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The Corporation Documentary – Summary – Analysis

The documentary film titled The Corporation (2003) attempts to present to the viewer different facets of this institution.  The points of view presented in the mainstream media are quite different from the actual realities associated with business corporations.  The documentary is based on a book written by Joel Bakan titled The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power , and is made by the team comprising Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott.  As the title of the book suggests, business corporations are all too often guilty of pursuing profits over the interests of people and the environment.  This thesis is suitably demonstrated in the documentary through a compilation of interviews, film clips and case studies from the past.  Divided in three one-hour episodes, the documentary succeeds in showing to the viewer the various negative aspects of a business corporation, which often gets little attention in the mainstream media and popular discourse.

One of the major themes of the documentary film is the damage done to the environment by large business corporations.  With commercial profitability being their primary motive, many large corporations neglect to address the negative impact on the environment.  For example, many paper mills in the U.S.A dump toxic effluents from their processing plants into the nearby stream or river, causing irreparable damage to the local ecosystem and also increasing risk to human beings.  The other criticism leveled against corporations is their tendency to exploit cheap labor in Third World regions.  A classic example of this is the substandard wages paid to workers of Nike in Indonesia, who get less than one percent of the marked price of the goods they manufacture.

Another well-publicized case is that of Monsanto Corporation, which introduced into the market a bovine hormone injection which had proven unsafe for both animals and humans during the testing stage.  Cognizant of this risk factor, Health Canada had banned the injection in Canada – a move that was repeated in many European countries as well.  Only in the United States was the injection allowed to enter the markets, which eventually caused much suffering for the animals and put the safety and wellbeing of consumers at risk.  In the case of Monsanto, the Fox News network refused to broadcast an investigative story about the company due to fears of loss in advertisement revenue.  The essence of this situation is concisely captured by Grant Ledgerwood in his book Environment Ethics and the Corporation as follows:

“The 1,000 largest corporations in the world drive international investment. Thereby, these businesses have a more direct impact on planetary environment than do governments.  Reflecting a growing awareness of this impact, leaders of international business must accept responsibility for the environment. Moreover, business has an impact on cities and human habitats which are ever more urban; therefore, exploring the urban dimension of how business manages the environment is also important.” (Ledgerwood, 2000, p.2)

The other important theme covered in the documentary is the psychological assessment of a corporation’s traits, since they are given legal rights and privileges on par with that of citizens.  The conclusion drawn by this psychological profiling is quite astounding, for it was ascertained that the corporation is psychopathic in nature.  This psychopathic nature is by no means inevitable, but was rather devised by corporate lawyers wanting to please their clients and a judiciary that lacked foresight and restraint. Noam Chomsky, a noted public intellectual who was interviewed in the film, draws attention to this mistake made by the Supreme Court when in the late nineteenth century it granted corporations all the rights that a flesh-and-blood human being was entitled to.  This crucial event would have a profound impact on twentieth century history as the corporation would displace the nation-state as the most powerful institution in world politics.

Sufficient evidence is provided in the documentary from published reports, firsthand accounts of employees, interviews of industry leaders, public intellectuals and social activists.  Hence it can be stated that the documentary has been effective in conveying its message in an objective manner without compromising on facts and evidence.  It’s central arguments and conclusions arrived thereupon are both logically sound and persuasive.  What makes the film even more convincing is the fact that people from fields as diverse as the academia and the industry are interviewed, which otherwise would have constituted bias on part of the film makers.

Activists like Noami Klien, Joel Bakan and Noam Chomsky have raised these issues in their speeches, interviews and written articles.  As a result of these efforts, the general public has become more conscious of the ‘social responsibility’ side of business corporations and has become more demanding of them.  This claim is becoming more vociferous by the day, as the world endures through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.  This sentiment is neatly captured by Barry Zigas as follows:

“The idea that private enterprise should be harnessed to the creation of social capital is an old claim given new resonance by the financial crisis. After beggaring millions of people and threatening the global economy with ruin, banks and other credit providers surely have an obligation both to run their businesses soundly and to meet a higher standard of social responsibility. While some argue this could hobble, distract, or damage corporate focus on the bottom line, let’s be clear. It was not an excess of attention to social needs that caused the near total collapse of the world’s financial system but almost every other kind of excess.” (Barry Zigas, 2009, p.29)

Such examples gathered from additional research, go on to reinforce the validity and merit of the core arguments presented in the documentary.  In sum, it is a very well made documentary film that does not deviate from standards of objectivity and balance, although in this particular case there is hardly anything praiseworthy about the modern corporation. The flaws inherent in business corporations can be set right to an extent by sincerely adhering to corporate social responsibility principles.  But for every corporation that is earnest in this regard there will be ten others which are not.  Hence, a more viable solution to protecting the interests of the environment and human health is through the enactment of strict regulations.  But this is not going to be easy as long as the powerful business lobby continues its propagandist work in the corridors of the House of Representatives and the Senate.  There is renewed hope, however, in the form of grassroots activism and localized community action.  On the legal front, legislation such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 are much welcome as they tighten some of the existing loopholes in corporate governance laws.

Secondary Resources:

Culp, Christopher L., and William A. Niskanen, eds. Corporate Aftershock:  The Public Policy Lessons from the Collapse of Enron and Other Major Corporations.  Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2003.

Green, Scott. “The Limitations of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.” USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education) Mar. 2005: 66+.

Ledgerwood, Grant, and Arlene Idol Broadhurst. Environment Ethics and the Corporation. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 2000.

Maignan, Isabelle, and David A. Ralston. “Corporate Social Responsibility in Europe and the U.S.: Insights from Businesses’ Self-Presentations.” Journal of International Business Studies 33.3 (2002): 497+.

Pollard, George. “Gabriella Turnaturi, Betrayals: The Unpredictability of Human Relations.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 34.2 (2009): 560+.

Smith, Ian G., and Yaw A. Debrah, eds. Globalization, Employment, and the Workplace:  Diverse Impacts.  London: Routledge, 2002.

Smith, Roy C., and Ingo Walter. Governing the Modern Corporation:  Capital Markets, Corporate Control and Economic Performance. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Wright, Patrick M. “Corporate Social Responsibility at Gap: An Interview with Eva Sage-Gavin.” Human Resource Planning 30.1 (2007): 45+.

Zigas, Barry. “What Does Financial Capital Owe Society? Corporate Social Responsibility Is a Worthy Goal, but It’s No Substitute for Regulation Subsidy, and Government Sponsorship of Social Institutions.” The American Prospect July-Aug. 2009: 29+.

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essay about the corporation film

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Land agent: "It ain't anybody. It's a company."

-- The Grapes of Wrath

I was at a health ranch last week, where the idea is to clear your mind for serene thoughts. At dinner one night, a woman at the table referred to Arizona as a "right to work state." Unwisely, I replied: "Yeah -- the right to work cheap." She said, "I think you'll find the non-union workers are quite well paid." Exercising a supreme effort of will to avoid pronouncing the syllables "Wal-Mart," I replied: "If so, that's because unions have helped raise salaries for everybody." She replied: "The unions steal their members' dues." I replied, "How much money would you guess the unions have stolen, compared to corporations like Enron?" At this point our exchange was punctuated by a kick under the table from my wife, and we went back to positive thinking.

"The Corporation" is not a film my dinner companion would enjoy. It begins with the unsettling information that, under the law, a corporation is not a thing but a person. The U.S. Supreme Court so ruled, in a decision based, bizarrely, on the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. That was the one that guaranteed former slaves equal rights. The court ruling meant corporations were given the rights of individuals in our society. They are free at last.

If Monsanto and WorldCom and Enron are indeed people, what kind of people are they? The movie asks Robert Hare, a consultant who helps the FBI profile its suspects. His diagnosis: Corporations by definition have a personality disorder and can be categorized as psychopathic. That is because they single-mindedly pursue their own wills and desires without any consideration for other people (or corporations) and without reference to conventional morality. They don't act that way to be evil; it's just, as the scorpion explained to the frog, that it's in their nature.

Having more or less avoided the corporate world by living in my little movie critic corner, I've been struck by the way classmates and friends identify with their corporations. They are loyal to an entity that exists only to perpetuate itself. Any job that requires you to wear a corporate lapel pin is taking more precious things from you than display space. Although I was greatly cheered to see Ken Lay in handcuffs, I can believe he thinks he's innocent. In corporate terms, he is: He was only doing his job in reflecting Enron's psychopathic nature.

The movie assembles a laundry list of corporate sins: Bovine Growth Hormone, Agent Orange, marketing research on how to inspire children to nag their parents to buy products. It is in the interest of corporations to sell products, and therefore in their interest to have those products certified as safe, desirable and good for us. No one who knows anything about the assembly-line production of chickens would eat a non-organic chicken. Cows, which are vegetarians, have been fed processed animal protein, leading to the charming possibility that they can pass along mad cow disease. Farm-raised salmon contains mercury. And so on.

If corporations are maximizing profits by feeding strangelovian chemicals to unsuspecting animals, what are we to make of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that living organisms can be patented? Yes, strains of laboratory mice, cultures of bacteria, even bits of DNA, can now be privately owned.

Fascinated as I am by the labyrinthine reasoning by which stem cell research somehow violates the Right to Life, I have been waiting for opponents of stem cell research to attack the private ownership and patenting of actual living organisms, but I wait in vain. If there is one thing more sacred than the Right to Life, it is the corporation's Right to Patent, Market and Exploit Life.

If I seem to have strayed from the abstract idea of a corporation, "The Corporation" does some straying itself. It produces saintly figures like Roy Anderson, CEO of Interface, the largest rug manufacturer in the world, who tells his fellow executives they are all "plundering" the globe and tries to move his corporation toward sustainable production. All living organisms on Earth are in decline, the documentary argues, mostly because corporations are stealing from the future to enrich themselves in the present.

"The Corporation" is an impassioned polemic, filled with information sure to break up any dinner-table conversation. Its fault is that of the dinner guest who tells you something fascinating, and then tells you again, and then a third time. At 145 minutes, it overstays its welcome. The wise documentarian should treat film stock as a non-renewable commodity.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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The Corporation (2004)

145 minutes

Directed by

  • Jennifer Abbot
  • Mark Achbar
  • Harold Crooks

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The Corporation

essay about the corporation film

“The Corporation” is a 2003 Canadian documentary film written by Joel Bakan, and directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. The documentary is critical of the modern-day corporation, considering its legal status as a class of person and evaluating its behaviour towards society and the world at large as a psychiatrist might evaluate an ordinary person.

Bakan wrote the book, ‘The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power’, during the filming of the documentary.

The film features interviews with prominent corporate critics such as Noam Chomsky, Charles Kernaghan, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, Vandana Shiva, and Howard Zinn, as well as opinions from company CEOs such as Ray Anderson (from the Interface carpet and fabric company), and viewpoints from business gurus Peter Drucker and Milton Friedman, and think tanks advocating free markets such as the Fraser Institute. Interviews also feature Dr. Samuel Epstein, who was involved in a lawsuit against Monsanto Company for promoting the use of Posilac to induce more milk production in dairy cattle.

essay about the corporation film

Technical data & performance rights

Directed by: Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott

Production: Mark Achbar, Big Picture Media Corporation, Bart Simpson

Music: Leonard J. Paul

Actors: Vandana Shiva, Michael Moore, Naomi Klein, Oscar Olivera, Noam Chomsky, Mikela Jay, Ray Anderson, Joe Badaracco, Robert Benson, Elaine Bernard, Edwin Black, Thomas D’Aquino, Milton Friedman, Sam Gibara, Robert Hare, Robert Keyes, Mark Kingwell, Pierre Pettigrew

Length: 145 min

Languages (Sound): English, Spanish

Languages (Subtitles): German

Country: Canada

Filming locations: Canada, United States

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essay about the corporation film

The Corporation

(2003) 2 discs. 145 min. DVD: $29.95 (VHS or DVD w/PPR: public libraries: $139; colleges & universities: $195). Zeitgeist Films. PPR. Color cover. Volume 19, Issue 6

by J. Shannon

November 11, 2004

Rating: 4 of 5

Arguably one of the most important documentaries of the new millennium, The Corporation is a riveting, intelligent, complex, in-depth, yet surprisingly entertaining study of the most dominant institution of the modern age. Adapted by Joel Bakan from his book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power , and co-directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, this Canadian production offers a brilliant, eye-opening analysis based on the pivotal 1886 court ruling (resulting from a dubious interpretation of the 14th Amendment) that granted corporations the same legal rights as individual citizens. This being the case, the filmmakers ask, "What kind of person is a corporation?" when judged by human standards, and the answer--arrived at by using the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-- is that corporations are by nature psychopathic, characterized by a self-absorbed lack of empathy and remorse, deceitfulness, and gross manipulation in their singular pursuit of profit. The filmmakers' bias is obvious but it's not entirely unbalanced: left-wing celebrities (Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore) share equal interview time with right-wing CEOs, PR mavens, political analysts, and others, who cover a wide spectrum of relevant issues (patented life forms, government collusion, corporate-driven news media, and much more) that point to our desperate need for a new and progressively humanitarian corporate paradigm. Allowing that some corporations have noble intentions, The Corporation suggests that there is hope for the future, but still offers plenty of reasons to be deeply concerned and motivated into action. Highly recommended. Editor's Choice. Aud: C, P. [Note: DVD extras on this two-disc set include an English descriptive video viewing option, audio commentaries (one by filmmakers Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott; the other by writer Joel Bakan), eight segments of “Q&A's” featuring Achbar, Abbott, and Bakan in locations including New York, Australia, and Vancouver, B.C. (27 min.), eight deleted scenes (17 min.), the 39-minute segment “ Majority Report interview with Joel Bakan” featuring Bakan's appearance on Janeane Garofalo and Sam Seder's NY radio show, the seven-minute segment “Katherine Dodds on Grassroots Marketing,” “Hear More From…” interviews categorized by person (40 segments), “Topical Paradise” interviews categorized by topic (23 segments), and trailers. Bottom line: a whopping extras package for an excellent and timely documentary.] ( J. Shannon )

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The Corporation

40 pages • 1 hour read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Key Figures

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Summary and Study Guide

Published in 2004, The Corporation , by legal scholar Joel Bakan, demonstrates that corporations often misbehave because it is in their nature to do so. The corporate legal mandate, to pursue profit on behalf of shareholders, impels corporations to take any action, including callous, antisocial, and even unlawful behaviors, so long as they generate a profit.

Because corporations are created by governments, they are beholden to the state for their survival, yet they often manage to co-opt regulators to serve corporate agendas. They have become, in many instances, more powerful than their overseers. Bakan points out that the state retains the power to control, punish, and even kill off corporations, and that citizens should back efforts by governments to revive their authority over the behemoths of business.

Chapter 1, “The Corporation’s Rise to Dominance,” outlines the history and growth of corporations in Western society, especially in the United States, where corporate activity is at first given free rein. During the Great Depression—widely blamed on corporate misbehavior—much of that power is clawed back by the government. In the late 20th century, the political winds change, and power and freedom are returned to corporations, with decidedly mixed results.

In Chapter 2, “Business as Usual,” Bakan explains how corporations will do anything to make profits, not because their managers are evil, but because corporations must by law focus exclusively on activities that benefit shareholders. This results in corporations behaving like psychopaths—unfeeling, antisocial, manipulative, charming—that paint themselves as good and caring corporate citizens only because such a strategy generates a favorable financial outcome.

The third chapter, “The Externalizing Machine,” assembles evidence that corporations often knowingly make decisions that cause harm or death, and they continue to do so in the face of public outrage or legal penalties as long as it is profitable. A number of incidents are presented where corporations display such callousness, including use of dangerous overseas sweatshops, an automobile design that is expected to increase accidental deaths, and safety cutbacks that cause an oilfield explosion—all in the name of “externalizing” costs.

Chapter 4, “Democracy Ltd.,” lists many examples of corporate manipulation of legislators and regulators. The most common way to accomplish this is by paying them to look the other way when companies misbehave. In one infamous case, a cabal of American corporate leaders goes so far as to plot a takeover of the Depression-era Roosevelt administration.

Chapter 5, “Corporations Unlimited,” describes how corporations are changing societies to suit themselves by turning public spaces into vast marketing efforts, putting ads in children’s educational materials, and encouraging people to abandon cherished human values in favor of consumerism.

And Chapter 6, “Reckoning,” makes specific suggestions on how to wrest society and culture back from the corporations and to restrict once again the freedoms those companies have persuaded us to give them.

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Themes in The Corporation Documentary Film

The Corporation is a documentary movie revolving around giant companies becoming increasingly influential in the current world. Cogitating on the functioning and development of these entities, the authors attempt to compare them to specific psychological patterns found in people (Encore+, n.d.). For instance, modern corporations focus on earning money as the central aspect of their functioning and the fundamental element of their rise. It can be viewed as a pathological state as such behaviors are not natural. Moreover, using a specific checklist, the authors diagnose all modern corporations. One of the points in this list is the incapacity to maintain healthy and sound relationships (Encore+, n.d.). Giant firms view individuals as tools, meaning they can be easily replaced if they cannot perform specific functions. It is one of the threatening symptoms proving that such organizations can be compared to psychopaths who disregard others and act to satisfy only their needs.

The movie was shot 17 years ago, but the information remains relevant. Today, the situation worsens as giant corporations control the world and influence the states’ policies with their wealth and financial resources (Palmiter, 2021). From this perspective, the documentary touches upon the ethical aspect of the business world. The further evolution of these companies might precondition the shift from humanistic values to the idea of profit and the possibility of using any means to generate it (Moe & Carter, 2021). In this regard, the documentary can be viewed as an ominous warning about the necessity to reconsider the way corporations work and their role in modern society. Otherwise, these psychopaths from the business world might precondition the emergence of irreversible changes in human society.

Reference List

Encore+. (n.d.). The Corporation – Documentary [Video]. YouTube.

Moe, M., & Carter, M. (2021). The Mission Corporation: How contemporary capitalism can change the world one business at a time . Rethink Press.

Palmiter, A. (2021). Examples & explanations for corporations (9 th ed.). Wolters Kluwer.

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The Corporation

essay about the corporation film

  • Film Format: 35mm
  • Origin: Canada
  • Runtime: 145
  • Language: English
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Jennifer Abbott

Jennifer Abbott is a documentary maker, cultural activist and editor with a particular interest in producing media that shifts perspectives on problematic social norms and practices. In addition to co-directing and editing THE CORPORATION, she produced, directed and edited A COW AT MY TABLE, a feature documentary about meat, culture and animals, which won 8 international awards. Her other past works include the experimental short and video installation about interracial relationships SKINNED which toured North America and Europe including New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Abbott has also edited numerous documentaries, installations and performance works including TWO BRIDES AND A SCALPEL: DIARY OF A LESBIAN MARRIAGE, produced by Mark Achbar. She is the editor and a contributing writer for the book Making Video œ“In”: The Contested Ground of Alternative Video on the West Coast . She lives on Galiano Island.

Mark Achbar

Working for almost 30 years on films, videos and books, Mark Achbar endeavors, through media, to challenge apathy around issues of nuclear lunacy, poverty, media control, East Timor, human rights, the religious right, U.S. hegemony and corporate power. Achbar is best known for MANUFACTURING CONSENT: NOAM CHOMSKY AND THE MEDIA, which he co-directed and co-produced with Peter Wintonick. The film was honoured with 22 awards and distinctions, screened theatrically in 300 cities and aired on 30 national TV networks. The 2 hour-45 minute epic is the top-grossing feature documentary in Canadian history. Achbar received a Gemini nomination for Best Writer on The Canadian Conspiracy, a cultural/political satire for CBC and HBO's Comedy Experiments. It won a Gemini for Best Entertainment Special and was nominated for an International Emmy. In 1999 Achbar worked with editor Jennifer Abbott to direct and produce TWO BRIDES AND A SCALPEL: DIARY OF A LESBIAN MARRIAGE, the comi-tragic story of Canada's first legally-married same-sex couple. The film has played world-wide in festivals and has aired in Canada on PrideVision TV and Knowledge Network.

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The Corporation

A film by mark achbar, jennifer abbott & joel bakan.

Provoking, witty, stylish and sweepingly informative, THE CORPORATION explores the nature and spectacular rise of the dominant institution of our time. Part film and part movement, The Corporation is transforming audiences and dazzling critics with its insightful and compelling analysis.

The Economist

Philadelphia inquirer, san francisco bay guardian, the new york post.

“Thought-provoking doc… an entertaining package”

Daily Telegraph

Seattle post-intelligencer.

“Fast-paced, highly enjoyable and provocative.”

Film Threat

Premiere magazine, san francisco chronicle.

“Coolheaded and incisive…thorough and informative… It leaves audiences with a cold shiver.”

Village Voice

The Challengers with Joel Bakan

About the Film

essay about the corporation film

Written by Joel Bakan. Directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott.

Taking its status as a legal “person” to the logical conclusion, the film puts the corporation on the psychiatrist’s couch to ask “What kind of person is it?”

Released in 2004, The Corporation includes interviews with 40 corporate insiders and critics – including Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Milton Friedman, Howard Zinn, Vandana Shiva and Michael Moore – plus true confessions, case studies and strategies for change.

Along with the groundbreaking 145-minute theatrical version of the film, the two-disc DVD has eight hours of never-before-seen footage. You can also buy or rent the digital version to download or stream.

“Thought-provoking doc… an entertaining package, and the coolheaded delivery increases its impact.”

The New York Observer

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The Corporation

The Corporation

  • Documentary that looks at the concept of the corporation throughout recent history up to its present-day dominance.
  • Since the late 18th century American legal decision that the business corporation organizational model is legally a person, it has become a dominant economic, political and social force around the globe. This film takes an in-depth psychological examination of the organization model through various case studies. What the study illustrates is that in the its behaviour, this type of "person" typically acts like a dangerously destructive psychopath without conscience. Furthermore, we see the profound threat this psychopath has for our world and our future, but also how the people with courage, intelligence and determination can do to stop it. — Kenneth Chisholm ([email protected])

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“The Corporation” Movie: Metaphorical Perspective Essay

After watching the film named The Corporation, it is possible to enumerate the understanding behind why a corporation is defined as a person ( The Corporation – Full Movie ). The person is a virtual orientation of business functionality to align with existing setups but cannot be defined by emotional and perceptual qualities. A corporation can also be defined as an entity that involves 2 or more people authorized by law and approved by the state government to act as a legal person in business and other activities with personal powers, duties, and liabilities.

The corporation may also be a group of people working together with individualized capabilities to take legal action against irregularities and handle responsibilities like a person. Furthermore, the personification allows the corporations to raise money through shares in order to increase the capital of the business.

The shareholders are protected against personal claims since the corporation’s chances of having its resource limits damages or debts. In case the shareholders commit fraud, then they suffer the damages or debts. This aspect of corporations functions as an individual entity within business borrowing and transactions where the responsibilities are equaled to those of a person willing to hire services. Once the shareholders of corporations vote for the board-of-directors as per the organizational laws, they choose the main staff and hire the topmost managers. It is a requirement to hold annual meetings of the shareholders and board members.

In the case of private business corporations, such information as the name of a business and amount of stock to be issued must be included. Some other corporations organized by and for religion, education, charity, and other public services do not make profits. Since a corporate person harbors the responsibilities to make successful deals in a court and recover from any presumed failure, he cannot give up on the strategic approaches able to render all services.

I do not think that the sorts of personal, ethical, and psychological evaluations exactly obscure deeper structural issues with moralistic statements. Ideally, obscuring a moralistic view is not the main focus of imagination. This agreement is based mainly on the personification of corporations. The personification is aimed at allowing the business to operate in all ways that an individual can. It allows the corporations to operate within the core business setups where people own them under the governance and standards stipulated. In this manner, the corporations can be charged for failing to meet various requirements stipulate by the national, local, and state regulations.

From an ethical perspective, the corporation is personified to take individual responsibilities with respect to the standards set nationally or internationally. In essence, whereas individuals may be understood on their capabilities to explain issues, the corporation cannot deliver similar insight without human intervention. In this respect, some of the personification may not abide by the qualities of a regular human being in business.

The film only offers a metaphorical perspective, and the personification cannot be taken literary to obscure a moralistic view since the persona is not real. However, the psychopath aspect of corporations pointed out is debatable. To some extent, multinational corporations are under immense pressure to perform. However, the corporations have various loopholes that can apply to foster improvements without external pressure, which limits the psychopath argument. However, the film convinces the audience that corporations operate like individuals in all business perspectives.

Works Cited

“ The Corporation – Full Movie. ” Youtube . TulsaLiberty, 2011. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2020, September 23). "The Corporation" Movie: Metaphorical Perspective. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-corporation-movie-metaphorical-perspective/

""The Corporation" Movie: Metaphorical Perspective." IvyPanda , 23 Sept. 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/the-corporation-movie-metaphorical-perspective/.

IvyPanda . (2020) '"The Corporation" Movie: Metaphorical Perspective'. 23 September.

IvyPanda . 2020. ""The Corporation" Movie: Metaphorical Perspective." September 23, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-corporation-movie-metaphorical-perspective/.

1. IvyPanda . ""The Corporation" Movie: Metaphorical Perspective." September 23, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-corporation-movie-metaphorical-perspective/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . ""The Corporation" Movie: Metaphorical Perspective." September 23, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-corporation-movie-metaphorical-perspective/.

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a film by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott & Joel Bakan

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essay about the corporation film

Who’s Who

The awardwinning team behind the camera bring their provocative and persuasive analysis to THE CORPORATION, interviewing 40 corporate insiders and critics – including Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Milton Friedman, Howard Zinn, Vandana Shiva and Michael Moore.

The Filmmakers

essay about the corporation film

Jennifer Abbott

DIRECTOR & EDITOR

Jennifer Abbott is a Genie and Sundance award winning filmmaker dedicated to filmmaking as art, philosophy and activism. She is best known as the Co-Director and Editor of THE CORPORATION (2003), still the top grossing and most awarded documentary in Canadian history also credited as one of the top ten films to inspire the Occupy movement. In 2020, she released two films:THE MAGNITUDE OF ALL THINGS (Director, Writer, Editor, Sound Designer and Co-Producer) and THE NEW CORPORATION: THE UNFORTUNATELY NECESSARY SEQUEL (Co-Director and Supervising Editor). Since the release of her first short film SKINNED in 1993, exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, she has been the recipient of 41 filmmaking awards and 17 nominations. While her primary interests lie in writing and directing, Abbott almost always edits and frequently sound-designs her own films. She lives on Canada’s West Coast with her twin teenage daughters.

essay about the corporation film

Mark Achbar

Producer, Director, Executive Producer

Mark Achbar is one of a wave of non-fiction feature filmmakers reaching large international audiences through mainstream theatres, TV, DVD, and the internet. After studying Film at Syracuse University, he worked on independent drama, documentaries, and books until he found his footing as the driving force behind the two most successful Canadian feature documentaries ever made. His five-year collaboration with Peter Wintonick resulted in MANUFACTURING CONSENT: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992) and six years working with Joel Bakan and Jennifer Abbott gave us THE CORPORATION (2003). Both surprise box office hits, the two films won a total of 48 awards, among them 14 audience choice awards, including Sundance.

THE CORPORATION’s box office success triggered a  Telefilm -financed “performance envelope” within the Canadian film-financing system, which set aside $2.4m for the exclusive use of Achbar’s production company. This thrust him into an unusual position; whereas previously he had to fundraise for several years to finance a film, he abruptly found himself controlling more production money than the budgets of some of the broadcasters he used to seek license fees from.

In his newfound role as Executive Producer, Achbar facilitated the development and production of more than a dozen feature documentaries. The completed films are: Sam Bozzo’s BLUE GOLD: World Water Wars (2008); Velcrow Ripper’s FIERCE LIGHT: When Spirit Meets Action (2008); Denis Delestrac’s PAX AMERICANA and the Weaponization of Space (2009); Kevin McMahon’s WATERLIFE (2009); Mathieu Roy’s and Harold Crooks’ SURVIVING PROGRESS (2011); Oliver Hockenhull’s NEURONS TO NIRVANA (2013); Mark Grieco’s MARMATO (2014); and Fiona Rayher’s and Damien Gillis’ FRACTURED LAND (2015). Still in production: Jonathan Corbiere’s SAPIENCE, Jill Sharpe’s SEX, BREATH, AND DEATH, Sean Devlin’s WHEN THE STORM FADES, and Malina Fagan’s THE COVERUP.

My overriding objective in making The Corporation and its sequel (in progress) was, and remains, to foster in viewers a critical distance on the corporations and the corporate culture that envelop us all. New perspectives on today’s dauntingly complex problems come from within as well as without, which is why The Corporation films strive to include the views of both critics and thoughtful leaders of big corporations who are working to advance significant value shifts while contending with challenging institutional constraints. — Mark Achbar

essay about the corporation film

Writer, Co-Creator, Associate Producer

Joel Bakan is professor of law at the University of British Columbia, and an internationally renowned legal scholar and commentator. A former Rhodes Scholar and law clerk to Chief Justice Brian Dickson of the Supreme Court of Canada, Bakan has law degrees from Oxford, Dalhousie, and Harvard.

His critically acclaimed book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), electrified readers around the world (it was published in over 20 languages), and became a bestseller in several countries. Bakan wrote and co-created (with Mark Achbar) a feature documentary film, The Corporation, based on the book’s ideas and directed by Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. The film won numerous awards, including best foreign documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, and was a critical and box office success.

The New Corporation, a sequel to that film, is based on Bakan’s book of the same name and directed by Bakan and Jennifer Abbott. Bakan’s scholarly work includes Just Words: Constitutional Rights and Social Wrongs (1997), as well as textbooks, edited collections, and numerous articles in leading legal and social science journals. His award-winning book, Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Targets Children (2012), has been translated into several languages. A recipient of awards for both writing and teaching, Bakan has worked on landmark legal cases and government policy, and serves regularly as a public speaker and media commentator. Also a professional jazz guitarist, Bakan lives in Vancouver, Canada with his wife Rebecca Jenkins.

Mikela Jay has had a vast and varied career, both in front of and behind the lens. As a teenager, she was scouted and became a top model appearing in magazine spreads and covers, billboards, ad campaigns, commercials, runway and music videos around the globe. This eventually led to Mikela becoming a singer herself, fronting a handful of electronic-based bands both in Canada and in much of Europe, since 1994.

Film and television eventually beckoned Mikela with an assortment of lead and guest star characters, ranging from two very different roles on Millennium, to super diva (Future Sport), burlesque dancer (The L Word), 1950’s religious housewife and mother (Talking To Heaven), 1930’s courtesan (Passageway), and the head of the FBI (Brotherhood Of Murder), as well as the award winning short film ALIEN ORE, directed by The Spear Sisters, to name just a few of her most challenging roles.

Taking a leave from acting, Mikela dived deep into the documentary film world, starting with the mega-hit Canadian docu-feature and multi-award winning ‘The Corporation’. Director/Producer Mark Achbar initially hired her to be the ‘Creative and Organizational Catalyst’ while the film was in post-production, with Mikela eventually supplying both the temp and eventual final narration. She continues to narrate a number of other hard-hitting documentaries including ‘Pax Americana’, Scott Noble’s documentary film series ‘Psywar’, ‘Human Resources, ‘The Power Principle’, and ‘Counter-Intelligence’, as well the voice of numerous in-house tech videos for Cisco Systems Inc.

Mikela has also worked as film editor, creative consultant and project manager. She continues to produce and sing as a solo performer, in addition to being one of the founding members of performance group BPL ( www.bureauofpowerandlight.com )

Bart Simpson

Bart Simpson has been part of the Canadian documentary and fiction community for the past eight years, and joined THE CORPORATION during the development days of late 1998. Previously, Bart has worked in various capacities on such documentary films as Nettie Wild’s Genie-Award winning A Place Called Chiapas and David Vaisbord’s Juicy Danger Meets Burning Man .

Bart currently serves as National Chairperson of the Documentary Organization of Canada (DOC), an association of over 500 documentary filmmakers across the country.

He has directed and shot documentary projects in the Yukon, eastern Africa and Norway, and has a special interest in Scandinavian and Nordic issues.

His short fiction films have appeared on national television across Canada and in festivals in Europe and the United States. His play Phat Tank: A Post-Rock Garage Opera (written with Step Carruthers and Christopher Gora) opened in Vancouver in 2003.

Velcrow Ripper

Sound Designer & Music Supervisor

Velcrow Ripper is a Genie award winning filmmaker, writer, and sound designer. He has directed over thirty films and videos, both fiction and issue oriented documentary including the spiritual activism trilogy: Scared Sacred, Fierce Light and Occupy Love . In addition to sound designing his own films, he sound designed such documentaries as A Place Called Chiapas (Best Sound Hot Docs, Best Sound Leo Awards), CultureJam (directed by Jill Sharp; nominated for a Leo) and The Falls (directed by Kevin McMahon), as well as sound fx work on The Adjuster, (by Atom Egoyan) Highway ’61 (by Bruce Macdonald) and sound consultant on Nettie Wild’s Fix .

Among his own films are In The Company of Fear (Vision T.V.), the Golden Gate Award-winning Open Season (co-directed with Heather Frise, CBC), the multi-award winning non-fiction feature Bones of the Forest (co-directed with Heather Frise; TVO; winner of over seven awards, including Best of the Festival and Best Over-all Sound at Hot Docs!), and I’m Happy , a feature fiction. 

Leonard J. Paul

Leonard Paul attained his Honours degree in Computer Science at Simon Fraser University in BC, Canada with an Extended Minor in Music concentrating in electroacoustics. He has a ten year history in video games with over ten titles to his credit and currently teaches Game Audio at the Vancouver Film School.

As a professional musician and composer, he works primarily with film and dance. He was honoured to be chosen as the composer for The Corporation and is inspired to do more documentary film work in the future. He composed for the anti-war multimedia dance project Painting Peace which was was awarded entry into the 2003 Barcellona Video Dansa Festival.

In 2003, he toured in Germany with Lars Korb and others playing clubs in Hamburg, Munich and Berlin as Freaky DNA for Urban Guerilla Records . In Vancouver, he does regular performances in the electronica group unspoken with mikéla j. mikael.

For more information see the Lotus Audio site.

Featured in the Film

  • Ray Anderson
  • Joe Badaracco
  • Maude Barlow
  • Elaine Bernard
  • Edwin Black
  • Carlton Brown
  • Noam Chomsky
  • Chris Barrett & Luke McCabe
  • Peter Drucker
  • Dr. Samuel Epstein
  • Andrea Finger
  • Milton Friedman
  • Richard Grossman
  • Dr. Robert Hare
  • Gabriel Herbas
  • Lucy Hughes
  • Ira Jackson
  • Charles Kernaghan
  • Robert Keyes
  • Mark Kingwell
  • Naomi Klein
  • Chris Komisarjevsky
  • Dr. Susan Linn
  • Robert Monks
  • Sir Mark Mood-Stuart
  • Michael Moore
  • Oscar Olivera
  • Jonathon Ressler
  • Jeremy Rifkin
  • Anita Roddick
  • Dr. Vandana Shiva
  • Michael Walker
  • Robert Weissman
  • Steve Wilson
  • Irving Wladawsky-Berger
  • Mary Zepernick
  • Howard Zinn
  • Share full article

An illustration of anthropomorphized movie concessions sitting on a curb and looking dejected outside a theater, which is in disrepair.

Opinion Guest Essay

How Bad Can It Get for Hollywood?

Credit... Tomi Um

Supported by

By Mark Harris

Mr. Harris is a cultural historian and the author of “Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood.”

  • March 1, 2024

The Academy Awards ceremony, which this year will take place on March 10, traditionally provides a reliable moment of optimism for a perennially anxious industry. The Oscars are the climax of an awards season that’s a prolonged exercise in collective congratulation, and in early March the rest of the year still looks bright. The Sundance Film Festival and its attendant bidding wars have wrapped up, offering nothing but promise and excitement. At the box office, the biggest bets of the year have typically not yet opened and thus have not yet bombed. Every unreleased movie on the schedule might yet be a great one. Every year feels as if it just might be the biggest year ever.

But not this year.

For Hollywood, 2023 was not so much a disaster as a preview of disasters to come. Sure, one of the big stories last year was the Barbenheimer phenomenon — two celebrated hits that marched arm in arm toward a combined 21 Oscar nominations — but everywhere else you look, the prognosis is grim.

The industry, still staggering back from the pandemic shutdowns, was hit with twin strikes that brought production to a halt for six months. Writers, actors and virtually the rest of Hollywood’s work force were united in animus against the studio bosses, who, in their refusal to cut necessary deals, blithely cast themselves in the role of supervillain. That fury persists: Each new headline about the huge compensation package for Robert Iger, Disney’s chief executive, or decisions by David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, to shelve entire projects for tax write-offs undergirds a prevailing narrative that the people who finance the movies are becoming the enemies of the people who make them.

All of this is happening as the industry seems to be realizing in unison that streaming services — those wondrous platforms that were going to carry the town into the future like magic carpets — maybe aren’t a panacea after all. And hanging over all this anger and anxiety is the menace of artificial intelligence, which threatens every human part of the creative food chain, from the writers who pen scripts to the actors whose faces fill the screens to, theoretically, the studio executives whose jobs are piloting hits.

The year 2023 was a time of downsizing, diminishment, shelving, sidelining, retrenching, retreating and bet-hedging. And 2024 is the year of consequences. The plain fact is that, thanks to the strikes, there simply aren’t enough movies and new shows in the pipeline to give the business the boom year it badly needs. (This weekend’s big opening, “Dune: Part Two,” was delayed from its original 2023 premiere date because of the strikes’ disruption.) For Hollywood, it will take at least a full year for the supply lines to start flowing at capacity again — and there are fewer supply lines than there used to be. Only five of the legacy movie companies still operate as traditional studios, and one of those, Paramount, is up for sale.

As for new projects, the industry’s current whispered motto seems to be: Just survive till ’25. Writers and producers pitching projects are being warned to keep expectations at basement level: Nobody’s buying, everybody’s cutting costs, caution rules, and the boom times are over. To quote Tony Soprano — the main character in a hit show back when a golden age seemed to be dawning, not dimming — things are trending downward. He had no idea how prescient he was.

If “Hollywood” were a big summer movie, we’d be right at the end of Act II, at the always-darkest-before-the-dawn moment in the story, when all seems lost. Or, as one agent put it to me, “A lot of us are feeling like we’re working in the aftermath of an industry, not in an industry.” But as any fan of Hollywood screenplays knows, this is also when the beaten-down heroes look at the redrawn battlefield, assess the new, heightened stakes, regroup and eventually triumph. The movie business, since at least the 1940s, has always defined itself by perceived threats to its survival — charges of Communist influence, the advent of television and the rise of the VCR, cable or streaming — and it has always found a way to rebound.

In the mid-1960s, when studio culture was besieged and foundering and nobody who ran Hollywood could understand why the old ways were no longer working, “it wasn’t just that we were sick of the system,” the director Arthur Penn once told me. “The system was sick of itself.” But that malaise, dejection and uncertainty led to a major upheaval — and a decade of churning creative excitement. The New Hollywood movement of the late 1960s and 1970s happened because a bunch of great young filmmakers made a bunch of great new movies (“Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Graduate” and “Easy Rider” and “The Godfather” and “Jaws”) that turned out to be huge hits. But it’s worth noting that the people in charge at the time considered most of those movies exceptions, oddities and anomalies. The industry didn’t realize that the world beneath its feet was changing.

That’s where the movie business is right now: The system, it seems, is once again sick of itself. The industry has, for the past four years, been wondering when it can get back to normal, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that there may be no such thing. There is only forward to something new. The industry is about to find out what that might look like.

In the ashes of last year, an outline of this new normal started to emerge. It’s a landscape that consists not of just big studios (this isn’t the 1950s) or big studios competing with upstart indies that steal their awards (this isn’t the 1990s) but of a mix of new and old models: studios; indies; streamers like Apple, Amazon and Netflix; and the kind of out-of-nowhere hits, faith-based movies and red-state phenomena like “Sound of Freedom” that keep taking people on the coasts by surprise.

It’s also a landscape that, like so many these days, involves Taylor Swift. In 2023 “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” bypassed traditional distributors, went straight to theaters and outgrossed all but 10 of last year’s biggest movies domestically. If theaters are going to survive, this kind of communal event — the “you have to be there with 20 friends” movie/dance party — is probably going to be integral to their future. One acknowledgment of the Swift effect came when the streaming rights to “The Eras Tour” went to Disney for reportedly more than $75 million. Hollywood finally stepped up with a tried-and-true old-school principle: If you can’t beat ’em, eat ’em (even if it’s a very expensive meal).

If the defining piece of good news for the studios in 2023 was Barbenheimer, the industry seems unwilling to learn from its success. Barbenheimer suggested that audiences might get excited when two huge, very different films open on the same day — but studios, which used to compete head-to-head almost every weekend, now try desperately to avoid those scheduling clashes. Astonishingly, several weekends in 2024, as of now, have not even one big new movie , let alone two, set to open. That’s a mistake. Studios need to chase this kind of collision, and Barbenheimer was a useful reminder that old-world studios (Universal released “Oppenheimer,” and Warner Bros. released “Barbie”) are among the few entities with the sheer marketing muscle to stoke a bona fide worldwide event.

The year 2023 provided two blockbusters that are going head-to-head for best picture, a Hollywood studio dream come true. But that can’t erase the fact that superhero movies, the industry’s cash cow for the past dozen years, showed ominous signs of collapse. All four of Warner’s DC movies underperformed, including “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom,” “Shazam! Fury of the Gods,” “The Flash” and “Blue Beetle.” Disney’s “The Marvels” — a sequel to “Captain Marvel,” which grossed $427 million — earned a woeful $85 million. It seems unkind even to mention Sony’s disastrous attempt at building out a “Spider-Man” extended universe with “Madame Web.”

Superhero movies aren’t finished — Disney and Warner Bros. have locked in multiyear, multimovie plans, and “Deadpool & Wolverine” is likely to be a hit this summer — but what had been a bulletproof business plan is in tatters. The days when audiences would faithfully trot out for every interconnected chapter of a cinematic-universe saga are over. That’s no longer entertainment. That’s homework.

If there’s a silver lining, perhaps it can be found in an earlier superhero film, one that premiered amid great doubts about the industry 35 years ago. In the summer of 1989, prestige Hollywood moviemaking was in a rut, and anxious executives fretted that maybe young people just wanted to stay home and watch MTV, much in the way they now worry that youth are addicted to bite-size TikToks. But in 1989, the success of the director Tim Burton’s “Batman” and the unexpected breakout hits “The Little Mermaid,” “Sex, Lies and Videotape” and “Do the Right Thing” opened up new vistas of possibility. Three genres that had been written off as marginal — comic book movies, animation and indies — became gold mines. Hollywood may not yet know what’s going to replace superhero films as the next reliable blockbuster category, but this current crisis at least provides an incentive to start chasing a reset.

A reset, however, requires creative energy and imagination, and that’s a part of the movie industry that legacy studios have spent much of the modern era trying to eliminate. Studios have moved into an age of brand stewardship and out of the business of generating ideas and developing scripts. They’ve redefined their business as curation rather than discovery. That has to change, too. This isn’t a high-minded plea for the industry to become something it’s never been; instead, it’s a pitch for the studios (and now streamers) to reconnect with the enterprising, flexible, relatively quick-to-pivot business model under which they operated successfully for a vast majority of their existence.

Hollywood has a long history of toggling between spurts of irrational exuberance and deep valleys of clinical depression. Before the perils of streaming and A.I., the existential threat in the aughts came from peak TV, that siren luring away A-list talent and audience eyeballs. But not everything that looks like an industry killer turns out to be one. The e-book did not end books or bookstores. And streaming, a business that, for all its flaws, gives more people more access to more films, will not kill movies or moviegoing. It’s possible that the bungled decisions that led to two prolonged strikes — the most vigorous recent attempt by studio heads to shoot themselves in the foot — created one unanticipated benefit, a green shoot of improbable hope: a serious delay in the completion of giant franchise movies. Given their recent disappointing box office numbers, a few of those decades-old franchises, like “The Fast and the Furious” and “Mission: Impossible,” may have finally reached retirement age.

In light of this blockbuster shortage — and out of sheer panicked supply chain necessity — Hollywood is looking at and buying and even making plans to produce a bunch of scripts that can get off the ground fast and be cast, shot and edited reasonably quickly. They’re the kinds of films that don’t require a $250 million budget and a year of complicated postproduction work. They’re films like “ Hamnet ,” directed by the Oscar winner Chloé Zhao (whose last film was an underperforming Marvel movie, “Eternals”), and “Novocaine,” a thriller acquired by Paramount starring Jack Quaid. Even Tom Cruise, who hasn’t starred in a nonfranchise movie since 2017, is teaming with the Oscar-winning director Alejandro Iñárritu. These are self-contained films that don’t demand moviegoers have a Ph.D. in previous installments or extended universes.

They’re the kinds of films you might sometimes wish Hollywood made more of. Maybe you remember them. They’re what used to be called movies.

Mark Harris is a cultural historian and the author of “Pictures at a Revolution” and, most recently, “Mike Nichols: A Life.” He is working on a history of pop culture’s intersection with the gay rights movement.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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In the past six months, Nicolas Cage has expressed confusion over his cameo as Superman in The Flash , discussed his desire to do TV and held forth on potentially retiring from movies. This week, in an interview with Deadline at SXSW , Cage expressed indifference at the thought of returning to the comic book genre.

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“Would I return to the comic book genre?” Cage asked himself, before continuing with a lukewarm, “I guess never say never.”

That’s hardly a ringing endorsement. Cage maintains there’s much more to him that a comic book geek.

“Come on, I’ve grown up. That’s not who I am anymore. Which isn’t to say I don’t appreciate it. I do. And I’ll probably still be open to playing something, but it’s not really on my mind.”

Cage’s film choices in recent years — Pig , The Old Way , Dream Scenario and Arcadian , which Cage was in Austin to promote — have reflected that mindset.

The actor told Deadline in January that he plans on being more selective about his projects going forward.

“I’m going to be more severe and stringent with the movies that I make. Maybe I’ll do one a year or every other year, I don’t know,” he said.

But he’s not ruling out a return to comic book/superhero movies entirely. In fact, one of the films he would be excited about making is a sequel to one of his best-loved outings in the genre.

“I’m saying if something came along that I thought had some pop to it, some spark to it, that maybe could be fun for folks to revisit, like a  Face/Off 2  or  Ghost Rider , that’s another conversation. But I mean, that’s not going out and finding a brand new bit of material and trying something else.” 

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Godzilla Minus One's Oscar win is a victory for low-budget action films. Can they disrupt the Marvel machine?

Godzilla stalks a boat from behind while they are both in the sea

When American Fiction writer and director Cord Jefferson collected his best original screenplay Oscar he used his speech to call Hollywood out.

"I understand that this is a risk-averse industry," he told the audience.

"But $200 million movies are also a risk. But you take the risk anyway. Instead of making one $200 million movie, make 20 $10 million movies. Or 50 $4 million movies."

Jefferson might have said it out loud, but the films sweeping the statuettes quietly confirmed the potential low- and mid-budget films have in an industry that won't stop pushing mega-blockbusters with enormous price tags.

Godzilla slays the competition

While mega-budget blockbusters are often locked out of the more artistically prestigious Oscar categories, one place they get a look in is visual effects: Impressive budgets frequently means slicker effects.

This year's contenders were:

  • Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 ($378 million budget)
  • Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One ($440 million budget)
  • Napoleon ($302 million budget)
  • The Creator ($121 million budget)
  • Godzilla Minus One ($18-23 million budget)

Despite costing a fraction of its competitors, this epic Japanese-language Kaiju production took home the award, becoming the first Godzilla film to win an Oscar in the character's 70-year movie history.

Even director Takashi Yamazaki seemed surprised when he and his team — carrying tiny golden Godzillas and wearing matching Godzilla shoes — took to the stage to accept the award.

"The possibility of standing on this stage seemed out of reach, and the moment we are nominated we felt like Rocky Balboa," Yamazaki said.

"This is proof everyone has a chance."

Four people on stage holding mini godzillas.

Give the people low-finance horror films

Godzilla Minus One sees the giant lizard terrorise post-WWII Japan and has been universally praised for its larger-than-life effects, a lot of which happen on water — a notoriously tricky VFX challenge .

Not only was Godzilla Minus One critically acclaimed, it made a fair chunk of change too, recouping $161 million ($US107 million) internationally .

"There is a history of low-finance horror finding mass audiences in congested film distribution markets," explains Steve Gaunson, an associate professor in cinema studies at RMIT.

"The Blair Witch Project was shot for $US60,000 and grossed $US250 million at the box office. In Australia we had similar, albeit [on a] smaller scale, with Talk to Me grossing $US92 million from a budget of $US4 million."

Gaunson says the issue smaller films face in a blockbuster world is not so much their production budgets, but their marketing budgets — which can add upwards of $150 million to the overall cost of a film.

"Unless a film can find an audience early into its release who can build a strong social media buzz, most films will often struggle to recoup their budget," he says.

Essentially, lower budget films like Godzilla Minus One or last year's best picture winner Everything Everywhere All at Once ($38 million budget) need substantial organic support before they can even dream of reaching the exposure of one Marvel marketing budget.

Mega-blockbuster backlash

When Marvel VFX workers in the US voted to unionise late last year , it brought to light the poor treatment of employees.

"It was almost six months of overtime every day. I was working seven days a week, averaging 64 hours a week on a good week," one anonymous whistleblower told Vulture .

"Marvel genuinely works you really hard. I've had co-workers sit next to me, break down, and start crying. I've had people having anxiety attacks on the phone."

In comparison, Yamazaki told Vulture that he works hard to make sure he runs a "white" company : one that doesn't exploit their workers.

"We really try to avoid long hours but, if you do, it's a very welcoming environment in which to spend a few extra hours," he said.

"Hopefully, in due time, VFX budget increases will allow for more improvements. I am looking forward to the day when we can pay creatives more."

But nothing highlighted the disparity, between the size of blockbuster budgets compared to their quality, than the release of Dune: Part Two earlier this month.

At a production cost of $287 million ($38 million more than the first edition, thanks to pandemic-related costs) Dune: Part Two is considered towards the lower end of blockbuster budgets.

However, Denis Villeneuve's film is being lauded for its stunning special effects, especially compared to the look of recent films like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania ($416 million) with its disturbing CGI villain, or even recent Universal tentpole Argylle ($302 million) which, you know, featured this scene .

Both these films underperformed at the box office: Quantumania became one of the rare Marvel films not to break the half-a-billion mark ( a flop in Marvel's eyes ); Argylle brought home a paltry $142 million worldwide — half of its reported production budget.

No end to the mega-blockbuster in sight

Despite the diminishing returns on mega-budget films, Gaunson says Hollywood seems committed to staying the course.

"Ultimately, studios are now producing few films but with high productions," he says.

"Rather than produce five action movies in an iffy market, they are pooling all of their budgets into one mega film with an all-star cast."

It gets even tougher for low- and mid-budget films to break through in a smaller market like Australia, where our number of cinema screens pales in comparison to the US .

"Audiences have never had such a wide choice of films, which is causing issues for theatrical distribution. With ticket prices also at an all-time high [Australia's are some of the most expensive worldwide], audiences are cautious on spending money on a mediocre film," Gaunson says.

"Therefore theatres are tending to book out known popular and crowd-pleaser films, rather than offer a wider selection for its audiences."

For a long time, it was unclear if Godzilla Minus One would even make it to Australian cinemas. But by the film gods' grace it debuted locally in December 2023 (a month after the Japanese premiere) to a very short run in select cinemas.

As Yamazaki confirmed in his post-Oscars interview, we still don't know when or if the film will come to streaming.

But while Godzilla Minus One's Oscar victory might notch one up for the little guys, Gaunson isn't confident it will bring around industry-wide change.

"Independent films finding theatrical distribution has never been so difficult."

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COMMENTS

  1. The Corporation Documentary Essay: Reflection Paper on the 2003 Movie

    The Corporation is a documentary written by Joel Bakan in 2003, which revolves around the attainment of legal status by corporate companies, which accords them the privilege of enjoying similar rights as human beings. It brings to the fore the social injustices that corporate companies commit in their business ventures. The Corporation reaction paper seeks to shed light on different opinions ...

  2. The Corporation Documentary

    The documentary film titled The Corporation (2003) attempts to present to the viewer different facets of this institution. The points of view presented in the mainstream media are quite different from the actual realities associated with business corporations. The documentary is based on a book written by Joel Bakan titled The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit

  3. "The Corporation" a Film by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and ...

    We will write a custom essay on your topic. The film interviews CEO's, top-level executives, a corporate spy, academicians, critics, historians and thinkers. 'The corporation' re-sounds a requiem for the perception that an entity's social responsibility is met by optimizing wealth for its shareholders. The documentary begins with an ...

  4. The Corporation (2003 film)

    The Corporation is a 2003 Canadian documentary film written by University of British Columbia law professor Joel Bakan and filmmaker Harold Crooks, and directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott.The documentary examines the modern corporation.Bakan wrote the book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power during the filming of the documentary.

  5. Analysis of "The Corporation" Movie

    Analysis of "The Corporation" Movie. Topic: Cinema Words: 569 Pages: 2. The movie The Corporation focused on the rise of the notion of a corporation as a legal entity and its equivalence to a person in regards to its rights and capabilities in society. The main message of the film can be found in the fact that corporate entities do not act ...

  6. The Corporation movie review & film summary (2004)

    "The Corporation" is not a film my dinner companion would enjoy. It begins with the unsettling information that, under the law, a corporation is not a thing but a person. The U.S. Supreme Court so ruled, in a decision based, bizarrely, on the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. That was the one that guaranteed former slaves equal rights.

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  8. About

    Based on Bakan's book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, the film is a timely, critical inquiry that invites CEOs, whistle-blowers, brokers, gurus, spies, players, pawns and pundits on a graphic and engaging quest to reveal the corporation's inner workings, curious history, controversial impacts and possible futures.

  9. The Corporation

    "The Corporation" is a 2003 Canadian documentary film written by Joel Bakan, and directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. The documentary is critical of the modern-day corporation, considering its legal status as a class of person and evaluating its behaviour towards society and the world at large as a psychiatrist might evaluate an ordinary person.

  10. The Documentary Film "The Corporation": Review

    The documentary film "The Corporation," released in 2003 and directed by the Canadian filmmaker Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, discusses the phenomenon of modern corporations, i.e., large legal companies, the goal of which is to make a profit. Interestingly enough, at the legal level, corporations are treated as people who have rights and ...

  11. The Corporation Film Analysis Essay

    The Corporation Film Analysis Essay. Decent Essays. 1736 Words. 7 Pages. Open Document. The Corporation Film Analysis. The Corporation was based on a book written by Joel Bakan. It is a documentary film that looks at the history of corporation and follows them up until present day to illustrate their dominance in society.

  12. Exploring Corporate Power: A Critical Film Reflection

    Reflection, Pages 3 (636 words) Views. 8549. Introduction. In this essay you will find a detailed film reflection on the Corporation. The award winning documentary was released in 2004 by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott & Joel Bakan. Favourite scene. When i started watching the documentary i was a bit bored but it changed rapidly and i was glued ...

  13. The Corporation

    Arguably one of the most important documentaries of the new millennium, The Corporation is a riveting, intelligent, complex, in-depth, yet surprisingly entertaining study of the most dominant institution of the modern age. Adapted by Joel Bakan from his book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, and co-directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, this Canadian ...

  14. The Corporation Summary and Study Guide

    Chapter 1, "The Corporation's Rise to Dominance," outlines the history and growth of corporations in Western society, especially in the United States, where corporate activity is at first given free rein. During the Great Depression—widely blamed on corporate misbehavior—much of that power is clawed back by the government.

  15. 20 Year Campaign

    Twenty years after The Corporation film had its world premiere, it's time to revitalize the movement against colonial corporate capitalism.. Watch The Corporation in HD on YouTube and you're also helping support the development of a new curriculum to educate and provide tools to resist corporate power.'The People's Portal: Education Outside the Institution', would be co-created by ...

  16. Themes in The Corporation Documentary Film

    Topics: Cinema, Corporation Words: 275 Pages: 1. The Corporation is a documentary movie revolving around giant companies becoming increasingly influential in the current world. Cogitating on the functioning and development of these entities, the authors attempt to compare them to specific psychological patterns found in people (Encore+, n.d.).

  17. The Corporation :: Zeitgeist Films

    The Corporation is unlikely to be the first to defy history. In this complex, exhaustive and highly entertaining documentary, Mark Achbar, co-director of the influential and inventive Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, teams up with co-director Jennifer Abbott and writer Joel Bakan to examine the far-reaching repercussions of ...

  18. The Corporation (2003)

    The Corporation: Directed by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott. With Mikela Jay, Rob Beckwermert, Christopher Gora, Nina Jones. Documentary that looks at the concept of the corporation throughout recent history up to its present-day dominance.

  19. The Corporation Film

    A film by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott & Joel Bakan. Provoking, witty, stylish and sweepingly informative, THE CORPORATION explores the nature and spectacular rise of the dominant institution of our time. Part film and part movement, The Corporation is transforming audiences and dazzling critics with its insightful and compelling analysis.

  20. The Corporation (2003)

    This film takes an in-depth psychological examination of the organization model through various case studies. What the study illustrates is that in the its behaviour, this type of "person" typically acts like a dangerously destructive psychopath without conscience. Furthermore, we see the profound threat this psychopath has for our world and ...

  21. "The Corporation" Movie: Metaphorical Perspective Essay

    After watching the film named The Corporation, it is possible to enumerate the understanding behind why a corporation is defined as a person ( The Corporation - Full Movie ). The person is a virtual orientation of business functionality to align with existing setups but cannot be defined by emotional and perceptual qualities.

  22. Who's Who

    The New Corporation, a sequel to that film, is based on Bakan's book of the same name and directed by Bakan and Jennifer Abbott. Bakan's scholarly work includes Just Words: Constitutional Rights and Social Wrongs (1997), as well as textbooks, edited collections, and numerous articles in leading legal and social science journals.

  23. "The Corporation" a Film by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott ...

    📝 "The Corporation," by M. Achbar, J. Abbott and J. Bakan, is a film presenting convincing and realistic perceptions on the origin, nature and impacts of th...

  24. Page couldn't load • Instagram

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    The film opens on a note of chaos, as viewers are thrust into a world already in ruins, with the storyline hinging on the familial bond and survival tactics of Paul (Cage) and his sons. In this ...

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    They're films like "Hamnet," directed by the Oscar winner Chloé Zhao (whose last film was an underperforming Marvel movie, "Eternals"), and "Novocaine," a thriller acquired by ...

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  30. Can Godzilla Minus One's Oscar win disrupt the Marvel machine?

    However, Denis Villeneuve's film is being lauded for its stunning special effects, especially compared to the look of recent films like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania ($416 million) with its ...