“Do you suffer from blockbuster fatigue?”
Great piece by Salon.com movie critic Stephanie Zacharek in which she considers whether 4 months of superheroes is too much:
The most important element of summer-blockbuster culture isn’t the selling of movies; it’s the selling of anticipation, because the amount of time we might spend looking forward to a big summer movie is almost always longer than the shelf life — in theaters, at least — of the actual movie. In New York, where I live, the subway platforms are perpetually adorned with posters for “big” movies that came and went in a blink. Generally, the posters stick around for much longer than the movies do, often defaced and decorated with Situationist-style détournement: The line between “I can’t wait to see that!” and “Who gives a rat’s ass?” is razor thin, and you know that line has been crossed when bored subway riders feel compelled to scribble all over Edward Norton’s face.
Good point. I saw The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian not even 3 months ago and I can hardly remember any of it. And by the time The Incredible Hulk was released on June 13th, barely one month into the summer season, I nixed seeing the flick because I was already worn out by the aforementioned Prince Caspian and Iron Man, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Kung Fu Panda, and Speed Racer. And then there are the trailers:
The studios themselves inadvertently invite blockbuster fatigue. Go to see a summer action movie, and you’ll be walloped beforehand with at least three trailers — all featuring the usual assortment of generic explosions, car chases and unshaven tough guys — for forthcoming action movies that you’re supposed to be looking forward to. These trailers all look the same (how exciting is that?), and they’re usually so nonsensical and assaultive that they grind you down even before the nonsensical, assaultive movie you’ve paid to see has begun.
As I’ve noted before, there were six trailers before each screening of The Dark Knight that I attended. And the studios shove every trailer in the same genre they can at moviegoers, figuring it’s their best shot at connecting with the target audience.
The funny thing is that it wasn’t that long ago when the summer movie season wasn’t all that different than the rest of the year:
Until the mid-1970s, it was customary for big Hollywood pictures to get a platform release: In other words, they’d open first in big-city theaters, spreading to smaller cities, suburbs and towns in subsequent weeks. That meant movies could stick around in the public’s consciousness — and in theaters — for months. Spielberg’s “Jaws” opened, on June 20, 1975, in 400 theaters nationwide, which was at the time essentially a wide release. It did open wider, into some 600 theaters, a month later, but that’s beside the point — it had already opened in many of the suburban shopping mall cinemas that would ordinarily have had to wait their turn. “Jaws” made a record-breaking $7 million in its opening weekend, and after that, it became opening-weekend business that mattered, a standard that’s even more pronounced today, with so many movies churning through theaters week in, week out.
The studio that released “Jaws,” Universal, didn’t have particularly high hopes for it: It was based on a bestselling novel, but it was still essentially a monster movie — in other words, not a particularly classy enterprise. But it did such massive business that it became the picture to beat, and to emulate. Today, opening-weekend grosses mean everything, and it’s rare for a picture to keep the №1 slot at the box office two weekends in a row (or four, as “The Dark Knight” has done). We live in a perpetual “All About Eve”-style cycle: Every Friday there’s a younger, hungrier starlet ready to take the place of last week’s tired, faded favorite.
So I guess the question is how much is enough? Even with the rousing success of The Dark Knight and four other movies generating over $200M in domestic box office receipts (Wall-E, Hancock, Iron Man and Kung Fu Panda), this summer will be flat compared to last summer in total revenues, and actually down in terms of tickets sold. As we’ve noted here, it looks like next summer will have fewer “superhero” movies. It will be interesting to see what impact that has on audiences — perhaps less blockbuster fatigue.