Jem and the Holograms: Learning the Right Lessons from a Box-Office Disaster
Unfortunately, director Jon M. Chu’s appearance at the Film Independent Forum coincided with the news that his new film Jem and the Holograms (2015) had opened with one of the lowest all-time box office results for any wide-release film in history. Producer Jason Blum also spoke at the forum and bluntly announced that the film was “crashing and burning” at the box office.
Chu had attempted to get a film adaptation of the 1980s cartoon off the ground before by pitching an idea to Hasbro and Universal (who ended up distributing the film) of a movie faithful to the source material, but they reportedly balked. “We pitched it to Hasbro and Universal and it was really fun. It was just really big. It was insane.”
The project eventually ended up at Blumhouse, where it was produced for $5 million, virtually a microbudget film by major studio standards. But even producing a film for such a relatively tiny budget can’t make up for that film’s playing to empty auditoriums on its opening weekend.
It seems likely that the lesson Universal, Hasbro, and Blumhouse will take away from the film’s disastrous box office is that “girl movies don’t make money.” Unlike Transformers or G.I. Joe — both also Hasbro franchises and based on popular 1980s cartoons — no studio was willing to take a chance on a blockbuster-level production of Jem. And looking just at the numbers seems to justify their reticence.
The nostalgia that the studios banked on for their “boy” franchises, for which they were willing to put up blockbuster-level budgets, appears to be nonexistent for Jem. The women who were young girls when the original cartoon was on the air weren’t interested in revisiting that world and its characters, and so they didn’t go. They didn’t take their friends, or their husbands, or their kids to the movie. Analyzing this by cold, hard box-office figures seems to back up this supposition.
However, the numbers don’t reflect the more nuanced reality of releasing a film in 2015. There are important factors at work here that predisposed fans of the original series to avoid the film. In an unsurprising move that alienated many of the original show’s hardcore fans, Jem creator Christy Marx was excluded from the film’s production.
Marx herself explained in a 2011 interview with The Mary Sue, “As much as I loved Jem, it was someone else’s property.” She further clarified in a Facebook post that Jem belonged to Hasbro: “It’s their property, they can do whatever they want with it, and they have no obligations whatsoever to me.” In that same post, though, Marx admitted that she was “deeply unhappy about being shut out of the project.” Jezebel posted a detailed story in January of this year entitled “Here’s How the Jem and the Holograms Creator Was Cut Out of the Movie” that caused many of the now-adult fans who enjoyed the series as children to question whether the film was actually being made with them in mind at all.
Who exactly the Jem and the Holograms film was produced for is an excellent question. Reaction to the film’s trailers was largely negative, especially among fans of the original series. It was clear from the trailers that the adaptation had jettisoned an enormous chunk of what made its source material so popular in the first place. Chris Plante at The Verge went so far as to refer to the film as “a tech bro drama disguised as a tween girl comedy.” Caroline Siede of The AV Club observed that the film’s second full trailer “lacks soul.” The trailers felt like fulfillment of the worry that many fans had that a Jem film produced almost entirely by men was almost inevitably doomed to fail.
In an interview with io9, Chu expressed confusion about the backlash that accompanied the announcement that the principal creative duties on the film were performed by men:
“It was definitely a surprise to me, because I didn’t think [Jem] was exclusively for women in the first place. We didn’t have some preconceived notions that we needed to do this as men for women, or something. I guess I just didn’t understand that [reaction], and most people complained that women shouldn’t be objectified, there should be more female-empowered movies. And yet, that’s what we’re doing. And we’re being attacked for it.”
In the same interview, Chu also gives specific insight into why the film’s focus was steered away from the original series:
“…we really started thinking, ‘Well actually, maybe we’re focusing on the wrong theme. We’re focusing on ‘Jem and the Holograms,’ but we really need to bridge this gap, to bring in the audience, to make a character we believe we could bring into that world, and we start with [Jem’s true identity] Jerrica. It was less about her journey to stage, but that was the hard part for me. We have to get her famous, but I don’t want this movie to be about her being famous.”
While any adaptation must grapple with the questions of what to keep and what to excise from the work on which it is based and how to translate that work into a different medium, it is difficult to imagine a more fundamental miscalculation than this.
The original Jem was appealing for a number of reasons, not least of which was its escapist fantasy of more-or-less “normal” young women who have secret identities as a flashy pop band. Jem and Holograms have nemeses in the form of The Misfits, a rival band of bad girls. At its core, the Jem and the Holograms cartoon series was a sort of superhero story geared toward girls, complete with secret identities and crazy technology.
So it’s bitterly ironic (if not at all surprising) that a new Jem and Holograms comic series from IDW has been garnering rave reviews and praise for its female creative team of writer Kelly Thompson and artist Sophie Campbell while the film adaptation has missed the point so spectacularly.
The irony is particularly pointed because the Jem and the Holograms film acts as a comic book style origin story for the characters. Origin stories are notoriously difficult to make interesting, and it is often the case with comic book adaptations that initial sequels (in other words, X: Part 2 where X = comic book character) are often superior to films that kick off franchises since all the heavy lifting of establishing characters has been done in the first film.
Years of comic book adaptations have borne this out and highlighted the question of whether most origin stories are even necessary. From a studio standpoint, putting in that work may seem worthwhile if it launches a franchise. But for viewers, seeing another typical origin story in hopes that the next movie will be better can be disappointing and exhausting.
This is certainly true for Jem and the Holograms. For a film preoccupied with teenage characters obsessed with social media, its 118-minute running time is inexplicably unfriendly for Youtube and/or Vine-trained attention spans. In addition to following the tired “rags to riches” band narrative to the letter — this is basically Josie and the Pussycats played totally straight — the film frustratingly falls in line with trends that have become ubiquitous in the age of the adaptation that seems to be embarrassed about its source material.
The two most egregious examples of this are postponing the naming of the band “The Holograms” until the last moments of the film (and tellingly, it’s Jem’s love interest Rio who actually names the band without consulting them) and the relegation of The Misfits to a reveal in a brief mid-credits sequence. This last detail is a perfect middle finger to the audience on their way out of the theater: “Imagine how much fun this movie would have been!” The assumption was clearly that Jem and the Holograms would be successful enough for a sequel that would have been a more fun and interesting take on the material.
Barring seriously miraculous international box-office, a sequel is extremely unlikely to happen. Even worse than the loss of what would be a potentially fun follow-up is the fact that now that there’s been a Jem and the Holograms movie, it’s virtually guaranteed there will not be another attempt at an adaptation for the foreseeable future. Considering studios have been known to make films that bear absolutely no relation to the screenplay that the studio bought in the first place, dooming that “produced” script to oblivion, there’s no reasonable hope that some studio might take a stab at producing a more faithful adaptation of Jem any time soon. It is also almost certain that the studios will look at the failure of this film as evidence that films geared toward a female audience don’t make money. There are definitely lessons to be learned from the “crashing and burning” of Jem and the Holograms, but that is not one of them.
Going back to the film’s pre-production troubles, the first lesson that should be taken away from this situation is: when adapting a franchise that has a devoted hardcore fan base on whose support a film’s success may well depend, getting the right people behind the scenes matters. When word got out online that Christy Marx had not been told that a Jem and the Holograms movie was going into production, the core adult audience who the studio probably expected to show up on opening night was immediately put on alert. Jon M. Chu seemed like a solid choice as director, given his track record with the second and third Step Up films and the Justin Bieber concert film/documentary Never Say Never. The cast seemed young but early images looked promising, or at least not too far removed from what fans expected.
But the film’s overwhelmingly male production team — of ten credited producers, only two are women, and the film was written by a man — rankled female fans who grew up and fondly remember the original series as empowering despite its origins as a series-length commercial for a line of toys. A lot of those fans are now online, and the nature of movie news makes it difficult to make any major film without a large amount of information getting out into the public space. Excluding the original series’ creator and using a heavily male production team alienated many of the core fans of the series who otherwise could have been its strongest supporters.
Chu has stated that he had been trying to get an adaptation of Jem off the ground for the better part of a decade, and while the finished product may seem somewhat slapdash, this actually backs up those claims. Films that are in development for a long time often have the things that make them most interesting and unusual sanded away by extensive reworking. Making a generic version of a highly distinctive work results in something nobody wants to see.
Hitfix writer Donna Dickens wrote a piece about the film’s first trailer entitled “There might actually be a ‘Jem’ movie hidden in this ‘Jem & the Holograms’ trailer,” the title of which neatly summed up the fact that even in the trailers it was impossible not to notice that much of what defined the original Jem series and made it so popular would be absent in the film. Even more telling is the fact that the first trailer was set to Top 40 Radio hit “Story of My Life” by One Direction instead of an appropriate song by a female artist or even an original song from the film.
Again, the final product explains why: the songs in Jem and the Holograms are not terribly memorable, sounding like a computer spitting out songs based on an algorithm built from what’s popular on the radio at the moment. This is absolutely lethal to a film that by definition could live or die by its music and performance scenes. The things that made Jem so unique and fun have been drained away and replaced with generic “girl movie” tropes and a set of bog-standard rock movie story beats that the film hits with depressing inefficiency. A large part of the film is taken up by a scavenger hunt to find missing parts of the robot 51N3RG.Y (renamed from “Synergy” in the original series), who has been demoted from an intelligent “female” supercomputer in the cartoon to a non-speaking “female” cute robot pet/video projector, which causes some delay in getting to those inevitable rock movie plot points.
This leads to a lesson that can be learned in tandem with another Universal release from earlier this year: Women will go to see a movie tailored to them if it looks like anyone involved in the production gave a damn about what they want to see.
In February of this year Universal released the film adaptation of the best-selling erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey, resulting in record-breaking box-office success due largely to its female fan base. Like Jem and the Holograms, Fifty Shades of Grey had a built-in audience of adult women. On paper, Jem would seem like more of a sure bet than Fifty Shades. Jem would be following in a line of Hasbro toy adaptations that included Transformers and G.I. Joe, while Fifty Shades was entering a market in which no major-studio “erotic film” had cracked the year-end top 20 box office since Basic Instinct in 1992.
The novel on which Fifty Shades is based had an enormous fan base, but a “sex film” with a budget of about $40 million was still a risky proposition. Having E.L. James, author of the book, closely involved in the making of the film helped bring fans of the book to the movie, as did the obviously high production values. In other words, Fifty Shades of Grey’s trailers looked like an attempt to translate from the page to the screen the things that convinced people (who happened to be mostly women) to buy the book.
There is always a fine line between making an adaptation attractive to fans of the source material and making it accessible to a wider audience, and on that count Fifty Shades was a success despite having to considerably tone down the sexual content of the book. It was obvious from the first trailer that Jem had been reworked from the ground up, and a large part of the film’s potential audience was lost.
Of course, this is also a volatile time for the film industry in general. This past weekend saw the simultaneous wide release of four studio films, all of which failed to make much of a showing at the box office. Blumhouse took a hit not just on Jem and the Holograms, but on the latest entry in their Paranormal Activity franchise as well. In the latter case, that poor box office performance may have been partly the fault of an experiment with a new release model that saw the film opening on considerably fewer screens than previous films in the series.
Studios are trying to find their way forward as methods of release and distribution rapidly change. The financial failure of Jem and the Holograms may have been compounded by some of these issues, but at its heart this was a simple case of a film that was market-tested to death.
Hopefully Hollywood takes the right lessons away from this experience, and that it also learned the right ones from the success of Fifty Shades of Grey. People will buy a ticket when it’s clear a movie was made with what they want to see in mind. It’s impossible to say whether Jem and the Holograms would have been a blockbuster if someone had spent $40 million to produce a more faithful adaptation of the original series, but it certainly seems likely they wouldn’t be looking at a near-record low for a wide-release film if they’d given the project a lot more care and paid attention to its potential audience. This is going to give a film the best chance to succeed whether it’s opening on 2400+ screens or on VOD.
The failure of Jem and the Holograms isn’t necessarily evidence that people in general and women in particular aren’t going to see movies as much any more. It’s evidence that they aren’t going to see uninspired adaptations of things they loved when they were kids.
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