“Eleven Lessons Hollywood Should Learn From Summer Movie Season”

Via Vulture. Here are excerpts from 5 of them:

#1: Fewer Movies = More Money: “This summer, fewer films were scheduled, making for sparser weekends and less competition.”

#2: Sequels Yay, Remakes Nay: “Regardless of their actual quality, sequels continue to be powered by our love of the past, while remakes are suffering from our unwillingness to tamper with the past.”

#3: Counterprogramming Works … As Long As It’s Very Counter: “Sony opened its dark, raunchy, R-rated comedy Bad Teacher against Pixar’s kiddie flick Cars 2. Teacher easily mopped up the older teens and twentysomething singles, and, priced at $20 million and taking in $98.1 million, Bad Teacher was almost as profitable as it was instructive.”

#4: All-Star Directors Don’t Always Know Best: “While as a director his [Spielberg’s] name means a certain quality, people are learning to shrug off the sight of his name anywhere else in the credits after seeing him touted as a producer on everything from Transformers to Eagle Eye to The Lovely Bones.”

#5: But Never Write Off an Old Director…: “Could he [Woody Allen] have just found a way to build the perfect wormhole of nostalgia to lure in a nation of moviegoers? The movie [Midnight in Paris] pounces on the very timely notion that in difficult times we long for what we rose-tintedly perceive as simpler times.

In advance of every summer, there are projections as to how movies will do at the box office. And at the end of every summer, there are analyses about why which films did what at the box office. But does anyone really know what the hell is going on?

What’s your take on this summer which by the way set a record in terms of B.O. revenues? As a screenwriter, anything you take away from it other than to jump on the R-rated bandwagon?

For more of the NY magazine article, go here.