Movie Trends, Part 2: “Hollywood Moves Away From Middlebrow”
This end-of-year analysis comes courtesy of the New York Times and a writer named Brooks Barnes: Hollywood Moves Away From Middlebrow:
As Hollywood plowed into 2010, there was plenty of clinging to the tried and true: humdrum remakes like “The Wolfman” and “The A-Team”; star vehicles like “Killers” with Ashton Kutcher and “The Tourist” with Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp; and shoddy sequels like “Sex and the City 2.” All arrived at theaters with marketing thunder intended to fill multiplexes on opening weekend, no matter the quality of the film. “Sex and the City 2,” for example, had marketed “girls’ night out” premieres and bottomless stacks of merchandise like thong underwear.
But the audience pushed back. One by one, these expensive yet middle-of-the-road pictures delivered disappointing results or flat-out flopped. Meanwhile, gambles on original concepts paid off. “Inception,” a complicated thriller about dream invaders, racked up more than $825 million in global ticket sales; “The Social Network” has so far delivered $192 million, a stellar result for a highbrow drama.
As a result, studios are finally and fully conceding that moviegoers, armed with Facebook and other networking tools and concerned about escalating ticket prices, are holding them to higher standards. The product has to be good.
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At Walt Disney Studios, which has traditionally not worried much about directorial artistry (at least in its live-action films), a new executive team has been busy attaching A-list filmmakers to broad blockbusters. David Fincher, who directed “The Social Network,” is working on an adaptation of “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” Guillermo del Toro, the “Pan’s Labyrinth” auteur, is developing a new movie around Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion ride.
The model for Disney is Tim Burton’s arty adaptation of “Alice in Wonderland,” which sold $1.02 billion in tickets in the spring to become the year’s №2 release. (The critical darling “Toy Story 3” was an inch ahead with $1.06 billion; “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1,” which is still playing, is third with $831 million.)
“In years past,” said Sean Bailey, Disney’s president for production, “most live-action films seemed like they had to be either one thing or the other: commercial or quality. The industry had little expectation of a film being both. Our view is the opposite.”
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At its core, the flight to classier blockbusters is also about insecurity: when in doubt, flee to quality. Studios are having a hard time reading what the audience wants. Animation is not as infallible as it has been. Stars are not delivering, as evidenced by “The Tourist” and “How Do You Know,” a Reese Witherspoon film that moviegoers collectively ignored. The sequel strategy still seems to be paying — “Iron Man 2,” “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” — until you notice flops like “Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore.”
North American attendance for 2010 is expected to drop about 4 percent, to 1.28 billion, according to Hollywood.com, which compiles box-office statistics. Revenue is projected to fall less than 1 percent, to $10.5 billion. It has been propped up by a 5 percent increase in the average ticket price, to $7.85, thanks to 3-D.
One of the biggest surprises of the year was “Despicable Me,” the animated movie about a criminal mastermind who has a life-changing encounter with three orphaned girls. An original story and made by Illumination Entertainment for Universal Pictures, it sold $540 million at the global box office, an enormous validation for storytelling that is not derivative.
“I believe there is a long-term danger to moviegoing if familiarity becomes too pervasive in the films we make,” said Chris Meladandri, the founder of Illumination. “The industry has a responsibility to its audience and to itself to make films that allow people to have a sense of discovery in the cinema.”
Rather than me dissecting the article, let’s just go to the Vulture who does a fine job messing with Brooks’ major contentions.
Here’s just a sampling of the mixed messages coming out of the article (and by extension, Hollywood):
• Barnes writes that the underperformance of remakes and TV-to-movie transfers like The Wolfman, The A-Team, and Sex and the City 2 have made studios hesitant to commit to more, but the successes of the The Karate Kid and M. Night Shyamalan’s critically eviscerated The Last Airbender tell a different story. Later, the article somehow cites Sony’s 21 Jump Street remake as evidence of a bold new studio strategy, simply because chief Amy Pascal is gambling on two animation directors making their live-action debut … a notion that didn’t aid two of 2010’s most notorious flops, Jonah Hex (from Horton Hears a Who director Jimmy Hayward) and Gulliver’s Travels (directed by Shark Tale’s Rob Letterman).
• In fact, many original films underperformed this year, especially films aimed at women: How Do You Know, The Tourist, Morning Glory, Leap Year, When in Rome, Life As We Know It, You Again, and The Switch all died on the vine, despite Barnes writing just twelve months ago that women had now conclusively “reasserted their power at the multiplex.” Meanwhile, Valentine’s Day succeeded, but only by boasting the kind of star power the NYT claims is no longer in vogue.
• Oddly, Barnes claims that “animation is not as infallible as it has been,” and yet six of the year’s top fifteen grossers were animated films. What’s more, only two of them were sequels, suggesting that family films might actually be more hospitable to originality than most movie genres (just don’t expect to see that reflected in 2011, where the biggest cartoons are Cars 2 and Kung Fu Panda 2).
• Though the studios swear they’re now committed to original content delivered by top-flight filmmakers, not a single example of such is produced in the entire article. Instead, the only future projects teased include the Spider-Man reboot, 21 Jump Street, a remake of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and The Haunted Mansion, another movie based on a Disney ride (one already mined for a failed big-screen transfer in 2003).
Certainly, it’s encouraging that both Inception and The Social Network performed so well, but the only filmmakers who will get to make more original content based on those results are Christopher Nolan and David Fincher, two A-listers who already have final-cut privileges. (Both men will have to put off that presumed original content anyway, as Nolan is committed to The Dark Knight Rises, while Fincher is shooting the English-language version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and prepping 20,000 Leagues.) If there really is a change afoot, it will be a while before we see it, since 2011 is so choked with sequels and superheroes that Jon Favreau (whose summer entry Cowboys and Aliens is one of the few without a caped crusader or a number in its title) is comparing the inevitable franchise pileup to Omaha Beach.
In fact, if there’s one lesson about originality that the studios have really taken to heart, it’s the cautionary tale provided by Universal. Over the last two years, Uni put out a daring, diverse group of movies including Drag Me to Hell, Duplicity, Funny People, Bruno, Green Zone, Devil, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and the meager box-office returns left the studio reeling. What’s on the docket now for the studio, once so admirably committed to quality? Battleship, Stretch Armstrong, and a movie based on a Ouija board. At the the very least, let’s hope that at least the excuses are original this time next year.
Hey, I would love for Hollywood to be making a move toward ‘quality’ films. But if Barnes had just checked the slate of movies to be released in 2011 — I’ll have IMDB’s projections of the top 50 box officer performers from that list tomorrow — and what they’ve been buying this year, I trust he would have immediately deleted his article.
What are your thoughts? Do you sense Hollywood is on the verge of some sort of renaissance? Or will we be in theaters on Dec. 31, 2019 watching Transformers 10: Blowing Up Shit Real Good One More Time?
For more of the Vulture article, go here.