Entertainment Weekly (I know, I’m hitting the hard stuff this morning) asks why movie audiences are not flocking to see 3-D movies in droves (so far) this summer the way they did when megahit Avatar was released. EW offers this bit of business analysis, which fundamentally misses the real point:
Stock analyst Richard Greenfield of BTIG Research is one of Wall Street’s most vocal opponents of 3-D. “I think people are tired of showing up and having to wear glasses — at high prices — every single week,” says Greenfield, who happened to mention the three most frequent complaints launched against 3-D: uncomfortable glasses, expensive surcharges, and an oversaturated market.
That’s all very interesting, but either the author or the analyst miss what I think is the real reason for the accountants’ angst.
So far this summer, three big movies have been released in 3-D: Thor, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, and Kung Fu Panda 2. Coming up, we have Green Lantern, Cars 2, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, Captain America: The First Avenger, The Smurfs, Final Destination 5, Glee Live 3D, Conan the Barbarian, Fright Night, and Spy Kids 4.
Pirates 4. Kung Fu Panda 2. Cars 2. Transformers 3. Final Destination 5. Spy Kids 4. Harry Potter 7 Part 2(!). That’s a lot of sequels. Thor, Captain America, Green Lantern, Smurfs, Conan, Glee, and Fright Night. A lot of remakes and adaptations of other stuff done elsewhere.
What that’s not a lot of is “new stuff.” Avatar brought something new to the table: a new world, a new mythology, a new look for the hero, in addition to the then-new 3D technology. The issue is not Hollywood’s ability to provide spectacle. The issue is Hollywood’s ability to produce a new story.
Now, don’t get me wrong about the other facets of these movies. I saw Thor and I’m quite interested to see Green Lantern. Both more for the spectacle than anything else. I had low expectations of the story in Thor, and the movie managed to exceed those low expectations. And it did look cool. That’s about what I expect for Green Lantern. I had high expectations for the effects, for the quality and credibility of the computer graphics, for transmuting the feel of reading a comic book into the big screen. Thor did a great job of that. But the story was, frankly, a little weak, so I do not feel like I need to see it again. Much as I have high hopes for the look of Green Lantern, that’s what I anticipate finding in terms of its script.
Also, I do understand the business dynamics behind this state of affairs. Big movies are expensive to make. Big movies in 3-D are even more expensive to make. Producers and investors will only pony up their money and their credibility for things that they are reasonably confident will not only get them their money back, but give them a return on their investment. So it will be difficult to raise money to produce movies like this that aren’t proven franchises with big names attached to them.
One thing I don’t understand is how the money keeps on going after these old franchises, though. Hasn’t it been well-established by now that movie franchises eventually run out of steam? Superhero movie franchises have a proven arc. First, you get Superhero: The Origin Story. If that one performs well, in two years you get Superhero 2: A Really Cool Villan. Then, you get Superhero 3: Milking It For The Paycheck. The suckers who put their money in to Superhero 3 will then be left anxious for about a year until foreign releases and DVD’s bring the end-the-franchise-with-a-whimper flick’s numbers back into the black.
Putting together a good script is also a tough thing to do with these sorts of production pressures. Because a 3-D movie involves so much post-production, the script has to come pretty close to nailing it before any photography begins. We saw problems with emotionally dead scripting in technologically demanding movies as long as as Final Fantasy: The Movie, and just how intolerably awful mixing high spectacle with bad writing could get in the Star Wars prequels. But the writing all has to get done before the photography and there is less flexibility for the actors and directors to make changes on the fly during photography, or editors to salvage things that didn’t work out quite right, when the film has to be micro-planned so far in advance.
It’s not complicated. It isn’t the awkward glasses. People will deal with the awkward glasses. It isn’t even the sometimes shockingly high price. Hollywood — by which I mean producers, distributors, and theaters — have all figured out by know that they can’t compete by price with Redbox and Netflix. So they have to offer a product that exceeds in quality the experience of watching a movie at home or streaming on the internet. That’s why we have 3-D IMAX movies with sound systems so good they blow the clothes right off your date. But the thing that is indispensible and always has been indispensible — from the days of Thomas Edison filming in jerky, splotchy 2-D black and white up through today — is the film’s ability to deliver on the promise to tell the audience a compelling story.
While I didn’t think Avatar‘s story was particularly original, something about that story resonated with people. It packed an emotional punch. It wasn’t a new story, but it was (apparently) well-told. People aren’t going to see Pirates 4 because they don’t think it’s going to tell them a good story. There seems to be no point to the spectacle. Thor provides a nice spectacle but it’s hard to identify with its beautiful characters or care all that much about what happens to them. There isn’t a soul in the suit.
This is why some moviegoers flock to arthouse theaters — they are looking for a good story. They think that the big names of big releases get in the way of storytelling. It is why actors and directors look around for “good, small movies” and why producers and distributors flock to marketing conventions like Cannes and Sundance — they are looking for a good story to tell, which will make them wealthy. When the movie offers a compelling story, the audience will respond, quantifiably, with its money.
All the good effects in the world — and 3-D is a marvelous effect with modern technology — are no substitute for a good story, well-told. The most important poeple on a movie’s credit screen are not the directors, not the actors, not the producers. They are the writers. If you don’t have good writing, you don’t have a good movie.
I will probably go see the latest X-men iteration because I want to see mutants wailing on each other with their bad-ass powers, and I have a dormant fan-boy love for the X-title comic books from when I collected them in college. That said, the story was so unspeakably god-awful in Hugh Jackman’s Torso, or whatever they called the Wolverine movie that even this particularly dedicated X-men fan found it excruciating. Adding 3-D would not have made it in any way more enjoyable.
The writing in Avatar was really no great shakes. It wasn’t bad, but the story was basically a mash-up of a bunch of other movies — Starship Gully with Wolves, if you will. However, James Cameron made it juuuuuust good enough to hang the magnificence of his spectacle on. We could immerse ourselves in the experience without being pulled out of it by, say, Hayden Christensen turning out the worst romantic dialogue in recorded history.
The old studio model was something to the effect of “make 50 movies for 10 million each, most of them will make 20 million. Everything else is gravy.”
The Godfather had a budget of six million (granted, that’s 6 mil in 1972), but that’s not some exponentially huge number compared to other movies from 1972… Cabaret? Six million. Deliverance? Two million. Poseidon Adventure? Five million. Those, as far as I can tell, are the biggest budget movies from 1972. Even adjusting for inflation, those are some seriously not insane numbers.
Now, see, that’s my point exactly. Godfather, Deliverance, and Cabaret all had emotionally-compelling stories to tell. (Admission: I’ve never seen Poseidon Adventure so I don’t know if that was a good story or not; the premise certainly has potential.)
Sinking huge amounts of money into slick production can certainly make it look better, and that’s cool and all. But it begins with the story and it ends with the story. No better example than Godfather: for $6 million in 1972 dollars, you’d have thought Coppola could have procured adequate lighting for his sets! Still, it’s one of the best movies yet made, which demonstrates that you can have a great success both financial and critical with a good story and barely-acceptable everything else.
You want asses in seats all summer long? Get a good writer hooked into a good story, and all the other pieces of the puzzle will fall into place. Your investors will thank you later.
> The issue is not Hollywood’s ability to provide
> spectacle. The issue is Hollywood’s ability to
> produce a new story.
I dunno, I think Hollywood’s ability to provide spectacle is part of the problem. As you point out, effects are expensive. Post-production is expensive. 3-D is expensive.
But everyone’s so panicked that they’ll miss the new wave of customer expectations that they’re gluing all that crud onto movies that either don’t need spectacle, or need less… pervasive? spectacle.
I remember seeing an interview with Cameron about Aliens, wherein he was regaling the interviewer with some story about nearly coming to blows with Gale Hurd about the laser used in the opening scene and staying under budget (Aliens cost a respectable but not crazy $18.5 million. The Terminator was $6.5 million). Apparently Cameron didn’t learn the lesson that he ought to have learned then; The Abyss cranked in at a whopping $70 million and his budgets have just gone crazy since then.
Now, compare The Terminator or Aliens to The Abyss, or Avatar, or anything else Cameron has made since 1989. The first two movies he had to sacrifice his natural tendency towards spectacle at the altar of gritty fiscal realism, and the result (I’d argue) is a much more effective use of spectacle as part of a movie-going experience. He had to use story and direction to keep the thing together, instead of “it looks cool”.
Everything he’s done since 1990 has been overindulgent and it shows. And while Cameron is an outlier in many ways, his approach to movie-making has become sadly overcommon.
Like Jaybird said, they used to make movies when they expected most of ’em to make a good return on money. Now they make movies where every movie is trying to be the home run king; they’re (almost) all overpriced, shooting for the moon.
Can you imagine if Kickass had an unlimited budget?
It would be the new X-men movie. Which, FWIW, is getting pretty good reviews (87% on rotten tomatoes) (though I think some are grading on a curve)
Getting this out of the way first: I really dislike 3-D. I think it makes movies worse, not better.
At the same time, I have a project going out to producers and directors next week, so I doubt I’ll be telling any of them that.
You’re right that it comes down to writing. On that I have a simple and possibly wrong guess: I think directors have had to master too much. It’s no longer just about actors and maybe a few horses. The tech has become extraordinarily demanding. In the good old days it was script, camera, sound, wardrobe, sets, props. Now it’s all that and the very latest in computer skills.
People focus on the new toys, the new fun stuff: FX. And they neglect the oldest stuff: writing.
And then there are the people betting 100 million dollars . . .
Movies are collaborative. Writing isn’t, or at least it probably shouldn’t be. Directors are managers of vast enterprises. Writers are loner schlubs typing away alone in their rooms (or in my case, back yard.) Some directors are great writers, and I suppose some writers could be directors. But I think if you want story and character you usually need to turn to the anonymous schlub and when there’s 100 million bucks on the line it’s hard to place a bet on some guy who owns 20 identical black t-shirts and no tuxedos.
I think your analysis is rather spot-on. In many regards, it’s simply easier to make an enormous action set piece with CGI and whatever else than it is to write a terse script with real characters, a compelling story-arch, and an original touch or resolution.
In the words of Turtle from Entourage: “James Cameron, baby! This could be the worst piece-of-shit movie ever and it’ll still make a billion dollars.”