“Why did so few specialty films cross over this summer?”

Labor Day weekend marks the official end of Hollywood’s summer season, so time to do some analysis. Here’s a start from LAT movie blogger (24 Frames) Steven Zeitchik, focusing on how well specialty movies fared — or rather didn’t — this summer:

Summer — that elusive, seductive damsel exiting the bar after this weekend — tends to inspire a lot of things, including too many contemporary country singers to write bad songs. What it usually also does is get filmgoers to take a break from the male explosion extravaganzas and female star-driven dramedies to check out something smaller. lighter and more human, movies that people see because they discover them, not because they’re marketed into submission.

The so-called specialty crossover hit has been a certainty in recent summers, when there’s reliably been a “Little Miss Sunshine” or a “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” to attract filmgoers. This year? Not so much.

The offbeat family dramedy “The Kids Are All Right” comes closest to earning the crossover crown — it’s grossed just over $19 million since being released in early July. For a $5-million acquisition of worldwide rights out of Sundance, that’s not a shabby investment for distributor Focus Features. But it’s hardly the blowout success of “Little Miss Sunshine,” a movie to which “Kids” has been compared but which grossed nearly $60 million, or even the quirky breakup dramedy “(500) Days of Summer,” which grossed $32 million last summer.

In only one other summer in the past decade did a specialty movie not crack the $20-million mark (it happened in 2007, when “Waitress” just missed the cut). “The Kids Are All Right” will probably make it to $20 million, but barely. And the Lisa Cholodenko film is actually the exception — there isn’t a single other specialty movie so far this year close to it. Many years there are multiple films. And sometimes there’s even one blowout one, a “Napoleon Dynamite” or, all the way at the upper end of the register, a “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” This year the well is dry.

Lack of quality product? The economic recession? Or perhaps this:

But it’s the simplest explanation that may be the truest: The number of financiers and distributors that might have produced and pushed these films are no longer doing business. The brothers Weinstein — who regularly churned out counterprogrammers earlier in the 00s, have been laying lower this year. Miramax and Bob Berney are off the scene. So are a lot of indie financing instruments. Sure, Fox Searchlight and Focus Features are still here as well-funded, infrastructure-heavy producers and distributors, but they’re increasingly the exception. Searchlight also took a rare pause form its usual crossover dominance this year as it released “Cyrus,” which grossed just over $7 million. (It did have the urban romantic comedy “Just Wright” gross $21 million, though that doesn’t fit the typical definition of a specialty film.)

In other words, fall-out from the demise some years back of several of the major studios’ specialty labels. The point there isn’t that more indie-type movies aren’t getting produced, but rather the outfits that have big distribution networks and significant marketing resources — namely the major studios — aren’t in the business that much right now (with the exceptions, as noted above, of Fox Searchlight and Focus Features). As Zeitchik puts it in his article:

When the financial crisis hit a few years ago, we heard often that indie films would now be left in indie hands, making indie money. This summer, we began to see it.

Thoughts?

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