Holy crap! The sky is falling!
If you’ve been paying attention to any sort of media that covers the movie business, lately it’s all gloom and doom. The whole cycle of paranoia started with this comment from Steven Spielberg at a USC event featuring he and fellow blockbuster buddy George Lucas:
“…there’s eventually going to be an implosion — or a big meltdown. There’s going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen megabudget movies are going to go crashing into the ground, and that’s going to change the paradigm.”
Then came pile-on time:
Hitfix: Just because Steven Spielberg says the sky is falling, is the industry really in trouble?
Salon: Lynda Obst: Hollywood’s completely broken.
FilmSchoolRejects: The simple math of why Hollywood is broken.
Indiewire: Is the film industry imploding?
Forbes: Why Spielberg and Lucas are wrong about the film industry ‘implosion’.
Guardian: Does Hollywood need saving from superheroes?
BBC: How the global box office is changing Hollywood.
Washington Post: Why the rom-com is almost extinct.
Ted Hope: The cinema giants agree: The film biz we know is OVER. Now what?
A few things. First, as I recall back in the 80s, Steven Spielberg himself went public with the assertion that VCRs and videocassettes would kill movie theaters. Instead domestic movie ticket sales, which in 1980 were 1.02B, rose during the decades of VCR and DVD penetration to a high water mark of 1.58B in 2002 [numbers from BoxOfficeMojo]. That marks about a 50% increase.
Which is to say that even an iconic filmmaker like Steven Spielberg can be wrong when consulting his personal Magic 8 Ball.
Second, as far as this movie fan and consumer is concerned, an implosion couldn’t come soon enough.
Now let me note, I do not wish this upon the screenwriting community. If, as Spielberg predicts, there comes a time when several $200M+ budgeted movies get released and fail at the box office, that could have a massive impact on the economics of the studio system. And whenever the monetary shit hits the fan in the movie business, screenwriters tend to get splattered first.
So in terms of employment for writers, I do not wish an ill fate to befall the current studio model.
But I said “movie fan and consumer,” so for the moment I’m taking off my screenwriter cap — but I’ll put it on soon enough — and speaking simply as someone who loves movies of all types and longs to see a diversity of films being released.
The current bifurcated approach of the studios — to go after big blockbuster franchises on the one hand and low-budget genre pieces with breakout potential on the other hand with very little in between — stinks. Yeah, it’s great that financiers have come along to fill the void in terms of distinctive indie films to medium budget adult dramas to bigger budget films from visionary filmmakers that present a challenge to market (read: Paul Thomas Anderson), but no one knows how to produce, market and distribute movies better than the major Hollywood studios. So even though there are fine films bubbling up through the cracks, how much better if the studios embraced a wide variety of movies in their development and production slates.
Oh, yeah, studios used to do that, didn’t they?
Let’s step into the Wayback Machine and head into the past all the way to the year 2000. [We’re talking ancient history here, folks.] The studio with #1 gross receipts that year? Buena Vista [Disney] with 15.5%. They were involved in distributing 30 movies, including a wide array of titles such as Dinosaur, Remember the Titans, Gone in 60 Seconds, Unbreakable, Shanghai Noon, and High Fidelity.
How about #2? That would be Universal with 14.1% with a variety of 19 titles including How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Meet the Parents, Erin Brockovich, Bring It On, and The Family Man.
Checking in with #3 which would be Warner Bros. with 11.9% with 28 titles including The Perfect Storm, Space Cowboys, Romeo Must Die, Miss Congeniality, and My Dog Skip.
This is just 13 years ago and do you notice something? Not one superhero movie in the bunch. What’s more, not one movie with an undeniable intention to create a franchise. Obviously Meet the Parents and Bring It On did spawn several sequels, but neither title is anywhere near the mindset nowadays present in movies like Iron Man, Man of Steel, or even The Smurfs, produced specifically with multiple sequels in mind.
But you know what? I think we all could live with superhero and franchise movies if the studios took a cue from the way they used to approach the business. And the best way to describe that is to use a baseball analogy.
Think of box office results as hits in a baseball game. A single is a small hit whereas a grand slam is a huge hit.
In the ‘old’ days of 2000, studios were content to create a slate of movies that targeted singles, doubles, triples, home runs and the very occasional grand slam. They actually embraced a diverse array of films with relative expectations from them. Mixing metaphors, it was a mutual fund approach to business, aiming high and low and in-between to minimize risk while making a profit.
Nowadays it’s either movies with a singles budget with the hope it breaks out to a double or triple performance, or a much bigger focus on grand slam budget franchise movies that better damn well bring in grand slam B.O. results or…
Well, that’s where Spielberg comes in.
So the question is this: What the hell happened? How did the major Hollywood movie studios — all of them! — slide from the singles/ doubles / triples / home runs / grand slams approach to the singles-that-we-hope-become-doubles-or-triples / grand slam philosophy?
In a risk averse business, doesn’t the latter approach seem… I dunno… risky?
There could be an implosion on the horizon. But maybe that’s what’s needed to provide a beat-down of a paradigm shift away from this current franchise / sequel / prequel / remake / pre-brand awareness obsession that has grabbed the business by the throat.
I mean check out these titles: Cast Away, Gladiator, What Lies Beneath, Finding Forrester, O Brother, Where Art Thou. Those were all movies distributed by major Hollywood movie studios in 2000. All fine films. With the exception of Gladiator, I doubt one of them would be green lit today by 20th Century Fox, Disney, Paramount, Sony, Universal, or Warner Bros. Nor many of the other titles noted above.
And although it’s impossible to know with the studios and their bookkeeping practices, it’s likely each of those movies in 2000 made a profit. A few singles, some doubles, even a home run here and there.
Maybe it’s time we got back to small ball in Hollywood.
Putting my screenwriter hat back on, that would mean more and different movies employing more writers with a wider set of skills, interests and voices. Wouldn’t that be nice?
What do you think? Is Hollywood imploding? If so, is that good news, bad news, no news?
And by the way, if you hit me with, “The reason Hollywood has had to change its tactics from 2000 is due to the collapse of the DVD market,” I have what I think is a defensible response for that, one I’m happy to provide in comments… if someone cares to ask about it.
UPDATE: So I hit Twitter this fine AM and what do I see? This!
BARCELONA — While blockbuster movies have, of course, been a success for exhibitors, Eddy Duquenne, CEO of Europe-based Kinepolis Group, asserted that studios need to provide “more estrogen” and “less testosterone.”
“Hollywood needs to do more estrogen, less testosterone,” Duquenne said.
Speaking Monday on a CineEurope panel moderated by The Hollywood Reporter senior film writer Pamela McClintock, several speakers emphasized that they want more variety in the types of films being made in Hollywood. “We need content that is more upscale, [films such as] Forrest Gump, for those in their ’40, ’50s and ‘60,” Duquenne added.
“More estrogen, less testosterone.” If by that dude means more characters and human emotion, less spectacle and mechanical explosions… works for me! I mean not every goddammed movie has to be this:
As to “upscale” films for those in “40s, 50s and 6os,” I’ve been beating that drum here since just about Day 1.
So apparently it’s not just this monkey with an Underwood who’s thinking these deep thoughts, but exhibitors over in Europe, too. Guess I will have to find a soccer analogy to go along with the baseball one…
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