Hollywood’s Death Knell? Maybe Not, by Chris Derrick – Sympathy for the Devil #37 | @MDWorld

July 30, 2013 Chris Derrick 0 Comments

A few weeks back film industry titans Steve Spielberg and George Lucas were predicting that the Hollywood Studio System is on the verge of imploding, that films as we know them will be seen at $25 a ticket using the Broadway model where they stay in the theatre for over a year, and the lion’s share of films will make their bow on VOD.

The culprit behind such a seismic shift in our entertainment view habits — the $250m films that, by and large, have failed this summer to connect with audience to justify such a price tag.

Consider this – on Disney’s slate for 2012 and 2013 two films — two films  — JOHN CARTER and THE LONE RANGER — cost close to $1 billion (including the pernicious and ever more expensive marketing budgets).

ONE BILLION DOLLARS!

How much do you think the entire European film industry spent on films in 2012-2013? I hazard to believe that it is probably 1b Euro IN TOTAL.

I can’t understand the accepted, agreed upon and paid for hubris of THE LONE RANGER — the conventional Hollywood wisdom is: Westerns are terrible business decisions, because they don’t generate business overseas (where at least 60% of the total revenue can come from)… so why spend the $500 million?

Why?

Is Johnny Depp still that cool?… and pirates have a greater allure than cowboys to the world at large…

This summer has seen an unprecedented number of big budget flops (and by big budget I mean over $150m excluding marketing costs) — PACIFIC RIM, R.I.P.D., RED 2, WOLVERINE (perhaps), WHITE HOUSE DOWN, AFTER EARTH, THE LONE RANGER — and most people with half a brain could have predicted them on paper before dollar one was spent on production (WHITE HOUSE DOWN, which was great, lost at least $50m in potential box office because of OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN)… yet they got made anyway, and as a result a bunch of people lost their jobs.

Note: just because a film flops doesn’t mean it’s a bad movie… it just failed to connect with the audience at sufficient levels to earn back the larger and larger opening weekend hauls necessary to justify the negative cost.

This summer’s A-List Star Vehicles still have some power — WORLD WAR Z, IRON MAN 3, THE HEAT – even though they have marginally interesting stories. What these films do have going for them are those lead actors who delivered audience-connecting performances… and that’s what we want we actively engage in the passive entertainment mode called storytelling. So at least that old standby business model can work… for the right project with the right cast (but what is that “right project” for the “right cast”?)

And the carnage might not be over, the much-anticipated ELYSIUM is on the horizon… and who’s to know how it fares? But the propensity for it to fail is quite higher than usual.

What is more puzzling about Lucas and Spielberg’s portents of doom is that total domestic box office revenue is actually higher this year than last! Yeah, ticket prices go up every year, but people could easily only be spending $7.99 on Netflix (or Hulu or both) and binge out on Orange In The New Black, Luther, Wallander, House of Cards or Top of the Lake and not go to the movies — but they have been going to the cinemas.

I’m going to attribute this bumper crop in the domestic b.o. to a few things — outside of the conventional wisdom — smaller, niche films (where creativity in storytelling is king) are doing well; THE CONJURING , THE WAY, WAY BACK, the must-see racial injustice film FRUITVALE STATION and Joss Whedon’s black & white version of Shakespeare’s MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING (any film of the Bard’s canon is de facto a creative boon and if it makes over $1m that is something)… and everyone is already saying that Woody Allen’s update/remake of “A Streetcar Named Desire” — BLUE JASMIN — is his best film in years – thus surpassing the scintillating MIDNIGHT IN PARIS from two years ago — and it will probably earn a good $60m.

See here’s the thing… we’ve reached a point with the so-called tentpoles (because they’re certainly not busting any blocks with ticket sales) where destroying entire cities or putting the entire big mud ball that we all live at risk is as commonplace and ho-hum as a bank robbery. That form of potential entertainment has run its course, and doesn’t raise the blood pressure anymore — why because the planet never gets destroyed — do a movie like MAN OF STEEL and have General Zodd blow up the moon and let the ensuing havoc upend the planet as we know it as the ending of the film — and then people might come to the theatres who otherwise might not (but then with such a downer of an ending a huge chunk of the audience will NOT come).

Some have been saying that American films are like Detroit cars in the late 60s — bloated masses of metal that no one seems to care about, really, but they still get hot and bothered about by the marketing campaign. Oscar-winning Italian art film master Bernardo Bertolucci enjoys our TV more than our cinema these days…

Here’s something else to consider — Spielberg and Lucas were lamenting the fact that their last two efforts — LINCOLN and RED TAILS, respectively — had extremely tough times getting theatrical releases (Spielberg stated that LINCOLN was “this” close to going to HBO); and the perhaps connotation was, if Spielberg and Lucas, the two men who upended the old Hollywood system 35+/- years ago can’t get their films made and into theatres and make a profit, then what hope does the rest of the industry have?

Now let’s take a step back for a second, LINCOLN, while an important film that received an extraordinary amount of positive press and over five Academy Award nominations, is basically a niche film when viewed in today’s trenchant media marketplace; so with a budget higher than say $30m and a marketing campaign north of $30m, does it really make a lot of sense when entertainment dollars and time are under such competition these days? The film has to make $120m in the box office to turn a small profit, so it could never be a surprise hit — too well-trumpeted and pedigreed before it’s official marketing campaign began and too important a piece of cinema during an all-important election year (not to mention the previous film that covered similar territory – Robert Redford’s THE CONSPIRATOR – pretty much sucked ass in the box office, which is hardly ever a judgment on the quality of storytelling and filmmaking).

Spielberg is the preeminent showman/movie director of the last 40 years; no director is more well known or made as much money or has greater clout in Hollywood or has make an impact on the culture – EVER. However, except for WAR OF THE WORLDS and MINORITY REPORT (ostensibly Tom Cruise films), he has not directed a film that lives up to this well-cultivated brand/hallmark in the last 16 years.

You might say, “what about the fourth Indiana Jones film?” When it came out there was a great deal of industry gossip that the film (which under preformed) that broke the camels back in regards to DVD revenue projections that would determine if a film got the greenlight. And by all intents and purposes that film was a let down to the legion of fans though (and not nearly as upsetting as Lucas going back to the well 25+/- years later with the Star Wars prequels, and sort of soured me on ANY type of sequel (show me some new shit, please!)

RED TAILS is perhaps more niche and it received primarily poor reviews (it’s story was quite pedestrian compared to even some of the great WW2 films from the old studio era, like 12 O’CLOCK HIGH or RUN SILENT RUN DEEP… which could have been aped, and I know Lucas knows the films to ape because he cribbed from them for the Death Star/Trench X-Wing fights in 1977). Also as a “black film”, it came under a different amount of undue rude scrutiny — primarily from the Black community, which is extra critical on its dramatic films — but it did reasonably well  ($49m) for a period film with no A-list stars (Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding, Jr. are solid actors, but what was the last film that they headlined that generated over $50m in worldwide box office?). Add to the mix a first-time feature, and it ended up with Lucas probably running the show from his trailer, and we all know from the STAR WARS prequels that he’s dramatically inert these days (when has he done something original in his “brand”? WILLOW? That was 25 years ago…).

And let’s not forget that RED TAILS was in the wake of Spike Lee’s WW2 story from a black perspective – MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA – also an unmitigated flop. Wanna know why? There are a lot scholarly reasons and theories as to why a black film of such import flops/fails to connect with a non-Black audience — even if the script was stellar — but that’s for another post, suffice to say — no white actors of note in any roles of significance to pull in a wider, white audience. So from a pure business point of view RED TAILS film was questionable from the get-go.

Speaking of Spike Lee, he’s recently gone to Kickstarter to raise money for a $1.5m film… going back to his roots with something. If you’re reading this, then you should donate to Spike’s film.

A few months back, Steven Soderbergh gave a keynote address – The State of Cinema – to the San Francisco Film Festival (see the full video here) where he decries what passes as a “creative meeting” with studio executives and the disgust has apparently driven him to “quit” making films (his HBO biopic “Behind the Candlelabra” is supposedly his last “feature film” and after he does a 10-episode cable series – “The Knick” – with Clive Owen for Cinemax… he’s packing up all narrative storytelling endeavors to a painter (that’s the latest rumor). So is he “done done”? Unlikely, he’s just doing a PR stunt… although I believe him when he says that movie directors today have taken on the mantle that TV directors once had — acquire footage so the studio brass (not the writers as with TV) get to determine the final product.

In any event, Hollywood executive suite decision-making needs to change in order to lure a talent such as him (and say David Lynch) back… although, lots of filmmakers give it up after one or two distasteful experiences. Soderbergh, so disenchanted with Hollywood feature film policies, suggested that AMC release the final two episodes of “Breaking Bad” in the theatres… obviously to prove a point that storytellers, not suits and MBA types, need to be the ones in charge of conjuring the magic that audiences will pay for.

Lucas made a comment that the marketing costs are the true killers of the Hollywood that so effortlessly manufactured dreams for the entire planet… but its more than that (although that’s a disproportionate share), it’s the lazy marketing departments who can’t compete — without spending more than a film’s negative cost — to raise awareness of films (and I wonder how much additional box office is generated by juicy marketing campaigns after a film has been successful and is past the second weekend of release? Yet, you still see prime-time trailers for films that have generated over $125m… is the high media spend still necessary at that point?)

These over $100m budgets are too damn bloated, but what really stinks about them is how much risk, boldness and creativity drains out of a film — almost at an exponential inverse ratio when a films budgets goes north of $30m — so by the time you’re looking at a $100m-plus budget, the film HAS to appeal to “All Four Quadrants” (that shit-ass marketing jargon for the widest possible audience imaginable… skip whatever genre it is and the tenants that make those genres appealing, make it PG or at worst PG-13, have a happy, hope-filled ending and don’t fuck with the audience.

Ever see the remake of TOTAL RECALL? Could have been a really cool as shit movie IF — and this is a huge IF considering the climate/cost of a crackerjack sci-fi action film — all parties involved decided to make a film that eschewed the script-writing formula outlined by Blake Snyder and decided to make a creepy, mind-fuck of a film that kept you guessing about what was real and was an implant up until the climax of the film (and get rid of that cheap fight between Brian Cranston and Colin Farrell — unless Cranston wins at the end… see mind-fuck).

It’s also actor’s salaries — movie costs over $100m, all above-the-title actors need to forgo their salaries and take a percentage of the gross revenues (to pay up to what they should have received, then slide the scale to something more reasonable — they need to share in the risk, essentially their multimillion dollar salaries are a free lunch, and as Milton Friedman used to say, “there ain’t no free lunch.”

The free lunch in storytelling and film economics has pushed the enjoyment of the escapist medium to the brink…