the mythical marvel movie man month

film studies meets management science

It seems that there’s another data point in the direction of Peak Superhero. One of the problems with the latest Captain America film seems to be that (having been written in anticipation of a different political environment than the one it was actually released in), it was catastrophically recut late in the process and consequently makes no sense. Which is a useful hook to hang a small point of cybernetics which might be increasingly relevant to film criticism.

The book “The Mythical Man Month” was published fifty years ago this year. It’s not exactly a work of management cybernetics, but it’s another example of the interesting phenomenon whereby intelligent people with engineering backgrounds tend to invent a lot of the same organisational principles when put into management roles, because they seem to intuitively grasp that what they’re dealing with is an information processing task.

In Fred Brooks’ case, the most famous chapters in the book deal with the multiplicative problem of co-ordination – which is to say, the number of connections between things tend to scale as the square of the number of things. If the things you are adding are programmers to a software project, and everyone needs to communicate with everyone else (or nearly everyone else), then the increment to this overhead of required time and effort can easily be bigger than the increment to the actual output capability. Or, as “Brooks’ Law” puts it:

Adding manpower to a late software project will make it later.

The only way to solve the problem of an overdue project is either to put back the delivery date, or to reduce the size of the project (remove some features). Brooks also argues that adding features during the development is almost always disastrous, as adding the capability needed to delivering them will also make the project harder to manage.

A modern superhero blockbuster movie now has so much CGI in it that it is probably best seen as a software project. (Or at least, that it has to be understood as a software project as well as a creative work, in terms of the input-output relationships). There is enough complexity and enough need for coordination to mean that Brooks’ Law applies. And the economics of the movie industry mean that it is very difficult and expensive to delay launch dates.

This means that if a Marvel Universe production goes off the rails, the only way to deliver a movie-shaped object to cinemas at all is to lose things. It also means that if you try to run one like a normal production, with all sorts of executives giving notes, then you’re very likely to destabilise the workflow and push it off schedule. And that these problems cannot be solved by spending more money.

In other words, this sort of film needs to be managed in a fundamentally different way from one which is not so heavily reliant on software. Score a few points for the director as auteur, because it is basically impossible to interfere from outside non-destructively. Unfortunately, this is pretty foreign to the Disney way of working (as explained in books like Disneywar), and it seems that they have been finding it harder and harder to keep their hands off.