This piece by Brooks Barnes in the New York Times is the most wildly off-base thing I’ve read all day, which is quite a feat when you consider the L.A. Times also published a newspaper today. Here’s Barnes’ theory, in a nutshell, explaining why Hollywood’s going to enter a new era of bold originality:
As Hollywood plowed into 2010, there was plenty of clinging to the tried and true: humdrum remakes like “The Wolfman” and “The A-Team”; star vehicles like “Killers” with Ashton Kutcher and “The Tourist” with Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp; and shoddy sequels like “Sex and the City 2.” All arrived at theaters with marketing thunder intended to fill multiplexes on opening weekend, no matter the quality of the film. “Sex and the City 2,” for example, had marketed “girls’ night out” premieres and bottomless stacks of merchandise like thong underwear.
But the audience pushed back. One by one, these expensive yet middle-of-the-road pictures delivered disappointing results or flat-out flopped. Meanwhile, gambles on original concepts paid off. “Inception,” a complicated thriller about dream invaders, racked up more than $825 million in global ticket sales; “The Social Network” has so far delivered $192 million, a stellar result for a highbrow drama.
As a result, studios are finally and fully conceding that moviegoers, armed with Facebook and other networking tools and concerned about escalating ticket prices, are holding them to higher standards. The product has to be good.
My personal tastes aside, if we’re to believe that then we have to believe that Alice in Wonderland, Twilight: Eclipse, Shrek Forever After, Clash of the Titans, Grown Ups,The Last Airbender, Robin Hood, Date Night and Due Date all qualified as “good,” and that Toy Story 3, Iron Man 2, The Karate Kid, another Harry Potter Jackass 3D, The Expendables, and Sex and the City 2 we’re all original. Because those titles represent 16 of the top 25 moneymakers of 2010.
Other than Inception and Shutter Island everything else in the top 25 is a cartoon or formulaic offerings such as The Other Guys, Valentine’s Day, and Salt.
Why would any executive look at that list and declare a new era of bold, original filmmaking. The only real outlier in the entire list is Inception, the film all the critics were sure Americans were too dumb to flock to.
Other than that, to these eyes it looks like business as usual between Hollywood and customer. Furthermore, overall business wasn’t down terribly over last year, nowhere near enough to start a panic labelled RETHINK EVERYTHING.
I’m not defending Hollywood’s business model. There’s a lot they could do differently to pull in the large swath of people thoroughly disgusted with what they see (correctly) as an an industry hostile to who they are and what they believe in (more 300s and Takens, fewer Fair Games and Green Zones). But that’s a completely different argument than the New York Times pretending they’ve discovered a new twist in how Hollywood will be doing business.
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