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- A Royal (Tenenbaums) Disaster
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A Royal (Tenenbaums) Disaster
Over the weekend, a certified controversy broke out on Film Twitter involving the nearly quarter-century old Wes Anderson classic The Royal Tenenbaums. A Twitter user noticed something very concerning while trying to watch the aforementioned film:
Reactions were unanimously horrified and rightfully so! I mean, come on man:
Why do this? What’s going on here? I actually know the answer!
Without insider knowledge of the specific details regarding how this situation happened exactly, I can take a few guesses based on what I know about the players involved.
First: Like many streaming services, Amazon Prime asks content providers to send them semi-textless masters. From their spec guide:
To play titles in multiple languages using a single video source, Prime Video requires delivery of semi-textless mezzanines. Information about semi-textless mezzanines is below. Amazon defines a semi-textless master as a version of the video where no timed text for foreign language dialogue has been burned into the video image.
Now, this requirement can itself be problematic for circumstances where the foreign language dialogue is intentionally stylized, as noted by another Twitter user in the case of John Wick on Netflix (as compared to, amusingly, Amazon Prime):
i was showing someone john wick for the first time and noticed the stylized subtitles weren't showing up. turns out @netflix got rid of them! attached is the netflix version, the netflix version when you enable subs, and then what it's supposed to look like (rented from prime).
— zach silberberg (@zachsilberberg)
6:00 PM • Feb 25, 2024
To be fair to Amazon, their spec also explicitly makes clear The Royal Tenenbaums video file they have would not be considered acceptable:
…only subtitles for foreign dialog removed. All other text remains. Some studios refer to this as "Texted with no subtitles" or "Textless with main, ends, and graphic text." It's becoming the industry standard semi-texted version. If there is collision between timed text elements and burned-in on-screen text, assets will be rejected. If your content falls into the below definitions, it must be reformatted to conform to the semi-textless definition.
Why did this weird version show up on Amazon? I’m guessing it’s because someone at or on behalf of Disney - Tenenbaums’s content owner - delivered an international textless version along with forced subtitles. These are created with the intention of the stylized onscreen text being replaced with similarly-stylized text in the relevant language for foreign markets. Basically maintaining the original creative vision while being readable by a foreign audience.
So, this is the result of a multi-part failure: of the content owner for sending an incorrect version based on a faulty reading of the spec, and of Amazon for not appropriately QCing within the context of its own spec requirements.
Unfortunately this slapdash treatment of movies is yet another reason why consumers are gradually tiring of the streaming model. I am personally shocked at how often things I view on streaming platforms are broken or badly set-up. Just this past weekend I found two foreign language films with incorrect subtitle files and a version of Blade Runner labeled as The Final Cut but was actually the original version of the film. Get it together, streamers!
Video Games Won’t Save Us???
Variety’s recent article “Borderlands Blunder Proves Hollywood Hasn’t Mastered Adapting Video Games to Film” caught my eye, since about a year ago I wrote a little bit about the strong success of recent video game adaptations.
The article has tons of great info about how these adaptations are already being downsized or culled entirely:
Given how “BioShock” takes place in a sprawling underwater city and “Horizon” revolves around a hunter fighting giant robotic monsters, producing live-action adaptations intended to look more realistic than the games themselves makes cost-cutting difficult.
“Halo” struggled greatly with this problem. Despite being a pivotal sci-fi action franchise that legitimized Xbox, its TV counterpart frequently dialed back action sequences. In fact, a YouTube compilation of all of protagonist Master Chief’s action scenes in the nine-episode first season of “Halo” is approximately six minutes long. The show’s attempts to fill out episode runtimes involved giving the super soldier a non-canon sex life, among other significant deviations from the games.
Even “The Last of Us” hasn’t escaped financial difficulties. As much as the show succeeded in delivering a faithful adaptation to wary gamers and attracting a wide swath of newcomers, its first season’s budget exceeded $100 million, higher than any of the first five seasons of “Game of Thrones.”
And like the second season of “House of the Dragon,” the next run of “The Last of Us” in 2025 will be two episodes shorter as HBO parent Warner Bros. Discovery counts its pennies.
These projects run expensive! Like the article points out, it takes a lot of cash to replicate the internal world of the game, something easy to do with pixels but more difficult with actors and sets.
However, Variety (and Hollywood, by extension) starts from the mistaken premise that there’s always going to be some sort of automatic transfer of audience interest from game to movie/TV show in every case. Just because a video game has a substantial audience of gamers doesn’t mean that audience is one to one for an adaptation.
Take Borderlands, it’s just a basic first-person shooter! There’s nothing special about it!
The game is fun but one would never walk away saying “Wow I need this in a form where I don’t get to play, only watch!” The reason why some video game adaptations are successes with general audiences and others aren’t is pretty obvious: it’s the premise, stupid!
Fallout, The Last of Us: post-apocalyptic setting with strong stories and characters
Super Mario Bros.: a beloved, generation-spanning IP enjoyable by families
Five Nights at Freddy’s: cheap-to-make horror with a passionate fanbase
What’s the general audience appeal for Borderlands or Assassin’s Creed or Prince of Persia if the fun gameplay is stripped out? Pretty minimal!
Kernels (3 links worth making popcorn for)
Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:
Spotify has a fake band problem. (link)
How Harry Selick broke the stop-motion rules for Coraline. (link)
AI data centers are gobbling up insane amounts of electricity. (link)