The Arthurian legends are among the most enduring stories in history. But when a $175 million film version casting Arthur as the lowlife foster son of a prostitute battling dragons and a campy Jude Law bombed at the box office, the reason for the movie’s failure, in Hollywood’s eyes, was simple: King Arthur was “very old IP.” See, it wasn’t fresh IP, like the upcoming Emoji Movie, which is about those little yellow graphics that began flooding your text messages in 2010. It wasn’t IP from 30 years ago, like Baywatch—the movie version of the 1980s TV show people thought would be a monster hit when it opened a week after King Arthur: Legend of the Sword but was actually a huge flop.
No, King Arthur was IP from a millennium ago. That IP is older even than Bernie Sanders. I know, I know. You want to know: What the hell is IP?
IP stands for “intellectual property.” It’s the term of the moment in popular culture. You see, no longer is a movie a movie, or a television show a television show, or a book a book. Such terminology is too limiting, too unambitious, because anything nowadays can theoretically spawn a franchise that will extend the reach of a story—taking it from the big screen to the small screen to the computer to the cell phone (in the form of games) to an amusement-park ride to a toy.
Forget “source material,” or even “a good idea for a fun movie.” That’s so 20th century.
The name of the game is IP, and your goal is to control it. You need to harness its power, to direct it to spread like a weed throughout the Land of the Millennials, capturing them in an ever-expanding net of purchasing and upselling and repurchasing and rebranding and re-releasing until that original IP spawns children and grandchildren and an entire IP universe of endless cash flow.
Disney is the wonderland of IP. Its animated films have been the founts of direct-to-video sequels, turned into theme-park attractions, stitched into princess dresses, and repurposed into Broadway musicals before the ultimate IP triumph: returning once more to the silver screen as live-action versions of the original cartoon. So brilliant has Disney been at exploiting its IP that it purchased Pixar, Lucasfilms, and the Marvel comic book catalog—and has planned out its respective IP exploitations and expansions through the middle of the next decade.
Alas, for Warner Bros., it has learned to its regret that, as the website Vulture recently pointed out with hilarious earnestness, “All IP is not good IP.” True, the tales that are the wellspring of almost all adventure quest stories just don’t stack up to emojis and Legos. “There seems to be a certain category of IP that seems particularly ill-suited to a contemporary remake,” says Vulture. “Audiences may be colloquially aware of the story, may have even seen another version of it at one point, but they have no opinions or strong feelings about the concept, the characters, and the world.”
The problem wasn’t that the advance word was bad, the poster was ugly, the catchphrase on the poster was absurd (“from nothing comes a king,” a phrase that sounds like my Yiddish-speaking grandmother wrote it in 1932), its director Guy Ritchie is a dreadful hack, the trailers were bad, and the reviews were terrible. The problem was that the IP wasn’t famous enough!
This doesn’t make sense, because the only reason it was made in the first place was that it was very old IP. King Arthur was, in theory, the most wonderful kind of IP because (like Disney fairy tales) the source material is free. The legends are in the public domain, given that Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur was published in 1485. So there was no need to worry about paying Malory a royalty or giving him a cut of the proceeds. That’s so much better than what Warner Bros. had to put up with from J. K. Rowling; she’s cost the studio hundreds of millions of dollars due to her arrogant ownership of the original Harry Potter IP. Much easier to deal with a writer who’s been dead for 500 years. No wonder the studio was willing to throw $175 mil at King Arthur.
The movie failed because it had no reason to exist other than that Hollywood pooh-bahs have become relentless seekers of exploitable intellectual property rather than the backers of creative people who are engaged in the effort to tell stories onscreen that might actually resonate with an ordinary person.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.