High sales at the box office and always new material: science fiction is booming – also thanks to the willingness to experiment of the streaming services
There is a lot of money to be made in the film business with science fiction. The genre is booming and recently brought with it Dune by Denis Villeneuve also good sales at the box office. The film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel, which David Lynch had already worked on in the 1980s, at that time with very moderate commercial success, brought in almost 370 million dollars worldwide at production costs of 165 million dollars – the sales of Warner’s own streaming service HBO Max not included at all.
If you look back at the science fiction film adaptations of the last few years, it is noticeable that the large budgets are primarily invested in the adaptation of older, often market-tested material, such as in Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Valerian (2017), the continuation of the Alienseries and the entire Marvel and DC blockbusters, not to mention the umpteenth revolution in the Star-Trek– and Star-Wars-Universe. The streaming services, on the other hand, are discovering material that has not yet been filmed for their increasingly expensive series, such as Apple TV+, which is based on Isaac Asimov’s Foundation approached. But you can’t call that innovative in the sense that original fabrics are created. The genre of science fiction has fascinating and newer stories to offer.
For nerds and educated citizens
The best example is the series The Expanse, whose sixth and, for the time being, final season started on Amazon Prime in December, but will unfortunately be canceled afterwards. The ten-part novel, whose authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck also co-wrote the screenplays, has only been filmed halfway through. The Expanse offers the rare pleasure of a science fiction critical of capitalism with class struggle in space and stylish subcultures in a future in the middle of the 24th century, which can inspire not only SF nerds but also left-wing educated citizens. The series tells of power-political shifts and social-revolutionary uprisings. Economic constraints are described as well as imperial and post-colonial dependencies and the associated racist exclusion mechanisms. And it’s all set in a changing solar system that’s as helpless to the threats of extraterrestrial, self-replicating technologies as we are to climate change. The Expanse is science fiction that is up to date, the plot of which sets clear, but not trite analogies to the here and now, to our political dissolution processes and life in late capitalism, in an exciting way.
On numerous spaceships, some of which look like left-wing shared flats, people cook together in the galley, argue with each other, and regularly spit a solid “Fuck you!” in the face of the other person, but there are also polyamorous group relationships and, in the event of a mutiny, crew members are “spaced out”. ‘, thrown out into empty space. The Expanse really takes place in outer space, where astronauts sometimes suffer a heart attack or die from radiation sickness. Right in the space that’s in Star Trek as a cute starry backdrop sticks like a decal behind windows that are always cleaned to a shine, the at Star Wars as a flashing background full of religious mysteries straight out of a fairy tale and the valorization of which so many businessmen on earth today are racking their brains. Whereby the same asteroid belt in which a large part of the action of The Expanse is located, could become the goal of one or the other real economic mission, but also regularly serves as a setting in current SF literature. The final season six, which has just six episodes, tells above all of the brute force and the murderous potential for destruction that a war between the colonial power Earth and the independent asteroid belters, the “Beltern”, with their proletarian habitus and the stylish tattoos would bring.
In contrast, the Foundation-Adaptation on Apple TV+ a bit outdated despite successful first season. The fact that the literary template dates from the early 1940s and is originally a Fordist story including genocidal horror is easy to tell from the material. The pleasantly diverse cast of roles doesn’t change that either. while in Foundation imperial godlike beings rule a space empire from above, the characters argue in The Expanse about how real solidarity works and whether it is possible to evade political and social constraints or to subvert them.
Yesterday’s tomorrow
More newer material is filmed in series than in the cinema. title like Devs, Tales from the Loop and Nevers are the latest examples. In view of the enormous production costs of science fiction, however, one also understands why cinema operations, especially in Corona times, are reluctant to engage in experiments. The example of Paramount, whose parent company CBS recently made itself unpopular with German SF fans because it released the fourth season of Star Trek Discovery Netflix took away a few days before the planned broadcast date in mid-November in order to be able to offer the series exclusively over the course of the coming year on the Paramount+ streaming service, which does not yet exist in Germany.
In 2017, the massively promoted real-movie remake of the iconic anime film flopped Ghost in the Shell, which implements the template surprisingly well in terms of visual aesthetics, but robs the story of an artificial intelligence that tries to build a resistant collective network of all its progressive content. Only a short time later, Alex Garland’s second film would follow obliteration – also produced by Paramount – in cinemas. Only had the director after his debut Ex Machina as a hot newcomer and representative of a new, sophisticated science fiction, the rights for the final cut of the film. From the literary source obliteration, a 2014 novel by Jeff VanderMeer inspired by Tarkovsky’s Stalker and contains philosophical debates about the relationship to nature, Alex Garland made a 50 million dollar auteur film, at times with a chamber play-like atmosphere. The dispute between the studio and the director, who did not want to re-edit the film for the masses, ended with Paramount dumping the film on Netflix without further ado.
The streaming platforms, with their focus on multiple niche audiences around the world, currently find it easier to allow more sophisticated and up-to-date content than the cinema. Some, Netflix first and foremost, even celebrate them as a kind of democratization in the film business. Stephanie Land, bestselling American author, whose autobiographical novel Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive was recently implemented as a mini-series by Netflix, he said Seattle Times: “Even when I was totally broke, I could always afford Netflix. I want poor people to have access to this offer too. I want them to be able to see themselves in an authentic way.”
For some, the cinema is also a hurdle. James Lassiter, the producer of the “Black Western” The Harder They Fall, took a very similar line when he recently stated that the film, with its all-black cast, had not found a producing studio. Netflix grabbed it, as it did with Spike Lee’s black Vietnam film Da 5 Bloods, for which Lee had long knocked in vain in Hollywood.
At Netflix, the trend to establish a science fiction Christmas film is gaining ground. In 2020, that was George Clooney Midnight Sky, the adaptation of a current science fiction novel that impressively deals with the topic of environmental and climate catastrophe. The rather quiet film sets itself apart from the otherwise so gun fetishistic and action-oriented science fiction blockbusters in the cinemas, where the film would probably not have been a box office success despite George Clooney. In this respect, with all reservations about the streaming platforms, especially in comparison to the cinema, one should take a close look at what is being produced.
Read more in the current issue of Friday.