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Mixing Fun With Innovation Is a Winning Hollywood Recipe

23 Jun, 2017 By: Thomas K. Arnold

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Virtual reality may still be a Great Unknown in terms of how it ultimately will change filmmaking — and storytelling, for that matter.

But while VR is essentially still in its incubation period, Hollywood sure is having a lot of fun taking baby steps, using VR mostly as a way to drum up excitement about its core product, movies.

Most recently Sony Pictures announced a new VR experience for Columbia Pictures’ Spider-Man: Homecoming movie that lets people experience what it’s like to actually be Spider-Man – in a virtual sense, of course.

They can sling themselves in the air to do battle against The Vulture, and play around with the superhero’s new and improved web-shooters that feature prominently in the newest “Spider-Man” film, the second reboot of the franchise.

The VR experience becomes available for free June 30, a week before the film opens, across all prominent VR platforms, including, of course, PlayStation VR, from a sister Sony division, as well as Oculus Rift (owned by Facebook) and HTC Vive.

According to our friends at Variety, Spider-Man: Homecoming VR was produced by Sony Pictures Virtual Reality, the studio’s VR unit, which was launched last summer under the auspices of Jake Zim, the SVP of Virtual Reality for Sony Pictures Entertainment. It was developed by CreateVR, the same agency that turned Sony Pictures’ The Walk into a VR experience.

It’s good to see Hollywood having some fun again, and at the same time, pushing the innovation agenda. Invariably, fun and innovation go hand in hand, and the whole excitement about VR is a refreshing change of pace from the regular industry news, which this summer seems to be revolving around “franchise fatigue” (which I don’t happen to believe in — in my view, a good movie is a good movie, and a bad movie is a bad movie, regardless of whether it’s part of series) and the continuing debate over releasing movies on other platforms around the same time as they debut in theaters (something I see as inevitable).

On the home entertainment side of the business, we’re seeing quite a few triumphs, including the remarkable home video performance of Lionsgate’s “John Wick” properties and Walt Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast.

And on the innovation front, the home entertainment business is doing quite well itself, particularly at 20th Century Fox, whose Innovation Lab has its fingers in all sorts of technological wonders. Fox also smartly set up a new business unit, FoxNext, that’s home to the studio’s video gaming, location-based entertainment, virtual reality and augmented reality productions.

It’s shaping up to be a long, hot summer — and Hollywood, despite the usual turbulence, is sizzling.

 

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