The Day the Movies Died
I’ve gotten a lot of email asking if I’ve read this: “The Day the Movies Died” by Mark Harris in the latest issue of GQ. The answer is yes. Here’s how the article starts:
You want to understand how bad things are in Hollywood right now — how stifling and airless and cautious the atmosphere is, how little nourishment or encouragement a good new idea receives, and how devoid of ambition the horizon currently appears — it helps to start with a success story.
Consider: Years ago, an ace filmmaker, the man who happened to direct the third-highest-grossing movie in U.S. history, The Dark Knight, came up with an idea for a big summer movie. It’s a story he loved — in fact, he wrote it himself — and it belonged to a genre, the sci-fi action thriller, that zipped right down the center lane of American popular taste. He cast as his leading man a handsome actor, Leonardo DiCaprio, who happened to star in the second-highest-grossing movie in history. Finally, to cover his bet even more, he hired half a dozen Oscar nominees and winners for supporting roles.
Sounds like a sure thing, right? Exactly the kind of movie that a studio would die to have and an audience would kill to see? Well, it was. That film, Christopher Nolan’s Inception, received admiring reviews, became last summer’s most discussed movie, and has grossed, as of this writing, more than three-quarters of a billion dollars worldwide.
And now the twist: The studios are trying very hard not to notice its success, or to care. Before anybody saw the movie, the buzz within the industry was: It’s just a favor Warner Bros. is doing for Nolan because the studio needs him to make Batman 3. After it started to screen, the party line changed: It’s too smart for the room, too smart for the summer, too smart for the audience. Just before it opened, it shifted again: Nolan is only a brand-name director to Web geeks, and his drawing power is being wildly overestimated. After it grossed $62 million on its first weekend, the word was: Yeah, that’s pretty good, but it just means all the Nolan groupies came out early — now watch it drop like a stone.
And here was the buzz three months later, after Inception became the only release of 2010 to log eleven consecutive weeks in the top ten: Huh. Well, you never know.
“Huh. Well, you never know” is an admission that, put simply, things have never been worse.
As tempting as it might be to look at this as the raving of an ‘older’ person about how Hollywood doesn’t make movies for ‘them’ anymore, it’s impossible to deny there are some obvious truths in the article. Hollywood is obsessed with pre-awareness titles whether they are video games or comic books, toys or board games, sequels or remakes. We have noted here how there are 27 sequels scheduled to be released into theaters this year, a record number. Why so much emphasis on known titles? Because they are perceived to minimize risk. Why is minimizing risk so important? Because fear is one of the operating principles in running a movie studio. Why is fear so prevalent? Because the average cost of acquiring, developing, producing, distributing, and marketing a major motion picture is $100M. A few flops and that can add up to some serious red ink.
But… let’s all take a nice, deep breath. Because here’s another fact: The movie business is cyclical. It always has been. Probably always will be. And just as experimental young filmmakers came along in the 60s and 70s to shake up old Hollywood, I have no doubt that something similar will happen in response to the current mindset. Indeed it probably already is happening and we’re just too close to the events to recognize a trend.
What are your thoughts? Are movies dying? Or is this article another example of hyperbolic apocalypiticism?
For more of the article, go here.
HT to Nate Winslow for sending me the link.
By the way, I’ll post more articles this week related to the state of the movie business and ultimately what that can mean to the spec script market.