Not Feeling It

If you were born in the 1950s or 1960s, you came of age during the last golden age of Hollywood filmmaking.  Looking back at the seminal films from the era of “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,” as coined by Peter Biskind, it’s easy to fall into the trap of overpraising any movie that was released from 1967 until the late 1970s, while feeling disdain or outright hostility for any movie that came after.

Not long ago, in fact, it was fashionable to trash the films that came out of Hollywood in the 1980s; in retrospect, this seems like an oversimplification.  Here are some of the films nominated for Best Picture during the 1980s, when there were only five nominees per category:

Coal Miner’s Daughter
Ordinary People
The Elephant Man
Raging Bull
Reds
Atlantic City
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
Tootsie
The Verdict
Gandhi
Missing
Terms of Endearment
The Big Chill
The Right Stuff
Tender Mercies
Amadeus
The Killing Fields
A Soldier’s Story
Prizzi’s Honor
Kiss of the Spider Woman
Hannah and Her Sisters
A Room with a View
The Last Emperor
Hope and Glory
Rain Man
Dead Poets Society
Born on the Fourth of July
My Left Foot

I’ve seen each movie on that list at least three times.  Other titles, such as Ordinary People, Tootsie, and The Verdict, I’ve watched at least five times, and there are a few on that list — Raging Bull, E.T., and Hannah and Her Sisters — that I’ve seen so many times I’ve lost count.

The point is, good Hollywood filmmaking didn’t necessary end after the 1970s.  The decline began in earnest in the 1990s, then really picked up steam in the new millennium.  Today, we’re living in an extraordinary moment in time: there really isn’t any such thing as a great Hollywood movie anymore.

There are competent films, or professional, intelligent films.  In 2011, movies such as Moneyball, Midnight in Paris, or The Ides of March weren’t half bad.  Midnight in Paris, in particular, was arguably Woody Allen’s most introspective work since Sweet and Lowdown, from 1999.  And while the nominees for Best Picture this season are, by and large, respectable and well intentioned, none is terrific, and few will stand the test of time.  If you’re an Alexander Payne fan, for instance, you might be left with the nagging suspicion that The Descendants is his worst film, and considering that his career began with Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt, and Sideways, you may have a point.

What exactly is missing from modern mainstream cinema?  It’s a vexing question.  Just when you think you’ve gotten closer to an answer, or even the beginnings of a promising theory, the proverbial rug is pulled out from under you.  Is it passion that is lacking?  Have all the best stories been told?  Have we tired of the two hour format?  I’m not really sure.  What about the blockbuster mentality, did it kill commercial cinema?  Yes, sure, it had a hand in it.  But blaming Jaws or Star Wars seems excessively harsh: those are tremendous films, and I couldn’t imagine a world in which they didn’t exist.

Part of the problem is that there is simply no penalty paid by studios any longer for making awful movies.  The six major Hollywood studios have thrown away their longstanding playbook, which for decades escalated budgets across the board, and are currently following a two-tiered strategy: spend around $150 million on movies with overseas box office potential, and spend significantly less on everything else.  The major studios are now producing movies at budgets normally associated with smaller, independent outfits such as Lionsgate.

A recent example of this phenomenon is The Vow, which got some of the worst reviews a movie can get.  A decade ago, a movie like The Vow would have cost twice as much to make (or more) and would not have been able to recover from its critical drubbing.  It would have been ganged up on by every reputable critic and deemed a “turkey” — a term that has lost all meaning in today’s film industry — by everyone in the media. 

The Vow has a 29% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, but that didn’t stop it from earning $41 million on opening weekend, and then going on to break some kind of single day box office record on Valentine’s Day.  Hell, there was even a movie from a few years back called Valentine’s Day that didn’t do nearly as well on Valentine’s Day, and that one had Julia Roberts!

When there is no connection between the quality of a film and its value in the marketplace, then the implicit contract that artists enter into with their audience is obliterated.  Last year, in a different post, I argued that better movies could make more money than bad ones, as long as budgets remained low enough.  This year — so far, anyway — some of the worst movies in recent memory have been enormous hits.  This new crop took their cues from some of last year’s success stories, which often had budgets in the neighborhood of $30 million.  That a “Hollywood” movie can get produced inside the studio system for $30 million is a development that seemed improbable only a few years prior.  Most people don’t know, or care, that The Help, Bridesmaids, Limitless, Source Code, and a whole host of other hits from 2011 were produced for $30 million or less, even though it could be argued that this new-found austerity has had the most profound effect on the film industry of any advancement since digital streaming.

For decades, high powered talent agencies could “package” projects with a movie star, a top producer, and a celebrated director.  The “above the line” costs of this approach, which also included pricey rewrites from script doctors, meant that a typical project could find itself $40 million in the hole before pre-production got underway or a single frame of film was shot.  You took a star, paid him a fat check (his “quote”), paid a director loads of money, and greenlit a movie.  There was simply no other way of doing business, not unless you wanted to work independently, outside the studio system.  Otherwise, the commercial film business was simply too expensive to allow for any legitimate external competition, as there were only a handful of major players who could afford to pay those kinds of prices.

Many factors came into play to undermine this packaging model, which took Hollywood by storm in the 1980s and has been effectively neutralized in recent years.  Here are some:

1.  The major studios tried to protect themselves from the huge losses suffered from box office duds by letting other companies share in the upfront production costs traditionally incurred by the studios themselves, which had the unintended consequence of transforming the largest studios into glorified content distribution companies.

2.  These same major studios that no longer finance many of the films on their schedules consequently don’t call the shots on the movies they didn’t pay for.  If an independently financed film is a box office hit, the studio releasing it must share those profits with the company that financed the picture.  Less risk for the studio, but far less reward.

3.  Audiences tend to associate any mainstream commercial film with a major Hollywood studio, regardless of whether the movie in question was financed and produced inside the traditional studio system or not.

4. Another cost-cutting measure the studios took to remain profitable in the past decade was to reduce the number of projects in their pipelines, which had another unintended consequence: it created voids in the release calendar that could now be filled by non-studio pictures.

5.  A movie not produced or distributed by a major studio can nonetheless open in 3,000 theaters, whereas in the past only the major studios had the muscle to book that many screens.

6.  The internet and social media have democratized the marketing campaigns of motion picture distribution, allowing smaller distributors with limited resources the ability to reach a far wider audience than would have been possible a decade ago.

7.  A movie budgeted at $25 million can be as good, if not better, than a movie with a $75 million budget, both from an aesthetic as well as a technical standpoint.  What’s more, a movie with a $25 million budget and a popular movie star will make, on average, about the same in its opening weekend as a similar movie with a $75 million budget and a popular movie star — and audiences won’t necessarily be able to tell the difference.

Last weekend, two new releases vied for the box office crown, each earning an impressive $40 million.  It’s unlikely that anyone who rushed out to see The Vow on opening weekend or Valentine’s Day had any idea it was produced and financed by Screen Gems, or that it had a budget of only $30 million.  Screen Gems functions as an autonomous mini-studio within Sony; Screen Gems movies are developed and financed separate from Sony, and must find their way onto Sony’s overall schedule.  Sony has plenty of their own (far more expensive) movies to worry about this year, including The Amazing Spider-Man, Total Recall, Men In Black 3, and the new Bond film, Skyfall, so I imagine they use Screen Gems titles to fill holes in their schedule.  Sony/Screen Gems won a weekend in January with Underworld: Awakening, and they did it again in February with The Vow.  Yawn.  The only thing that seemed to matter to audiences, apparently, was that The Vow was an unapologetically sappy love story.  A huge segment of moviegoers wanted to see a love story, and so they sought it out despite its obvious flaws.

Safe House, from Universal, was produced the old fashioned way, with a $85 million budget — a big chunk of that money undoubtedly going to its star, Denzel Washington.  $85 million is no man’s land in today’s Hollywood: too expensive to be profitable in the short term, and not expensive enough to attract massive overseas audiences.  Overall, Safe House received reviews that were only marginally better than The Vow‘s, but once again it didn’t seem to make any difference: Denzel Washington’s star power still shone brightly enough to bring people into the theaters.  Universal rolled the dice and their gamble paid off — the film is on track to exceed $100 million domestically — but most executives in Hollywood are well aware that this model is no longer financially sustainable.  The Grey, produced and distributed by Open Road — a new company no one has heard of — had a budget of only $25 million and earned nearly $20 million when it opened two weeks prior.  Both Safe House and The Grey were marketed efficiently to the same audience of male action fans.  But an $85 million movie needs to make around $100 million in the U.S. and $100 million overseas in order to break even — a target that is simply out of reach for most pictures, especially ones that can only hold onto their audience for four or five weekends.  Contrast that with The Grey, which, having earned $50 million worldwide after three weeks in release, is already profitable.

This is the motion picture business in 2012.  The number one film at the box office any given week is just as likely to have been produced by a major studio as a shrewd upstart.  A movie with a $30 million budget can best one that cost three times more to produce.  This new landscape will look radically different than the film industry of past decades.  If you’re a screenwriter or hot director, you may still be able to get a deal with Warners, but you’re just as likely to develop your project with a company that’s only been around six months — and that won’t be such a bad thing.  Independent production companies, making low-risk genre films with nearly guaranteed returns, will often have access to the same amount of cash that Warners would have been willing to spend anyway, and your movie, shot on a Red camera or an Arri Alexa, will resemble a Hollywood production even if you don’t share the same shooting budget (Chronicle was shot for $12 million, got a splashy release from Fox, and has already earned $40 million).  Maybe your movie will get distributed by a company that has figured out how to best reach users of Twitter and Facebook, or whatever tomorrow’s trendy social media tool happens to be.  For every newfangled content streaming device or multimedia platform, another five companies will pop up to grab those users.

What is still referred to as the movie industry will continue to splinter off into a mishmash of financing deals and distribution partnerships, eager to compete against what’s left of the remaining media conglomerates.  Indeed, much of what is being fought over has already been settled.  The studios are no longer borrowing or spending as much as they once did (with much of the investments now coming from overseas); budgets are lower across the board, and won’t shoot back up again anytime soon; and the majors are no longer bringing as much pressure to bear on theater chains, which allows other companies the opportunity to capture the same audience, on the same screens, as the majors once enjoyed all to themselves.  Much will be written about this in the coming years, and, in a way, it’s quite exciting.  When a system that remained fairly intact for 80 years begins to fracture into thousands of little pieces seemingly overnight, it can feel as if something dangerous and unexpected is about to take place.

But if the movies getting released week in and week out aren’t any good, it’s hard to take sides in this ongoing war of attrition.  You may feel, perhaps out of nostalgia for old Hollywood, an impulse to root for the studios to figure a way out of their somewhat precarious situation.  Or perhaps you’re siding with the newer production companies who have been skillfully beating the studios at their own game.  In the end, Major Studio X may successfully fend off an attack from its leaner competitors, while Major Studio Y may collapse under the weight of its inflated budgets and overhead.  Slick, bloated productions such as Safe House, or this weekend’s new $70 million crap-shoot This Means War (which has gotten reviews even worse than The Vow‘s — Todd McCarthy called it a candidate for worst film of the year, and we’re still in February!) and the $75 million Ghost Rider sequel, will need to reach the coveted $100 million mark domestically in order to justify their budgets.  Meanwhile, by the time The Vow reaches a $100 million, it will be a gigantic moneymaker for its producers.

But I keep coming back to this fear: what if these movies aren’t any good?  What if, in this newer, leaner, smarter Hollywood, a studio can successfully market any movie that they spent almost nothing to produce?  The stars already get less money upfront, camera, lighting, and CGI costs have plunged, and soon the majority of projects will be shot digitally, at a fraction of the price of celluloid, if this isn’t happening already.  Many have predicted the demise of the theatrical distribution model, but isn’t it just as likely that there will always be a core group of younger, less discerning moviegoers who, week after week, will show up to see whatever happens to be playing?  We like to disparage the film industries of countries like India, where junky, brainless movies turn a quick profit, but isn’t that exactly what’s in danger of happening here?

I imagine that by complaining about these things, I sound like a bitter old man, screaming “get off my lawn!” to the neighborhood kids.  Someone, somewhere, is enjoying these movies.  But anyone who is still trying to think intelligently about some of the biggest hits of the day will only come away feeling dispirited.  It’s possible that indie distributors will get smart over the next few years and begin to release their most promising titles in 3,000 theaters, as opposed to the current strategy of art-house focused, specialty releases in select markets and a heavy reliance on VOD.  If the studios have changed the way they do business, then indie distributors may need to rethink their current strategies as well.

Maybe tomorrow’s Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, or Paul Mazursky will need to figure out how to make an inexpensive movie that can play at the local multiplex for a few weeks, bringing in $30 or $40 million before anyone has a chance to figure out that the filmmaker may be up to something slightly more ambitious.  Last fall’s Drive, distributed by FilmDistrict and directed by Nicholas Winding Refn, seems to have applied this strategy to great effect.  With Ryan Gosling in the lead, it earned $35 million domestically from a $15 million budget.  Its title and trailer sold the film as a kind of smart Fast and Furious rehash, when it was really nothing of the sort, prompting one irate customer to sue the studio for misleading advertising!

It may be time to admit that just about any movie — good or bad — can earn a bit of money right now, as long as it’s made cheaply, little is expected of it, and it’s playing at the mall.