Entertainment Weekly just ran a feature asking what is wrong with this summer’s movies. By extension, it merits asking what has been wrong with movies in 2010, from both the critical and commercial standpoint.
If you ask the masters of the greenlight, who must be smarter than I am since they make so much more money – the problem is…sunspots. Or the Internet. Or mean critics. They themselves are blameless, having only made the movies we asked for.
But did we ask for this? I know that the summer is our dessert season, when we get our action and our fantasies and our cartoons. But did we really ask for ALL dessert for four consecutive months? And did we really ever promise that we would eat any moose turd pie a studio put whipped cream on between the months of May and August?
I know we have given an awful lot of our money to superheroes and explosions over the years, and I am fine with them responding to that. I show up for it like anybody. But there has to be such a thing as variety. As of now, July’s Christopher Nolan dream spectacle Inception looks like the only large-budget summer movie that wasn’t spawned from a Satanic ritual and a brand-awareness survey.
The problem is not the audience; I honestly believe that our movie screens are being held hostage to the insular egos of the studios green-lighting these movies and blasting them onto 4,000 screens apiece, bullying smaller movies out of the multiplex to make room for a weekly game of Kill-or-Be-Killed among the alphas.
Take, for example, Prince of Persia, which is based on a damn good series of video games that have inherent cinematic potential. It is currently nose-diving its way to a domestic gross of around $85M. For an action-fantasy movie that would be a fabulous result – if the movie cost $70M. However, Walt Disney Studios – whose employees, it cannot be emphasized enough, must by nature of their salaries be far, far smarter than me – spent $200M.
Now, the argument goes that this is an attempt to launch a new film franchise a la Pirates of the Caribbean, and you’ve got the hit-maker Jerry Bruckheimer producing, and those last Pirates movies had budgets of over $200M; so what’s the problem?
Well, the problem is that the FIRST Pirates movie in 2003 “only” cost $140M, and at the time was considered a terrifying gamble at that price. One would think that Persia, which has fewer recognizable stars and is based on a brand only known to video game junkies, should cost less – if one is going about this rationally.
But I think that budget was actually dictated by the release date. Simply by virtue of it being assigned the Memorial Day tentpole slot, the studio felt it was REQUIRED they spend that kind of money. That’s not because assuming you can create a hit of that magnitude is any kind of business plan; it is driven by insecurity about size.
Are there filmmakers out there with enough imagination, technical savvy and discipline to have made an $80M Prince of Persia adaptation that would have satisfied audiences? Absolutely. And that would have freed up $120M to make a few other movies to broaden the palate of offerings and off-set Disney’s risk.
Studios, however, with Disney leading the way, are pursuing a strategy of making fewer and fewer and bigger and bigger movies. One reason is that the investment and effort, not in producing the movies, but in ADVERTISING them – staking out a brand identity within the din – is simply becoming too much for the slates of yesteryear. But the dirty secret is, it’s only too much because the majority of studio employees know only one way to sell a movie (the opening day playing-at-every-theatre blowout) and only want to make movies that can be effectively sold that way. And so the cycle perpetuates.
When I saw Spider-Man 3 in 2007 I wrote that “we’ve finally breached the threshold of diminishing returns when it comes to PG-13 fantasy violence spectacles. These movies have simply become so expensive, so over-marketed, and so sustained by their own momentum as cross-demographic brand name juggernauts, that Hollywood’s geek talent pool may finally be overtaxed by the assignment of spinning them into turnstile gold.”
There have been fabulous high points since then, like the Iron Man franchise, Star Trek, the landmark Dark Knight and the ongoing wizardry of Pixar, but maybe what is happening right now is that 2010 is when all those looming signs of danger behind the successes have finally given way to the threatened disaster. Tell me this doesn’t resemble a broken dam? Persia is a nightmare for Disney, and it doesn’t look promising for their upcoming The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, or Warner Brothers/DC Comics’ Jonah Hex. Clash of the Titans only qualified as a hit by padding their box-office take with 3-D markups, and the only reason Robin Hood isn’t causing mass layoffs at Universal is that its international box office is doubling its limp US take.
The studios thought that all we wanted were big brand names, and they gave us this. And it’s too late to turn around their slates for the next three years, what with release dates and giant budgets already assigned to the likes of Battleship. There are many available lessons in 2010 – but I think the studios will continue putting bigger budgets behind a shrinking pool of brand names, and thus hasten their obsolescence.
This weekend, the two widest releases were both shameless cash-ins on 80’s nostalgia: The Karate Kid and The A-Team. The Karate Kid (forgive the pun) waxed The A-Team, pulling in an estimated $56.0M compared to $26.0M. Reviews helped, cross-demographic family-friendly appeal helped even more, I’m sure.
But even take all those advantages away, and assume that the numbers had turned out much closer. You want the true measure of Kid’s resounding victory? Its production budget was only $50M, compared to The A-Team’s $110M.
I’m here to say there is room for re-makes and re-launches and sequels – when they work, we like them. I’m sure the producers of The A-Team felt very cocksure about the budget they spent. But a sense of proportion (and, judging by reviews, making a better movie) is about to make The Karate Kid’s producers much, much wealthier.
Box office analysts are thinking of Get Him to the Greek as a dud because it didn’t do the numbers that The Hangover did on the same weekend. But The Hangover is currently the highest-grossing comedy of all time. It’s absurd to use the wildest outlier in existence as a measuring stick – Greek only cost $40M to make and will be handily profitable by that standard. Hell, if you accept the rough ratio that matching your budget in domestic gross is a good sign that you’ll make a profit once foreign and DVD are factored in, The Tooth Fairy is a bigger hit than Prince of Persia will ever be.
Persia opened on over 3,600 screens, and obviously did not sell out many of them. Imagine if they had cut that opening by just 300 screens. They wouldn’t have lost a dime. Playing to fuller houses might have given the audiences a better sense of fun. And maybe some of those 300 screens could have allowed a smaller or independent film to find an audience. The studios would be no poorer, and we as moviegoers would be enriched.
But it was Memorial Day Weekend – and size matters.
When you spend $200M to make a movie, it demands that you come up with, not just a hit, but one of the biggest hits of all-time, just to turn a worthwhile profit. That’s insane; it’s like planning a basketball game around making half-court shots at the buzzer.
Here’s a bit of free wisdom to all my wealthy superiors. You want more hits?
FEWER SCREENS, CHEAPER MOVIES, MORE VARIETY.