As studios roll out their big guns, the ever-more-expensive intended blockbuster wannabes, they worry that last year’s box office decline might not be an abberation, that the audience might be seeping away despite their best efforts. Ever since Steven Spielberg’s 1975 Jaws created the summer blockbuster by offering thrills in the water through a then wide release pattern insuring an entertainment event, and then two years later, George Lucas cinched the formula by adding amazing special effects in his space fantasy Star Wars, audiences have hit the cineplexes in greater numbers creating ever bigger totals in revenue from tickets and licensed merchandise. But an interesting new New York Times article analyzing what ingredients make for a successful summer film shows just how much an acheivement making a successful blockbuster is. It’s a short piece so after you read it, come back for my two-cents’ worth.
The bathroom formula is funny but telling–it’s the secret that Lucas, Spielberg and other directors have used to create a new mass audience to replace the one Hollywood lost in the 1950s when television stole the millions who had kept it prosperous for a generation until the post Word War II era. Up till then, the movie studios’ Production Code had effectively made all their films safe for all ages because nearly everyone went to the movies at least once a week. When was the last time you went, and how often do you go?
Once the Production Code was overtaken by legal decisions putting films under First Amendment protection, filmmakers could experiment with ever greater levels of sex, violence and language content. The audience dropped over the next two decades as the films increasingly became less family-centered and more youth targeted, i.e., college-educated and more sophisticated demographic than its parents’ generation. When the Blockbuster Era became the operating system for the next generation of filmmakers, the next 25 years sought to do appeal to both the juvenile and, “rejuveniles” the NYT article refers to. This of course is the secret of Star Wars and most other subsequent blockbuster–something for everyone that lands the film with a PG or PG-13 rating.
I was recently reading the preface to a book on changes in Hollywood’s narrative style (The Way Hollywood Tells It) by the great film scholar David Bordwell and he references a remark by a colleague (the equally distinguished Noel Carroll) that in a modern democratic film culture, the Bible and literature have been replaced by cinematic allusions as cultural reference points–IOW, it’s all movie culture wherever you find it, because that’s all we know now–hence the blockbuster move that strikes the right balance–appealing to kids with “adult” references and to adults for the juvenile appeal but mostly drawing from other movies.
A film like Sky Captain, and the World of Tomorrow , which sought to follow the Blockbuster recipe of having a retro appeal for the adults and gee-whiz production design for the youth segment, is fun for the game of catching the rich trove of 20th century pop culture items throughout it–but it may have flopped because that’s not enough–audiences may have felt it to be too derivative.
Bordwell discusses the longing of young filmmakers from the 70s on to emulate the classics of Hollywood’s Studio Era–but these were made by men with knowledge of the Bible and literature–it was of course simply the culture of their upbringing. I was thinking a few nights ago as we watched last week’s American Masters doc. on John Ford and John Wayne, that several of the great studio directors, including Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and Frank Capra, all raised Catholic and saturated with that culture, could produce such wonderful work–but contemporary artists can’t find the secret for building on them because they can’t draw from the same sources. Hence the Spielberg/Lucas formula draws instead from pop culture and genre films rather than classics or scripture.
But this isn’t to totally denigrate the modern blockbuster–as the article points out, it’s a real achievement to produce a successful one (such as Spider-Man 2, which demonstrates that themes of virtue and sacrifice, rightly executed sells tickets) –and involves a degree of difficulty greater than art films or standard genre flicks–if only because so much is at stake and there are so many more elements to balance correctly–and still leave time somewhere to hit the bathroom.
The last movie we went to was MI3; it was last Sunday afternoon at a cut-rate theater with a great sound system. My son and I thought it a great guy flick. But we don’t go to a theater more than about once a month, on average.
We watch a good many movies, but we largely get ‘em on DVD from the library. There are several reasons, few of them having to do with movie quality (though we won’t go see a crummy or evil movie just to go see something).
Mostly it’s the price of the movie plus popcorn that decides things. The theater we frequent (www.shannontheatre.com) charges $2 to $3 for admission, sells advance passes for $20 per 11 that are good at every showing of every movie, and you can get two drinks and a tub of popcorn for $4, with $1 refills on the popcorn. They also have one of the best sound systems in the area; they were tagged as the area opener for “The Phantom Menace.”
We just can’t see paying $7 a head, plus $10 for popcorn and a drink, to sit in a little box with a cheesy sound system. I realize that’s “cheap” for some areas… but not mine.
Comment by Dan Berger — May 18, 2006 @ 11:34 am |
The prices sound amazing! Especially for a first run theater. It sounds like a small family-run theater we went to in GA for a while until it closed–everything sounds at least half the cost of chain cineplexes–that would keep me going more often.
We’ll be at Over the Hedge this weekend.
Thanks for writing!
-Alex
Comment by Alex — May 18, 2006 @ 11:40 am |
The box office failure of Sky Captain is not explicable in terms of the movie itself, the movie is so good it makes you poop your pants. It had to have been some weird, external factor, like a conspiracy or something.
Comment by Dave Munger — May 24, 2006 @ 4:10 pm |
There’s a saying that goes something like, “Success has a thousand parents, failure is an orphan.” There are always Monday morning quarterbacks trying to explain the success or failure of a movie–and I have almost given up trying to guess what will or won’t succeed for whatever reasons. While we are of the small group that saw the film, and smaller group still that liked it, I can only guess as to why it didn’t take off. Not everyone is as in love with the pre-WWII sci-fi/fantasy design that the film glories in, as I am. The actual digitized cinematopgraphy, which you might think is going for a 30s era look, is actually much darker and murkier than the Hollywood imagery of that era. This was more like an Amazing Stories magazine of 1938 come to life and apparently it lacked whatever current sensibility that appealed to the wider audience that made the Indiana Jones and Star Wars films hits. But now that we have the DVD, we can enjoy it anytime.
Thanks for reading and writing!
-Alex
Comment by Alex — May 24, 2006 @ 4:39 pm |
I’m thinking, when I saw the trailers, I wanted to see the movie at the theater BADLY, yet I didn’t for some reason. I’m pretty sure everyone IS as in love with the Gernsback Continuum as you and I, but whatever kept me out of the theater kept everyone else out too. I can’t remember the reason I didn’t see it though, maybe it just dissapeared too fast.
Comment by Dave Munger — May 27, 2006 @ 12:55 am |