Let’s talk about the Spider-Man: No Way Home vs. MMFF debacle—constructively.
Let’s talk about the Spider-Man: No Way Home vs MMFF debacle—constructively.
The specter of Spider-Man: No Way Home looms on this year’s MMFF—or the other way around.
In the list of highest-grossing films of the Philippine box office, Marvel has almost always dominated the pack. Six out of the top ten highest-grossing films in the country are Marvel films. Avengers: Endgame (₱1.7 billion) comfortably sits at the top while Avengers: Infinity War (₱1.2 billion) loosely follows behind.
If you consider the studios behind each film, Disney produced eight of those ten films, with Frozen II (₱816 million) taking fourth place and Beauty and the Beast (₱686 million) sitting squarely at sixth. That leaves two spots for local films in the top ten: Hello, Love, Goodbye (₱880 million), the highest-grossing Filipino film ever, in third place, and The Hows of Us (₱810 million), showing a respectable fifth place.
Now, if you combine the local box office returns of all seven Spider-Man films (not including animated, sorry Miles) from Tobey Maguire all the way to Tom Holland, you would get a whopping estimated ₱2.5 billion worth of total earnings. This makes the web-crawler easily one of the most profitable and consistently recognizable superheroes in the Philippines.
So, given the 1:4 ratio of local films in the top ten box office list and the enduring popularity of Spider-Man in the country, it seems that unless all of the films had Kathryn Bernardo in the lead role, it was inevitable to find vitriol thrown at this year’s Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF) for “ruining” the sanctity of an early Spider-Man: No Way Home release.
Instead of MMFF capitalizing on a resounding call to support local films again after a year terrorized by the pandemic, it fell on deaf ears, with almost any post about the film festival on social media being spammed with a barrage of angry reacts and #DontDelayNoWayHomePH comments. If No Way Home was released any other time in the year, this wouldn’t be an issue, but since we’re stuck in this timeline, here we are.
Tom Holland and Zendaya star in the final installment of the Homecoming trilogy.
In a way, this has been a chronic problem in our local film landscape. Lino Brocka once talked about the ails of the industry and pointed to foreign competition, particularly American films, and the bakya crowd, or the Filipino mass audiences, being constantly fed with commercialist fanfare as the primary obstacles to achieving more artistically capable local films. He said:
“Too often has the bakya crowd been blamed for the sad state of Filipino movies. But what can one expect of an audience that has been fed nothing but secret-agent, karate, fantasy, and slapstick movies since time immemorial? A child raised on rock ‘n’ roll would find classical music strange, discordant, unpleasant; an audience raised in an atmosphere of motion picture commercialism and escapism would regard a good film totally alien.”
Brocka hit the mark on a phenomenon that remains the common practice today. Who can blame the superhero fans for wanting to see a big multiversal event if they’ve been fed a majority of Marvel and DC superhero films their whole lives and have grown to love them? This kind of relationship is severely lacking with the limited number of good local films they’ve seen or heard of.
This new bakya crowd doesn’t just consist of the Filipino masses arriving in droves to see the latest Vice Ganda or Toni & Alex Gonzaga flicks in theaters. They now include the Marvel diehards, the Snyder followers, the Star Wars fanatics, and so much more. And just like our previous group of bakyas, they shouldn’t be blamed for wanting to watch films that personally resonate with them. We all should want that.
The problem is that this unique situation between No Way Home and MMFF, along with their excruciatingly disruptive schedules, has created a rift that threatens to forever change the way we view the small multiversal pocket of local films. The MMFF was perceived as a disturbance in the force, nothing but a desperate ploy to shove films we don’t like down our throats for the sake of “supporting local.”
The barrage of angry reacts on the MMFF posts.
On one end, the venom discharged against local films was unwarranted and uncalled for. You don’t have to shit on local films just because you want to watch a foreign one. Yes, loads of criticisms have been hurled against MMFF in the past, but they were never motivated by a desire to watch a multi-million dollar film they obviously can’t compete with. They were motivated by a genuine desire to improve the quality of local films we see, no matter how small or big they may be. Plus, back then, one could watch blockbuster films in IMAX or 4DX cinemas during the MMFF period, but that luxury doesn’t exist anymore, leaving fans with no alternatives.
On the other hand, you can’t realistically expect people to support local films for the sake of “supporting local,” it’s unsustainable. The bakya crowd has always been perceptive and intelligent in their own way. They can distinguish what a dumpster fire film is from a good one. Even if they do flock to run-of-the-mill comedies starring well-known actors, they can tell if something’s off or if the story feels contrived. They’re drawn to these films because they know what they’re getting into. It’s the familiar laughs and kilig moments along with the entire family. Not everyone has the capacity to risk venturing into indie films they might not enjoy. Sometimes the masses just want to be economical with their time and money.
Herein lies another dilemma, it’s still understandably scary to watch films in the cinemas. With the Omicron variant emerging in the Philippines, most people might be thinking about whether they would risk not just their hard-earned money but also their own lives when deciding what to watch. So basically, the mindset of “If I’m going to risk my life to see this film, it better be one that I really need to see.” One look at the Philippine box office numbers already tells you what films the public thinks are worth risking for.
On the producers' side, there’s been an incentive to go back to what they know is safe (commercially speaking) since filmmaking has become more costly. Hence, the return of pito-pito filmmaking and the rise of raunchy services such as Vivamax steadily shelling out a flurry of bomba films recently. Local films found new homes in other streaming services such as Upstream, MOOV, FDCP Channel, KTX.ph, and even Netflix, making these stories accessible to anyone with an internet connection, albeit with varying costs.
A screening of a local film in cinemas (courtesy of Kun Maupay Man It Panahon page).
But, as physical cinemas returned, local films had to renegotiate their space on the big screen. The bastions of local indie films (Cinema Centenario and Cinema 76 San Juan) were swept away by lockdowns, leaving only a handful of microcinemas capable of reopening. In malls, the smart business decision was to show the blockbusters that the country missed out on. There was nary a local film that postured itself commercially viable unless it was promoted by film festivals (or caught in the act of being sly election propaganda). A void was left behind by the longest cinema lockdown in the world, and unfortunately, local films were never in a position to fill in that void.
Cinemas reopening also comes at a time when homegrown films were found to be more profitable if they were released online, as exemplified by Vivamax garnering a ₱1 billion investment this year. When an Upstream executive was asked whether they’d consider hybrid releases (both streaming and theatrical releases), they said: “Why not?” But, if the numbers keep showing that local releases perform better online, we might see their slow exodus from cinemas.
If this trend proves to be true, it might further accentuate the narrative that cinemas are only for the elite and privileged. Ticket prices aren’t as cheap as they used to be anymore. The average ticket price for the only remaining IMAX cinema in the country is now ₱850. You’d also be lucky to find a cinema that will show a film for less than ₱300, that’s not even accounting for the extraneous expenses such as travel, food, and time. So, is there still space for local films in cinemas?
According to Spidey fans, local films shouldn’t disturb the space of foreign releases until we get better ones they’d be willing to watch. But, there are good ones, they just aren’t getting the same love here compared to other places. Arguably the two best local films of the year: Kun Maupay Man It Panahon and On The Job 2: The Missing Eight found homes in the cinemas of Toronto and Venice, not here. Granted, cinemas were closed and it’s been an accepted fact that local films first have to be noticed by foreigners before making their public debut in the Philippines, but a little bit of excitement could have been appreciated. Even if Kun Maupay is getting an MMFF release, the conversation surrounding it is eclipsed by the outrage of Marvel fans and the disdain for the other releases alongside it.
A still from Kun Maupay Man It Panahon set to have its local premiere at MMFF 2021.
No Way Home’s demand shows how deep we all are into the Hollywood money-making machine called nostalgia. They have with them the promise of the return of well-known characters, the interminable permutations of comic book stories actuated into real flesh and blood, and the advantage of having big-name actors and visual effects at their disposal. It’s an unfair battle that local films will always lose. It’s like the Sinister Six going against Peter Parker, all alone without powers.
To be honest, I’m also frustrated that I won’t get to see No Way Home early, and I have to turn off social media for about 4 weeks to avoid spoilers. I used to have a Spider-Man 2 DVD from Video City, and I’d watch it over and over again until my parents would get mad at me for wasting our electricity. In fact, every year on my birthday, I would rewatch Spider-Man 2 as a tradition because it meant the world to my childhood and the development of my love for film.
I’m sure most people feel the same way, so perhaps the anger comes more from a desire to experience it simultaneously with the rest of the world, to feel some sense of normalcy and collective experience after almost two years ravaged by the pandemic. But, on the flip side, we have to understand that festivals like the MMFF are a litmus test for whether or not local films still deserve a space in cinemas and in our collective mindset as Filipinos.
Peter Parker and Doctor Strange about to do some multiversal-bending shit.
We have a responsibility as Filipinos to champion our local films, or if not, to clamor for better ones, even if it comes at the expense of not seeing our most anticipated films early (it’s not like we’re NOT getting it at all). Even Spider-Man himself had to toe the line between responsibility and his deepest desires. Maybe it was time we learned a thing or two from him and accepted the compromises we’ve been dealt with.
Of course, I still wish things were different. I want to be able to see Spider-Man, and I want to support good MMFF films at the same time. I want to feel that I’m sacrificing a movie-viewing experience with an equally good one on Christmas. I want to support local films while also satiating my desire to turn off my brain for two and a half hours and gleefully cheer alongside a packed theater.
I just wish that in another universe, these responsibilities and desires could co-exist.
To cap it off, let me show you my favorite scene from Spider-Man 2 because why not:
