Column: Hollywood says greed is good. Next up — no joke — the ‘Billions’ Cinematic Universe!
Nina Metz, Chicago Tribune
6 min read
The number of newly formed labor unions more than doubled nationwide in 2022. It was the largest one-year increase on record.
Call it a trend. Something in the air. The zeitgeist.
You’d never know it by looking at the shows TV executives have been greenlighting.
As a critic, I keep returning to this single-minded obsession with stories of the very wealthy. I’m only following Hollywood’s lead.
Last week Showtime announced that “Billions,” its drama about hedge fund egomaniacs, will be spawning several spinoffs. The original series may be six seasons in, but narratively it ran out of steam somewhere around Season 3. No matter. Like hedge funders themselves, Showtime wants more. The working titles so far:
•“Billions: Miami” (the jet-setting world of private planes and beachy nightlife)
•“Billions: London” (high finance in the UK, which, cough, HBO is already doing with “Industry”)
•“Millions” (30-something pals in NYC with money — “Friend$,” anyone?)
•“Trillions” (the network didn’t even bother with a premise, describing it as “fictional stories of the richest people in the world” — or as Chandler might say on “Friend$”: Could you be more vague?)
A “Billions” Cinematic Universe. It sounds like a parody! Why not take a page from “Muppet Babies” and go full-on “Billions: Babies”?
Actually, if you’re in the mood for crybaby tantrums, HBO is more than happy to serve that up on “Succession,” which is back for a fourth season next month. The network can’t get enough of Mike White’s “The White Lotus” either, with its elite malcontents soaking up luxury hotel trappings. Season 3 is on the way.
Even the so-called Eat the Rich genre of films of the past year — from “The Menu” to “Triangle of Sadness” — are stories that center on the overindulged and financially bloated. Listen, watching the fictional rich suffer can be mighty fun as entertainment. But as critique, it’s about as deep as their capacity for shame.
There’s just ... well, a lot of it. And what we see on screen influences how we live our lives — how we think and feel about the world around us.
“Why are we scared to revolt in the United States of America?” someone asked on Twitter recently. The sharp rise in union organizing and work stoppages in the past year would suggest more people are interested in taking collective action, at least when it comes to better workplace conditions and pay. It’s a start.
There would probably be more, but it’s scary to ponder the risk-reward fallout. Taking action might seem less daunting if some of that was happening in real and fictional contexts on screen. Sometimes you have to see something in order to imagine it for yourself.
Hollywood decision-makers keep feeding us a different message. Worth mentioning in all this: There’s a potential TV and film writers strike brewing in May.
Nuances of the streaming business model — fewer episodes, smaller writers rooms, minuscule residuals — mean that lower- and middle-level writers are increasingly having trouble making ends meet.
The Directors Guild is also predicting tough negotiations with the studios over many of the same issues when its contract is up in June. Visual effects artists work under notoriously taxing deadlines to create computer-generated imagery and many are engaged in serious talks about unionizing, as well.
With some of that context in mind, perhaps it’s no surprise studio brass would rather pretend stories about collective action and union efforts are nonexistent. Better to lull audiences with the empty narcotic promise of yet another “Billions” spinoff rather than back new versions of 1979′s “Norma Rae” or comedies about regular people taking down corporate greed and leveling the scales.
Twenty years ago, Johnson & Johnson heir Jamie Johnson made the documentary “Born Rich” as an attempt to sort through uncertain feelings about his own massive wealth. It streams for free on Tubi and includes interviews with various peers in his social circle. Many of those featured have famous/infamous last names including Ivanka Trump, Georgina Bloomberg and S.I. Newhouse IV of the Condé Nast magazine empire. Some are more obnoxious than others. On the whole, no one comes off well.
Josiah Hornblower is a descendant of the Vanderbilt and Whitney families, and while describing to Johnson how one side of his ancestors made their fortune, he notes: “It was a complete racket. They were crooks.” Wow, you think — finally some honestly. “But,” he adds with a shrug, “everybody was a crook back then that made money.”
So much for introspection. So much for anything more than a passing thought about the rigged conditions under which all that money was amassed — or whether those conditions still exist. (Spoiler: They do.)
Even Johnson doesn’t go there. But he goes further than most.
The film begins with a voice-over as he prepares for his 21st birthday, which is a pivotal one: It’s the age at which he inherits.
“I live in a country that everyone wants to think is a meritocracy. We want to think everyone earns what they have.” Pause. “I guess if it makes you feel better, keep telling yourself that. It doesn’t work for me anymore.”
Meanwhile, two decades later, legislators in Iowa and Minnesota have responded to union demands for better pay and conditions by introducing bills that would loosen child labor laws and workplace safety protections in meat packing plants, among others.
Re-watching Johnson’s documentary and reading that news back-to-back — talk about whiplash.
It’s rare that anyone with real wealth is openly questioning the fairness of it all. Or publicly saying: “Tax us more.” But Disney heiress Abigail Disney has been an outlier.
Last year she made the documentary “The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales” (rentable on Amazon), which looks at vast income inequality at the company that bears her family name.
She focuses on employees who work full time at the parks. They aren’t being paid enough to get by and it remains an ongoing issue. Last week, after months of negotiations, more than 14,000 workers in Orlando overwhelmingly rejected Disney’s “best offer” of a $1 pay raise. A shop steward told the Orlando Weekly that he knows of fellow workers “who are homeless, who sleep in their cars, and who cut down on food costs by eating only cheap ramen packs. Many have families they work to care for, and have long commutes.”
Bob Iger was CEO when Abigail Disney made her film. He stepped down not long after, but as of November he unretired and is back at the helm. His name actually comes up in the film when Abigail and her sister Susan are talking about the plight of Disney workers. Susan is sympathetic, but also can’t help pointing out that Iger is such a nice person.
Abigail responds: “My issue is not that he’s not a nice person, my issue is that nice isn’t enough.”
I let out an exasperated sigh watching that exchange, because nice is irrelevant. Corporations and the rich people who run them don’t need to be “nice” — they need to not base their business models on exploitation. That has nothing to do with being nice.
Last week, Iger announced that Disney plans to lay off 7,000 people from the company.
Meanwhile, his multimillion-dollar compensation, and that of his fellow C-suite colleagues, remain unchanged.
