miller, of Mad Max fame, was going to direct it, with a cast of young newcomers. Armie Hammer, later known for The Social Network and The Lone Ranger, would play Batman, and Adam Brody, of The O.C., would play Flash. The film was set to shoot in 2008, for release in 2009. Lin’s plan called for a new solo film for Superman to follow soon after, then films for other key DC superheroes, after which a Justice League sequel would be released in 2012 and every three years thereafter.

  Though Lin and Warner were unaware of it, this was the opposite of the plan being hatched at the time by Marvel Studios, which would introduce its superheroes in a series of
solo films, starting with Iron Man in 2008, before bringing them together in The Avengers in 2012.

  If it had succeeded, Lin’s plan for DC movies would have made his studio immediately competitive with Marvel in the superhero cinema world. But that was not to happen. Just months before shooting was to start in Australia, Justice League: Mortal was delayed by a strike by the Writers Guild of America. By the time the strike ended, Warner executives had gone cold on the film due to its huge budget and concerns that audiences might be confused by a different version of Batman than the one played by Christian Bale in The Dark Knight.

  So Lin now had to start his producing venture from scratch, a difficult task as the 2010s dawned and studios were cutting back their slates and focusing more on branded movies. He quickly produced one film that he had first developed as an executive, a fourth Terminator, but the 2009 release performed only decently at the box office, and fans hated it, so no sequels followed. A trio of low-budget pictures, the horror movie The Box, the kids’ film Shorts, and the Ricky Gervais comedy The Invention of Lying, all performed poorly.

  But a new version of Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey Jr., was a hit that year. It seemed that Lin had found his first franchise as a producer; a successful sequel quickly followed in 2011. But the Sherlock movies were based less on the core appeal of the character than the charismatic performance of Downey. Once he became busy starring in a Marvel movie nearly every year, plus occasional passion projects like The Judge, the Sherlock series came to a halt.

  Lin’s toughest year as a producer came in 2013. He hoped that year’s reboot of Godzilla, for which he had helped to acquire rights, would kick off the new franchise his company needed, but instead it resulted in the darkest moment of his career. The financier Legendary Pictures booted Lin and his fellow producer, Roy Lee, from the project, alleging they had not done enough work to earn the millions that the duo claimed was rightfully theirs. Lin, who rarely betrayed any strong emotion, particularly anger, felt severely wronged. He and Lee sued Legendary, but the case was in court for two years and the legal bills were substantial.

  With his company short on hit films and no TV show on the air yet, Lin had to move his family to a rental house and lay off his top executive in order to stay afloat.

  Lin Pictures might have met an ignominious end, if not for The Lego Movie. The project had initially come Lin’s way as a Warner executive, when Roy Lee had pitched him to make a film based on Bionicle, a Lego sub-brand with characters that resembled the Transformers. Lin wasn’t interested, but he met with a Lego executive and ended up discussing a bigger idea. After seeing his young son Miles play with Legos and invent his own worlds, Lin thought he could use the brand to make a movie with broader themes about invention and creativity.

  Executives inside Warner and throughout Hollywood mocked the idea of a film based on a toy set that lacked characters or a story. They thought at best it would be a “hand tugger,” the type of movie that little kids have to drag their parents to see. But as Lin developed the movie for several years, he stuck with his belief that the Lego title would attract a broad audience if it married two qualities: a subversive sense of humor that appealed to adults and an action-adventure story full of physical humor for kids. By linking brand to big idea, it drew upon his skills as an MBA and as a Hollywood producer. Lin also found a way, with his Australian animation studio, to make the movie for the bargain-basement price of $60 million and signed Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who had shown their ability to playfully subvert a brand in Sony’s hit 21 Jump Street, to write and direct.

  Lin forged deals to feature a variety of characters, many not owned by Warner, to appear in the film in Lego block form, including Batman, Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Chewbacca from Star Wars. Those satirical portrayals, as well as a surprise live-action scene featuring Will Ferrell, were funnier than anyone expected but still gave depth to the story, about a painfully ordinary guy who saves the world by discovering his creativity.

  The movie got extremely high marks from preview audiences, and as its debut, in February 2014, approached, Warner upped its internal estimates for the opening weekend from $30 million to $40 million to $50 million and, finally, $60 million. That was still short of the actual opening gross: $69 million. The Lego Movie ultimately grossed $469 million worldwide and was hugely profitable, giving Lin and his company the financial break they needed, thanks to his share of the revenues.

  But it was the week before The Lego Movie opened that the major transformation of Lin Pictures really began. The chief executive of Warner Bros., Kevin Tsujihara, called Lin and asked whether he had more ideas for Legos. Lin replied that he did and almost immediately sent the studio a plan. It was in fact the presentation he had prepared for the DC movie franchise seven years earlier. “I literally just put the Lego name on it and revised a few of the details, but all of the notions were the same,” Lin later explained.

  Warner itself was in need of franchises, as the Harry Potter series had just ended and the Hobbit trilogy was about to expire too. So the studio quickly approved Lin’s plan, asking him how many follow-ups he could make, and how soon. They quickly decided that, just as Lin had originally planned for follow-ups to Justice League, spinoffs featuring individual characters should follow The Lego Movie, after which a proper sequel would be released. Lego Batman, featuring an obnoxiously hilarious version of the Dark Knight, was the first spinoff, after which would come a movie about a group of goofy Lego fighters called Ninjago. These would be capped by The Lego Movie 2.

  Lin and his team had been given wide latitude to make the first Lego movie however they wanted. But now that it was a franchise, and Tsujihara had publicly touted Lego as one of the studio’s three pillars, along with DC and the Harry Potter spinoff Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, it would be tougher to keep the series fresh. “Everyone wants to get their hands on it,” Lin observed. So he convinced Warner to fund the creation of Bricksburg, arguing that the movies needed their own creative culture away from the corporate studio lot. Most important, Lin wanted to keep the idea of a child’s freewheeling play at the core of every movie and allow Lord and Miller, who remained as producers, and the new directors and animators to let ideas run wild, without scaring executives who thought they knew what a Lego movie was supposed to be.

  The result is a building filled with purposely planned whimsy, including a yellow slide connecting the two floors on which animators work and a hidden room, furnished with a phonograph, a light bulb in a glass human head, and a chandelier made of branches, that’s accessible only via a bookcase opened by yanking on The Illustrated Works of Sherlock Holmes.

  Lin works with the studio executives at Warner headquarters in Burbank and the animators in Australia, trying to protect the creatives working in Bricksburg from corporate and technical concerns. His job is twofold: to keep a project on schedule, so Lego movies don’t disappear from public attention for too long, and to keep his team creatively invigorated, so that their work feels fresh but also in line with the culturally savvy attitude and turbocharged visuals that audiences expect from the franchise.

  Pixar had taken many years to develop its unique culture, but Lin had to bootstrap one in a hurry with Bricksburg. Inevitably, perhaps, it feels a bit affected, but also endearingly earnest. “We’re trying to keep a sense of creative chaos, because that’s what was so successful in the first movie,” Lin said in “Another Room,” his name for the hideout behind the bookcase. “But the chaos is hard to scale, particularly because the stakes are so much higher now.”

  The first offering from Bricksburg, The Lego Batman Movie, demonstrated that, if anything, it was working better as an engine of creativity than as a source of big profits for Warner Bros. The movie grossed $301 million, a solid result but well below the $469 million that The Lego Movie generated.

  But there was no denying that Lego Batman was something different. Its outwardly obnoxious but inwardly lonely pr
otagonist was the funniest superhero seen onscreen perhaps ever, and the film earned overwhelmingly positive reviews. For a spinoff created on a high-pressure schedule and featuring two franchises in the title, that’s no easy feat.

  King of the X-Men

  Simon Kinberg’s office is nothing magical to look at. With the exception of a pile of Deadpool DVDs sitting on a table, there was almost no hint on a summer afternoon in 2016 that it’s the creative home base for 20th Century Fox’s most important film franchise, the X-Men.

  While Bricksburg is a physical manifestation of the cinematic universe at the heart of Dan Lin’s career, Kinberg works out of an office the size of a child’s bedroom inside an old bungalow on a faux suburban street on the Fox lot. The X-Men cinematic universe, it turns out, can be found only inside the head of the skinny, neurotic screenwriter with spiky gray hair who works there.

  According to the cliché, a movie writer spends most of her time hacking at a keyboard in a coffee shop or a poorly lit apartment while bemoaning Hollywood’s lack of interest in her original idea. Or he is lamenting over an arrogant director’s unwillingness to let him spend time on the set where actors are speaking his words.

  Simon Kinberg hasn’t written an original screenplay in more than a decade. And he is on set virtually every day for the movies he writes. Nobody has spent more time on the sets of Fox’s superhero movies over the past five years than he has. Understand him, in fact, and you can understand some of the most important themes of the recent X-Men movies, hidden beneath the sound and fury of superpowered mutants battling over the fate of the world. You might even see these adaptations of Marvel’s most famous superhero team as personal stories of his.