We’re through the teeth of the summer movie season now, and a number of entertainment pundits are asking one very salient question: Why so many big-budget bombs?
After Earth, starring Will and Jaden Smith, allegedly cost about $130 million to make, but only collected $27.5 mil during its opening weekend, and just $59.8 million during its domestic run. (Typically, Will Smith earns more than that when he sneezes.) White House Down, a $150 million flick with the ever-reliable Roland Emmerich in the director’s chair, made $24 million in its opening frame. The $215 million Disney movie The Lone Ranger earned $29 million in its opening weekend.
And just this past weekend, the $130 million action-comedy R.I.P.D. took a massive pratfall in theaters, earning a truly dismal $12.7 million.
Maybe all these big-budget disasters represent a bit of linguistic irony. After all, the word “blockbuster” was used to describe explosives dropped by the Royal Air Force in World War II. In other words, a blockbuster is a bomb.
What’s going on? Well, it would seem that the times, they are a-changing. An unidentified Los Angeles producer told Fox News this:
It seems that the ‘summer blockbuster’ is becoming a thing of the past. The cinema model is changing. Unless it is a genius concept and genius marketing, nobody cares. Take White House Down which is just another version of Olympus Has Fallen and months before the film’s release the Internet is buzzing with people talking badly. The only way to push forward is go backwards and learn. The ADD generation doesn’t care if a movie is in 3D, they don’t care about Transformer’-sized effects, so what do they care about? Regardless of the generation, people have a natural empathy towards people, and if the actor cannot transcribe the emotional conflict to the screen, the audience isn’t interested.
I don’t know if I completely agree with the sweeping statement that the blockbuster is going away. Last I checked, some blockbusters did and are doing just fine. Iron Man 3 has earned $407.1 million. Man of Steel has collected $285.6 million.
But while big-budget theater titans might not vanish, I do think they will diminish. Every week this summer, it seems, there’s been a massive monster of a movie needing to do amazing numbers to earn back its $100-200 million budget. And let’s face it: The moviegoing public can only see so many movies. Sometimes, we all need to get out and throw a Frisbee. Keeping the makers of, say, Pacific Rim, flush in cash drops lower on our to-do list.
Now, anyone who reads me regularly knows that I enjoy a good CGI spectacular. But, frankly, if the movie industry stops cranking out so many would-be blockbusters and begins focusing on cheaper, more targeted films, I’d be good with that. Because all the CGI in the world isn’t worth much if there’s not a good story for it to serve. And lately it seems as though some of these blockbusters have dispensed with story for the sake of the spectacle. Says producer Madison Jones to Fox News:
It’s not the budget audiences are attracted to, it is the content. The films were not that good. They all feel like formulas we have seen before just presented with robots, cowboys and Indians, special forces or in the future. They don’t feel fresh.
We are creatures of story. And when the story is good, we long to share it with others. We need to sympathize with the characters. We need to resonate with the themes. We need to be able to feel a little of ourselves in the story, be it in the pages of a book or on a 30-foot-tall screen. Sometimes the secret to good storytelling isn’t to make everything bigger and more blockbustery, but to make it smaller. Explosions and falling cities may draw our attention for a bit. But after a while it becomes all background noise.
If the movie industry does refocus its attention on more budget-minded stories—perhaps sometimes more niche products that aren’t intended to appeal to every man, woman and child—that could bode well for more films that reflect our own values, concerns and hopes. I don’t imagine a quantum leap in the quality and number of faith-based films (though we’ve seen both incrementally increase over the last several years), but maybe more stories will, at least, talk openly about spirituality. After all, faith is a prime mover in many of our lives—not only something we like to see reflected in our entertainment, but a fantastic focal point for storytelling. Faith is a wellspring of both hope and conflict, an element in our lives that can sometimes make characters (us) do crazy things.
Time will tell, of course. But here’s hoping that my hope isn’t a bomb.
Recent Comments