Over the past weekend, I got a chance to watch Zak Snyder’s Army of the Dead: a rambunctious action-comedy starring Dave Bautista that is about a rag-tag team of mercenaries tasked with stealing 200 million dollars from a zombie-infested Las Vegas hotel. This 2-and-a-half-hour-long rollercoaster of entertainment features everything from over-the-top fight choreography, as well as blood and guts, to visceral laughs, colorful characters, and grandiose set pieces that you can only find in zombie land cinema—and in all, the film itself manages to hit a lot of qualitative checkboxes for what I like to find in action movies.
But for as much as Army of the Dead manages to be a lot of these things, it also features a lot of Snyder-Esque qualitative fumbles that manage to detract from the overall experience in meaningful ways. Certain characters don’t really get explained, or introduced, very well. The mechanics of how zombies infect other characters have little to no consistency or even canonical reference to zombie lore, and finally, while some zombies are certainly cool in their ideation, unexplained additions to the movie such as “robot zombies,” and “zombie fetuses” quite literally make little to no fucking sense at all…. All the same, I quite distinctly hate the idea of two zombies literally screwing each other’s brains out with rotting organs.
This is to say that if Army of the Dead is the sum of its parts, Army of the Dead just might be considered a bad movie—because many of its parts are objectively frustrating, if not downright bad. Keep in mind, however, that I have not completely come to a conclusion on this—and I don’t know if I will for a while—but like Sandra Bullock’s Bird Box, Army of the Dead once again revisits an interesting question that I think continues to intrigue content creators of all strokes. Namely, the question that it revisits relates to the overall scope of merit that we as an audience decide to place on good and bad things—as well as what predicates our willingness to recognize that qualitatively bad things can still have their merits, and even be enjoyable. This is why when movies such as Army of the Dead hit our living rooms only to leave us laughing, crying, retching, and scratching our heads all in the same 2 and a half-hour stretch of time, the question must be asked: if a film releases that everybody watches, but nobody has to pay the itemized price for, does it really matter if the movie is good or not? It’s a question that is much akin to asking if a tree makes a sound when it falls in the woods, and nobody hears it. To this, however, my answer is yes and no—and I think answering this question can be useful for anybody that is trying to plan or create content for themselves, or even a client.
Something that I think Netflix has brought to the table in recent years is their entire approach for planning, creating, and releasing content. Though many businesses have tried to compete, few actually have, and because most are still stuck in legacy business models that do not actually cater to the contemporary needs of the customer. Considerably, when I think of a company that is the apotheosis of this ideal, I look no further than Disney. In most cases, businesses such as Disney are more fixated on the itemized value of intellectual properties, which means that when one is being planned or released, it is being planned and released to maximize profits on that individual movie—or tv show. While this makes Disney lots of money in the short run and ensures that the business releases a lot of things that are enjoyable and nostalgic, at the same time it means that the company takes 0 creative risks, and more times than not releases work that is formulaic or overplayed. This is also why Disney, despite having an impressive portfolio of intellectual properties, will never be the number 1 streaming entertainment provider—no matter how many shitty Star Wars movies they pull out of their ass.
By contrast, Netflix engages in a practice that I call “qualitative averaging,” or, measuring a portfolio of intellectual properties not by their itemized quality, or even value, but by how they contribute to the overall quality of the greater catalog of IPs. When you think about it, qualitatively averaging IPs is something that has distinctly been made possible by streaming business models, as it requires for there to be less financial commitment on the side of the end-user to justify the enjoyability factor of diverse deliverables. The resulting phenomenon is that films and tv shows can clear a qualitative barrier of entry that would have existed if people had to pay for each of their movies or TV shows. Think about it: even the power of movie and music reviewers was predicated on the idea that if they said something bad about the media under review, nobody would buy it. For a while—a very long while—this would remain true because people needed something to assist them with making buying decisions on limited financial resources. So in a world where 10-20 dollars got you access to one movie, knowing if that movie is good actually has a large degree of utility within the scope of the greater buying decision. But if those same 10 – 20 dollars got you access to 100 movies, then knowing whether or not each individual movie is qualitatively good becomes less relevant. Instead, what begins to matter more is that most of the movies are good, instead of each movie being unto itself, a stellar experience.
Here’s the thing: most people understand that a diversity of creative preferences are out there when it comes to visual entertainment because most people aren’t fucking psychopaths. So when offered 100 movies for 10 bucks, people don’t really expect—or even care—that they find all 100 of those movies enjoyable. Instead, they might care about whether or not they find most of those movies enjoyable, or even that they just simply have the ability to find something whenever they want to watch something.
When it comes to the value proposition of Netflix to most people, the average person probably won’t even have the time to watch every new IP that releases on the service. Hell, even if people binge-watched an IP a day, that would only be 30 pieces of entertainment per month. Even for a business that releases 700 intellectual properties per year, the average user on Netflix won’t even have the time to watch 100 of them regularly. So in a configuration of 700 intellectual properties, even if only half of them were objectively good, the average Netflix user would not have the time to watch them all. Hell, there is still shit on my movies list from 2 years ago that I haven’t watched yet—and I watch a good bit of Netflix in my free time.
So why do movies with obvious flaws such as Army of the Dead become so important to the content creation conversation? Because Netflix proves that if your business is set up to accommodate risks, then all of a sudden taking risks doesn’t really become so risky—it just becomes a part of the business. Army of the Dead, if anything, was an opportunity for Netflix to take creative risks—and risks that could ultimately have gamed themselves out to deliver potential sequel, and subscription, opportunities. More importantly, however, the downsides of Army of the Dead are much lower than the upsides. Should the movie be “only ok,” well, the company still makes enough money on all of its other IPs to where Netflix “doesn’t have the family farm” riding on the success of a small catalog of movie properties. More importantly, however, Netflix knows that even if the movie is only OK, because of how they are set up as a business, people will still watch it. But even more importantly, the concept of what people begin to consider as “good entertainment” begins to change. Instead of framing quality within the context of a greater buying decision, quality becomes framed within the context of raw entertainment value—which inherently means that not all movies will benefit from the same level of creative nuance, and sometimes when movies are scattershot experiences of plot and lore, they can still be considered “good,” for all intents and purposes.
The only time I think quality becomes relevant to the streaming business conversation is when the average quality of what is being offered on the streaming service is low. While this could, in theory, hurt a company like Netflix, it would not be without multiple years of creating mostly bad IPs before any of these decisions had a measurable impact on the business. In the end, all this means is that anybody banking on the failure, or mere non-success, of an individual movie tanking Netflix, might want to keep dreaming. Not only does it seem illogical, but it is merely improbable. While I think some people may see movies such as Army of the Dead as another semblance of the Laissez-faire approach to content creation that wealthy content businesses such as Netflix can engage in—and to the potential detriment of customers—it is important to remember that the same risks that bring movies such as Army of the Dead to our living rooms are also the same risks that have brought to us such masterpieces as Devilman Crybaby, 6 Underground, The Old Guard, Yasuke, Castlevania, The Witcher, and many others. While in the end, I would not put Army of the Dead on the same critical level as the aforementioned Netflix IPs, I don’t think it has to be. As off-color as this may sound unto itself, I don’t think whether or not Army of the Dead is critically good even really matters. Instead, the only thing that matters, in the end, is simple: have I been entertained?
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