Brands And Their Beautiful Stories
How "Eat The Rich" satire gave way to a bunch of movies that could've been emails.
Oh what a difference a year makes. In January of 2023, we were in a heated debate about whether or not we’d reached an oversaturation of movies in which the wealthy were finally given the fictional retribution that they so frequently elude in real life. The budding genre (likely inspired by 2018’s instant classic and Best Picture winner, Parasite) drew a lot of attention after the successive releases of Knives Out: Glass Onion, Triangle of Sadness, and (perhaps most notably) The Menu and was quickly given the nickname “Eat The Rich” satire.
People were growing tired of movies in which plucky, average joe protagonists finally found a way to stick it to the One Percent. This fatigue certainly wasn’t born of any love lost between regular people and the rich (the vast gap between workers and the wealthy had only become more apparent over the pandemic). Instead, it seemed more rooted in the futility that the genre’s existence highlighted. Sure these stories were satisfying in the moment, but their proliferation in the deeply capitalist world of entertainment served to show how much anti-capitalist ideals had been absorbed and commodified by the very systems they sought to dismantle. How afraid could those in power really be if they were funding this many stories about people murdering them?
[interlude: My two cents? Eat The Rich movies didn’t do enough actual eating. In Parasite when Ki-Taek, who’s just watched his daughter die, sees that his boss (who is the unwitting cause and solution to all his family’s problems) can’t even stomach the scent of him, he stabs him to death. It’s a horrifying, visceral, and deeply satisfying moment that most of the other movies in the subgenre fail to come close to providing. Food for thought, screenwriters!]
The discussion hummed along through the first few months of the year until it suddenly became clear that the genre’s ubiquity was to be short lived. It was swept away in lieu of something new. If 2022 was the year cinema ate the rich, 2023 would be the year that the rich bit back. Enter, Brands & Their Beautiful Stories.
In 2023, filmmakers were finally given the opportunity to ask a revolutionary question: What if the real underdogs in America are businessmen? This would be the year that the unwashed, unmoneyed masses were given a chance to root for our country’s greatest anti-hero: Corporate America.
In one single year, the American moviegoer had the chance to be a fly on the boardroom wall at some of history’s most influential brands. Nike! Mattel! Blackberry! Frito Lay! Gamestop! Ty? The genre developed a quick stranglehold on the streaming and theatrical film release schedule.
I’ve had something of a personal obsession with this genre since I noted its existence last summer. Just three or four movies had launched a multi-month discussion on the merits of “eating the rich” in film and yet at least six movies that could (by my definition) be called Brands & Their Beautiful Stories had come out, with a couple in varying level of awards contention (and delusion.)
But before we get too in the weeds, lets learn a bit about the genre by exploring its latest highest profile entries. Here are most of the movies released in 2023 that qualify as Brands & Their Beautiful Stories. These aren’t the first films in the genre and they’re unlikely to be the last, but you’ll likely recognize them.
Air - This is probably the worst offender. Air is a movie about a meeting about a shoe. Is it about the guy who created that shoe? Absolutely not, that guy is a minor character. Is it about the incredibly famous athlete who inspired the shoe? No, they refuse to show that guy’s face for some reason. This is about the guys who had the idea to make a shoe inspired by a famous athlete and the incredible meeting that changed all their lives…
Blackberry - A little more cinematically inclined than some of its peers and with an uncommon-for-the-genre disdain for tech, Blackberry covers the rise and fall of the titular smartphone.
The Beanie Bubble - What seems like it might be an exploration of unchecked CEO egos and consumerism run amok ultimately ends up being a story about how actually lots of people helped make Beanie Babies.
Flamin’ Hot - This is the story behind Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and the low-level employee who had the idea. This is the only one on this list I haven’t seen, in part because a bunch of it got debunked but also because it looked pretty bad.
80 For Brady - You’re probably thinking, “Wow Dan, that’s cold. 80 For Brady was a movie about a powerful, elderly, friendship.” Guess again you clod, it was produced by Tom Brady. You got got my friend. They used Sally Field to lie to you.
Barbie - I was somewhat hesitant about Barbie’s inclusion because of how much of the film is fictional and because some of you might get really mad at me. But ultimately, the prominence of Barbie (the brand and the product) combined with the inclusion of real life corporate figures from Mattel forced my hand.
[Interlude: While these movies are often bad, but they don’t have to be! I found plenty to enjoy in Barbie and Blackberry, for instance. Do not get mad at me, that’s illegal.]
But these six films were not the first films made about companies. Corporate thrillers have existed for decades at this point, so it begs the question: When does a movie stop being a corporate biopic and start being Brands & Their Beautiful Stories?
Well, not to be cute but the secret to Brands & Their Beautiful Stories is their choice to center a brand and its beautiful story. The story is of course populated by human characters, but they are only given as much depth as is necessary to glorify the brand they represent.
Let’s look at a recent movie that could be in discussion to be included in the genre but doesn’t quite get there: Ferrari.
Taken at face value, Ferrari is a movie about the founder of the titular car company. But the film’s focus remains locked in on its human protagonist. Arguments over stock shares, budgets, and the future of the company, all serve a greater narrative purpose beyond just telling us how Ferrari (guy) became Ferrari (brand). And the tone of Ferrari certainly doesn’t match the house style we see in Brands & Their Beautiful Stories. These movies follow the same type of rigid narrative structure that’s nearly killed the musician biopic and sport ultra snarky dialogue that reads like Succession fanfic. Above all, at the risk of compromising the film’s subtlety, artistry, and quality, Brands & Their Beautiful Stories seek to highlight and glorify BRANDS rather than any one human being involved.
Still confused? Here’s what a page of the Ferrari screenplay would look like if it was a Brands & Their Beautiful Stories film
In this version of Ferrari, the Mille Miglia would be seen exclusively through the eyes of everyone watching it on TV so that more time can be spent dwelling on the meetings that followed. That is Brands & Their Beautiful Stories. A genre where brands and products supersede characters.
What’s more frustrating is when these stories try to drape themselves in timely themes and lessons. They’ll highlight the tireless work of the underappreciated and marginalized folks behind the scenes of these major companies, offering the same faux-catharsis of Eat The Rich satire but with a pro-corporate, Hustle Culture, sheen.
Of course, I’m not criticizing these films just for being made by major corporate entities. Any major studio film coming out in 2023 is going to have primarily earnings-based goals. Those Eat The Rich movies weren’t made because studios thought they’d get us to riot in the streets, but because the popularity of that sentiment could be used to get us to buy warm corn. Corporate media is corporate media, and corporate media will always on some level carry a corporate message. But there is something that feels egregious in how little they’ve tried to hide it. Enjoy this parable on the importance of taking chances from your friends at Nike. Here’s a story about the difficulty of womanhood brought to you by your friends at Mattel.
It’s no secret that entertainment is in a state of chaos right now. Months of long overdue writer and actor strikes ended only for studios to begin openly and unapologetically embracing attempts at replacing creative workers with AI. Obviously, movies can’t be made with full knowledge of the context in which they’ll be released. But if this is what the studios want to make in such plurality when they’re working with human beings, it paints a pretty grim picture of the types of stories we’ll be subjected to as they put more trust in algorithms. It’s not just that I fear the idea of a world where stories either need to be about a brand or include a character from a legacy IP; it’s that we’re nearly already there.
Some might think it’s silly to spill this much ink over a genre of film that’s cheap to make and quickly forgotten but benign as it may seem, I feel like “six movies about brands in one year” is as worthwhile a thing to note as any. Maybe it’s naive, but I want to live in a world where a director like Greta Gerwig doesn’t need to make a movie for Mattel to get a massive budget. If Zach Galifinakis is gonna play a weirdo, I’d prefer it not be a real guy who built that waterpark near my hometown. I’d like to not have to watch movies like Air!
I’m not saying that either genre will have much tangible effect on the world at large, but I liked the audience/studio dynamic more when we were forcing them to make movies where thinly veiled caricatures of their bosses got trapped on desert islands. As obsessed with viewer data as these people are, the least we could do is deny them the satisfaction of seeing us engage with brands and their beautiful stories.
Welcome back to Brain Worms!
It’s been a bit! Sorry!
I had a corporate day job for a year so my memories for the last twelve months are a grey haze. Happens to the best of us!
But I’m back now and will be doing my best to publish this thing more frequently in my free time. I’m trying out a new stream of consciousness approach, whereas in the past I’d get hung up on trying to make these as close to perfect as I could get them only to have the moment they were intended for pass. No more!
See you next time!
-Dan
Thanks for this, it really struck a chord. I work in the film industry and being unemployed for a year while these movies were coming out and reading countless comments of people blaming writers for reboots and unoriginal content and being "shills" instead of blaming a bunch of moneygrubbing businessmen really got to me some days. Now that I'm back to work it's on a spinoff of a spinoff but I'll take what crumbs the moneygrubbing businessmen are willing to give me. We're so neck deep in this delightful capitalism muck lol
This was funny, entertaining, spot on and made me desire Warm Corn.