“‘The Lone Ranger’ Represents Everything That’s Wrong With Hollywood Blockbusters”
It was a big July 4th weekend. In its first 5 days of release, Despicable Me 2 generated $141M in domestic box office revenues. In The Heat’s second week, it only dropped 36% and has now hit $86M, likely on its way to $150M. Overall for the three-day weekend, total box office in the U.S. and Canada was $220.7M which ranks #10 overall.
All good, right? Not quite.
On the other end of the spectrum is The Lone Ranger which took in $48.9M in five days, a decent opening for a Western, but not for a movie that cost a reported $250M to produce with another $150–175M+ to market. In fact, THR is reporting the movie may cause Disney to take a $150M write-down.
Vulture piles on with some analysis in an article titled: “The Long Ranger” Represents Everything That’s Wrong With Hollywood Blockbusters.” In it, they posit four negatives associated with the current blockbuster business model:
1. The Franchise Problem
Last November, shortly after it was announced that Disney had acquired Lucasfilm and would make a new Star Wars trilogy, Vulture’s Kyle Buchanan posited that we were entering a phase in which we would begin to see films from the same franchises over and over and over. That’s because, as Obst writes in her book, studios need movies with “pre-awareness” — titles that are familiar enough to sell in both the U.S. and abroad. Whether it’s ready-made properties like Star Wars or surprise hits that studios can then sequelize until the properties burn out (see the Hangover series), franchises are, and will continue to be, the name of the game.
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But in addition to all those very recognizable properties, there is pressure to expand and find more. As a result, studios will glom on to practically anything that is even vaguely recognizable (hello, Battleship!), preferably one with a title that is the name of a person or a cartoon or a superhero.
2. The Origin-Story Problem
This is a corollary to point number one. Don’t be fooled by the title. The Lone Ranger is as much a movie about sidekick Tonto as it is about the titular masked man. It’s a choice that makes sense, given that the Native American is played by Johnny Depp in full, mugging Jack Sparrow mode. You don’t pay Johnny Depp money and then shunt him to the side. As a result, the movie must make its way through not just one, but a pair of origin stories, as we learn both how lawman John Reid (Armie Hammer) became the masked avenger as well as how face-painted, dead-bird–wearing Tonto became the wandering outcast of this version. The Lone Ranger spends a good chunk of time marking off origin-story checklist items and very little time on the actual lone ranging. But, if you’re going to try to establish a franchise, the origin story must be told, especially with a character as obscure to current audiences as the Lone Ranger.
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3. The Rating Problem
The modern blockbuster’s primary responsibility is to deliver maximum profits and to perpetuate franchises. According to Obst, “If you make a movie that makes $200 million and you can’t make a sequel out of it, it’s a dead property.” So in order to ensure sequels and appeal to the maximum number of people, it must be rated PG or PG-13.
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Yet, in The Lone Ranger, an ostensibly family-friendly PG-13 movie, the following things happen: A man eats another man’s heart (off-screen), a Native American tribe is massacred, a group of Texas Rangers are all loudly shot to death, two men have their heads crushed by a giant block of wood. All these things happen and there is nary a drop of blood to be seen. The film shows us death and gun violence but brushes aside any sense of consequence. The same thing could be said about Man of Steel’s blasé destruction of an entire city or World War Z’s gore-free zombie apocalypse.
4. The Length Problem
The modern blockbuster suffers from a bloat problem, a bagginess problem. Two-hour plus running times have long been a calling card of fall/Christmas releases. Last year, Les Misérables, Django Unchained, The Hobbit, Lincoln, and Zero Dark Thirty all fell between two and a half and three hours in length. The modern summer blockbuster is slowly but surely following that example. The Lone Ranger is two and a half hours long.
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But it’s hard to argue that summer blockbusters, as entertaining as the best ones can be, deserve to be as long as the generally more substantive fare of Oscar season. Do studios feel that, with less people going to theaters these days, movies need to be lengthy in order for a moviegoer to feel justified in spending both their time and money?
We have visited the Franchise Problem multiple times here, so don’t need to add anything more about the “pre-awareness” obsession. The Rating Problem arises when a movie tries to have it both ways, the violence of an R-rated movie with the more lighthearted tone of a PG-13 movie. The Length Problem is an odd thing because a longer movie means exhibitors can’t squeeze in another screening per day which would seem to be anathema to the studios, but evidently there is something to this idea that the suits believe consumers need to feel like they’ve gotten their money’s worth, and that translates into actual minutes their derrieres are in theater chairs.
From a screenwriting standpoint, it’s that second one that’s a real challenge. Why? Because origin stories are almost always more difficult to make entertaining, simply because you have to set up the story universe and the characters. That means exposition and facts and personal history and backstory. And that can often = boring.
I much prefer movies to start out in media res, then I pick up what I need along the way. Indeed I believe audiences today are more sophisticated in this regard, they don’t need as much exposition, that’s one reason why what used to pass as the big plot point at the end of Act One often now happens in the middle of the first Act. Moviegoers seem to be saying, “Don’t worry about losing me, let’s get this thing going.”
But as the article points out, the pressure to create an origin story is significant if the studio is intent on creating a franchise because the first movie, they feel, must set up everything.
Are there origin movies that work as entertainment? Sure. I thought the reboot of Star Trek was great, especially in slotting in the idea of a parallel universe which gave the franchise the freedom to do whatever the hell they wanted to story-wise and still respect what had transpired in the TV series and previous Star Trek movies. Stroke of genius.
But more often than not, origin stories get weighed down with too much ‘stuff’.
I haven’t seen The Lone Ranger, so I don’t know for a fact this is the case with that movie. I’ll let others who have seen it weigh in. However here is the bottom line: While After Earth, White House Down, and The Lone Ranger have misfired, the fact is this looks to be the biggest summer yet in terms of domestic box office. So all of the potential Sturm und Drang about the red ink those three movies generate is likely to translate into zero change in terms of the major studios’ approach to making movies. At least for now.
While they may not change the way they make movies, we can change how we decide what movies we see. More on that tomorrow.
For more of the Vulture article, go here.
Flavorwire weighs in with their analysis: 3 lessons Hollywood should learn from this summer’s 3 big budget bombs.
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