Dear Hollywood,
I just wanted to drop you a line to explain why I haven’t been calling as much lately. Most of all I want you to know that it isn’t you, it’s me.
Hopefully this letter doesn’t come off as merely a series of excuses because I really love the time we spent together, I recall fondly how we’d catch up in the dark for a couple hours a week, share some popcorn and watery Coke and just enjoy each other’s company.
I remember sneaking into an R Rated screening of Total Recall at age 16, being blown away by Drunken Master 2 in a small ‘edgy’ cinema a couple years later and even recently how Avatar was more an event than a film – it almost made wearing the 3D glasses worthwhile.
But over the last decade things have changed between us, the weekly catch-ups are now more bi-monthly, sometimes less, and they are far more carefully planned than before.
No longer will I fork over $20 to watch something that might be OK, when you only get to meet 6 or 8 times a year you make sure that you are there for a sure thing, no more dalliances and taking chances… I’m too old and time is more precious and a sparser commodity.
I won’t go on about how much it costs to meet now. OK if you must know I will, but remember you asked! Just know that 2 adult tickets plus the same watery Coke and 4 kgs of popcorn (but the last 3 kgs are only 55c extra!) can set you back $60 easy, and I wont even add the babysitting costs and post film icecream of coffee, it wouldn’t be fair tagging that on you.
I always hear talk about how nothing is original any more, that Hollywood is all sequels, remakes, reboots, superheroes and cartoons. I guess I agree, but at the same time I can’t think of many films outside of those categories that I ever go to nowadays. That comes back to the limited opportunity again, when you have a finite number of visits you want the sure thing, there’s something comforting in the noisy eye melting brain cell destroying nonsense that is Transformers, something distracting about the vacuous eye candy on display in the Twilight films, hell something resembling watered down fun in the Pirates films. I guess like many others I like the 100% possibility of familiar mediocrity than the 50% prospect of creative genius. (And there’s nothing worse than the judgmental glances that come from a mate that essentially says ‘YOU chose this one!”, I got that at Scott Pilgrim Vs the World and practically every film that I dupe my wife into seeing by saying stuff like “Bradley Cooper is in it”… Limitless).
OK this is getting us both nowhere. I might as well fess up. I’ve been seeing… others. Let me explain. There is so much live sport on TV now that the only thing limiting how much you watch is how many eyes you have and how many minutes there are in a day. And I love my sport.
Speaking of TVs, did you know you can hook up a big screen TV to a decent speaker system and watch Blu-Ray movies in your own home? The way you want. I want chips? Got ‘em. A beer? Got ‘em. I wanna watch in my boxers with my chips and beer? Well the wife might not be ecstatic but it happens. I don’t have to worry about queues, high priced food, nattering idiots in the crowd, same idiots checking their phones every 12 seconds in case the President called (me included I guess). I can even tell noisy people to shut up guilt free – they’re my family after all – and pause the film to get more beer or to check those sports scores on the other channels.
I’m always front row and with my trusty remote never miss a line of dialogue (or a flash of celebrity nudity). All the best qualities of a trip to the movies with none of the drawbacks. All this and when I finish I stumble the 12 steps to my own bed.
I should also mention that someone else is constantly calling me these days. He’s called the internet, you might have heard of him? Well he’s got everything. I could waste so many hours on ‘ol’ netty’ that I might never leave home – even got this website I write for…
Oh and I have this family, a job and a few friends too, they take up some time.
So while this isn’t goodbye, it might be as good a time as any to tell you that we’ll be seeing a lot less of each other in the future.
We shared many good times over many decades, and some of my earliest memories revolve around trips to the cinema, but good times don’t go on forever.
Yours sincerely,
Generic cinema-goer.
Four months later…
Dear Faceless Consumer,
We scanned your recent correspondence (undated) and for a laugh actually decided to reply to one.
The truth is we haven’t really missed you. While we like to cry poverty every couple years in truth Hollywood is a money making machine that will find a way to squeeze every last dollar from your pocket one way or the other.
While you and some others might have reduced your visits might we point out that pre-teens are heading to the cinema in greater numbers than ever before, possibly due to the fact that kids are spoilt more than ever these days and a trip to the cinema is seen as a 90 minute nap for the parent and an outing for the kid. And we get to charge for two tickets. All we need is a cute hero and a couple famous names and we’re getting paid out the ass!
Animated Films
Check out this list of cash-cows from the past 12 months (Mental note: we need to produce a film about a cash printing cow. Memo: make the cow cute and have Paris Hilton’s voice as a love interest… or a Kardashian.):
- Gnomeo and Juliet
- Hop
- Tangled
- Toy Story 3
- Rio
- Rango
Aside from Rango they were all kids films essentially. Need we ask how much money you make out of your kid? We’re making more than ever before thanks to gormless parental saps like you.
The above 5 films grossed us over a BILLION DOLLARS. (To be fair most were actually pretty good, only Gnomeo and Juliet and Hop were rated as ‘Rotten’, I have seen neither.)
Then let’s say your kid makes it to their early teens, what are they after then? Superheroes and PG 13 horror flicks of course! Well we thought of that too and have you covered.
Superhero Movies
In fact you might as well send your kid’s pocket money and the loot they nick from your wallet when you’re watching your ‘live sport’ (*Cough* Porn!) straight to us, maybe address it ‘Care of; the guys that are really raising your children’.
Thor
Iron Man 2
The Green Hornet
X Men First Class
That foursome grossed three quarters of a BILLION DOLLARS for us. But I ask you; do you really think any of those films will end up in your Blu-Ray collection? They’re all ‘OK’, but only OK… despite being reasonably well received.
But wait there’s more! 2011 still has Conan, Red Sonja and the ultimate in bad idea sequels: Ghost Rider 2… to mildly look forward to.
The rise of the Franchise
Now for years the next phase really stumped us. Once the internet started swallowing the free time of the beanie and nose-ring set we kinda lost them all the way until they started settling down with families. Sure we got the occasional date night and the blockbusters that essentially everyone saw, but we didn’t have that sure fire ‘go-to’ that ensured these one off cash-cows could be replicated year in year out, bringing in repeat business to our vast coffers.
Then it hit us like a geriatric punch in Rocky 6. Just look at what worked last year and give them the same shit every year!
See in the 80s and 90s the term ‘Franchise’ wasn’t well defined. A good first film, say Beverly Hills Cop, was only greenlit for a sequel when we were sure it made enough money and had ‘legs’. In the case of BHC the second film was pretty good and made money too, so even though we had wrung the Foley character and premise dry we went back for a third film. The result was… well let’s just say it was enough to end the franchise at a trilogy.
In the 2000s we woke up and smelt the money, we worked out that in essence ‘people are stupid’, not you, people. If they like something once they will pay for it again, even if it is far inferior to the films that preceded it.
I mean you try explaining this in another way than ‘people are stupid’.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Rotten Tomatoes Score Box Office
2003/ The Curse of the Black Pearl 78% 300M +
2006/ Dead Man’s Chest 54% 400M +
2007/ At World’s End 45% 300M +
2011/ On Stranger Tides 33% 200M + *
* And the fourth decidedly average film is still climbing!
‘But wait’ – I hear you think – ‘Are you telling me that despite a continually lower level of quality Hollywood are making the same if not more money?’.
Well allow us to reply with numbers: Sequels for Transformers, Harry Potter, Twilight, Kung Fu Panda, Paranormal Activity, The Hangover and Fast (and Furious) Five grossed almost TWO BILLION DOLLARS at an average of over 250M per lazy effort.
Throw in another 200M for a lacklustre reboot of The Karate Kid and things are just depressing.
Yep, sure am, and thanks dumbasses.
So the last decade or so has seen the rise of the Franchise – the leveraging of one hit into many, usually of vastly inferior quality and equal if not greater profits thanks to the hamsters of diminished IQ blindly and stupidly stepping up to hit the pellet button… all at $20 a pop.
The original Transformers sucked. It ‘earned’ a 57% (or Rotten) rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but made over 300M. (OOOhhhh, big CGI robots and confusing camera angles and Megan Fox in a tank top. The second was apparently worse – a criminal 20% rating. Yet over 400M at the box office!
Ask yourself if you think it was the fact that we satisfied 1 in 5 critics or the 400 million clams that got the totally unnecessary third film greenlit?
Now you tell me who is to blame for the dumbing down of Hollywood. (We enclose a voucher for 50c off a 4 kg vat of tasteless popcorn, to be used only with the 3 kg upsize offer.)
Yours condescendingly,
Hollywood
Dear Hollywood and Movie-going audiences,
Before you think that I just cherry picked a few examples that suited my argument on the preceding pages.
Here is a list of films from the last 12 months that found their way to cinemas that are not:
- Animated
- One of a franchise
- A remake/reboot
- Superhero related
… and are therefore not referenced above by Hollywood.
I have divided them into two categories, those that I think are fairly original and those that I think are pretty derivative, in essence formulaic.
Original(ish)
- Devil
- Kick-Ass
- The Last Exorcism
- Limitless
- Paul
- Scott Pilgrim Vs the World
- Source Code
- Splice
- Sucker Punch
- The Warrior’s Way
Box Office Average: $35,000,000
Rotten Tomatoes Average Score: Fresh (64%)
Devil, The Warrior’s Way and Sucker Punch were all deemed ‘Rotten’.
Formulaic
- Battle: Los Angeles
- The Expendables
- Faster
- Hanna
- Insidious
- Machete
- Piranha 3D
- Priest
- Skyline
- Unstoppable
Box Office Average: $48,000,000
Rotten Tomatoes Average Score: Rotten (52%)
5 films were deemed ‘Rotten’ (Box Office aggregate 252M), 5 ‘Fresh’ (Box Office aggregate 224M).
Take a look at the critical reception, then the box-office, then explain to me why the better reviewed films almost always have the poorer grossed, and the more creative (read unfamiliar and perhaps challenging) the film, the more it is ignored? In summary the more original films were rated as superior efforts, yet on average grossed about a third less. Even in the formulaic films category the better reviewed half actually grossed significantly less than the critically panned.
What the hell is going on there? Explain that in a way that doesn’t say audiences prefer to watch the same films even when they are lower in quality… you can’t.
If you were “Hollywood”, would you rather churn out lazy flicks that rake in mad cash? Or really strive to be original and creative -taking more risks of failure – and have your better received (by non-paying critics!) earn decidedly less again and again???
Thought so.
The one exception to the rule in the last couple years? Inception, though it was made by Christopher Nolan, the man that single-handedly revived the credibility of both the superhero movie and the superhero Franchise with Batman, and also a man with a track record of originality and most of all balls.
Before that? Avatar, again made by a man with an exceptional track record and one who wasn’t afraid to try something new, James Cameron.
In both cases the pre-release hype was enormous, ensuring that both Inception and Avatar were destined to be ‘must-sees’ well before they came out.
Referring back to my comments above, as I see it most people past their teens head to the cinema at most once a month (I said most), often less. So with only so many films to go around it tends to be the known quantities that get supported, and films like Scott Pilgrim, Source Code and Limitless – all very worthwhile – end up resigned to low box-offices and a life consigned to DVD rentals, which I also mentioned isn’t a bad thing for the consumer as they can be viewed in the ideal setting, just later…
I can see in the future these films will simply skip cinemas altogether and be fast-tracked to streaming services or pay-TV movie channels at a higher cost.
I would prefer it that way personally, rather than repeatedly showing up to buy tix for films that I know will be rewarding yet challenging to find a theatre ‘packed’ with 5 other punters. I can get that many comfortably in my TV room.
Anyway if I have a point it is that the dumbing down of Hollywood and the homogenisation of cinema is no-one and everyone’s fault. In the Hollywood corner why be creative when it is the least creative films that make the most money? And from a viewing perspective why hunt for quality when you simply don’t have time? Watch the blockbusters at the flix and track down the real obscure gems in your own home.
Yours sensibly,
OGR
